Tag: DISABILITY

Last year, Toyota proudly announced the development of a new mind-controlled wheelchair, which was reportedly capable of interpreting a user's brain waves within a few milliseconds. Now, a group of Swiss scientists have taken the prototype one step further, by adding an extra A.I. touch to a new brain-controlled wheelchair. As Engadget reports, researchers at Switzerland's École ...

Highlights from this morning's other big tech headlines.... As part of an ongoing (and often ridiculous) modernization movement, the British Monarchy has created an impressive Flickr account featuring both current and historic snapshots. [From: Reuters and Flickr] The Cellular Telephone Industries Association (CTIA) is attacking San Francisco's "overzealous" cell phone radiation labels ...

Today, most blind Web surfers rely on Braille screen displays to read online articles. And despite recent advances, it remains a pretty arduous task. Instead of using lights, like most computer screens, Braille displays use electromechanically controlled pins to show information that's been digitally converted into Braille. The converted text then appears onscreen in the form of touchable ...

The Web is teeming with the unrealized ideas of both students and established designers who set out to produce astonishing renderings and prototypes for unusual products. Unfortunately, due to the lack of time, money, or technology, many of those products never progress from the planning stages to the mass market. But that doesn't mean we can't salivate over them, nevertheless. Last week we ...

What's harder than beating a tortuously long 'Zelda' game? Doing it blind. Just ask Jordan Verner. Two years and over 100,000 keystrokes after he set out on his bold mission, the blind student from Canada has finally conquered 'Ocarina of Time,' the first Nintendo 64 entry in the Zelda franchise. But he couldn't have done it without a little help from some total strangers. It all started when ...

One of the beautiful things about the march of technology is how it brings parts of the human experience to the disabled that they would otherwise have missed. Los Angeles' Tony Quan was able to write graffiti even though ALS has taken away his ability to move anything other than his eyes, while Brit Graham Hunt found the Paragolpher, which let him take to the putting green despite being confined ...

Late one night, a woman rolled up to a White Castle drive-through in St. Paul, Minnesota on her mobility scooter. No, this is not the beginning of a joke, and she was not reenacting a scene from a recent stoner flick. Ariel Wade just wanted some burgers. And since the lobby was closed, Wade, who suffers from degenerative arthritis in her back, had no choice but to roll up on her blue scooter. ...

In the Candian province of British Columbia, the disability case of Brendon Bishop has taken an interesting turn involving the Internet's most popular social networking site. In 2005, Bishop was involved in a car accident that, according to him, left him too fatigued to work. As a result, Bishop filed suit against British Columbia's provincial insurance agency, as well as the other driver, ...

Yeah, we may be hardened cynics -- our cold, black hearts have closed off to all but the most extraordinary tech-related stories, and we don't talk about the triumph of the human spirit a lot, but PlayStation 3 forum user KitsuneYume has us stepping outside our usual box today. With the help of an engineer, he made an "adaptive controller" that allows him to game with the pros despite serious ...