The Best Product Designs of 2006

conq writes "BusinessWeek has made available IDSA's annual list of the best designed products of the year." From the article: "The Talking Tactile Tablet system allows visually impaired individuals to access graphic imagery they otherwise would not be able to enjoy. Instead of using Braille, which the majority of visually impaired people do not read, users hear audio descriptions of each component of an image. Key considerations of the design were ease-of-use, ruggedness, cost and providing a pleasing aesthetic experience, namely how the product feels."

Comments

A better way to link

[houghi]

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/06/idea2006/s ource/1.htm
That way you only need to edit the number at the when somebody mentions a number

Re:A better way to link

[NewbieV]

The list is also available on the IDSA website, in a more-organized fashion: clicky

Re:Wait, so Lenovo gets in the top 10...

[justthinkit]

I saw Lenovo in there twice, and there were duplicate pages for a shoe as well.

More info on the touchgraphics tablet.

[glowworm]

Although just skimmed over in the precis, as no one else seems to have commented I will say the tablet would be quite handy in some school settings.

Right now our school employs a aide to copy graphical information onto paper with puff-ink or an embossing wheel. She traces the pictures and the ink expands and is "readable" by the visually impared kids we have, the wheel on the other hand leaves an impression in the paper that feels like braille.

Both these techniques lets them "see" the shape of squares, triangles, countries - even letters that you or I read. The biggest disadvantage is that the aide needs to be with the child as they learn to give a description of what is being seen. With this system and pre-prepared sheets the child can explore graphical images in their own way without another person being with them.

The web page is at http://www.touchgraphics.com/ttt.htm if anyone is interested in looking more.

By the way, for all the web developers out there, we find that many pages are not really accessable; tables for layout are generally a PITA to read, CSS works very nicely though.

Just like you create a web page then test it in Opera, FFx, Safari, Konqueror, Lynx and IE you should run it through a JAWS simulator. JAWS is the main Windows based text to speech screen reading tool many visually impared people use. JAWS Demo from Here FANGS is a firefox extension that simulates what a visually impared person will see if they are using JAWS (FANGS is easier than JAWS for sighted people to use as you don't need to learn a heap of key bindings). Please add it to your arsenal of testing tools.