lifekludger

iTouch iStick iKludge

Last year I captured this video, and has been on my youtube channel, yet seems I never posted it here.

iTouch iStick iKludge
From: lifekludger | August 10, 2009

The iTouch/iPhone needs skin so it doesn’t work with my mouthstick. In this video I show use by running copper wire down the stick from mouth. Contact to the device is using a pogo stylus. Taping the stylus to the stick and the wire to the stylus with sticky tape, the wire conducts whatever it is in my skin that the iTouch needs.

This kludge was an experiment and is not very serviceable and therefore unsatisfactory as an end solution.

The video alsio shows the lack of ability to perform the pinch gesture to zoom in and out when only having one point of contact.

For more of the ongoing “Touch Barrier” issues see these past posts.

Meanwhile, over at the ATMac blog is a good post on the way one person’s overcome the ‘Touch Barrier’, based on my mouthstick experiments.

I’m concerned about the way the pervasive use of (capacitive) touch on all manner of devices is causing increased inaccessibility to those who can not use their hands. In essence we are seeing the options decreasing that are available for controlling devices as everyone moves towards ‘skin based’ touch. This again puts more barriers up and less choice with yet another thing to kludge our lives around.

The feeling of technology turning from being an enabling to disabling I wrote about on this Lifekludger blog in this post : http://bit.ly/touchbarrier

While we can find work arounds with wire and tape, I’d like to see some more sophisticated solution maybe coming via material sciences to deliver a material/substance which emulates the properties required to use a capacitive screen without the requirement of conducting from skin.