Eventually a common theme became apparent: Apple’s applications — Calendar, Messages, Mail, iPhoto, even Maps and most surprisingly Camera — are completely usable by blind people. These applications aren’t using any kind of secret API sauce. They’re using the same UIAccessibility framework you and I have access to.

To get your mind blown, fire up Camera and point the camera at a nearby face, preferably a cute infant.

Well I never knew that about the camera app. Thats pretty neat.

This past fall, Obert took a class on assistive technologies. Coincidentally, in the first week the students took turns riding in wheelchairs around campus to better understand the challenges a paraplegic faces. Obert thought the exercise was superficial. “I understand the idea,” she says, “but at the same time it felt a little bit trivializing. People were like, ‘Oh, it’s so hard to open the door’ … and [that’s] such a small, tiny piece of what you actually have to deal with every day if you’re in a wheelchair.” Better, she says, to talk to people with a disability, to shadow them for a day and ask them about what they need. — Wheels on the Ground - Technology Review

It’s roughly equivalent to giving someone a car in which the steering wheel has been replaced by a joystick. Not only do you need to learn how to steer with a joystick, but all of the controls formerly attached to the steering column are now scattered in various spots on the dashboard. The wiper control is a lever above the radio, the high beam lights are a switch on the rearview mirror, the turn signal is a set of buttons under the speedometer, and the cruise control is a dial hidden inside the ashtray. Oh, and you honk the horn by bouncing up and down in your seat. —

Michael Mace, on the issue of how Windows 8 is not the easiest to use if you have spent the last x years on traditional “Start” menu based Windows.

Does this not sound rather like an analogy for users of Assistive Technology? Where even small changes; say a moved switch, a sticky rollerball, a joystick no longer in the same place or the debounce on the keyboard being changed - causes equal amounts of “annoyance”.

In short, if you change something think hard and long about it and keep it that way for as long as possible. Otherwise you may end up making your users feel like they are driving clown cars when they want to be doing far more important things like communicating.

The Canadians know how to advertise their own Paralympic team.

In computer terms, I have a baud rate of about three that responds to the information in about 20 words a minute. By contrast, a political speech has a word rate of about 150 and an information content of zero. — Stephen Hawking. From an interview with Larry King in 1999.

Wheelchair rams (Happy Birthday Sue!)