Ideas for student projects in accessible ICT design
Written by CFIT Projects Tuesday, 06 July 2010
Students in ICT & Design are always looking for exciting and worthwhile subjects for MSc or undergraduate projects. People with vision impairments have come to us with some great ideas for projects that are cutting edge, socially useful and which NCBI CFIT would be able to support with advice, expertise and practical asistance.
A lot of these make use of new mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPad which, in many ways, are ideal for vision impaired and older people. All are achievable and we hope some of them will appeal to bright students who can turn them into solid conceptual designs or working applications.
So far, we have collected the following ideas:
Working with RTÉ on making the RTÉ Player accessible
Mobile phone barcode applications
A chart plotting application for blind sailors
Simple iPad apps for older people
Mobile phone labelling applications
Mobile phone colour identifier
Other ideas
Working with RTÉ on making the RTÉ Player accessible
The RTÉ Player is currently not fully accessible to users of screen reader software and other assistive technologies. Blind people are avid TV watchers and we receive a lot of emails about this. RTÉ are working to make the Player accessible and would like to do it by supporting a student project. They will provide a desk for a student with necessary development tools and access to the source code of the RTÉ player. They will assign a senior developer to mentor the student and supervise the development process. This is a fantastic opportunity for a student to work directly with the developers of this cutting edge technology. It would require an ability to program in Adobe Flex.
Mobile phone barcode applications
Blind people have a job identifying and accessing key information about packaged products such as groceries, CDs and DVDs. All of these have barcodes that can be read by the camera on a mobile phone. There are already mobile apps available that can read a barcode and look up shopping websites to tell you where you can buy the product cheapest. What would be useful for blind people would be an iPhone (or similar) app that could first help the person to locate the barcode on a package and position the camera for reading it, then read it and allow the person to associate information with it, so that the next time the bar code is read, the information is available to them. This information could be voice recordings or typed in text. Also, possibly, details retrieved from barcode databases on the internet. It could have a system for filtering or classifying information so, for instance, you would be able to say "For food items, I'm only interested in allergy advice and cooking instructions". It could be extended to creating and printing new barcodes on sticky labels with miscellaneous information. The possibilities are pretty endless.
A chart plotting application for blind sailors
Sandra Garvey, a blind sailor, wrote to us: "Last week I went to the UK to sail in blind week, an annual event. There were forty VI’s sailing on twenty boats. We can helm boats because there is an audible compass. It bleeps a high pitch sound if you deviate to port and a low pitched sound for starboard. It is easy to use and you get used to it after a while. I had conversations with the VI’s about improving our ability to sail. What we cannot do is plot courses. Paper charts are no good as we cannot read them. The other navigation system is chart plotters, a small screen and no sound. Because we cannot use charts we cannot navigate at sea thus taking away a large part of the fun of sailing. As a sighted person I loved chart plotting and feel I am not a complete sailor unless I can plot a course. This was echoed by those I talked to. Blind Sailing is an international organisation crying out for someone to devise an audible chart plotting system, which obviously has to be on the nose accurate or we could all be literally lost at sea. This is not a small group of people but a large number who continue to sail and want to learn to sail. I hope this is of interest to students".
Simple iPad apps for older people
The iPad is a device that may be ideal for older people. It removes the complexity of the PC and allows the creation of apps with clear and simple user interfaces that do basic tasks very well and are very forgiving in terms of user input - no need to use a mouse of a full size keyboard, buttons can be as large as you like, the screen responds to gross gestures such as swipes and it has a built in screen reader making it ideal for older people with vision impairments. The possibilities are endless. Apps for keeping in touch with friends or family. Apps that help keep fading memories alive through photos and other reminders. Apps that help people remember to do things. An iPad could be the perfect device for an older person.
Mobile phone labelling applications
Similar to the barcode app, a general labelling app that would allow you to associate information with simple labels that you could stick on various items (one person would like to stick them on the collars of his goats to make it easier to identify individual animals and assigned them to the correct labelled stalls). When the camera is pointed at the label it would read out the information (recorded as text, voice memos or anything else you could think of, photos even). At its simplest, this could use coloured labels. Anything that a phone could be programmed to reliably distinguish.
Mobile phone colour identifier
Dressing nicely involves getting colour combinations right, something that is challenging for many blind and partially sighted people. A colour identifier that works through the camera of a mobile phone would be useful. At its simplest, it could tell light from dark or the blue end of the spectrum from the red. Being able to distinguish blues and greens in different lighting would be more challenging.
Other ideas
Anything along the following lines would be useful:
- Anything to do with making social networking sites more accessible to assistive technologies, particularly Facebook.
- Something exploring methods of effectively engaging with and consulting with users during the digital media development process.
- Using virtual models of disabled users in hardware/software development.
- The potential of video games to educate in accessible design.