There’s a lot of chat about the newly announced personal voice stuff from Apple. A lot are screaming how awful an idea it is without having a clue about the field of AAC. There’s some good work on places like MacStories interviewing David at AssistiveWare- and this piece from FastCompany which explain the background well. Let’s be frank. It’s either mildly useful or a major disruptor to a field of companies and research groups doing similar thing at cost. You can discuss the business situation but for end users it’s a win in my book. I do have some concerns though and that’s on portability. If you create a voice it shouldn’t be locked to one system. If your access needs change and say you need eyegaze and an eyegaze system not brilliantly supported on iOS then what happens to your voice ? Tough (I imagine).

Let’s see. But my money is riding on no portability out if iOS.

See also Michael Tsai’s concerns

Will there be a way to export your Personal Voice so that you aren’t totally reliant on iCloud to preserve it? Many of these users will not be able to just re-record new prompts if something goes wrong or if they need to switch to a different Apple ID.

They aren’t the first to have this problem. Smartbox recently have done a solution with SpeakUnique for regional voices. As much as it’s needed I’m not aware of any way you can use those voices on other platforms.

What the .. (from the Apple PR on accessibility)

“For users at risk of losing their ability to speak — such as those with a recent diagnosis of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) or other conditions that can progressively impact speaking ability — Personal Voice is a simple and secure way to create a voice that sounds like them. Users can create a Personal Voice by reading along with a randomized set of text prompts to record 15 minutes of audio on iPhone or iPad. This speech accessibility feature uses on-device machine learning to keep users’ information private and secure, and integrates seamlessly with Live Speech so users can speak with their Personal Voice when connecting with loved ones.”

Now we find out who the first company is to make a system wide third party TTS voice (a developer SDK to create a system wide voice was released in iOS 16)!

GitHub - Skycode22/HIDs: HID projectsNeed to make your own rollerball / trackpad? These are neat. Uses the v neat QMK firmware

This is neat. There’s a few commercial things like this but if you are AT user wanting to do some maths check this out. Also on GitHub under a MIT licence here

From Culinary Dud To Stud: How Dutch Plant Breeders Built Our Brussels Sprouts Boom Did you hate Brussel sprouts when you were younger and now “meh” or even “yay”??! It could be because since the 90s breeders have been breeding less bitter varieties.

If you ever wondered if one switch automatic scanning is really that hard to learn - or should I say, why some people (me for one) bang on about always trying to find two-switch scanning rather than defaulting to one-switch scanning, this is a great demonstration. This is a paternoster lift. A non-stop, never-ending lift that to ride you have to time your jump in and out. And if you get it wrong.. well.. its awkward. Now imagine you are automatically scanning.. The result of not getting the correct item can be.. well.. super frustrating and potentially embarrassing or just dangerous. Now imagine if you could just manage the moving of the lift through floors. More presses of the button, but phew! less stressful. (Props to Michael Ritson for coming up with this analogy). (Vid from imgur.com/8dTGlqS)

This is a great little video from Apple today - but it reminds me of some really bizarre design decisions by Apple. Let me explain by listing what’s needed:Yes. There is facial gesture detection in MacOS. It’s cool. But - why can’t you map facial gestures to switch actions?And similarly - why can’t you map them as switch actions on iOS - alongside switch boxes (it already has one - the face movement left or right).WHY OH WHY IS THERE A HEADMOUSE BURIED IN SWITCH ACCESS? WHO ON EARTH NEEDS IT THERE? (To be clear. Headmousse should be an option alongside Bluetooth devices or game controllers for AssistiveTouch)Some parity with iOS - can we have sound switches in MacOS, too, please!For mouse control - (and really eyegaze) there needs to be a zooming method to help with accuracy.There desperately needs to be a simple way of resetting different areas of accessibility settings. It’s now so easy to get yourself in a pickle with different conflicting settingsThe Game controller access stuff is AMAZING. Like - really neat and well done. But why is it that on the home screen, you don’t actually get a cursor - you get a moving box?

For us at Ace Centre, the MDM we use (incidentally Meraki) is a lifesaver. We have an endless amount of devices on it, and we can do magical things like push apps to client devices on the spot in an assessment or allow a purchased device from us to say have its own AppStore account on it. Or even we’ve had cases where schools ring us and say, “Sorry we have lost the device” and we can tell them its just been left on the school bus. It’s brilliant. The amount of clinical hours we save in revisiting and technical time in setting the kit up pays for itself. But.. Does every service need it? Here’s what an MDM does. And here is what Apple Configurator (free on a Mac) does.

ref: http://birding.about.com/od/Bird-Trivia/a/20-Fun-Facts-About-Flamingos.htm