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Comment Re:Ha your great medicare (Score 1) 174

I see the problem a bit differently.

The problem is that the market for assistive devices is so used to insurance paying for everything that they've clung to 100% custom solutions that, while operational, don't have to play by any rules of competition or scale.

My son had an $8K system for a while that was based off a Transmeta processor and had a touch screen, built-in CD-ROM, telephone interface, and IR remote. It was also 10 pounds. Baked into the price was about $1200 in software that allowed for the building of pages consisting of graphics tiles that could be read aloud via speech synthesis. Yep, $1200 for the modern equivalent of HyperCard.

There is nothing stopping a person from grabbing an iPad and loading it with the accessibility apps that are pertinent to them (including an app for a tile based speech system - it's already there in the app store). $500 for the iPad. $30 max for the accessibility software. Of course, that will all be an out of pocket expense, but a person will have the cheaper solution instantly rather than go through half a year of Medicare/Medicaid approvals.

One downside of the iPad, though, is that it isn't as compatible with the classroom as a Windows netbook. My son's school loads their software onto his netbook so he can interface with it via touchscreen. That's not possible with the iPad.

Comment Re:Icrap is kid friendly (Score 1) 174

I have a son about to turn 2 who knows all that stuff sans iPad/iPhone. He also sings songs, can identify Chewbacca, and comes running like a madman when I whistle the theme from "Shaun the Sheep".

Then there's my other son who is 8 who has cerebral palsy and for years used a medically approved $8000 computer as a communication device. When it crapped out, I decided a netbook would be just fine. Total cost: $350.

We've looked at an iPad for him and might eventually go for one, but his netbook is working well at the moment.

Comment Re:New blacktop for the road to hell (Score 1) 168

Didn't we already have these discussions a month ago?

There are four camps here:

1. Accessibility will totally fuck with my Web x.0 experience
2. Accessibility will cost me money
3. Accessibility is easy, why not do it?
4. Accessibility is a necessity.

Camps 3 and 4 form an alliance and try to convince camps 1 and 2 that they're bellyaching over nothing. Camps 1 and 2 ally and talk about how small businesses will be sued out of existence.

And the unspoken camp 5, the people that require the accessibility, sit by and hope that people don't shut them out of the conversation by making the means inaccessible.

Comment iPad just doesn't cut it for me (Score 1) 291

I recently toyed with an iPad to see if I could use it for quickly publishing articles with photos during an upcoming event. Using a DSLR and the camera connection kit (what we call in netbook/PC parlance an "SD slot"), I was able to get the photos onto the iPad.

But when I was in my CMS editing the articles, I tried to upload my photos. Couldn't. All the "browse" buttons in my CMS interface for selecting files for upload were disabled. Turns out that iPad's Safari implementation just turns that off with no way around it.

So... to use the iPad in the manner I wanted, I would have to:

1. Transfer all photos from SD card to iPad photo albums
2. Launch an app to store photos somewhere other than my web server
3. Launch a browser to create the article
4. Launch a second browser window to get cross-site image references from 3rd party photo hosting service

Or I could go buy a netbook and do everything in one app (a browser), without an extra kit, no interim transfer stage, and reduce it to:

1. Launch a browser to create article and upload images from SD card directly into it.

Why they couldn't enable HTTP uploads from photo albums is beyond me.

Comment Re:Stress? (Score 5, Funny) 470

Honestly, the only time I feel stress about being a tightwad teetotaler is when people offer to buy me a drink or try to hand me a beer and then express shock that I'm alcohol averse.

But then, I masturbate a lot, so maybe I just relieve stress in other ways.

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