Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Tue, 14 Aug 2012 17:00:00 PDT Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100908/16203510945/dailydirt-tools-blind.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100908/16203510945/dailydirt-tools-blind.shtml setbacks that prevent some ingenious innovations, plenty of developers are still working on hardware and software tools to help out people with disabilities. Here are just a few examples of some interesting projects for the blind.

• An iPhone app called VizWiz helps blind users by letting them take a picture of something that is confusing -- and then crowdsourcing a helpful description to make things clear. This app uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk service to obtain helpful people, and the average turnaround time for a description is 27 seconds. [url]
• The Poet image description tool is open source software that helps to crowdsource image descriptions for digital books. This tool is aimed at textbook illustrations that aren't too helpful for people who can't see them. [url]
• The Tacit project is developing a hand-held sonar device with haptic feedback -- a technological take on the white cane. It's still just a prototype device, but so far, users seem to be able to use it fairly quickly without much training. [url]
• Haptic shoes could help people navigate by vibrating different parts of the shoe to tell the wearer if there are obstacles ahead. These shoes, like the Tacit project's handheld, are based on open Arduino hardware -- allowing other developers to contribute improvements and build upon existing tools. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

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]]> urls-we-dig-up http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100908/16203510945 Thu, 2 Aug 2012 17:00:00 PDT Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100901/10193510858/dailydirt-diy-space-satellites.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100901/10193510858/dailydirt-diy-space-satellites.shtml Student Spaceflight Experiment Program), but now almost anyone can participate in a space experiment. Here are just a few examples.

• SkyCube is a satellite project on Kickstarter with $1 sponsoring 10 seconds of the mission. For just $6, you can broadcast six 120-character messages from space! [url]
• Whatever you can fit inside a ping pong ball can be sent up to the edge of space (100,000 feet) -- and anyone can make a PongSat. Presumably, though, they won't let you fill your ping pong ball with a combustible propellant and an altimeter trigger.... [url]
• The ArduSat Mission has completed its Kickstarter campaign and put up a list of experiment ideas that could be run on its Arduino-based satellite. Some of the suggestions for experiments/apps aren't too exciting, but there's also a prize of $1,500 for the most innovative experiment or app for the ArduSat -- so someone is bound to come up with a few more ideas. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

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