What's next?

As a frequent reader of Gizmodo.com, I'm often pouring over the site looking for potential technology that would be appropriate for people with disabilities. Besides the enjoyment of looking over (fill in the blank) made of legos and funny shaped USB powered gadgets, I've come to appreciate the sheer enormity of this whole tech scene.

From time to time, I'll highlight something from this and other sites and give the assistive tech bent on it.

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The above picture is of a stair climbing robot developed by Japanese engineers... Looks like something out of a movie. Would be interesting to see how exactly a person with a disability could independently transfer in and out of this chair.

Tech Tool of the Day - E-triloquist

E-triloquist (http://www.etriloquist.com/) is a free text-to-speech program which is specifically designed for users with communication needs. I first encountered this program about 7 years ago through a former coworker of mine who had used it with one of his ALS clients. Since then, I've recommended it to numerous patients and clients as a resource to check out.

Nice Features:

- FREE

- Easy editing features for quick messages

- Ability to save text to a Word-compatible file
- Compatible with high quality commercial speech synthesizers which the user can purchase (AT&T, Neospeech, etc).

Features which need improvement:

- Interface a bit quirky

- Limited help guide

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Overall, this is a great FREE program. Visit the website (http://www.etriloquist.com/) for more info including the story behind the software.

Greetings!

The purpose of this journal is to help educate readers about assistive technology and point to resources that are available on the web.

I want to extend a special welcome to the ALSA 2008 Leadership and Clinical Conference attendees. I will be posting some reviews of software mentioned during my presentation in the upcoming weeks.

Andy