We are honored to be one of four finalists in the 2010 da Vinci Awards category for Environmental Adaptation/Daily Living/Work Aids category. Held every year and made possible by the Michigan chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, the da Vinci Awards are a celebration of innovation to benefit the National MS Society.
As a finalist, we will be sharing our product at the awards ceremony in Dearborn, Michigan, on September 30, 2010. You can support our efforts by viewing our submission video – the finalist video with the most views by September 26th will win a new award called the “Leo.”
Wish us luck in our pursuit of a 2010 da Vinci Award, and thanks to all of our customers and supporters – without you guys none of this would be possible!
On September 11, 2010, the Ai Squared “Zoomers” team will run in the Jay Hathaway Memorial Team Challenge portion of the Maple Leaf Marathon here in Manchester, Vermont.
Our team consists of fellow Ai Squared employees Fred and Jamie from our development department and Scott and I from marketing. Our finishing scores will be added together, and if we have the lowest combined total of all the teams, we win! However, we are all what you would call casual runners, so we will just be happy to finish. We are so pleased to participate, especially since all of the proceeds from the team challenge benefit the Lion’s Club.
Over the years I have given up some sports due to my vision impairment, but luckily running isn’t one of them. Ice hockey worked for a while since I could kind of see the black puck on the white ice, but I had to stop playing when I could no longer tell if someone was skating towards me or away from me. And white water canoeing had to go when I took an unintentional plunge into some Class 4 waters on Maine’s Dead River. Those gray rocks are very difficult to see!
I have to admit that I have taken some bad spills running too, and one time I even cracked some ribs. Curbs and uneven sidewalks are hard for me to see, but my peripheral vision is what allows me to keep on running. I just have to be sure to pick up my feet a little bit more, which I will be doing a lot of on September 11th! Wish me luck!
Although we all hate to admit it, August has come to an end, kids have gone back to school, and our last three-day holiday weekend is here. According to AAA Travel and Motor Club, 91% of all travel this Labor Day weekend will be made by car. Almost every holiday comes with its share of delays, frustrations, and stress, but when it comes to preparing for a vacation, the best thing you can do is plan.
In our last ZoomText Tech Support tip, we showed you how to save your ZoomText configuration. This week, Tony shows you how to use Application Settings, a very powerful feature that can allow you to customize ZoomText to load your favorite settings on the fly for applications you use the most.
Watch the video right here by clicking on the play button below or go onto Vimeo and watch it there.
Previously I’ve talked about how I still enjoy photography despite being visually impaired. But an SLR can be a lot to carry around, and picture-taking opportunities can come along when you least expect them. One solution is to use a cell phone camera. In the past, cell phone cameras have been truly terrible, and in any event, most cell phones are not very accessible to low vision people. The iPhone has changed all of this.
The camera on the iPhone is not going to put the SLR makers out of business, but it is a passable alternative to a point-and-shoot camera when you are taking pictures outside. Also, the iPhone is incredibly accessible to low vision users, with both speech and magnification features available out of the box. You can use the iPhone with its Zoom magnification mode turned on at any time, including when it is being used to take pictures. Therefore, you can zoom in on the screen as much as you want using the Zoom accessibility feature to see just what you are shooting without having to use the camera app’s digital zoom feature. This is good because the digital zoom feature on a camera will drastically reduce image quality and resolution. Because the iPhone lets you use the Zoom accessibility tool to take pictures, you can take high quality pictures and still see what you are photographing.
The picture above was taken on an iPhone camera by totally blind photographer Jason Castonguay, and shows the kind of quality you can get from the iPhone outdoors.
Three out of my six siblings have been diagnosed with juvenile macular dystrophy at different times during the last 15 years. More specifically, I was diagnosed with Stargardt disease, the most common form of juvenile macular dystrophy. Stargardt disease is an autosomal recessive retinal degenerative disease, which means that our parents are carriers although they were not affected.
After my diagnosis in 1995, I researched Stargardt disease exhaustively and concluded that the disease was so complicated there would likely be no “cure” or treatment for it in the next 20 years. But after attending the Visions 2008 conference sponsored by the Foundation Fighting Blindness in Washington D.C., I started paying attention again.
In 1981, I biked from Brattleboro, Vermont, to Bar Harbor, Maine, by myself, so having bicycle repair skills was crucial. These skills came in handy when I had a flat tire coming down the other side of the White Mountains on a dirt road that eventually led to pristine Center Sandwich, New Hampshire. I’m sure [...]
We’ve talked a lot about the iPad here on Zoomed In – let’s face it, it’s just cool. There are many reasons we decided to highlight it here, one of which being its built-in accessibility features. Maurie was the first here in the office to get one; she happens to be visually impaired and has [...]
We are honored to be one of four finalists in the 2010 da Vinci Awards category for Environmental Adaptation/Daily Living/Work Aids category. Held every year and made possible by the Michigan chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, the da Vinci Awards are a celebration of innovation to benefit the National MS Society.
