Looking For "People Friendly Media" Technology

I was honored to connect with Deaf Mom and read about her life on her blog Deaf Mom Shares Her World. I learned from her that video interviews are not accessible for people who are deaf, that text transcripts along with videos are accessible. She inspired me to become interested in the people friendly media technology available. Just this morning we were emailing about this need:

NEED: We are looking for a technology that can "transcribe" audio files to text.

Then today I read about another inspiring person (T.V. Raman, a Computer Scientist and an Engineer at Google) in the New York Times article "Going Where No Guide Do Can". The article describes him as a leading thinker for accessibility issues and notes that some of Mr. Raman's innovations may help make electronic gadgets and web services more user-friendly for everyone. For example, the article also mentioned that Mr. Raman said that with the right tweaks, touch-screen phones - many of which already come equipped with GPS Technology and a compass - could help blind people navigate the world.

I will be heading to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week. I decided to add accessibility technology that can assist people with disabilities to the my list of things to look for.

Please comment on this post with any technologies (and links) you know of to assisting people who are Blind or Deaf. I would also like to hear from people with other disabilities to add the technology they use also and will post about that also.

After reading the New York Times article, I realize that my comments do have a captcha which may be hard to use for screen readers. If you want to comment, and find the captcha an issue - then please email me and I will add your comments to this post. My email is techmamas(at)gmail(dot)com.

Relevant Links:

Start with a visit to Words Matter - Writing about people with disabilities

Official Google Blog: T.V. Raman on Even More Books to Read

Google Accessible Web Search For the visually impaired (Google Accessible Search) and Google Accessible Search FAQ

Google Book Search Becomes Accessible

Links From Deaf Mom:

• Deaf Mom: Moving in a New Direction With CSDVRS
• www.overstream.net and www.bubbleply.com are two sites that allow a person to add captions to videos.
• You Tube has a captioning feature that can be turned on and off-- video host has to add the captions.Here is a link to the TechCrunch post on YouTube captioning (Click Here):           

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/28/youtube-adds-closed-captioning/