Outfox Shoutout

I wanted to blog about this as soon as it hit my feedreader, but then there was that proposal to finish. Anyway:

One of the highlights of a decade spent at Carolina was getting to work with Gary Bishop, a professor in the Department of Computer Science. We found ourselves in a collaboration initiated by Jason Morris, a blind Classics graduate student who was deeply interested in ancient geography and for whom Braille maps constituted a ridiculously low-bandwidth, low-resolution disappointment. The idea of producing immersive spatial audio maps took off in the hands of a group of Gary's undergraduate students and, with some seed money from Microsoft Research, this one initiative blossomed into a research and teaching program in assistive technology.

Gary's recently blogged about a cool new project: the Outfox extension for Firefox, which:

allows in-page JavaScript to access local platform services and devices such as text-to-speech synthesis, sound playback and game controllers

It's open source (BSD License), and you can help.