Author: Equal Entry

Wheelchair-accessible taxis have been available for some time in New York City, but they have never been so quickly or easily summoned.  If you have a smartphone, you can now download the Accessible Dispatch WOW Taxi app, summon a wheelchair-accessible taxi to any location in Manhattan, and be transported. The Accessible Dispatch mobile app and […]

Developers and hackers have been using the Xbox Kinect in several ways, some of which demonstrate useful applications for assistive technology.  One such application for the Kinect involves its speech recognition capabilities, as covered in Xbox, Listen to Me. A second application involves the Kinect sensor’s ability to record physical gestures: Users with speech impediments […]

Visually impaired people have been taking photographs since the advent of cameras, and many have created art that would seem impossible.  We recommend watching the documentary “The Dark Light – The Art of Blind Photographers” for an in-depth exploration. BlindSighted contains a series of descriptions from visually impaired photographers of their individual processes for capturing images. Pete […]

A phoneme is a distinct type of sound that forms a building block of a language. An example in English is the phoneme /k/, which occurs in words such as cow, krill, school, and skid. Each language has its own phonemes, and a unique system of rules to explain how various phonemes are allowed to […]

Designing good speech recognition software is no easy task. Nuance Communications should know. The company has succeeded in creating a product that amazes most users: Apple’s Siri. But this product, like the human speech it’s programmed to recognize, is imperfect. Most owners of an iPhone can share stories about Siri’s often humorous misunderstandings of their […]

The New York Times reports that a recent local election frustrated many citizens by printing information on the ballot in a nearly illegible 7pt font. There is no New York state law that governs the proper sizing of text used on ballots, but now people are asking whether there should be. The polling locations do […]

Dance Central is one of the most successful game franchises for the Xbox Kinect. In the games, you learn and perform choreographed dance moves to popular songs. The Xbox Kinect console recognizes your movements and indicates whether your body placement matches the pose of the avatar on the screen. Many of the songs in Dance […]