Solving problems of inclusion and equalityAs part of the inclusive prize, CommuniKate and The Open Voice Factory (as AzuleJoe) had a small amount of press at Computer Weekly recently. Click to read.
Today’s guest post comes via Yonatan Wexler, Senior VP of R&D at OrCam, OrCam have been putting together some interesting designs in AT and I invited them to talk to us about the design process – Joe
At an exhibition in London this year I met a woman who had a stroke at the age of 18. After six years of hard work she regained the ability to move and speak, but part of her brain is still damaged, preventing her from being able to read. It means she can’t get a job, and can’t support herself financially.
OrCam was designed precisely to address such difficulties. OrCam was invented to give people with sight loss or other visual disabilities independence and an improved quality of life.
OrCam interprets visual information through a smart camera placed on a pair of glasses and connected to a pocket-sized computer. It instantly recognises text, products and people, simply by pointing at them. It then relays that information to the wearer discreetly via a small personal speaker which does not block the ears.
Designing a new device
Five years ago, we set out to use advances in artificial vision to help people with sight loss. We wanted to create a device that would give them the power to immediately read and identify things around them, changing their quality of life in a very practical way.
When we set out our original design vision, we had three specific qualities in mind.
After years of research and development, OrCam Technology incorporated all of these requirements into its first device. OrCam is small, light and discreet. It is placed on the wearer’s frames and can be taken on and off when needed. It weighs less than any pair of glasses and its dark colour helps it blend in. Despite its size and weight, OrCam is robust. It’s made out of a sturdy nylon plastic so users don’t need to handle it with kid gloves.
What we want most is for users to feel comfortable about wearing OrCam when they are out and about. It doesn’t weigh you down and keeps your hands free. It is ready for action as soon as you need it.
Users often note that OrCam doesn’t look much like a camera. This is no accident. We didn’t want users or others around them to feel like they were filming or being filmed, especially since that’s not the case. Although OrCam takes photos it doesn’t store them. It analyses the photo and then deletes it, which means that there are no privacy issues and people who look at sensitive documents as part of their jobs won’t have any issues using it.
Long-lasting battery power
We know how frustrating it is when a device runs out of juice in the middle of the day. We designed OrCam’s battery to last the entire day so that users only have to charge it overnight.
The light, pocket-sized battery and computer unit is attached via a thin, soft wire to the camera. The wire also means that users don’t have to worry about the camera getting lost or separated from the computer pack.
Advances in technology
OrCam launched the device in 2013, and since then we have worked to advance the technology behind it. A year ago, we updated OrCam to include a better camera, a faster processor and longer-lasting battery. In early 2016 we plan to release OrCam 2.0 – a newly designed device that also incorporates feedback from our users.
OrCam’s users range from children in school to the elderly. It takes a few hours to learn how to use it successfully and each device is hand-delivered by a certified OrCam Trainer™ who teaches the new user how to incorporate the device into their daily life. Users can customise OrCam to their lifestyle, adding new objects, products and faces to its library as needed.
We are now preparing for our UK launch in January 2016. Approximately 2 million people in the UK live with sight loss, according to the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), and the number is rising as the population ages. We look forward to improving the quality of life for this community.
We’re in the process of running some user-testing for CommuniKate and AzuleJoe. User testing is an interesting proposition for the sort of things that we are building given the extreme ranges of situations that people in AAC deal with.
User-testing is that thing that designers don’t want to do because they know their design will work. And user-testing just wastes time. The world is littered with the bones of people who have that view.
We’re using our user-testing as a chance to get to proper grips with where some of our users are, with the issues that they want to talk about (often different from the ones that affect them), and with the stories that they want to tell.
Time allowing, we’ll talk properly about the user-testing itself in a later post, today I’d like to show off our information sheet for the study. Kate made it, and it is a work of art in its own right.
We want to make sure that our information sheet is a real one, and it genuinely gives of all the information it possibly could do for users with cognitive issues.
Of course, aspects like data retention and anonymity are difficult to pull off. Kate and I went back and forth quite a bit on a suitable symbol for ‘anonymity’ (more on that in a future post).
This is the first draft of our information sheet. You can view the full on in Word and Pdf, we’d be interested in any comments people might have.
Today’s guest feature is from Tobias Buehrs. Most of my guest features are from people who are re-purposing ‘everyday’ technology into disability technology, so it was particularly nice to find someone who was re-purposing disability technology to attack a very different social issue – Joe
European news is currently dominated by reports of thousands of refugees arriving in Europe as their last resort.
Although there are many volunteers doing a great job 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the language barrier is often significant.
Inspired by a post in a German communication aid forum from a user trying to use a feature in our product Boardmaker 6. Boardmaker 6 gives the option to create bilingual boards in up to 44 languages. Boardmaker can search in one language and will return a field with two languages (e.g. Arabic and English) and in addition a symbol to support understanding also for pre-literate people.
And so I discussed with my colleagues the idea of producing a translation board that might make a difference in the refugee crises.
After a quick round of brainstorming what should be on it, the first refugee communication board was born. It contains a rating scale and important questions refugees could have.
My colleagues and I can’t, read Arabic, so we took the advantage working in an international company like Tobii Dynavox and found several colleagues who were able to support us in doing a quick review of the boards.
We shared those boards on Facebook and the feedback from several groups supporting refugees the positive feedback was fantastic. This seems to have a great impact on the daily work with refugees.
But this was only the beginning. A few days after the first post we got the request from several institutions like a local Red Cross institution and private person all over Europe if it is possible creating additional communication boards in other languages.
And so until now our website lists 13 boards not only translations in Arabic, Farsi and Albania were added as language too. If you are missing a language on that page please feel free to contact us on our website www.tobiidynavox.com
The purpose of this post is to show you how easy it is for a hobbyist to retarget AzuleJoe with nothing but Paint and Notepad.
The injection of the Inclusive Technology Prize money has meant that I have been able to spend a lot of time recently developing on AzuleJoe – it’s moving forward on a variety of fronts and there will be a couple of proper announcement posts in a few weeks.
This is, obviously, fantastic.
On the other hand – it’s also making it a little less ‘hackable’. One of the joys of the original code was that it was easy to retarget – if you had a bunch of pictures of grids and a text editor, then you could retarget AzuleJoe to talk about anything you wanted.
In recent months the code has started to look a little more professional – we use JSON for the data rather than Javascript, and quite a lot of extra code has been added to do all sorts of other things. Our next big push will probably obliterate most of the original code anyway.
I think this is a bit of a shame, because I’d like to keep that ‘hackability’ as available as possible.
In an effect to keep an easily ‘hackable’ version of the code around. I’ve released a ‘tagged’ version on the github repository: https://github.com/joereddington/azulejoe/releases/tag/v0.9 (at the time of writing there have been 69 commits to the repo since the release, so the code is moving on without it).
To show how easy it was to retarget the software to any pageset, I prepared a three minute video (bits of it are sped up – it was about 10 minutes in real life)
The voiceover was recorded while I was sick with cold and the mouse movement and even the typing is difficult to follow at times, but the point is that it points the curious in the direction of the right files to play with. And I’m on the other end of email if anyone would like more info.
So the Supertitle Project is starting to rise up a little bit, and it’s time to talk about where it is right now. As you know, the Project was funded by the National Lottery to expand it into a broader piloting/research stage. This means three things for me:
To make this happen I’m doing a lot of school visits, talking to teachers, finding out the best ways of working with schools so that their needs are met. I’m only visiting schools in the N and NW areas of London at the moment, partly because I live in NW, but also because I have other projects running in other areas of London and I think it’s best not to be bombarding schools with quite so many unusual ideas. There are three involved right now and I’m hoping to make it ten by Christmas. If you know a school that might be interested, please get in touch.
The code is coming around. More and more of is is automatic and right now it can be used easily without me on site – but it does need a significant polish to make it pretty and friendly looking. On the other hand – the demos are pretty:
This one is in English, simply because I didn’t have a translation handy – but it demonstrates the use case- students are given a file to edit and another file that lets them bring up the subtitles on a device they can just place near the TV. Everything syncs up nicely.
This is in two parts – on the one hand I’ve got a excellent PhD student who has experience in this sort of work – he’s preparing me a couple of research tools to give to students that are involved. There’s a bonus to this. While the point of having proper research done on a project is clearly to make sure it works, it is also nice to have a nicely formatted pdf file full of p-values and carefully checked statistics to give to both schools and potential funders.
I’m hoping that by next May, we’ve set up regular Supertitle groups in a range of schools, and released research that show the project makes a significant difference in terms of student outlook. I’m also hoping that the code will be tight, and perhaps we’ll have even attracted a couple of other developers to extend it.
AzuleJoe and CommuniKate have won some funding from London Catalyst.
London Catalyst are been a really interesting group to work with actually – before our application was considered by the trustees the CEO interviewed us at their offices to get a bit more of a sense of the projects and the bid. I think this is a fantastic system; I’m constantly amazed that grant committees can get a real understanding of the passion and potential behind an idea just from the application form itself.
The grant itself is for £2,500 ( £1000 for software and £1500 for outreach, facilitating and volunteer support) and is predicated on us doing a large amount of outreach in London – so we’ll be looking for venues to come and visit shortly. If you have such a venue – and you know a group of people that might be interested to hear the story behind CommuniKate and AzuleJoe – then please get in touch! 🙂
Christine is one of our regular writers – she focuses on topics related to eating disorders, in particular, what it’s like to be in a ward dedicated to that purpose.
5am. A nurse, I’m not sure which one, bursts into my room. ‘Weighing time.’ They shrill. I shift in my bed slightly, and lift myself out of it. Squinting I plod (with the kind of grace that only a 70lb weakling can plod with) down the corridor to the bathroom, to pee out anything that might not count as true physical weight. Of course, I’m only allowed to drink 700ml a day at the moment, so the bladder does not really need emptying right now.
When it’s my turn I enter the weighing room. Pulling of my top and stepping out of my trousers I feel the cool sterility of the room hit me and make the hair on my arms tremor and my nipples stiffen. It wasn’t embarrassment anymore; I was used to being a medical experiment and observed by nurses. Boxes of tablets and bottles of medicines fill the white cabinets that lined the room. I wish I could just take a pill to be rid of this horrible illness. What was it that I had been told – it’s a spiritual, physical, and mental illness. The NHS might be able to try to fix the latter, but spiritual – that was beyond the best of them. It is such a difficult illness to navigate. A bit like walking on a frozen river – most of the time I felt safe enough, but there was always the danger that my strength might crack and I will plunge through.
The nurse’s voice brings me out of my hazey state.
‘It’s ready for you.’
I step on to the scales, looking down at my lilac toenails against the black surface. Beep. Notifying me that the weight had been registered. Whatever the results, my heart sinks. There were reasons I was here, and the reasons I wanted to get out – but that did not always translate to what I wanted to see on the scales. The shifting sound of a pencil on card told me that the results had been marked on my charts, and the morning ritual was over.
Leaving the room, I keep my head down and try to avoid the eyes of the queue of girls lined up outside, wrapped in dressing gowns and wrapped up in their own fears. Padding back to my room, I briefly pull apart the curtains and peer through the crack I have created. The bottom half of the window pane is clouded with condensation. It is still dark outside, but there is a fiery haze enveloping the red brick buildings, a suggestion of a vast cosmos beyond the deserted hospital site.
I sigh, trying to roll my shoulders back and stand tall and strong, but really just wanting to curl up into a tiny ball. When the bell rang for breakfast, I find myself in the foetal position on top of a pile of sheets and covers. It seemed that I had been doing exactly that.
A new post from Josh Grisdale who runs the very wonderful Accessible Japan (www.accessible-japan.com)
Japan is on the to-do list of many travellers. For the less adventurous, it is westernized enough and developed enough that it is not too scary. For those who want something unique, Japan offers thousands of years of history and a fascinating culture that makes visitors want to come back again for more and more, feeling like you have just scratched the surface.
Japan holds a great secret; it is very kind to those with mobility issues. Though many Asian countries conjure up images of endless stairs, narrow roads and impassible crowds, Japan can be surprisingly accessible to seniors and those with disabilities.
Here are 3 great things about accessibility in Japan.
Thanks to the aging population and the bubble economy of a few decades ago, there are many seniors in Japan with a disposable income who love to travel. Add to this the creation of laws similar to the Americans with Disabilities Act, and you have great accessibility at many of Japan’s top tourist attractions.
As many of Japan’s tourist attractions are cultural heritage sites, attention must be paid to integrating accessibility features with the aesthetics of the site. This may mean a slight inconvenience (ie entering via a hidden side entrance), but more often than not it will come in the form of a ramp made of aged wood or an elevator designed to look like a temple building. As some may not be immediately obvious, make sure you ask a staff member or security guard.
The majority of these sites have multiple wheelchair accessible washrooms that are clean and are clearly marked on maps.
While looking at a subway map of Tokyo may strike you with fear, here is a secret: it’s actually easier if you have a disability. Most visitors to Japan spend a lot of time staring at signs and trying to figure out how to get to their destination. For those with physical disabilities, simply tell the staff member at the ticket gate where you want to go and then wait while they make arrangements. They will call ahead to your destination (including any transfers along the way) and then a staff member will direct you to the track. After helping you on the train with a portable slope, you can rest easy knowing that another staff member will be waiting to help you get off. The vast majority of train and subway stations in urban areas are accessible and have accessible toilets available. Check out this video to see it in action.
The Bullet Train, or Shinkansen, also features spaces for wheelchairs (including a private compartment if needed) and a toilet that is large enough to handle a wheelchair.
When travelling in another country, what to do when nature calls is an issue whether you are disabled or not. However, for those with disabilities it can be even more stressful of an issue than for others as there are far more regular washrooms in the world than accessible ones. In many countries, there is generally a toilet stall at the back of the washroom for wheelchair users. Unfortunately, it is often just big enough for a wheelchair and doesn’t account for personal care workers or transfers.
Japan has an excellent answer to this – the “multipurpose toilet”.
Instead of being located near the back of one of the public toilets, these extra wide accessible toilets are an entirely separate room located between the men’s and women’s toilets. They are designed not just for people with disabilities, but also for seniors and mothers with young children – equipped with handrails, diaper changing board, baby chair, sinks for cleaning ostmate bags, and emergency call buttons
These toilets are also readily available. In a pinch, your safest bet is to find the nearest train or subway station as a majority of stations are equipped with accessible toilets. They can also be easily found at tourist attractions, public buildings, department stores, larger supermarkets and in parks.
In 2020, Tokyo will be holding the Olympics and Paralympics. This has led to an ever increasing flow of foreign tourists and a strong effort on Japan’s part to continue promote Japanese “omotenashi” (“hospitality”) and make visiting Japan accessible to all.
Come visit Japan – it’s easier than you think.
Josh Grisdale has cerebral palsy and has been living in Tokyo for nearly a decade. He runs Accessible Japan (www.accessible-japan.com) – a source of information on accessibility in Japan including general tips and a database of hotels with accessible rooms. Follow Accessible Japan on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/AccessibleJapan) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/AccessibleJapan).
Christine is one of our regular writers – she focuses on topics related to eating disorders.
You’d think that there were only so many dvds that one person could watch, so many crosswords they could do, so many ceilings you could stare at, but you’d be wrong. It is amazing how quickly doing nothing filled time, and the routine of being fed becomes a full time job.
It is raining, and so the hallowed five minutes air on the ‘bench’ is diverted to a five minute stand in the hospital corridor by the doors. Desperate to get some air but not keen on getting wet, me and Jay position ourselves right by the automatic doors, resulting in an irritating yet successful result of the doors opening and shutting every twenty seconds.
I laugh, a sort of muffled explosion. I would have been ashamed of such a pathetic burst before, but now it seemed at least something. ‘Look,’ I say, nodding at the vending machine that is empty apart from one bottle of water with a fading label. ‘Even the vending machine is anorexic.’
It is something about the hospital. The deathly silence, empty corridors, faded walls and jaded looks of the few staff that did float by occasionally. The whole thing is otherworldly, but not a good otherworld. This is the world where people become forgotten. Where glassy eyed patients fade into an insignificant world of NHS numbers and patient budgets.
‘Time’ the nurse shouts. I jump, perhaps a little too suddenly as I am reprimanded for being too active. ‘For god’s sake.’ I mutter.
I want to scream, but that would only have suggested I am really crazy. And I’m not, I’m just…ill? Trudging back with a heaviness that belies my weight, I climb the stairs to the ward and resign myself to another day of battles.
I thought that the battles would go away now that I was under the care of the experts, but they had not. In some ways they were magnified, made clearer. Stripping away everything else, the reality of the situation became stark.
Back on the ward I decide to investigate the games cupboard. I pick out a puzzle of a steam train chugging along a track that ran through rolling hills. I’m envious of such freedom and excitement. The picture evokes a warm tug of nostalgia and a desire for an old world that I did not really know. I am constantly wanting to get out of here for my old life, yet clearly my old life had not made me happy and had led me here.
My plans to do the puzzle are scuppered. There’s a smell. Opening the lid, I find a good number of puzzle pieces coated in bran flakes and congealed milk. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Not for the first time, I feel like I am failing the illness by not trying harder to hide my food. Last night Denise hid tuna in her slippers. Fishy feet. Jay often looks like she’s got a ball in her pocket, there’s so obviously potatoes stuffed in it. It’s often difficult to see that failing the illness is another step towards succeeding at being me. Or the me I want to be. I want to be brilliant. Strong, vivid, bright and bold. Glowing with life and radiating passion. That won’t come from stuffing cereal in a box.