If you can actually read and understand them, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 requires, amongst other things, that there is sufficient contrast between text and background color. For a person with a color disability, the colors used on a web site can mean the difference between being able to read text and images or not. 1 in 12 people have some sort of color deficiency.

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Teik-Toe Teoh, Yok-Yen Nguwi and Siu-Yeung Cho of the Centre for Computational Intelligence of the School of Computer Engineering of Nanyang Technological University state that “emotion is a state of feeling involving thoughts, physiological changes, and an outward expression. In this paper, we propose a system that synergizes the use of derivative filtering and boosting classifier. “

The portable facial expression recognizer locates the edge of the human face through Gaussian derivatives, Laplacian derivatives and filter out non-face images using Adaboost. Secondly, the feature locator finds crucial fiducial points for subsequent feature extraction and selection processing. Finally, the meaningful features are classified into the corresponding classes.

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Color blindness is most commonly a lack of distinction between the colors red and green. It is not generally a lack of seeing all colors (this is extremely rare). It is usually inherited.

Color Blindness and Web Design

Most Web designers are used to having a palette of millions of colors to choose from when designing a Web page. And just because you want your page to be accessible to color blind people doesn’t mean that you have to limit that palette. All you have to do is think about the color combination’s that you use.

If you’re using colors to make distinctions, you should be aware that red and green can be hard for a color blind person to tell apart. Red and green are often used to indicate “stop” and “go” in US culture. However, if you use them in that way on your Web page, your purpose would be completely lost on a color blind person.

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Codirector of the Center for Neuroengineering at Duke University Medical Center, in Durham, N.C., Nicolelis and his team are developing a real-time interface together with a full-body exoskeleton to be controlled by signals from a paraplegic’s brain.

Nicolelis has assembled an international team of neurophysiologists, computer scientists, engineers, roboticists, neurologists, and neurosurgeons at laboratories around the world for his project. Their goal is to enable a paralyzed person to walk again by the end of 2012. The Walk Again Project, the first worldwide nonprofit brain-research initiative of its kind, includes partners in Europe, Latin America, and the United States.

“We’ve created a consortium that will manage all the scientific and clinical aspects of this work with the goal of making someone walk again,” Nicolelis says.

Since he briefed reporters about his work at a media event held in March to celebrate IEEE’s 125 anniversary, the team has developed a simulation of an entire exoskeleton that can be controlled by a brain-machine interface (BMI).

Nicolelis’s project began to show results four years ago, when he and his group implanted electrodes in a rhesus monkey’s brain that detected when it intended to move an arm. Later the animal was able control with only its thoughts the reaching and grasping movements performed by a robotic arm.

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Dr Mike Wald and E.A. Draffan in the Learning Societies Lab within the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) are leading a project funded by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) TechDis which looks at how well people with disabilities can access web services such as blogs and wikis and social networking sites. The team includes Seb Skuse, Russell Newman and Chris Phethean who have all studied at ECS.

The team have built an accessibility tool kit which will enable users to test the accessibility of web 2.0 services. The accessible pen drive offers freely available assistive technologies that can be used to help with this evaluation.

The tools have been developed as a result of the award-winning LexDis project which identified some of the strategies learners used to enhance their e-learning experience.

Web2Access, part of the toolkit, provides an online checking system for any interactive web-based services such as Facebook.

‘We developed it because nowadays users contribute, as well as read, information and so you cannot just click on a button to see if websites are accessible and easy to use,’ said E.A.

According to Dr Wald, it is the first time that there has been a systematic way to evaluate and provide the results of accessibility testing of web services.

A key feature of the tool kit is ‘Study Bar’, which works with all browsers and reads text aloud, spell checks, and offers a dictionary, text enlargement, colour and font changes. Study Bar can be used with web services like blogs and Twitter, which has not been possible before without specialist-installed assistive technologies.

Students at the University of Southampton were introduced to the toolkit last week shortly before testing began. The beta testing will be carried out for four weeks, after which the tools will be passed to JISC TechDis so that they can be distributed further.

But then I realized that I had my MacBook (with its built-in webcam) in my briefcase. A few phone calls later and my mother was using iChat to speak with and see her great-grandchildren for the first time in years.

My mother, born in a Belarussian village before the advent of commercial radio, was by her late 90s using a cellphone, receiving e-mail messages from her family and asking me “what is this Twitter thing anyway?”

She was far from the only centenarian using technology for more than just medical monitoring and protection against falls. Contrary to stereotypes, computers, social networks, e-mail and even video games are becoming essential parts of older peoples’ lives.

Some of the highest growth rates in broadband use are happening among the elderly. The Pew Research Center found that broadband use for those 65 and older increased from 19 percent in May 2008 to 30 percent in April 2009. Since 2005, broadband use has tripled in that group.

Although challenges remain for many older people, any number of products can help them become more involved in the digital age. Here’s a look at some of the most popular ones.

IT ALL STARTS WITH THE PC While many digital devices like cameras or cellphones don’t require a PC, their use can be enhanced with a computer by helping users transmit photos or easily update a mobile phone address book.

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Like T9 texting on mobile phones, AutoCorrect uses your shorthand to expand common words or phrases. Start by identifying things that you commonly enter in your industry, then add them to Word’s preferences.

I’m always typing tech terms, so I save keyboard strokes by expanding “nb” to “netbook” or “dt” to “desktop.” For this example, I’ll show how to turn “PCW” into “PC World.”

Within Word, click the Office button in the upper-left, and pick Word Options. Choose Proofing, and click AutoCorrect Options. In the AutoCorrect tab, enter your shorthand in the Replace box and the full term in the With box. So I typed pcw and PC World. Click Add.

Leave the other settings as you found them, and add more terms that you typically type. Click OK. Now, when I type pcw and hit the Spacebar, Word expands it into “PC World.” Neat.

Zack Stern is building a new business from San Francisco, where he frequently contributes to PC World.

“I was told I would have to live with my situation,” Sauer, who lives in Sun City West, Arizona, said in a telephone interview.

But an experimental computer-based program has helped Sauer regain some sight and given her hope of further recovery.

“We were very surprised when we saw the results from our first patients,” said Krystel Huxlin of the University of Rochester Eye Institute in New York, who tested the system with seven stroke patients.

“This is a type of brain damage that clinicians and scientists have long believed you simply can’t recover from. It’s devastating, and patients are usually sent home to somehow deal with it the best they can.”

Writing in the Journal of Neuroscience, Huxlin and colleagues said their approach used so-called blindsight — when a person with vision loss senses something they cannot actually see.

“It is interesting that if you forced them to guess … they can sometimes guess correctly. This is a phenomenon termed blindsight,” Huxlin said.

Sauer and some other patients can drive, shop and live near-normal lives. “I think I have been able to live a pretty fulfilling life,” Sauer said.

But it took months of staring at a computer screen to do so.

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When a troubled 13-year-old named Joe first entered the Kids in Transition program in 2007 in Camden, N.J., he hardly spoke to his therapist. Like many teens at this residential mental health treatment facility, he was admitted because he had trouble controlling his anger, had run away from home several times, and had a history of run-ins with the law, according to Heather Foley, a social worker with the program. Therapists typically encourage patients like Joe to get at the core of their problems via face-to-face role-playing—pretending to be in a situation and having the patient practice how to handle it. But Foley says this approach was a nonstarter for Joe, whose confrontational behavior and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) impair his ability to engage and focus in this way.

When that approach failed, Foley enrolled her young patient in a program that treats teens using something familiar to most of them: the virtual world, in this case a customized one called Simulated Environment for Counseling, Training, Evaluation and Rehabilitation (SECTER).

Joe is one of 20 teens who have been treated using the program that allows them to role play in a 3-D virtual world environment in which they communicate with therapists through avatars.

Foley says that once a week for eight weeks she and the boy sat at computers in her office and donned headphones so that they could communicate with one another’s avatars through the Internet, just as gamers do in the virtual environments of Second Life and World of Warcraft. She notes that SECTER avatars can assume different postures as do humans when interacting with one another. Users can also add special features to their avatars, including facial expressions, hair and skin color, and different mannerisms. For instance, Foley says, Joe made his avatar do high fives and sport a swagger when it moved.

In addition to treating troubled teens, virtual environments have been used to help treat Asperger’s syndrome (a disorder resembling autism), anorexia and bulimia, anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress syndrome and alcoholism as well as physical disabilities in stroke victims.

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