It seems key to then report on what the money is getting used for, to report on how many people are subscribing, to thank people in a heartfelt way and to set goals to increase subscriptions. So, “If we get 30 more people giving $10 a month, we can afford this particular wheelchair, or van, or whatever” is more effective than just asking for money over and over. Then when that goal is reached, set another one and ask again.

Note that Tim and Kaylan ask for people’s time and for help with specific tasks, for visits and company, for rides to appointments and stuff like that too. They made it really clear what they need and made it easy for people to volunteer for small roles or one time occasions. They got people to throw benefits and donate for auctions. Good idea! It’s a ton of work to coordinate in itself, of course.

If you look at sites like Kiva.org they operate on the same principle. They tell a story and they set a goal that’s easy to imagine. If someone said, “Hey, I live in Ecuador and have kind of a hard time in life and you’re making bank as a web developer in the United States of Amazing Privilege, how about you give me some money to even things out?” I might say “Oh sure, okay” since I’m a socialist at heart anyway. But do I go out and do that spontaneously? No. But if someone said “Hey I want to buy a truck for my business and can afford it if I raise $2000 ” I feel pretty good giving them 20 or a hundred bucks towards that goal and am inspired to do so.

I think about this a lot, since I have a job and like to donate to people online or off. It’s a pleasure after my own difficult years and the help I got from friends, to be the one who buys dinner for friends once in a while or to just paypal a random blog-friend 50 bucks when they have a difficult month and have been eating ramen for way too long.

Tim and Kaylan do a really good job of telling the story of what ALS has been like for them, on the blog and in their videos produced by AllAcesMedia. They make it really clear how much that story has been about their entire community rallying around them.

Not everyone has that level of real life support. But we’re still able to build strong communities online. More of us should try telling those stories, including what we might need and need help to get.

While not everyone can articulate their situation or make a story out of their life, if you are capable of doing it or have help to do it, it might be worth a try.

The times I’ve asked for help online have been pretty minor, things like needing someone to bring groceries for a week or two. Successful, though.

I was thinking about this issue recently also because of Roger Ebert’s post announcing that he was putting some of his content behind a subscription wall. He’ll still write out in public for free, supported by advertising revenue or paid by newspapers, but there’s extra stuff you can see by paying him $5 a month. I worry this will be pointed to by news media as a successful example of the subscription model for content. When in fact it will be successful not because people are willing to pay $5 a month for a writer’s extra blog posts and twitters, but because people like and admire Roger Ebert and want to give him a hand and show him he’s appreciated for his lifetime of entertaining writing and performance and for what he’s put out into the world and will continue to do.

Have you ever donated money online to an individual in a hard situation? Why or why not? Would you ask for help in this way? Have you ever run a successful fundraiser for yourself or something you need for accessibility or help with an impairment or illness? Or do you think I’m way off base in suggesting this tactic to people with disabilities?

My name is Mel, I’m an electrical engineer with a built-in high pass filter (severe bilateral high-frequency sensorineural hearing loss since age 2), and this is my first Hack Ability post.

I also just got a car, and like most young people with cars, I like using my car to go out with friends.

Problem: The vibration of a car’s engine and the car rolling over the road happens to be right around the few frequencies of speech I can hear, which in the past has led to chronic episodes of – ah – educational detours, as friends yelled “GO RIGHT! RIGHT!” and I went “go straight? OK!” and missed our turn. Repeatedly. I’d usually lipread, but turning to lipread passengers is not a particularly great option when you’re going 60mph down a highway. In the dark. In the rain. In Boston.

Solution: Dashmirror!

A photo of the dashmirror, with part labels; it's made from a car visor mirror glued to a GPS suction-cup mount.

It’s a simple design. My friend Mark and I made it during lunch one day when we were both visiting Chicago. The parts cost $36.62, but I’m pretty sure you could do it for cheaper.

• $4.39 for the mirror; we found one you’re supposed to clip to your car visor and just removed the clips. The important thing was finding a cheap light mirror of the right size.
• $3.99 for the smallest, cheapest tube of 5-minute epoxy we could find.
• $24.99 for the cheapest generic universal GPS mount in the store. It was still overpriced.
• And then 9.75% Illinois State Tax to make up the remainder.

Assembly instructions: clear off back surface of mirror, choose broadest and flattest attachment for GPS mount, epoxy mirror to that attachment. Like I said, it’s a simple design. The tough part for us was finding the parts. We tried different types of GPS mounts and found a suction cup dampened vibration far better than a clip, so that’s the type I’d recommend; I haven’t yet tried the weighted kind you plonk onto your dashboard.

Dashmirror photo from the back, with the different part outlined in different colors to show how it was assembled. It's very simple.

This is actually the third dashmirror I’ve made, but the first I’ve been satisfied with. I cobbled together the first one when I was 17 in order to adorn the extra family car I drove to college (Melmobile v.1.0), and it was awful; there simply weren’t off-the-shelf parts available for mounting visual displays to the dashboard or windshield of your car. Now, thanks to the proliferation of GPS units, they’re everywhere.

Here’s a photo of the dashmirror in action, with my cousin (also named Mark) as the driver/model. Note that it works equally well from the passenger side – no more aching necks from constantly turning towards your driver! You do have to turn on the interior light when it’s nighttime, but you’d have to do that to lipread your driver or passenger anyway.

A photo of the dashmirror being used inside a car.

I use this every day, and love it. I’d like to come up with a more portable design so I can take it on the road with me (when I share rental cars with coworkers and such) – any ideas?

Deal with Disability blog screenshot

I use a Flip Mino. It’s very small and records 60 minutes of video.

2) What adaptations, if any, does it have to enable you to use it
conveniently?

Really none. I can’t use my hands at all so I just have my attendant set it
up and press the record button. Sometimes doing it this way is easier than
trying to adapt it because it can be so expensive and time consuming. Plus,
since it’s attached to my chair, I am totally in control of what’s recorded.
So adapting that was not high on my priority list.

3) How do you mount it to your chair or other places?

I use an action mount made by the Flip Video company.

It’s made for attaching onto bikes but it works perfectly when strapped to
the handle of my chair.

4) Do you do still photography too? If so what equipment has worked out
for you? Did you modify it yourself in some way, and if so, how?

Yes, I do photography. Again, like the video camera, it would have
been way expensive and complicated to adapt it. Instead, I have worked out
an elaborate communication system with my attendant. I generally tell her
what I want to take a picture of and she she takes it from a variety of
angles and settings. And then I download the images, chose the one I like
and edit them in Photoshop completely on my own using a Headmouse.

5) What other free, very cheap, or DIY hacks have you used, invented, or
thought of?

My most useful DIY invention is my communication system which I
invented when I was 16. Before I used to use my hand on a big letter board
to spell out what I want to say. This was tiring because my control over my
arms is not great. So one day I was like, “hmmmmm what if I attached a laser
pointer to a baseball hat?” I have the most control by far over my head and
neck, so this just made sense to me. Those pen lasers only last like 20
minutes, so the next step was to create a battery pack to attach to the
lazer that would give it more life. I just need to change the batteries
every so often (like once a week), and I have unlimited laser life.

Lots (and I mean LOTS) of people have chided me over not using a
Dynovox or other system. My dad even paid me to learn how to use one when I
was 14 and was pretty surprised when I refused to take it to my first day of
school that year. People who make AAC devices and even disabled people tell
me my letter board makes me too dependent on other people. But for me, the
letter board is the best and fastest way to communicate. It gets people to
interact with me by reading my board. (versus waiting for me to type it
out), and it flows more like a normal conversation. It’s also great because
it is so portable and if necessary, you can make one on a whim. I believe
that the Dynovox, especially for people who can’t write and just use the
pre-programmed buttons, is designed to keep people with disabilities quiet
since they can’t completely express themselves. So my board is by far the
most useful DIY for me.

Thank you Eva for the interview, and for your fantastic blog!

I have invited Eva to post her any time she likes. If you want to join Hack Ability and post about your own DIY projects, you are welcome to join and to email me at lizhenry@gmail.com.

Here is a video clip with a bit about Eva’s own invention for her communication device with board and laser pointer hat.

* A recent announcement of a group at Stanford who have created an open source camera called the Frankencamera, or Camera 2.0. Here’s a press release about the Frankencamera.

The Frankencamera is aimed at researchers in the computational photography community, so they can develop new algorithms and publish them, and at teachers at the university level, so they and their students can play with these algorithms. Our goal is to start distributing cameras within 12-18 months, but the numbers will be small (dozens of cameras), they won’t be cheap ($1K if we’re lucky), and you’ll need to be an experienced programmer to use one.

* Elphel free software and open hardware, wth code on sourceforge, an irc channel and a wiki.

* Apertus open source cinema also looks promising!

Any other free/open source camera hardware and software projects out there? I see potential here both as a model for people creating open source accessible and assistive tech, and as a project that people with disabilities might want to put an oar in, early as possible in the project so that our own specs for usability are considered. If hardware is open source, we as people with disabilities might be able to hack and customize it more easily and to share those hacks with others, than we will be able to hack proprietary cameras.

webaim is running their second ever Screen Reader Users Survey. The first survey has been invaluable to web developers who want to write to how PWD actually use extensible technology, instead of writing to how standards designers think we use accessible technology. If you use a screen reader, please take the survey!

The survey mentions :

* Hal
* JAWS
* NVDA (free, open source)
* Supernova
* System Access or System Access To Go
* VoiceOver (Free)
* Window Eyes
* ZoomText

And asks for information on any other screen readers not mentioned. They didn’t list Orca which is free, open source, and scriptable.

Meanwhile, Glenda Watson Hyatt from Do It Myself Blog (Hi Glenda!) asks, So, how do we get programmers going on an open source screen reader for Macs? Let her (and us) know if you hear of any open source screen readers for Mac OS, please!

Accessibility Camp DC Logo

Washington, DC, is fast becoming a breeding ground for BarCamps, and Accessibility Camp DC has just been announced for October 10, 2009.

The flowering of the Barcamp format in DC is a welcome change from gathering from think tank gatherings for white paper presentations and Congressional testimonies for policy research.  I’m looking forward to this event organized by John F Croston III to get to meet some of the ability hackers in DC, start an email list, start projects, and take over the world. You know, the usual Barcamp stuff.

Occasional posts, or just a guest post or two, are welcome!

You may be hearing soon from new Hack Ability bloggers: from Mel of [M]etabrain [E]ntry [L]og, from Haddayr, from Evester of The Deal with Disability, from Greg Elin from Life Labs / UCP, from Guy, from Minnie, and from Ricky Buchanan from ATMac (who contributed enormously to the setup and first concepts of this blog a year ago.)

I like to keep my knees warm, but don’t want to wear long underwear all year round. Regular legwarmers tend to feel too tight for me and also, a bit itchy. So I cut the toes off some very fuzzy chenille socks and use them over my calves or knees, and under my jeans. A more organized person might stitch around the cut edge, but actually, it’s fine without hemming.

In dollar stores sometimes, you can find these or fuzzy armwarmers and cut off the toe or fingertips. The very loose weave stretches further than regular socks or leg-warmers. They’re about 5 dollars. Without something covering my right lower leg, just the air touching it feels like sandpaper. Sandpaper on fire. An extra layer to stop the cruel knife-like breeze that other people think of as “air” is extremely helpful.

Happy warm knees, or warm calves, to you!

For example, this camera tripod mount for no-hand or one-hand use. It’s a sentence or two describing the concept of the device or invention, then a bibliographic reference. There’s no plans, photos, designs, links, capacity for tagging. While there’s a “Review this product” link to the side of each page, it doesn’t actually associate with the product or design. There is merely a separate page that gives an alphabetical list of anything that has gotten a review — without threading or real attribution or identity information on the comments. Sooo, like blog comments, or a forum, but a million times worse.

The Abledata DIY repository is a start, and it seems to be useful data. The ideas are useful to think over. Yet I can’t mess with that data in any useful way. There is no API that I can find to pull the data out of the database. My feeling is since it is a public government funded work, the data should be openly accessible and usable.

Then, anyone could build applications to use this data.

As it is, I’m sure I could write a little script to crawl all 41 pages of this data pretty handily and do something with it.

Compare the Abledata site, segregated off into a little silo, with the Instructables Assistive Tech group. Each DIY project is clearly described, with how-tos, photos, video, places for threaded comments and feedback by readers and people who might make the project themselves. Take a look at Build a Motorized Window Blinds Controller. It lists materials and costs (about $15.00). There are 60 people in a lively discussion of the idea including people trying it out and getting advice from the original inventor. The original inventor can easily edit her own project and add clarifications, based on feedback from the crowd. It’s a thing of beauty.

Abledata project may not have the expertise to convert their site into something with crowd sourcing power. (Though, it would be like a 1 week long project to just stuff it all into Drupal and fancy it up a bit.) But they could *easily* make their data available by download or by API. Why not do it? I think it is part of the mentality of control and fear that surrounds disability and assistive tech as “medical” information. Give it up, people, let go of that. Get with the times.

The Manual Wheelchair Training Guide is available as a book for about $15 on Amazon or Spinlife. But you can also get it FREE as a PDF from “Wheelchair University”:

Free PDFs of all the chapters of The Manual Wheelchair Training Guide.

It’s useful, with fitting and maintenance tips, and great advice on how to deal with other people’s attempts (welcome or unwelcome, invited or uninvited) to help. And the cartoons are really cute. It’s like being in 1976 all over again, in a good way.

You’ll have to get the PDF for each chapter separately. The bound book that you can buy online is paperback and has pages that are wider than they’re long, so it lies open flat.

There’s also a Powered Wheelchair Training Guide!

* Post step by step instructions on WikiHow, perhaps in the category Disability Issues.

* Post your hack on Instructables, and tag it disability and “hack ability” as well.

* Link up to your instructions, and post more information if you like, on Disapedia‘s DIY Tips pages.

* Creative Commons or open source license your instructions and plans, and if you’ve got them, designs and blueprints.

* If you have a simple or undeveloped idea, you could post it in the comments on our Ideas page, or on WikiHow in the WikiHow request queue. Maybe someone else will write it up in more detail for you.

Anything might happen to your idea. Someone might commercialize it and try to profit from it but they can’t claim it’s theirs or stop other people from using the idea too. Once your idea is out in the world for free, then anyone can build it, expand it, work on it, and hack it!