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Accessibility for People with Limited Mobility?
rscrawford asks: "There's an older woman at my church who suffers from advanced Parkinson's Disease. She's in good spirits but misses being able to communicate with her children who live far away. Because she she has advanced tremors and her muscles have atrophied, she can no longer use a keyboard; and because her voice quavers, she probably wouldn't be able to use voice recognition software. Now, I've seen tools for people who are vision impaired or who have cognitive impairments, but what about people like this woman? Are there any tools that would help her use her computer to e-mail her children?"
I remember reading about a mouse software or driver or something that was specifically designed for people with unsteady hands. What it does is it takes the average of the cursor position and gives that to windows to work with.
Another solution you might want to look into would be engineering something that could track the movement of part of her body and translate that into mouse movements.
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How about something along the lines of what Stephen Hawkings uses? He only has one operational finger, I believe. Although, it might be out of her price range?
They have keys that are 4 times as big as standard keyboard keys. Recommended for those suffering from Parkinson's. Also good for getting toddlers hooked on computers.
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I don't know if she can write by hand, but if so maybe just write letters out and scan them into the computer. Then email the letters as attachments.
The easiest and best way would most certainly be to go there yourself, keep her company for awhile, and type her e-mails! It'll be a lot nicer for her in all aspects, whithout having to devise complex stuff for her to use *alone*, which will be most likely difficult and tiring for her.
Stop being a geek for a few hours and be a human friend. Parkinson's disease is extremely tiring, people affected by it at the stage you describe benefit a lot more from some human presence than any gadget, unless of course if such gagdget were to function seamlessly (wich it prolly won't).
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Try Morse code, and recognition + morse->text conversion software. With Parkinson's disease she could get a nice WPM rate, but it would be hard for her not to send long strings of "eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee" instead of pausing. ;)
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Start, Accessories, Accessibility, On-Screen Keyboard.
The only posible problem is that the keyboard is on the smaller side. Your cna change the font size but not the button size.
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Instead of sending regular e-mail, perhaps she could send out voice recordings.
With a simple interface, she could record the messages she wants to send, have them converted to .mp3 or .ogg or whatever, and send them to family. Granted, I would recommend that the family all get Gmail accounts or similar for space.
With a good user-friendly interface, she could then get replies from the family, read them, and record a reply.
While her voice may not be good enough for voice recognition software, I'm sure that someone could help her get set up to at least record her voice well enough that her family could receive it.
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Forget email, set her up with Packet8 or Vonage VOIP with a videophone, and get her kids the same. Set up a big speed dial to dial her kids.
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Search for a keyguard. It's a plate that goes over a normal keyboard that has holes in it. It allows the user to hook their finger in the right hole for a key and then apply pressure to press that key. Simple and effective.
How about her kids communicate with her? Hey - they could even do it in person - a wild idea I know. Sheesh
Other things I have seen:
Good luck!
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7772
Not sure how she would get a prescription though... Or whether its such a good idea.
Dragon voice recognition software might surprise you. When I worked at a school district I got a pc set up for a disabled student. He could barely speak and unless you'd spent a few months with him learning to listen you couldn't understand him. Dragon picked up on it just fine and after a few weeks of training it was working beautifully. This was a number of years ago so I imagine the software has only gotten better.
Help set her up on Vonage or an unlimited rate plan through her local phone company so she can just call the kids for a flat rate each month and not worry about long distance bills.
The GNOME project has some open source accessibility tools that are very easy to set up and use; the major Linux distributions such as Mandriva already include them. See the Gnome Accessibility Project pages for a good overview.
There is an on-screen keyboard; there's also Dasher a predictive text entry system which some people find useful and which can be used via a pointer device.
I'll also mention that there are pointer devices that use a dot on your forehead, so you move your head, which can be useful for people who have tremors in their hands; another option can be foot pedals. The Dasher page mentions use of an eye-tracker.
As others have mentioned, voice-over-IP can be useful, and tools like gnome-meeting and an always-on webcam might be worth considering.
The World Wide Web Consortium also has some resources about accessibility.
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Requirements:
Communicate with children remotely.
Not require great dexterity or voice control.
Be easy to use.
Be low cost.
I think the device that best meets all those requirements is the telephone. Simple and robust. If cost is an issue due to long distance rates, encourage her to use SkypeOut or some similar VoIP alternative.
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What about the good old fashioned telephone? Don't most people have an answering machine or service these days? She could get a telephone with big keys that speed dial people she loves.
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...there may be a Technology Access Center near her. The Assistive Technology Alliance has offices in most states, multiple offices in some. I've dealt with one in my city before and they have/know about some very cool stuff. This page - www.ataccess.org/community/centers.lasso - is a list of their centers around the US; you could check it to see if one might be able to help her, and maybe you could make a couple of phone calls if there's one in her state. I've heard buzz about new and exciting things in the speech-to-speech arena, and you could ask about that. As others have said, depending on the severity of her tremors, she might also be able to use certain specialized keyboards and/or mice. For one, Infogrip (www.infogrip.com) has some innovative stuff.