[nabs-l] FW: [real-eyes] Article from Business Week: "How Tech for the Disabled is going Mainstream"

[V Nork]

-----Original Message-----
From: real-eyes-bounce at freelists.org [mailto:real-eyes-bounce at freelists.org]
On Behalf Of V Nork
Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 2010 2:08 AM
To: real-eyes at freelists.org
Subject: [real-eyes] Article from Business Week: "How Tech for the Disabled
is going Mainstream"

Hello list, I am passing along this article from Business week on universal
design, it is about nine months old.  It is really encouraging to see this
kind of article in a mass market publication like Business week.  Also, I
had never heard of Mind Flex.  Best, Ginny
 

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., All rights reserved. http://
www.mcgraw-hill.com

 

 

Apple is widely celebrated for making devices as easy to use as they are
elegantly designed. What customers probably don't know is that some of these
features aren't exactly new--they evolved from software Apple created to
help disabled people use PCs. Among them: the new iPhone's voice control
option, which allows users to speak to their handsets to prompt an action,
such as calling Mom, or to get a spoken answer to such questions as "What
song is playing?"

 

And "mainstreaming" tools for the disabled is spreading. Software developer
Nuance Communications, for instance, invented voice command technology to
help people who are unable to type on a computer. Today, the company's
algorithms are used in products ranging from Amazon.com's latest Kindle
e-reader to cars from Ford Motor. Meantime, Mattel is incorporating
technology, initially intended to help paraplegics, into a
soon-to-be-released game controlled by players' brainwaves.

 

Other companies should consider following these trailblazers, say innovation
consultants. "Companies could look at designing for accessibility as a sales
opportunity. Most features that are accessible for the disabled have great
value to everybody," says Donald A. Norman, a former Apple vice-president
for advanced technology who heads a joint business and engineering program
at Northwestern University.

 

BENEFITS FOR THE BLIND

 

Mainstreaming has a long history. Thomas Edison saw his invention of the
phonograph as a way to open the printed world to the blind by recording book
readings. More recently, predictive-text software, the algorithms that
finish words people type in search engines or e-mail, had its roots in
technology geared to the disabled, according to patents filed for related
programs.

 

Apple's VoiceOver feature can be traced back to the late 1980s, says Norman,
when the computer maker decided to try to embed "universal access" in its
Macintosh PC line. The term is used in engineering and design circles to
describe goods, from scissors to cell phones, made in such a way that people
of any age or physical ability can use them. VoiceOver became a standard
feature of Apple computers in 2006. When it's activated, the Mac reads
everything highlighted by the cursor, from text on a Web page to numbers in
a database, in a natural-sounding voice.

 

While VoiceOver helped broaden Apple's reach to the blind, it also became a
mini-engine for innovation within the company. "When we created the
VoiceOver idea and concept for the Mac, we also realized we could take
advantage of it by mainstreaming it," says Greg Joswiak, Apple's
vice-president for iPod and iPhone marketing.

 

Now the technology has made its way into the iPod Shuffle. Unlike its larger
brethren, the Shuffle is too small to have a screen to display information
about its music content. The latest model, introduced last March, gets
around this shortcoming with software that can say what song is playing.
Sales were 51% higher in the new Shuffle's first week than they were for the
previous model's debut, says Barclays Capital analyst Benjamin Reitzes. The
low $79 price undoubtedly was part of the reason. But many users raved
online about the voice interface, indicating that the feature helped
popularize the music player, too.

 

Apple added a reverse version of VoiceOver to its third-generation iPhone,
released in June, that enables users to tell the phone to perform functions
rather than type commands. That permits hands-free use of the smartphone and
makes the device functional for people with visual and other physical
handicaps, as well as for motorists. "Some customers need assistive
technologies, and other people want convenience," says Joswiak. "We try to
solve problems for the disabled community, then we drive the solutions into
the mainstream, to let everyone take advantage of them."

 

The rising demand for devices that can speak and be spoken to has been a
boon for Nuance Communications. The Burlington (Mass.) company supplies
voice control software for a growing number of products, from its Dragon
NaturallySpeaking speech recognition software for PCs to hands-free voice
dialing for phones from Nokia, Samsung, LG Electronics, and BlackBerry maker
Research in Motion. Through a joint Ford-Microsoft venture called Sync,
Nuance also provides voice command capabilities in top-selling GPS
navigation devices, such as Garmin and TomTom, as well as in Ford, Lincoln,
and Mercury vehicles.

 

"While the disabled aren't a significant percentage of our users today, they
are our biggest power users," says Peter Mahoney, general manager of
Nuance's Dragon unit. "They help us push the envelope" when it comes to
improving products for mass-market customers.

 

Other companies are borrowing technology that aids the deaf. At Google, a
deaf software engineer, Ken Harrenstein, spearheaded the creation of a
captioning tool for videos posted on Google's YouTube site. His original
intention was to help deaf users. But the company soon figured out the
software could also help translate languages. That idea led in late 2008 to
an auto-translation tool that allows people to add captions in 50 languages
instantly to YouTube videos they upload, increasing the number of people who
can watch and understand the clips.

 

MIND CONTROL

 

Mattel is taking mainstreaming into the toy market. In October it plans to
release Mindflex, an $80 game that borrows from technology used by severely
disabled people to control electronic devices by channeling brainwaves via
sensors. Mattel has licensed the toy's brainwave-harvesting technology from
a San Jose company called NeuroSky. To play, users put on a headband with
sensors. By focusing their thoughts on motion, they can cause a motor to
propel small plastic balls through a tabletop obstacle course. When they
relax, the objects stop moving.

 

Mattel is betting that the technology will become the basis for a line of
mind- controlled physical games like Mindflex, opening up a new category for
the toy industry, says Geoff Walker, a senior marketing vice-president at
the El Segundo (Calif.) company.

 

As pioneers boost sales by incorporating technology once confined to
products for the handicapped, other companies are sure to follow. They could
come out ahead, says Tim Bajarin, president of technology consultancy
Creative Strategies in Campbell, Calif. "It's smart, because there is an
aging population that will need easier-to-use tech. It's even smarter to
follow Apple's lead--and then call these features out and get people's
attention. Then it becomes a competitive advantage."

 

[Table]

 

MORE APPLICATIONS THAN FIRST IMAGINED

 

COMPANY             PRODUCT,            TECHNOLOGY FOR      MASS-MARKET

 

RELEASE DATE        THE DISABLED        APPLICATION

 

Google              YouTube caption     



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