Morse code has a reputation. It looks complicated, nerdy maybe - a wall of dots and dashes, something from wartime thrillers and ham radio basements. In assistive technology that reputation is a problem — because Morse is genuinely useful for people who can’t use a keyboard but can manage a single switch (or realistically two switches). Yet it gets screened out early, on the assumption that…
Dear world. Code signing for windows. My god it’s a racket. I was hopeful using azures approach but gah you can’t do it unless you pay for a p1 subscription. Seriously? Signpath looks good but they will only sign you up if you already are well known. So what do you do?
Accessibility overlays. Pointless. overlayfactsheet.com/en/ here’s one of many quotes. …I know with 100% certainty, any site which has deployed an overlay in the past year and a half has been less useable for both my wife and me—both blind.
Loving zed - new font which looks like they’ve done all the right work to test its suitability for low vision During the tests, Zed Text was directly compared with – and outperformed – Helvetica in terms of speed of reading for all types of hospital patients. We have since further improved the speed and ease of reading by creating wider versions of Zed that benefit readers with declining vision.…
Hmm. Adapt-a-Tray was a cool idea but a pain to manufacture and get bits for (I bought one!). What if we use to use an Ikea Pegboard and then make a printable site to make components for what you need?
A while ago I managed to get Bliss working in a PPM model using Bliss unicode (its bit harder than getting toki pona in PPM ). I’ll be watching this closely to see if the team can make a text2image model for real bliss combining floeproject.org/projects/…
So yesterday Michael in our team chatted through a client Deteriorating Neurological condition. Signifcant VI - requires huge font Black on White background. Difficulty with Fine motor control but is literate. Tends to mouth words but not easily undersood. She needs the letters so large we could use echo but we have to put it under apples magnifier - its not easy to setup. Hmmmm. He is right. When…
Quick demo of using the CoreMotionAPI you can get from Airpods to use as a headmouse. Annoyingly you can’t use just one airpod.. Or at least I cant figure out how.. I can’t be bothered to work on this any more as the use case is kind of 🤷 but hey! It does work! ( Code )
I’m doing a ton of work on languages at the moment. This article is a good read why we don’t have diacritics in the English language. Love it. After the Conquest, French took its place for centuries … But the period of French dominance left its mark on all aspects of the language … And, as Godwin found to his chagrin, it had a revolutionary impact on English spelling. The HN Comments…
Last week we were honoured to win the Samantha Hunnisett Access Award at the CM Awards. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting it. Most of my attention was on the big-ticket award of the evening — the Lifetime Achievement Award for Alli Gaskin. Alli was an awesome SLT colleague and friend, and she will be deeply missed. (If I did have any clue we were up for it I might have prepared a coherent speech…
Made a little tool to print alphabets (in alphabetical order, frequency, uppercase or lowercase) in a wide range of languages - and then keyboards for each of these languages.. for python or nodejs github.com/willwade/…
I woke up this morning to see a ginger cat looking at me. Now I’m sure many of you are thinking “ ah that’s nice. you’ve got a new cat!” I haven’t got a cat. I have no idea how this cat got in my house.
Alright, gather ‘round, aspiring communication chefs! We’re about to embark on a culinary adventure – one where we cook up something genuinely useful for the world of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). This post dives into how we built tools to automatically correct sentences – specifically tackling tricky issues like typos and words mashed together without spaces. My…
AI doesnt hallucinate. Its not a bloody person. Lets be clear - it get its wrong. If we want to anthropomorphise our technology we could say “Poor AI it got confused” or “That shit. It just lied”. But no. Its a statistical inference machine. It got it wrong.
Does anyone know how I submit a bug report to Microsoft Azure Team on their translation tool? I keep coming across problems - like Eng->Pashto - all strings are “Afghanistan National Cricket team”. Is nobody checking these lang pairs? Seen similar problems in Kurdish and other langs..
Who the hell would be crazy enough to buy this ? Shaking hands with my friends? How did that reach the top of the pile for v1 must have features? I’m more concerned that this would “Memorizes your kitchen inventory..”.. “Memorizes your clean home layout”. Go on, cyber overlords. Take everything.
I hate having to do this. But I have. I’ve made ANOTHER tool to load up your env vars in a terminal. Why? Because I had a mare getting direnv to work on my specific Windows machine. It was really due to the way our office locked down the way a users $PROFILE works - that is it puts everything on OneDrive and there was a ton of admin issues getting it all working correctly. So, stupidly,…
So we built this aacprocessors library. Intention was to read and manipulate any AAC software. Its not ideal but just made a new method just for the grid right now. def replace_cell_with_xml( self, gridset_path: str, target_caption: Optional[str], target_action: Optional[str], new_content_xml: str, output_path: str, ) -> None: """Replace a cell's content with a new XML fragment across the gridset.…
If anyone out there is a python dev - and wanting TTS support in theri code - I’d love someone to help roadtest this python library . I think its probably the most extensive TTS wrapper accessing pretty much every online and offline TTS engine… in a nice unified way.. AVSynth on MacOS is what I really want testing due to the mad way we create a swift bridge.. I feel its going to…
Adam did this marvellous reprint of the poppy mini trackball for a client needing a chin controlled trackball. This modification stops it falling out. It’s a win as the designs are all open source. @PKL@mastodon.social ploopy.co
Want to access Panels editor in Mac? Access it here /System/Library/Input Methods/Assistive Control.app/Contents/Resources/Panel Editor.app Pin it to your dock (saves you opening in rather wierd way via system settings) or ln -s "/System/Library/Input Methods/Assistive Control.app/Contents/Resources/Panel Editor.app" /Applications/Panel \ Editor.app
Been working with Sherpa-Onnx TTS a lot over the last year. It’s a nice project to make a onnx runtime for lots of different languages and interfaces. Just whipped together a Gradio demo to show all the voices and hear them - most notably MMS Onnx models Sherpa-Onnx Demo