Last week, Samsung teased its Infinity Flex Display for use on a still-unnamed folding smartphone. Samsung’s project isn’t the only bendy-screen device in the works, but reports from two Korean news agencies already have people balking about the gadget’s anticipated price.
The show will not have a feature that allows people with visual disabilities to watch.
One of the scenes I remember most in Harry Potter was when they were all young and learning their first spells. The scene where Hermione shows off by making the feather float is very memorable. Now you can buy a toy version of that magic wand and the accompanying floating feather for your next cosplay.
Muggles can play with this wand as it uses a high-tensile Aramid fiber threads connected to an Ostrich feather. The threads are invisible from 6-feet away, making it look like the feather is floating in the air at the command of the wand.
Sadly, this surfaced right after Halloween; it would have been perfect for people dressing up like Harry Potter and crew. The wand is $14.99 and available now at ThinkGeek.
Just a few years ago, Li Mengqi could not have imagined shopping on her own. Someone needed to always keep her company to say aloud what was in front of her, who’s been blind since birth.
When smartphones with text-to-speech machines for the visually impaired arrived, she immediately bought an iPhone. “Though it was expensive,” Li, a 23-year-old who grew up in a rural village in eastern China’s Zhejiang province, told me. Cheaper smartphone options in China often don’t have good accessibility features.
Screen readers opened a plethora of new opportunity for those with visual impairments. “I felt liberated, no longer having to rely on others,” said Li, who can now shop online, WeChat her friends, and go out alone by following her iPhone compass.
Reading out everything on the screen is helpful, but it can also be overwhelming. Digital readers don’t decipher human thoughts, so when Li gets on apps with busy interfaces, such as an ecommerce platform, she’s bombarded with descriptions before she gets to the thing she wants.
Over the past two years, Alibaba’s $15 billion R&D initiative Damo Academy has been working to improve smartphone experience for the blind. Its latest answer, a joint effort with China’s prestigious Tsinghua University, is a cheap silicone sheet that goes on top of smartphone screens.
Li is among the first one hundred visually impaired or blind users to trial the technology. Nothing stands out about the plastic film – which cost RMB 0.25 or 3.6 American cents each to produce – until one has a closer look. There are three mini buttons on each side. They are sensory-enabled, which means pressing on them triggers certain commands, usually those that are frequently used like “go back” and “confirm”.
“It’s much easier to shop with the sheet on,” said Li. Having button shortcuts removes the risk of misclicking and the need for complex interactions with screens. Powering Smart Touch is human-machine interaction, the same technology that makes voice control devices possible.
Alibaba’s $1 “Smart Touch” plastic sheet helps smoothen smartphone experience for the visually impaired. / Photo credit: Alibaba
“We thought, human-machine interaction can’t just be for sighted people,” Chen Zhao, research director at Damo Academy told TechCrunch. “Besides voice, touch is also very important to the blind, so we decided to develop a touch feature.”
Smart Touch isn’t just for fingers. It also works when users hold their phones up to the ears. This lets them listen to text quickly in public without having to blast it out through speakers or headphones. Early trials of ear touch show a 50 percent reduction in time needed to complete tasks like taking calls and online shopping, Alibaba claims.
Emotions also matter. People with visual disabilities tend to be more cautious as they fumble through screens, so Smart Touch takes that into account. For instance, users need to double-click on the silicone button before a command goes through.
At the moment, Smart Touch works only on special editions of Alibaba’s two flagship apps, e-commerce marketplace Taobao and payment affiliate Alipay . The buttons automatically take on different functions when users switch between apps.
But Zhao said she wanted to make the technology widely available. Some tinkering with existing apps will make Smart Touch compatible. The smart film requires more testing before it officially rolls out early 2019, so Damo and Tsinghua have been recruiting volunteers like Li for feedback.
“Unlike with regular apps, it’s hard to beta test Smart Touch because the blind population is relatively small,” observed the researcher, but embedding the technology in popular apps could speed up the iteration process.
There’s also the issue with distributing the physical sheets. According to state census, China had around 13 million visually impaired people in 2012. That’s about one in a hundred people. However, they are rarely seen in public, as a post on China’s equivalent of Quora points out.
One oft-cited obstacle is that most roads in China aren’t disability-friendly, even in major cities. (In my city Shenzhen, blind lanes are common but they often get cut off abruptly to make way for a crossing or a bus stop.)
Damo doesn’t plan to monetize the initiative, according to Zhao. She envisions a future where her team could give out the haptic films — which can be mass produced at low costs — for free through Alibaba’s expanding network of brick-and-mortar stores.
Time will tell whether the accessibility scheme is more than public relations fluff. Initiatives around corporate social responsibility have mushroomed in China in recent years. They have come under fire, however, for being transient because many merely pander to the government’s demand (link in Chinese) for corporate ethics overlook long-term impact.
“The technology is ready. It just takes time to test it on different smartphones and bring to users at scale,” said Zhao.
Visions of the end of the world tend to extremes—the planet fatally fracked, flooded, hurricaned, nuke-cratered. No survivors, or maybe one or two survivors, dazed and dust-grimed, roaming a wasted landscape, eating canned beans, rotted squirrels, each other. But the truth is we might be in for a slow burn,…
The cheapest Netflix subscription plan costs $7.99 per month in the United States. It lets you stream TV shows and movies from Netflix on one device at a time in standard definition. It offers a total of three plans with the most expensive one allowing for 4K UHD streams on multiple devices simultaneously. While the company has seen considerable success with these plans, it may be thinking about offering cheaper plans in some markets to increase its subscriber base.
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said in an interview with Bloomberg that the company may experiment with cheaper plans in some markets.
There aren’t a lot of details about this plan right now. Hastings wouldn’t say if this will involve simply lowering prices in some markets or merely offering cheaper plans in markets where Netflix doesn’t operate currently. Hastings didn’t say in what markets the cheaper plans would be offered and when.
The report adds that these cheaper plans could go a different route. The company may not just drop prices. It may just limit features further on the cheaper options. However, even details about that are slim at this point.
Analysts are of the view that this strategy may help Netflix achieve more success in markets like India where it has the potential of gaining around 100 million subscribers. A cheaper option in that market would also enable Netflix to compete with local services more effectively that are quite a bit cheaper.
Cheaper Netflix Subscription Could Be Offered In Some Markets , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
The commercial for the bear that looks like Donald Trump is a local ad, according to Fox News.
One of the scenes I remember most in Harry Potter was when they were all young and learning their first spells. The scene where Hermione shows off by making the feather float is very memorable. Now you can buy a toy version of that magic wand and the accompanying floating feather for your next cosplay.
Muggles can play with this wand as it uses a high-tensile Aramid fiber threads connected to an Ostrich feather. The threads are invisible from 6-feet away, making it look like the feather is floating in the air at the command of the wand.
Sadly, this surfaced right after Halloween; it would have been perfect for people dressing up like Harry Potter and crew. The wand is $14.99 and available now at ThinkGeek.
The usual prowling grounds of Jaguar’s F-Type convertible are sweeping mountain roads and beachside resorts, but two new rally editions of the British drop-top have leaping not cruising in mind. Taking inspiration from the Jaguar F-Type Chequered Flag Limited Edition, but then cranking it up several notches, the rally cars certainly stand out. They’re intended to mark the 70th anniversary … Continue reading
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