The New Hofstader.com

A bunch of blogs by Chris "Gonz Blinko" Hofstader and his friends and their dogs.

Technology Review

A Cast Of Thousands

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Introduction Last month James “Jamie” Teh announced he would be leaving NVAccess, an organization he co-founded with Mick Curren to create, improve and maintain NVDA, the screen reader used by an estimated 40% of blind people on the Windows platform. Almost immediately, I started receiving Twitter direct messages (DMs) and emails asking what I thought… Read more about A Cast Of Thousands

Seeing AI: First Impressions

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Introduction On July 12 of this year, Microsoft released a pretty remarkable new app for Apple’s iOS line of products. The app is called Seeing AI: Talking Camera For The Blind, it can be used to perform OCR, recognize products, to do facial recognition and (in a beta state) to have a scene described to… Read more about Seeing AI: First Impressions

Amazon’s Sky Rocket To Improved Accessibility

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a Introduction I’ve known Peter Korn, accessibility architect at Amazon, for nearly as long as I’ve been in the access technology world. He and I have worked on some of the same committees, forums and other working groups over the years and I’ve long been impressed with his intellect and ideas but, more so, with… Read more about Amazon’s Sky Rocket To Improved Accessibility

Howard Kaplan, Spotlight Gateway and Me

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February is visually impaired awareness month so I chose to write about a very interesting project being announced today by a number of organizations and companies. Introduction Spotlight Gateway, announced today by a number of blindness organizations, a large pharmaceutical company and Bookshare intends to provide an iPad to every underprivileged child who is either… Read more about Howard Kaplan, Spotlight Gateway and Me