Spotlight projects
Three accessibility tools, built across two decades for specific named people. Each produced a working artefact and an insight that exceeded the artefact. They share a structure: a person the tool was for, a constraint that defined the problem, a counterintuitive insight that solved it, an artefact that resulted, a teaching that exceeded the artefact, and a coda about what happened to it.
The three projects
- Sign16 — a sign-writing system on a 16-key feature phone, built mid-1990s in Singapore for the gay Deaf community there. Won for the price of a beer.
- TUP — adaptive thumbwheel text input on iPodLinux, early 2000s, for cousin Paul as his MS progressed. The predictive system that put the predicted letter under your finger, rather than asking you to reach for it.
- Audio Tetris — a Java/JOAL audio rendering of the most visual game, built as the PhD’s deliberate falsification test for the framework. Discovered, by accident, that the modality shift turned a third-person observational game into a first-person immersive one.
Substantive prose pages are in active drafting (Track 3 of the site update plan); each page will run roughly 1,000–2,000 words.