[laptop-accessibility] Introducing me

[Chris Ball]

Hi, all.  

On Wed, May 09, 2007 at 08:20:03PM -0700, Peter Korn wrote:
> Welcome to the list.  We are thus-far very low traffic; waiting for a 
> critical mass or critical energy level I think.

My own introduction:  I spent two years as the maintainer of Dasher,
which is an on-screen keyboard replacement (see http://dasher.org.uk/),
and for the last six months I've been working as a contractor at OLPC.
I'd like to make sure that once Sugar is far enough along to start
making concrete accessibility plans, we reuse as much of the existing
technology (e.g. at-spi) as possible.  Getting Dasher to run on the
XO would be great, too.   :)

> Re: affordable switch devices to connect to the OLCP; one suggestion I 
> got at CSUN was to see if you could use the microphone input port for a 
> potentially very inexpensive switch.  It would mean you couldn't also 
> have an external microphone in use (and perhaps it would also disable 
> the built-in microphone by the act of plugging one in).  Nonetheless, it 
> might allow a <$1 switch...

You can!  The microphone has an "analog input" mode, whereby we can get
a direct reading from the microphone port to enable very cheap sensors 
(photodiodes, accelerometers, etc) to be attached.  Youcould easily
configure the analog in to behave as a switch.

- Chris.
-- 
Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>