4 replies to this topic

[Apparelyzed]

Spinal Cord Injury Assistive Technology - What Do You Use?

With assistive technology becoming more available in today's technology markets, it'd be interesting to see what assistive technology people with spinal cord injuries actually use.

In the computer tablet market, assistive technology is becoming more popular as an inbuilt feature, as it is in the mobile smart phone market. Such features as Assistive Touch on the iPhone are provided as standard, and Dragon Voice recognition Apps can be easily and quickly installed.

But, there is still the specialist market for higher spinal cord injuries, such as eye tracking software, and as technology changes, emerging technology opens up accessibility to those who in the past have been isolated due to their loss of function.

What technology do you use to help communicate, or use the computer or smart phone?

This is an question for all levels of spinal cord injuries.

Regards

Simon

[greybeard]

I do not use any of the following accessibility applications, but I thought some of them may be of use to Linux users who have not come across them before. They are all installable on Linux machines via Synaptic.

MouseTrap permits people with movements impairments to access the computer.
It uses image processing to translate the user's head movements into
mouse events (movements, clicks) which allow users to interact with
the different desktops managers and applications.

[attachment=12263:MouseTrap.jpg]



K-Mouth KDE's type-and-say frontend for speech synthesizers.
It includes a history of spoken sentences from which the user can select
sentences to be re-spoken.
This package is part of the KDE accessibility module.

[attachment=12264:K-Mouth.jpg]

Dasher is an information-efficient text-entry interface, driven by natural continuous pointing gestures. Dasher is a competitive text-entry system wherever a full-size keyboard cannot be used - for example,
on a palmtop computer
on a wearable computer
when operating a computer one-handed, by joystick, touchscreen, trackball, or mouse
when operating a computer with zero hands (i.e., by head-mouse or by eyetracker).
The eyetracking version of Dasher allows an experienced user to write text as fast as normal handwriting - 25 words per minute; using a mouse, experienced users can write at 39 words per minute.
Dasher uses a more advanced prediction algorithm than the T9™ system often used in mobile phones, making it sensitive to surrounding context.

[attachment=12265:Dasher.jpg]

Orca is speech synthesizer program that speaks whatever on the screen is indicated by the mouse.

Jovie text-to-speech system is a plugin based service that allows any KDE (or non-KDE) application to speak using the D-Bus interface.
It uses the speech-dispatcher daemon for the actual speech job; kmouth is an useful front-end for it. This package is part of the KDE accessibility module.

KMouseTool clicks the mouse whenever the mouse cursor pauses briefly. It was designed to help those with repetitive strain injuries, for whom pressing buttons hurts. This package is part of the KDE accessibility module.

[St. Peter]

On my iPhone I have an app that helps me open the garage

[Apparelyzed]

St. Peter, on 13 January 2012 - 04:14 AM, said:

On my iPhone I have an app that helps me open the garage

What's the App called?

I presume there's some hardware that connects to the iPhone's Bluetooth or your WiFi network?

Simon

[St. Peter]

Apparelyzed, on 13 January 2012 - 08:33 AM, said:

St. Peter, on 13 January 2012 - 04:14 AM, said:

On my iPhone I have an app that helps me open the garage

What's the App called?

I presume there's some hardware that connects to the iPhone's Bluetooth or your WiFi network?

Simon

here a link of a friend of mine

http://gtluke.com/mi...ge-door-opener/