ABILITY Magazine: CSUN 2013

What we do is work on broadcast innovation. You might say what would be broadcast innovation for

accessibility purposes and I would say, for example, radio for the deaf.

That's a project that we've been working on here at our booth for the last 2-3 years.

With folks like Gallaudet, the Hearing Loss Association of America.

And once we've created a mock-up of how to produce captions for radio,

then the folks at the Helen Keller national center said can you convert it into braille for the deaf/blind. So we showed how to do that as well.

And then it was a matter of can you now add emergency alerting features that will run through

the local public radio station. We've now got a project that we'll begin testing and showing how we can do that this summer in the gulf states.

Latino USA became our first regular program that's going to carry captions each and every week hereafter.

So you can go and view them online at their website: futuromediagroup.org and look for the links to Latino USA and their caption radio program.

And you can follow the work we do at NPR labs at: nprlabs.org.

Humanware is involved in a few areas of assistive technology. We have kind of have three focuses:

we have blindness products, speech and braille products, DAISY players.

And we have the low vision side of the business which is magnification of course. Video magnifiers.

And some learning disability products too. Some book reading and comprehension products.

We manufacture braille embossers that vary all the way to the very basic to high end high production embossers.

We also have a touch pad that we call IVEO.

We also distribute products like voice eye and a product from independent science which is a talking mapquest.

We're the industry leaders in tactile graphics and we work very hard to support all the assistive

technology needs for anybody around the world.

Today we're here talking about Windows 8 and our new surface tablet and some of the improvements we've made for accessibility in Windows 8.

So our magnifier and our onscreen narrator for hearing the computer in text speech in a touch environment.

So you have a tablet, you don't have a keyboard, how do you actually use these devices when you can't seem them very well.

So our magnifier and our narrator have been enhanced so you can use them with touch.

Our approach to consumer research is to actually include people with disabilities in the broader user research we do.

So several months, probably a year or so, leading into the release of Windows, we will work with consumers. We have beta testing phases.

We do usability studies and tests and all of those include specific feedback from people with disabilities. Of all types of disabilities.

Hamilton relay services the deaf, the hard of hearing, people who have difficulty speaking or being understood on the telephone, as well as people

who have combined hearing loss with vision loss. Today at our booth, we are showing all of our different services that are available.

For example, we have the California relay service, which is an awesome service for people who are completely deaf.

For people with speech difficulties, we have a service called speech to speech which is amazing for people who are struggling to be understood on the phone.

We also have visually assisted speech to speech which adds a visual component to our already existing speech to speech service.

We also have Hamilton CapTell, which is a great service for people who are hard of hearing, finding it hard to understand what's being said

on the phone, where they can listen to what the person says, and read captions of the call.

So we have many different solutions for people from one extreme to the next and we'd love to share more information with you.

We sell aids to people so they can live independently on their own. Things as far as talking watches, braille watches, talking clocks,

magnifiers, a lot of braille products, a lot of teaching products for small children. We have braille blocks.

And just things to make life a little easier to live on their own so they don't have to depend on other people.

For the past 10 years, we have served as experts in the field of accessibility for the federal government.

We offer electronic documents, such as PDF remediation, we offer website development,

web application development, assessments and remediations there as well.

We also offer full online training courses and classroom training courses as well for developers and content managers and the like.

If you would like to find out more information, please visit our website: www.devis.com