After reading through a few comments / questions about the accessibility project that I posted about last week - I decided to add a video walk-through that I hope will better illustrate what it is that I'm doing...

If you are unsure what this is all about... I would recommend reading my previous post: 'A' is for Accessible... of the 508 kind. 'H' is for Hardware. It will help bring you up-to-speed. If you're good to go - take a few moments to watch this inspirational TED Talk by Aimee Mullins. Then we can get down to business.

Good?

As I said in my previous post... accessibility (the user experience for disabled individuals) is largely a moving target and if we continue to think inside that box - we will be forever constrained by its dimensions. Time for a flashback with Aimee at her first TED appearance...

Did you catch the part about the guy explaining to her that you have to have a 'planter' foot to be able to do high-jump? Boxes... disability... each one is both the same. I, like Aimee, believe that the most profound (crippling?) disability is that of preconceived notions.

It seems pretty grand... and obvious in the same right; that disconnecting accessibility from an application / operating system creates a new frontier in human computer interaction. I'll write more about this later... let's skip to the examples.

What does the Flex code look like? It's pretty simple... not what I ultimately intend on using but for initial prototypes it will do.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" creationComplete="ccomp();" layout="absolute">
	<mx:Script>
		<![CDATA[
			
			import com.quilix.accessibility.texttospeech;
			import com.quilix.accessibility;
			
			private var qa:QuilixAccessibility;

			private function ccomp():void
			{
				qa = new QuilixAccessibility();
				qa.connect("127.0.0.1", 5331);
			}			
			
			private function doSend( msg:String ):void
			{
				qa.textToSpeech(msg);
			}
			
		]]>
	</mx:Script>
	
	<mx:HBox horizontalCenter="0" verticalCenter="30">
		<mx:TextInput id="txtOut"/>
		<mx:Button label="send" click="doSend(txtOut.text);"/>
	</mx:HBox>
	
	<mx:HBox horizontalCenter="0" verticalCenter="-30">
		<mx:Button label="Button One" mouseOver="doSend(event.target.label);"/>
		<mx:Button label="Button Two" mouseOver="doSend(event.target.label);"/>
	</mx:HBox>
	
</mx:Application>

More in a bit...