The Sensory Story Project - Kickstarter

Joanna Grace is the author of a range of accessible sensory stories, some of which have been published by Oxfam and Amnesty International. Joanna has created a Kickstarter project that hopes to create a carefully crafted range of affordable sensory stories to sell on-line.

The Kickstarter Sensory Stories project, if funded, aims to complete within seven months. Backers get all kinds of interesting rewards. This is a great project, well worth supporting.

Reminds me a little of this passage from Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums that I'm half-way through at the minute: "A real haiku's gotta be as simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing, like the greatest haiku of them all probably is the one that goes 'The sparrow hops along the veranda, with wet feet.' By Shiki. You see the wet footprints like a vision in your mind and yet in those few words you also see all the rain that's been falling that day and almost smell the wet pine needles."

New HKL Accessible Games and Activities

A raft of new activities, many of them one-switch accessible have arrived at the Help Kidz Learn site. They've also some one-switch accessible games for the iPad, which are extremely rare things to find at the minute. Most work from a cause and effect level onwards.

One Switch Reader

On the back of a request to find a one-switch method for reading Kindle books on a PC, I got in touch with the highly talented William Pilgrim and Tim Brogden. Both turned up two excellent solutions to the problem, and both allow one-switch users to browse up and down the pages of Kindle, PDF and Word documents. You can also use this method to scan up and down web-pages.

The simplest version to get going is William Pilgrim's: One Switch Reader. Set your switch to act as the key "1", and you'll have the power to page up, page down and slow-scan (a line at a time) through a document or web-page, aided by an arrow indicator. Happy reading.

PageBot - Switch Accessible Kindle

It's really good when you see something that you know many people want, turn into reality. Origin Instruments have created a switch interface for Amazon's Kindle (an electronic book) called the PageBot. It's a convenient way for switch users to read books on the go. This is progress on from the super expensive real-world switch accessible book page turners.

Available from Origin's Amazon page, and retailing at $379 USD for Kindle DX and $329 for Kindle 2. Link found via Dave Banes and Accessibility and Technology Geek blog.