Technology innovation

I've just wrapped up my second visit to the mega Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. There's been tons of coverage of all the exciting new products, especially wearable technology, health and body monitoring technologies, devices to enhance our autos and, of course, more and more 3-D printing.

Braille Bug poster displaying braille alphabet and images of kids reading braille

Saturday, January 4, marks the 205th birthday of Louis Braille, the inventor of his eponymous code for people with vision loss. In celebration of his birthday, as well as National Braille Literacy Month, we’ve assembled a roundup of braille-centric content throughout AFB's family of sites.

The American Foundation for the Blind is getting started with the AFB Access Awards process earlier than in past years, because the awards will be presented on February 28, 2014, at the AFB Leadership Conference in Brooklyn, NY.

There are just a couple of other items I want to share from CES. I did get a chance to play with the Fleksy keypad from Syntellia. As many know, this is an app for Android and iOS that allows text input using a touchscreen keyboard using the relative position of your finger touches to mimic the qwerty keyboard. In other words, you start typing where you think the letters are, and Fleksy fills in what it thinks you're typing. It works quite well and I found the learning curve to be very short. I can see why so many users are finding this popular.

A man holding a business diagram, featuring different types of technology.

Day 2 at CES featured some TV, some audio, some speech and a nice little company making nifty headphones.

OK, so I sort of surrender to the TV juggernaut that is CES with a visit to Panasonic. But, this is a blindness access story and not a (super high-def, screen as large as my garage story).