Vodafone Smart Accessibility Awards
There is a diverse market of commercial video magnifiers, allowing zoom and realtime colour filters, beneficial not just to low vision but also other conditions such as dyslexia and colour blindness.
They cost from £500 – £1500. This is prohibitively expensive for much of the audience who are retired or low income.
Anyone with a smartphone already owns a screen and a camera, so we have produced a video magnifier as a free software solution rather than an expensive hardware solution.
The app is designed to be as universally accessible as possible, bearing in mind the varying target audiences and high likelyihood of multiple conditions.
The buttons are larger and higher contrast than the usual Android recommendations, with large simple zoom in / zoom out buttons rather than the complex motor demands of pinching or dragging. There is no reliance on text, with as literal / metaphor-free iconography as possible.
Use Case
An elderly man is reading the Financial Times. Typically he has a range of minor impairments. He has blurred vision due to cataracts. He has no cognitive impairment other than some forgetfulness due to medication, and has some difficulty operating small fiddly things due to some hand shakiness (essential tremor).
With Zoom Plus he can zoom in and increase the contrast. Both of these things are helpful for blurred vision, especially taking into account the dark paper of the FT.
The jargon-free menu with simple iconography is appropriate for his level of IT literacy, and the large well spaced buttons and reliance only on simple presses are appropriate for his motor ability.
We have partnered with Digital Accessibility Centre for expert review and user testing, with great results for both low vision and dyslexia.
It was noted by our dyslexic user in particular that the colour changes that the app could change to were very clear and helped our dyslexic user tester a great deal.
Digital Accessibility Centre
Technology
Developed in Adobe Air which doesn’t yet support screenreaders, but the app is intended for people with some vision.
It accesses the input from the camera and applies various colour filters. and a digital zoom.
Painting By Brainwaves
Following the genius of Big Spaceship we’ve implemented “Mashup Fridays” where we spend the day working with the latest technologies to put something random and hopefully interesting together. This week we bought the Mindwave Headset which was featured in the April edition of Wired magazine…
The Idea
We wanted to hack the headset and port the data into Adobe Flash where it could be manipulated and hopefully used to create some mind controlled artwork. The rules were simple, no constants were allowed, all data should come from the headset thereby making whatever mess we created 100% mind made.
The Solution
The Mindwave headset mainly measures Meditation and Attention, however, it also measure brain Alpha, Beta etc so we had plenty of variables to play with. The tricky part was writing those variables into an algorithm that would paint something more Pollock than Tracey Emin.
The final solution was to create our own curve algoritm using methods from both Cartogrammar and Paul Tondeur which would draw between points derived from brain data. The X coordinate was taken from the meditation, Y from attention and others like colour from the other variables like Alpha Beta etc.
Below is our initial version of the “artwork” (using the term loosely). We will be updating this post hopefully with a more aesthetic version in the near futures as well as a video of it working.
