From: "Andrew Plumb" Subject: APPS: Apple Newton, Disabilities and Sign-language Recognition. Date: 5 Apr 1997 19:52:33 GMT Message-ID: <01bc41fa$effa02a0$78810f82@tekmage> Organization: Teknomage Industries How much market penetration does Apple have into the disabled market? I'm thinking primarily of those with audio impairments. Battery life is substantial, giving any user a good day's-worth of continuous use. A person who would normally be carrying around a paper note-pad all day would (in theory) be able to get considerably more use out of a Newton. The good backlighting gives it a substantial edge over a paper pad. Text-to-Speech. This part is easy. When Dragon Systems gets their Speech-to-Text applications working on the Newton Platform, all of a sudden a deaf person could (again in theory) carry on a "normal" conversation on a telephone... or with a blind person, though for this a simple IrDA-equipped Braille keypad could close the loop. Who is familiar with the dynamics of sign-language? I'm not, but I have an idea to toss out there. General Reality Company sells data-gloves, normally used in VR environments. The latest incarnation communicates over a regular serial (RS-232) port and tracks 3D glove pointing direction (not position). The MP2000 has two serial ports available on the interconnect port, thus able to support both a left and right glove right out of the box. What would it take to implement even simple gesture recognition/sign-language translation on the Newton? Denny (or anyone else), know of anyone using the 5DT for sign-language conversion on other computer platforms? Andrew. P.S. My apologies for the massive cross-posting. :-) -- Andrew Plumb, VE3SLG E-mail: Tekmage@io.com 3app@qlink.queensu.ca ve3slg@amsat.org WWW: http://www.io.com/~tekmage/ Surfing digital oceans astride an analog dolphin...