My friend, David Niemeijer of AssistiveWare, sent me a link to an amazing video.
It is a video of an American game reviewer playing Unreal Tournament. I am sure you’d be surprised by it even if you are not into gaming.
Wondering what’s so special about it? See the video, and I am sure you will agree.
David has been telling me about Mike, but it is surprising to see him actually play games, write game reviews and even a novel using only one finger, which is about all that he can move at will.
David’s software SwitchXS helps him do all these things.
SwitchXS is such an excellent program that it can work with almost any software available as-is. That means you don’t have to do anything special with your software to become part of this miracle, but you can optimize the design of your software so it will work better. For example, let’s say your software only works with mouse control. You can make it more accessible to someone like Mike by also supporting keyboard controls.
SwitchXS and most of AssistiveWare’s software is fully functional without any payment. So perhaps you can use that time to test how well your software works with it. Even if you don’t have the intention to optimize, I will assure you that it would be fun to test.
David actually has some more amazing videos.
The latest shows a ten year old girl fluently writing things out on her Mac:
Elina
Here, you’ll find directory for more movies:
AssistiveWare videos on computer accessibility
Wow, thank you very much for posting this! Those videos are very moving; I was a bit skeptical about how the video could show something I hadn't seen before, but after about 1 minute into it I saw exactly why you wanted people to watch these videos for themselves. I don't know if there's a way of describing it that can have the same impact as seeing it for yourself.
I'm glad to know there's software like this out there, and I've put evaluating how this software works with wxWidgets/wxPython apps on my TODO list. :-)
Kevin, thank you for the nice comment. I believe support at developer tool such as wxWidgets/wxPython would be very helpful. I am glad you liked it.
Also, thank you for leaving the surprise factor for watching this movie ;-)
Holy... this is an amazing piece. I won't post a spoiler, but there are several points made in this clip - the value of the software itself is the least of them. Mike is on my hero list.
Steve,
You are right. Mike is the hero here; and on my Japanese blog, I've featured it that way:
http://nobi.cocolog-nifty.com/nobilog2/2007/05/mac_266d.html
But because this is a blog for developers, I thought it would be more appropriate to talk about the software and how to make the software environment better for someone like Mike ;-)