A final-year student on the University of Huddersfield's Computer Games Programming course has developed a computer game for the blind. 22 year-old Craig Burgess made the game after considering the impact that disabilities have to interacting with games, and picked blindness because games are a massively visual medium. The game uses pitch...

Microsoft Corp. today launched new software that will make it easier for anyone to create documents and content that will be accessible for blind and print-disabled individuals. The new "Save as DAISY XML" add-in, designed for Microsoft Office Word 2007, Word 2003 and Word XP, will allow users to save Open XML-based text files into DAISY...

Nattiq Technologies announced today the release Eye-Pal reading solution for the vision impaired. With a high resolution camera connected to a standard PC and an installed speech synthesizer, a vision impaired user instantly hears a book or a document being read to him as he places the document under the camera. The Eye-Pal is also...

Put your graphical user interface to this test: Adjust the contrast on your display until the screen is completely black. Now, perform basic e-mail, word processing and Web-browsing tasks. What? Having a problem? Welcome to the world of the 1.3 million Americans who are blind. For them, the world of personal computers, office automation...

What portion of the Web or computer applications is accessible to users with disabilities? For the Web, surveys done showed shockingly low numbers. But it depends a lot on what you include in your survey. If you include government sites or large companies sites you could get better numbers. If you focus on social networking sites, you will get...

Shawn Henry, who is W3C lead for promoting web accessibility for the disabled, believes more should be done to educate web developers on making it easy for the handicapped to navigate cyberspace. "Making sure everyone has full accessibility will lead to many benefits for all concerned," she said. There is increased potential for the site to...

Industrial designer Jonathan Lucas has developed a concept PC specially designed for blind people. Named after a blind ant found in West Africa and Congo, the Siafu PC utilizes a conceptual material called Magneclay to provide a digitally tactile interface. This morphing substance allows Siafu to take different shapes, display images as a 3D...

Tran Anh Minh Nhat, a blind IT teacher in Vietnam, can still recall being overwhelmed the first time he was taught to use computers. "When I realized computers were eyes for the blind, I felt such great happiness it was hard to express."� Nhat says he first heard about computers when he was teaching Braille - he sometimes heard a friend at...

Visually impaired customers of American Express say they can no longer read their credit card statements online. In December Amex changed its format for UK statements from HTML to Portable Document Format or PDF. However, it failed to encode the new PDF documents so they could be read by "screen readers," special software used by blind or...

Computers are such a visual medium that it might be hard to understand how a person with vision impairment can use them. But, indeed, screen readers, magnifiers and a variety of other devices enable people with vision problems to use the Internet, read and write documents, and do other types of electronic tasks at work and at home. In fact,...