Non-Profit Group Holds Forum On Technology With Disabled Students
Morgan Brief
Posted on: 12/4/08 Section: News
Software developers form Project Possibilities, a non-profit community-service organization designed to make experiential differences in the lives of people with disabilities, held a think tank session at PCC on Tuesday to brainstorm new ideas and innovations for assistive technology software with disabled students and disability teachers.
The titular slide of the show featured the passage, "We supply the developers, you supply the ideas."
Michael Parker, the 26-year-old representative from PP and full time software engineer for Google, showcased a series of new open-sourced programs already in production, but asked the meeting's attendees for additional input.
Among Parker's list of future programs was a mobile currency reader that could identify what denomination of a bill you were holding by taking a picture of it with your phone, and a plug-in system for YouTube that would allow people to become captionists and add text to online videos for the hearing impaired.
"Imagine being able to create a captioning on a video so your brother could understand what was going on. Once you added the text, anyone else in the world could access that captioning for themselves," said Mark Sakata, teacher specialist for physical disabilities and member of PP's board of directors.
Most of the attendees voiced propositions and issues with current technologies rather than suggesting new ones. Much of the presentation was spent going over the features of the Word Predictor on-screen Keyboard and power reader programs presented by the PP representatives.
The on-screen keyboard system would be accessible for students who use eye-tracking software as well as computer mice. The program feeds words to the user through a list of popular choices with similar beginnings in five small fields at the top of the on-screen keyboard.
The Power Reader could read, out loud, any text file. While this reader technology is not very new, the additional features of altering text speed, zoom, word focus, image size and association, following words and making spoken words grow larger as they are being said, are cutting edge coding.
The titular slide of the show featured the passage, "We supply the developers, you supply the ideas."
Michael Parker, the 26-year-old representative from PP and full time software engineer for Google, showcased a series of new open-sourced programs already in production, but asked the meeting's attendees for additional input.
Among Parker's list of future programs was a mobile currency reader that could identify what denomination of a bill you were holding by taking a picture of it with your phone, and a plug-in system for YouTube that would allow people to become captionists and add text to online videos for the hearing impaired.
"Imagine being able to create a captioning on a video so your brother could understand what was going on. Once you added the text, anyone else in the world could access that captioning for themselves," said Mark Sakata, teacher specialist for physical disabilities and member of PP's board of directors.
Most of the attendees voiced propositions and issues with current technologies rather than suggesting new ones. Much of the presentation was spent going over the features of the Word Predictor on-screen Keyboard and power reader programs presented by the PP representatives.
The on-screen keyboard system would be accessible for students who use eye-tracking software as well as computer mice. The program feeds words to the user through a list of popular choices with similar beginnings in five small fields at the top of the on-screen keyboard.
The Power Reader could read, out loud, any text file. While this reader technology is not very new, the additional features of altering text speed, zoom, word focus, image size and association, following words and making spoken words grow larger as they are being said, are cutting edge coding.
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