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Private Enterprise, Moore’s Law & Accessibility Innovation Are Empowering the Disabled

by on November 29, 2009 · 2 comments

The disabled have much to give thanks for this year—but contrary to common assumptions, it’s not for paternalistic government accessibility mandates, regulations or subsidies (see, for example, the FCC’s November 6 Broadband Accessibility workshop), but for the good ol’ fashioned private sector ingenuity that has made America great. Five broad categories of examples suggest how constantly-improving computing power and innovation can make life easier for many, if not all, disabled users—and how market forces empower the disabled along with everyone else.

Video transcription. Last week, Google announced “the preliminary roll-out of automatic captioning in YouTube, an innovation that takes advantage of our speech recognition technology to turn the spoken word into text captions.” Google uses the same speech recognition technology it refined with its free Goog-411 and Google Voice services to automatically transcribe video dialog (which can also be automatically translated using Google’s translation engine). Why? Not because of any government mandate, but because of some combination of three factors: (i) it’s an easy way for Google to invest in its “reputational capital,” (ii) the underlying technologies of transcribing videos make videos easier to use for all users, not just the hearing-impaired, and (iii) those technologies also make it possible to contextually target advertising to the verbal content of videos.

http://www.youtube.com/v/kTvHIDKLFqc&hl=en_US&fs=1&

It’s worth noting that Hulu currently offers closed captioning for some of its television programming but notes that “closed-captioning data that’s used for broadcast TV isn’t easily translated for online use.” The online television clearinghouse promises to offer more closed-captioning soon. Perhaps they ought to license Google’s algorithmic transcription?

Voice recognition for direct consumer use—most notably, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, the latest version of the leading voice recognition software, which was released in summer 2008 but only recently seems to have really hit critical mass. Continue reading →

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Naked Pictures of Bea Arthur

by on May 5, 2009 · 14 comments

… could be illegal under a proposed Massachusetts (per Boing Boing) law that would make it a crime to “photograph with ‘lascivious intent’ a person over the age of 60 or a person with a disability who has been declared mentally incompetent.”  Like the recent prosections of teens for sending nude pictures of themselves on Myspace under child pornography laws, the Massachusetts proposal would criminalize the sharing of “lascivious” photos regardless of the consent of the person being photographed.

Arthur would be turning in her (recently-dug) grave.  Dorothy Zbornak (her most famous character) might not have been much of a libertarian—it seems safe to assume she, like most progressive Catholics (however fictional) voted for Mondale—but one can easily imagine how her withering sarcasm would lay bare (no pun intended) the noxious paternalism underlying this proposal:  It’s bad enough that the government treats adults like children, assuming we’re all not smart enough to make good decisions for ourselves, but must the State really draw a line in the sand beyond which age (60, in this case) Americans officially lose their status as adults and revert to a second childhood in the eyes of the law?

Dorothy and the other Golden Girls would never stand for it.  One can only imagine the rage of  aging beauty Blanche Devereaux at the crimp this law would have put in her (previously thriving) sex life.

Those who don’t get the title’s reference to the 1994 classic Airheads, or who just plain don’t care for the Golden Girls’ geriatric charms, might nonetheless be crestfallen to realize that the bill could also deny the world naughty pics of  developmentally disabled sex kittens like Susan Boyle, the surprise star of Britain’s “Got Talent” (essentially American Idol with worse teeth).  (Of course, the bill would apply only if Susan were declared mentally incompetent).

Ah, Susan, be still my beating heart!

http://www.youtube.com/v/9lp0IWv8QZY

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