Getting rid of CEO Travis Kalanick has apparently not magically resolved all of ride-hailing giant Uber’s many, many problems, with the company now facing a lawsuit in New York over its near-total lack of cars accessible to people with wheelchairs.
Science fiction and fantasy conventions exist in the venn diagram between professional networking events, marketing expos and fan celebrations. Between all three of those things, they do a lot to shape fandom and the stories we love. And for years now, conventions have been failing disabled fans and professionals. So…
It’s hard enough for most of us to get to work on time using the subway—but imagine if you only had access to 25 percent of stations. That’s the reality for wheelchair users in New York, for whom getting around the city is sometimes a near-impossible task. [CORRECTION]
The software running on the smartphone in your pocket has a bunch of options to help improve readability, and whether you have a serious problem with your eyesight or you just want to spend less time squinting, they can make a big difference to usability. Here's how to get text looking bigger and sharper on the latest…
Stephen Hawking is a survivor. He's been valiantly holding his own against ALS disease for 50 years now, but it's still taking its toll. The cheek-twitching mechanism he's been using to talk for the past 10 years isn't quite as efficient as it used to be. He's down to one word per minute at times, but Intel's CTO is…
GamingNexus editor John Yan has a four-year-old son with a mild form of autism. The little guy's tried to play 360 and PS3 but has trouble getting a hold on the controllers. With Kinect, though, he was an instant pro.
"I have seen a lot of technology for the blind, and I can safely say that the iPhone represents the most revolutionary thing to happen to the blind for at least the last ten years."
Your eyes are absorbing this webpage. They're passing over this, this, then this word, right now. That's how reading works, online: you take this for granted. But what if you couldn't?
As a result of severe autism and learning disabilities, eleven-year-old Callum Lodge is unable to talk. In order to allow his son to communicate with the world around him, his father has developed Speaks4me, an electronic communication system.
We've seen software and applications designed to assist visually impaired individuals in the past, but nothing's been quite what we're shown in this video. The LookTel software actually allows phones to recognize and audibly identify objects almost instantly.
The chair displays a realtime 3D HUD while the user concentrates on basic functions, such as rotating the chair left or right. That information is read by the chair via EEG waves (the electricity running along your scalp as a byproduct of your brain working). It's the same idea we've seen in recent game controllers,…
Instead of making the user find the right place to press their finger, the engineers made the software find the user's finger. Wherever the user touches when dialing becomes 5, and from here things are pretty obvious. Swipe up for 2, down for 8 and way down for 0.
The screen-based controls and rich visuals that make a device like the iPhone an attractive option for deaf users aren't of much use to the visually impaired. By employing a combination of an embossed "Moon Type" alphabet casing, a custom home screen and a screenreading app, the InVision solution could (awkardly)…
Star Trek's Geordi still has the advantage over this "seeing machine" designed by a legally-blind poet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but for $4000, this represents the current state of the art. It's housed in a box that's rather small, but it's not small enough to fit inside a pair of Star Trek glasses…
With all the emphasis on phones that are thinner and more feature-rich, Emporia is targeting a different demographic with the EmporiaLife handset. Think of it as the large-print Reader
s Digest version of the Razr. Big buttons and an easy to read LCD make it easy for someone with failing eyesight to operate the phone.…
