Proud Geek

I work with several people with visual impairments, and it has been an eye-opening experience (weak pun intended) for me to watch them work on computers. The things I take for granted — quickly steering the mouse to the exact button and then clicking on it — becomes a labor for some of them. One uses a screen-reader, and tabs from button to button or from text to text and listens until she finds the right button she needs (assuming, of course, the button has text on it with exactly what the button does, rather than just a mysterious “Click Here”). Websites I’m totally used to suddenly becomes a mysterious landscape when viewed through screen-readers or magnified 10 times.

And so it’s encouraging when I read that Yahoo Mail has made its classic interface (not the new AJAX-y drag-n-drop interface) more accessible to people who use screen-readers. I have not figured out yet exactly what has been changed, but it may be that frames (long the bane of screen-readers) have been eliminated in favor of columns that can more easily be scanned by screen-readers.

Good for you, Yahoo! Gmail, when will you do this?

(Thanks, DownloadSquad!)

I’ve previously blogged about options for voice messages to be converted to text to be emailed or SMS’ed to you. (See my reviews or mentions of SimulScribe, Spinvox, and Jott.) But this one, folks, is free.

CallWave provides a suite of “outside the phone” services, and the one that’s of most interest to me (as a deaf person) is its free service transcribing voice messages to text. You can then read the voice message either via email, via a text message, or via a “PhonePage” — your own customized Internet page where you can go through and sort voice messages much like you would like an email inbox.

CallWave even provides a widget that you can put onto your iGoogle, Yahoo, Vista Sidebar, or Apple Dashboard showing your list of voice messages (that you should have already transcribed to text, right?). Very useful, very convenient. And for free. Waitamin, I just caught something — it’s free during its beta period. Ohhhh.

CallWave provides several other services — some at a low monthly fee — like virtual faxes and voice mail on your computer.

Heads up: a new subtitled bonus video at the end of this blog post — this time, of my younger daughter walking for the first time!

Four months ago, I told you about Overstream, a website where you can easily add subtitles / captions to your videos. Several of you (including myself) mentioned that while this website was wonderful, there wasn’t a way to move your captioned videos from one site to another.

I’m happy to tell you that Overstream now has made it easy to export your captions / subtitles to other video-hosting websites.

Max, the creator of Overstream, recently added a feature where you can save your subtitles as a “.srt” file. An SRT file pretty much just contains your subtitles and the times in hundreds of seconds that they are to appear (and then disappear) in your video. I believe SRT files are similar to what is being used by major television and movie producers, but I could be wrong. And I also believe this is similar to what rather complex subtitling computer programs create — like Subtitle Workshop and MAGpie.

Anyhow, on Overstream, after you’re finished creating your subtitles, you can then click on “Tools” to see an option for exporting current subtitles as SRT. Click on that option, and then you’ll get an option to save the subtitles as a file on your computer or copy all the subtitles (and time codes) to your clipboard.  (Hey Max, yet another suggestion: can you add buttons to allow the user to move the current video frame back or fro a half second, a second, and five seconds?  I found myself constantly re-positioning the arrow showing the current video frame.)

Last July, I told you how Google had added a feature where you can upload “.srt” files which is used to add captions / subtitles to videos. This is where you can import the SRT file you created with Overstream, or even paste the subtitles into a special text box.

And thus, I was able to easily subtitle my 21-second Google video of my younger daughter walking for the first time! Here’s a quick step-by-step guide on how I did this:

1. Upload my video to Google Video
2. Go to Overstream.net and create a new Overstream (series of subtitles) using my new Google Video as the base video
3. Export the subtitles (via the Tools button on the Overstream Subtitles editing screen) to a SRT file on my computer
4. Go back to Google Video, and view my “Uploaded Videos“
5. Click on the “Add” button next to “Captions / Subtitles” for that video
6. Upload my SRT file to Google Video
7. … and hey presto, the video is now subtitled!

A huge benefit of using Google Video and an uploaded SRT file is that the subtitles can be turned on or off (!!!) using the “CC” button at the bottom of the video screen. The subtitles appear just below the video itself. Doubling the size of the video or making it full-screen still makes the subtitles look sharp — the subtitles aren’t stretched and distorted, but rather the font size is increased by Google Video. Very nice.  When the video is embedded on another website, like what I’m doing below, the captions seem a bit small — but that seems to be a Google Video issue and not Overstream’s.

The SRT export functionality brings the Overstream - Google Video duo to the top of my list of recommended sites to use to caption your video. Thanks, Max, for listening to us and adding this super-duper-terrific functionality!  Makes me think — it’s not easy for a sitemaster like Max to allow users who create media on his site to take this media elsewhere, so I really appreciate the new Export SRT file feature that Max added.

What’s that? You want me to shut up now and show you the video? Ok, ok! Without further ado, here’s the video of my younger daughter walking for the first time!

For people who use wheelchairs, even the tiniest bump or step can seem like an imposing barrier. Curbs without a curb ramp? Forget it. A step along the sidewalk? Impossible. A walk along a trail that has some bumps and dips? May as well scale Mt. Everest. High service counters? Neck-crick time.

Perhaps not anymore. There’s a new type of power wheelchair designed to give persons with disabilities yet more independence — the Independence iBOT 4000 Mobility System.

With the iBOT 4000, persons who use wheelchairs would be able to:

• Easily raise yourself to reach high shelves and countertops.
• Safely travel at eye level.
• Go up or down steps and stairs.
• Travel over uneven terrain.
• Climb curbs up to 5 inches high.
• Travel indoors and outdoors much like a conventional standard power wheelchair.
• Using remote control, maneuver the iBOT® Mobility System up a ramp and into a vehicle for unoccupied transportation.

Impressive list of features. At 289 pounds (unladen), it’s not exactly lightweight stuff. But with remote control and its ability to transverse uneven terrains and steps, that seems to be a fair trade-off.

I should note that the stair-climbing feature has some limitations. The person using it would need to have at least one railing to hold on if using this independently to climb stairs, or have a person assist. I took several snapshots of a video showing how this stair-climbing feature works:

Thoughts? Concerns? Observations? Share with us in the comments, willya!