Saturday, 1 May 2021

In the blink of an eye - week 14

 Technology has many effects on human societies, among the bests, is that it “enables people”. It makes it possible to do something that before was not; for example, granting disable people access to places in the “real” world, just let’s think about what the invention of elevators have meant for many, but this is even more true also when comes to the digital world.

There are many devices out there that helps people whit many specific personal peculiarities to access a computer, and benefit from the bounty of the world wide web just like everyone else, because after all... "if a person has control over any function, it can also be used to control the computer".

An illustrative real-life case of the above principle are some mouses emulators that can help a person with a limited body usage. The human function they mainly use is the movement of the face only! That will be enough to grant full access to the computer resources and capabilities!

Easy to initialize, mouse emulators are very special input devices, capable to simulate the functions of a two buttons mouse. For their working simple face gestures are the only requirement. A movement of the mouth will start them while the movement of the chin will conveniently substitute a click on the button, in other cases the “click” is made by the mouth to, but a different gesture. There are also examples of the equivalent of the clicks communicated by a sensor sensible to blowing or even biting!

Most sophisticated mouse emulator systems look even magical! They allow moving the mouse pointer on the screen to track the eye's movement using special cameras. They work whit a led positioned under the monitor and connected to a camera that detect eyes movement and transmit them to the computer. The computer will then take the input just like it will do whit a normal mouse input device. The name of this technology is “eyes tracking system”

Another possibility yet for people who have kept the ability to speak is given by software for vocal recognition. These technologies allows to pronounce words and visualize them on the screen instead of using a keyboard but also to perform the classical operation usually done by a mouse.

The level reached by the vocal recognition technology allows today for very extended vocabularies and a high level of precision. All together a much better way to use this technology instead than for Siri or Alexa!


SOURCES (sorry for the Italian)

WEB ACCESSIBILE (accessible web)

https://www.webaccessibile.org/le-basi/come-comunichiamo-con-i-computer/disabili-e-informatica-dispositivi-di-input/

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In the blink of an eye - week 14

  Technology has many effects on human societies, among the bests, is that it “enables people”. It makes it possible to do something that be...