ADVR: Assisted Digital Video Recorder
The objective of the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) is to bring existing, developing and future media and technologies to people with disabilities. For the past two years, Synthesis has been collaborating with Boston's public television and radio broadcast service, WGBH, to design the ADVR, a menu-based television system for visually impaired people and families.
A collaborative relationship between NCAM and Synthesis was vital to creating a system that was both effective and usable. NCAM's experience with the visually impaired population has given the organization a deep understanding of the existing barriers to modern television systems. Technically, the implementation of the system was challenging. Simple actions such as navigating an on-screen TV schedule proved to be very complicated when only voicing commands. By means of an evaluation process with NCAM, Synthesis created and fine-tuned a useful and cutting-edge real-world solution.
Through this partnership with NCAM, Synthesis created a media environment based in the open source MythTV project; the end result of the ADVR was essentially a talking television. With a Linux-based digital video recorder (DVR) and a Windows Mobile-powered personal digital assistant (PDA), the user would be able to listen to the ADVR options and navigate the menu. In order to improve the system, Synthesis teamed up with Panasonic to enable the user to speak commands into his or her PDA which would then be communicated to the television and ADVR via Bluetooth™ technology.
Currently, Synthesis is continuing to add features and improve the ergonomics of this prototype system in the hopes that it will soon be available to the visually impaired population.