This Blog includes information related to Library Adaptive Technology events, archives, presenter and participant recommendations and suggestions.

Friday, November 25, 2011

Maker Mondays

Building off of the November 12th Accessibility Hackathon, “Maker Mondays” will be held on the first and third Monday evenings of December, December 5th and 9th, from 6pm to 8pm in room 215, Adaptive Services at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library.  These events will be an opportunity for developers and users of adaptive technologies and web accessibility to get together to discuss and build solutions to accessibility issues.  The events will be open to remote participation via conference call and web audio-video.  Topics for discussion will include reports back on some of the ideas that were generated at the Accessibility Hackaton, including the Mobile Accessible Book Generator, a 508 Repository, a Mobility/Security working group, a Metro Access vehicle locator app, and various other accessibility fixes.  We also plan to experiment with generating an accessible book by scanning and then converting into a number of different accessible formats.  During the discussion we will also be experimenting with the AV and remote participation capability of the Learning Lab in room 215 - using Ustream, Talking Communities and Google Hangouts.

Maker Mondays
Monday, Dec 5th
Monday, Dec 19th
6pm to 8pm
Room 215 Adaptive Services
Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library
901 G Street NW
Washington DC, 20001

December Events for the Adaptive Services Division

December 3rd , Saturday Technology Training Session, 1pm to 3pm, room 215 – Richard Krafsig of TCS Associates demos the Orabis Read-Aloud text reader CCTV, a read-aloud text reader and a magnifier in one device, and the Braille Pen, a Braille display and Braille keyboard that works with iOs devices, as well as JAWS, System Access, Talks, Mobile Speak, has Bluetooth, connects to phone, netbook, PC or PDA, write SMS, does 6 key entry.  After the Saturday Session guests are welcome to visit the Open Data Hackathon in the  LibraryLab space on the first floor.  The Open Data Hackathon is a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications, liberate data, and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world's local, regional and national governments.

December 3rd, Braille Book Club for Kids, 11am to 12pm, room 215

December 3rd, American Sign Language Story Hour, 11am to 12pm, Children’s Division,  

December 3rd, Deaf Education and American Sign Language, 1pm to 3pm, Great Hall

December 5th – Maker Mondays, 6pm to 8pm, room 215  – experiment with Talking Communities and other technologies for remote participation, Kevin Johnson, Red Cross

December 6th – Tech Talk Tuesdays, 6pm to 8pm – Introduction to iPhone, iPad, iTouch and other mobile, gestural accessibility, open to all levels

December  20th – AccessibilityDC meetup 6:30pm to 8:30pm, room 215

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Accessibility hackathon ideas

Accessibility hackathon

The following is a list of products that have been proposed to be built colaboratively at the Accessibility Hackathon at DC Public Library on Saturday, Nov 12, 2011, 10am to 5:30pm, in the Library Lab space and Room 215. Please send any comments or aditional ideas to patrick.timony@dc.gov . Register at: http://accessibilityhackathon.eventbrite.com/
1. Light weight version of Bookshare for BrailleNote users using the Bookshare API (http://developer.bookshare.org)
2. TTS Twitter client either using Chrome TTS APIs (http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/tts.html). See example code at http://github.com/gcapiel/ChromeWebAppBookshareReader
3. Searchable Repository of 508 Technology Guides. Jamal would contribute zip of content. Could be done in Drupal or Wordpress.
4. Mobile Accesible Book Generator - Scan a book with your phone, type in, speech recognize or OCR the text, keep the images and output an RTF, DAISY 3 text (http://daisy.org), or EPUB version, which can be submitted to Bookshare and other repositories of accessible ebooks for people with print disabilities. Particularly useful for children's books which have few pages and words.
5. Mobile App that detects when the person in line in front of you has moved. One idea is to check when the iPhone camera comes out of focus.
6. Mobile color identifier that speaks a smaller set of colors (8 or 16?).
7. Accessible version of Tor
8. Accessible fork of privacy tools at http://guardianproject.info using Android's Accessibility APIs
9. Alphabetic keyboard for beginning level VoiceOver users. The QWERTY keyboard arrangement is a barrier for some users.
10. Facetime Audio description network.
11. Face-Name or Voice-Name recognition Quiz for social networks - a system that would train the user to associate either images of a face or recordings of a voice with the name of the person they belong to
12. VoiceOver Math Equations, Audio Description for Video Programming, instead of audio track, have metadata - pause the screen and get an audio description, searchable
13. App for movie description via iPhone, a collection of inaccessible material made accessible using a mobile accessible format conversion station
14. Something that makes Twitter easier to read - automattically read a stream of information to you, using live regions ARIA Web App, a New Tweet comes in announces it automatically
15. Are there any apps that desperately need to be made accessible?
16. non visual mind mapping app -- structure information present non-visual trees, branching tree nodes, windows explorer - folders, nested folders, tree control http://www.informationtamers.com/WikIT/index.php?title=Mind_mapping_for_people_who_are_blind
17. An application that integrates with TheMashupApp, a powerful personal database that could work together with #4, #10, #18 and possibly others.
18. an application that makes audio description non-linear, with text to speech, from educational point of view, tagged, with layers of information
19. QR codes could be used to put in an app or provide info to the iPhone, add contacts to your iphone, a QR code on movie ticket, push description to iPhone, embeded in clothing, various object, specialized information, walking directions, signs specialized info pushed to iphone, tactile identification so you know where it is.
20. Any of various tasks that would help out the Adaptive Technology Program like making an accessible interface for Ustream where all the STTS audio and video is stored, captioning those videos, dragon-recognize Victor-Streamed interviews from the beginning of Accessibility Camp
21. an accessible conferencing solution
22. create accessibility templates, wizards
23. an iphone app for Metro Access that shows the location of all vehicles
24. basic, accessible installation profiles for Drupal, JoomLa!, or WordPress. Initial configuration settings, modules, and themes would be selected so as to maximize accessibility. Documentation would be included that explains why each installation profile was built in the ways chosen. Results of testing on WCAG or ARIA guidelines would be included if possible.

Monday, November 7, 2011

Accessibility Clearninghouse

As required by the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act
of 2010 (CVAA), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has launched a
clearinghouse of information about accessible communication technologies.
The official URL of the Accessibility Clearinghouse is

http://apps.fcc.gov/accessibilityclearinghouse/

Note that the path portion of the URL (after fcc.gov/) must be in all
lower case. An unofficial, possibly friendlier URL that is
a bit shorter and not case sensitive is

http://AccessibilityClearinghouse.info

That URL redirects browsers to the official home page of the Accessibility
Clearinghouse.