[deleted]
Show HN: Giving my mother-in-law an easy internet radio with real icon buttons
91–100 of 125 posts
Re: Show HN: Giving my mother-in-law an easy internet radio with real icon buttons
#92http://www.q2radio.co.UK make a cube shaped internet radio - you assign 4 stations to 4 of the sides of the cube, whichever side is facing up is played
Re: Show HN: Giving my mother-in-law an easy internet radio with real icon buttons
#93This is amazing - and incidentally has given me a solution to a very real problem. My grandmother is suffering from dementia, and within the last few months has forgotten how to tune a radio. She's an avid radio listener, so I worked around this by buying her a few radios, tuning them, and labelling them - so she only has to hit the power button on the one she wants. Unfortunately, she's not thrilled by how much spac…
A SDR + some sort of "stream deck" from the parent article could be a potential "offline" solution. You could even wire a couple mechanical keyboard switches to Rpi's GPIO pins for selecting preset channels and avoid the stream-thingy all together. RTL-SDR: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0129EBDS2 https://github.com/pothosware/SoapySDR/wiki/PythonSupport
I also like the idea of this more because it means you do not have to worry about URLs changing. FM channels changing are much more rare.
Re: Show HN: Giving my mother-in-law an easy internet radio with real icon buttons
#94This is amazing - and incidentally has given me a solution to a very real problem. My grandmother is suffering from dementia, and within the last few months has forgotten how to tune a radio. She's an avid radio listener, so I worked around this by buying her a few radios, tuning them, and labelling them - so she only has to hit the power button on the one she wants. Unfortunately, she's not thrilled by how much spac…
A SDR + some sort of "stream deck" from the parent article could be a potential "offline" solution. You could even wire a couple mechanical keyboard switches to Rpi's GPIO pins for selecting preset channels and avoid the stream-thingy all together. RTL-SDR: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0129EBDS2 https://github.com/pothosware/SoapySDR/wiki/PythonSupport
There are linux libraries for the elgato streamdeck shown here
Re: Show HN: Giving my mother-in-law an easy internet radio with real icon buttons
#95+1 for tactile buttons! Through our work at GoGoGrandparent.com (a service that helps older adults and people living with disabilities use Uber/Lyft, grocery services, meal services and pharmacy services reliably without smartphones) we’ve interviewed dozens of folks living with visual impairments. The feedback that stands out the most was from a gentlemen in his 30s or 40s living with blindness since birth. Paraphra…
I spent an hour or so messing with Siri on a Mac Mini I have lying around from an old contract gig. Wondering how I would use it without much (or any) vision. It's directly hooked to a fairly fast lump of hardware and communicating with a potentially huge back-end. Utterly maddening, barely useful, overly tied to Apple products, and it's a design problem I had never considered before. Kind of disappointing after watc…
My understanding is that blind or visually impaired people tend to use Windows because that's where the two(?) big screenreader programs run; JAWS is one[1], I forget the other but it might be NVDA[2]. Microsoft have traditionally had some focus on accessibility, e.g. there's a video from a few years back of a blind programmer demonstrating how they program in Visual Studio[3]. Outside that, Emacspeak[4] is an eyes-free Emacs, I think it can boot into that environment; it was developed by a blind person and claims:
> Emacspeak introduces several improvements and innovations when compared with screenreaders designed to allow blind users to interact with personal computers. Unlike screenreaders that speak the contents of a visual display, Emacspeak speaks the underlying information. As an example, using a calendar application with a screenreader results in the blind user hearing a sequence of meaningless numbers; In contrast, Emacspeak speaks the relevant date in an easy to comprehend manner.
> The system deploys the innovative technique of audio formatting to increase the band-width of aural communication; changes in voice characteristic and inflection combined with appropriate use of non-speech auditory icons are used throughout the user interface to create the equivalent of spatial layout, fonts, and graphical icons so important in the visual interface. This provides rich contextual feedback and shifts some of the burden of listening from the cognitive to the perceptual domain.
[1] https://www.freedomscientific.com/products/software/jaws/
[2] https://www.nvaccess.org/download/
Re: Show HN: Giving my mother-in-law an easy internet radio with real icon buttons
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I spent an hour or so messing with Siri on a Mac Mini I have lying around from an old contract gig. Wondering how I would use it without much (or any) vision. It's directly hooked to a fairly fast lump of hardware and communicating with a potentially huge back-end. Utterly maddening, barely useful, overly tied to Apple products, and it's a design problem I had never considered before. Kind of disappointing after watc…
My understanding is that blind or visually impaired people tend to use Windows because that's where the two(?) big screenreader programs run; JAWS is one[1], I forget the other but it might be NVDA[2]. Microsoft have traditionally had some focus on accessibility, e.g. there's a video from a few years back of a blind programmer demonstrating how they program in Visual Studio[3]. Outside that, Emacspeak[4] is an eyes-f…
I'll break out a Win10 PC and give it a shot, although it seems like ipads and iphones get most of the accessibility credit. I was also fooling around with those sorts of features on a Chromebook.
I can't help but wonder if simply reading the screen is the wrong answer. It's as if the important thing is to understand the screen and then explain it without the need for any visual/location kind of concept. Another angle would be to write a completely audio-based alternative interface for important websites.
No doubt people a lot smarter than me have spent a lot of time on these issues, but I'm pretty dissatisfied with what I've seen so far.
Re: Show HN: Giving my mother-in-law an easy internet radio with real icon buttons
#97That's a really good idea. For reasons I won't trouble anyone with, I've been educating myself with accessibility features on computers/phones/tablets, smart speakers, appliances, etc. It's funny how much shittier it all is than it could be. It certainly hasn't helped that the button-per-function thinking in consumer product design has been largely replaced with low cost small displays. Maybe I'll design a piano that…
I was just thinking about how I'd like to redesign an internet radio. . Break apart the programming/setup from the physical interface. . Use a phone or pc for all setup, perhaps like a Google wifi router, a lot of the time this is done by a different person than the end user. . make it look like a Tivoli Model One, except with an 8 (or so) pole switch or button set. off/am/fm/aux/internet preset 1-5
https://www.amazon.com/Urbanears-Multi-Room-Bluetooth-Connec...
These came quite close to this (but have since been discontinued by Urbanears). Physical knob presets to internet radio stations (or turn it to “airplay/Bluetooth mode”)
Re: Show HN: Giving my mother-in-law an easy internet radio with real icon buttons
#98I did something similar for my kids, but I used Raspberry Pi’s running MusicBox, which can do internet radio, Spotify, local MP3s, or in my case load a folder of MP3s from a share drive on my network.
I threw on a $10 USB DAC and some cheap Logitech Z120 speakers, and I hardwired some big arcade buttons from Adafruit to it. I wrote a little Python script so each button plays an MP3 playlist (Eg one for sleep, one for daytime, and one to stop everything).
The same buttons could quite easily play an internet radio station.
I think the entire thing cost me ~AUD80 total.
Next I want to integrate it all into a 3D printed housing and add some LEDs as night lights.
Re: Show HN: Giving my mother-in-law an easy internet radio with real icon buttons
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was just thinking about how I'd like to redesign an internet radio. . Break apart the programming/setup from the physical interface. . Use a phone or pc for all setup, perhaps like a Google wifi router, a lot of the time this is done by a different person than the end user. . make it look like a Tivoli Model One, except with an 8 (or so) pole switch or button set. off/am/fm/aux/internet preset 1-5
https://www.amazon.com/Urbanears-Multi-Room-Bluetooth-Connec... These came quite close to this (but have since been discontinued by Urbanears). Physical knob presets to internet radio stations (or turn it to “airplay/Bluetooth mode”)
That does look pretty darn close.
The other thing I worry about with internet radios is to keep the price low. It's just too easy to have the underlying webstrate (is that a word?) up and disappear. Think of Frontier or the death of the early Grace Digital radios (Reciva?)
Re: Show HN: Giving my mother-in-law an easy internet radio with real icon buttons
#100This is amazing - and incidentally has given me a solution to a very real problem. My grandmother is suffering from dementia, and within the last few months has forgotten how to tune a radio. She's an avid radio listener, so I worked around this by buying her a few radios, tuning them, and labelling them - so she only has to hit the power button on the one she wants. Unfortunately, she's not thrilled by how much spac…
I think there's a business opportunity around people who aren't tech literate and want what tech they have to stay the same, but every time I think about what an ecosystem that could handle everything from photo sharing to email to even the TV, it seems like a fool's errand because the market seems small, it keeps shifting to people to are comfortable with somewhat newer things, and I don't think enough people would…
I wonder if all the boomers would pay for this. Supposedly they are the ones with lots of money. The market might only be good for 20 years, but you could make a lot of money in those 20 years.