Schlagwort: Joe Birch

  • A smart guitar for blind, deaf, and mute people

    A smart guitar for blind, deaf, and mute people

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    ChordAssist aims to bring the joy of learning the guitar to those who otherwise may have problems with accessing guitar tutorials. Offering advice in Braille, in speech, and on-screen, ChordAssist has been built specifically for deaf, blind, and mute people. Creator Joe Birch, who also built the BrailleBox device, used Raspberry Pi, Google Assistant, and a variety of accessibility tools and technology for this accessible instrument.

    Chord Assist: An accessible smart guitar for the blind, deaf and mute

    Powered by the Google Assistant, read more at chordassist.com

    Accessibility and music

    Inspired by a hereditary visual impairment in his family, Buffer’s Android Lead Joe Birch spent six months working on ChordAssist, an accessible smart guitar.

    “This is a project that I used to bring my love of music and accessibility (inspired by my family condition of retinitis pigmentosa) together to create something that could allow everyone to enjoy learning and playing music — currently an area which might not be accessible to all,” explained Joe when he shared his project on Twitter earlier this month.

    BrailleBox

    This isn’t Joe’s first step into the world of smart accessibility devices. In 2017, he created BrailleBox, an Android Things news delivery device that converts daily news stories into Braille, using wooden balls atop solenoids that move up and down to form Braille symbols.

    Demonstration of Joe Birch's BrailleBox

    ChordAssist

    This same technology exists within ChordAssist, along with an LCD screen for visual learning, and a speaker system for text-to-speech conversion.

    Chord Assist was already an Action on the Google Project that I built for the Google Home, now I wanted to take that and stick it in a guitar powered by voice, visuals, and Braille. All three of these together will hopefully help to reduce the friction that may be experienced throughout the process of learning an instrument.

    ChordAssist is currently still at the prototype stage, and Joe invites everyone to offer feedback so he can make improvements.

    To learn more about ChordAssist, visit the ChordAssist website and check out Joe’s write-up on Medium.

    Website: LINK

  • BrailleBox: Android Things Braille news display

    BrailleBox: Android Things Braille news display

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Joe Birch has built a simple device that converts online news stories to Braille, inspired by his family’s predisposition to loss of eyesight. He has based his BrailleBox on Android Things, News API, and a Raspberry Pi 3.

    Demonstation of Joe Birch's BrailleBox

    The background

    Braille is a symbol system for people with visual impairment which represents letters and numbers as raised points. Commercial devices that dynamically produce Braille are very expensive, so Joe decided to build a low-cost alternative that is simple to recreate.

    Braille alphabet

    Image by DIPF CC BY-SA 3.0

    News API is a tool for fetching JSON metadata from over 70 online news sources. You can use it to integrate headlines or articles into websites and text-based applications.

    The BrailleBox

    To create the six nubs necessary to form Braille symbols, Joe topped solenoids with wooden balls. He then wired them up to GPIO pins of the Pi 3 via a breadboard.

    One of the solenoids of Joe Birch's BrailleBox

    One of the solenoids Joe built into the BrailleBox

    Next, he took control of the solenoids using Android Things. He set up the BrailleBox software to start running on boot, and added a push button. When he presses the button, the program fetches a news story using News API, and the solenoids start moving.

    BrailleBox Demo

    Uploaded by Joe Birch on 2017-06-20.

    Since Joe is an Android Engineer, looking through his write-up and code for BrailleBox might be useful for anyone interested in Android Things.

    If you like this project, make sure you keep an eye on Joe’s Twitter, since he has plans to update the BrailleBox design. His next step is to move on from the prototyping stage and house all the hardware inside the box. Moreover, he is thinking about adding a potentiometer so that users can choose their preferred reading speed.

    Accessibility

    If you want to find our community’s conversation about accessibility and assistive technology, head to the forums. And if you’re working to make computing more accessible, or if you’ve built an assistive project, let us know in the comments or on social media, so that we can boost the signal!

    Website: LINK