I just got back from co-presenting at the national 2012 AHEAD Conference in New Orleans. While I am not a member of AHEAD (Association on Higher Education and Disability) I am associated with it through my work at FSU’s Student Disability Resource Center’s AT Lab, where I primarily work on alternative text projects.
After that mouthful of boring, I have to say it is an incredibly inspiring and motivating organization. For me as a text technologist, access to text is not irrelevant. I think that people and businesses who are dealing with text accessibility issues are, actually, on the forefront of determining what text is.
For example, there is the Livescribe Smartpen. Most people I know (outside of the SDRC) who are familiar with it see it as a corporate businessperson’s toy: a glorified recording device to take to board meetings and sales pitches.
What it really is, however, is an incredibly complex text technology. It records spoken words as it captures written words and images while creating “text” files such as PDFs which encode both modalities of recordings that can be accessed anywhere. There is no way to fully relate here how much this “pen” can do, because that stretches out into “whatever you can imagine” territory. If you draw a piano keyboard with the pen, you can then ascribe a scale to it and play music by tapping the “keys” with the pen. Where does text begin and end with such a tool?
(Of course my presentation was on the utterly mundane topic of using project management techniques in the development of a SharePoint web site, so there you go. I’ll talk more about that in a post later this week)
