Google’s new Hangouts group video chat service has been a big hit with early adopters. Now the company is looking to make it more widely available without leaving anyone behind: Google is going to launch a field test with users fluent in American Sign Langauge (ASL) to make Hangouts more accessible to deaf and hearing impaired users.

The field test is spearheaded by Google’s technical program manager for accessibility engineering Naomi Black as well as the company’s engineering director Chee Chew, who kicked off the initiative with a post to Google Plus that explained his personal stake in the issue:

“One area that I’m personally quite passionate about is facilitating communications and community for the deaf. My grandfather, aunt, and uncle were/are all deaf. While I’m very much a novice, i find ASL to be a beautiful expressive language. I hope that Hangouts can be awesome for the deaf (and hard of hearing) community as well as the hearing.”

Video chat applications have long been used by hearing impaired users to communicate via sign language. Skype seems to be particularly popular with hard of hearing users, and some users have turned to the service to learn and practice sign language.

Google is asking Google Plus Hangouts users for feedback on sign language support.

Multiuser video chat would be the logical next step for hard of hearing users, but there are also some technical challenges associated with group video conferencing. Google Hangouts, for example, is optimized for audible communication, as it switches its focus between users based on their microphone input. The idea of this feature is to prominently display the video camera input of the user that is currently talking, which has the added benefit of giving users an incentive not to talk over each other.

Gauging participation based on microphone input levels obviously doesn’t work for users that communicate via sign language, so Google is now looking for other cues. “We need an indicator for who has the floor,” explained Chee in his post, adding: “I’m sure there are subtle issues that I don’t know.”

Making its video products accessible to deaf users isn’t just stewardship for Google, it could also help the company avoid future liabilities. Disability advocates have begun targeting online media offerings in recent weeks to force them to adopt closed captions for web video. Lawsuits against CNN and Netflix allege that the companies discriminate against deaf and hard of hearing users by failing to provide captions for each and every video served online. Some of the points made by the plaintiffs in these cases could also be used to argue that a video chat service that focuses on audible speech discriminates against deaf users.

Regardless of the motivation, early feedback from Google Plus users about the Hangouts field test is overwhelmingly supportive and even enthusiastic. In a comment on Chew’s post, one user summed up his feelings this way:

“I actually cried with joy at reading this post and finding out that Google and the Google+ team actually care about all of their user base. Thank you very much for just thinking about us.”

Picture of kids learning sign language courtesy of Flickr user daveynin.

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GigaOM — Tech News, Analysis and Trends

By Andrew Liszewski

If you were planning on making your first million with the brilliant idea of adding a voice recorder to a foam ball, someone’s already beaten you to it. (There’s just something about shattering dreams and Monday mornings that I love.) Powered by 3 button cell batteries the Message Ball has a built-in voice recorder that will record and play back 10-seconds of trash talk, secrets or whatever else you choose to confide in the ball. It might also make for a handy tool for conversing with a co-worker if your company prohibits the use of cellphones, regular phones, instant messaging, talking, shouting, passing notes, email, carrier pigeons, smoke signals, morse code, sign language, cemaphore and/or telepathy. $12.99 from Perpetual Kid.

[ Hog Wild Message Ball ]

There were some perks to dating a cyborg.

My ex-boyfriend Josh was born mostly deaf, but had some hearing in one ear thanks to a cochlear implant—a spiral of electrodes threaded into his cochlea to stimulate the auditory nerve, bypassing damaged parts of the ear. The surgery, which is irreversible, wipes out any residual hearing in the operated ear. (It’s a major invasive procedure—fortunately a one-time thing—that puts the patient at risk of facial paralysis.) A microphone connects to a removable external processor that converts sound to digital code; the code is transmitted to the implanted mechanism by way of a magnet. When fed through the cochlea, the decoded digital information is perceived as sound.

Josh wore the external part of the CI during most of his waking hours and we got by with lipreading and basic signing whenever he took it off. He never once complained about my snoring. If I wanted to have a private conversation with him in the room, I could just detach the magnet on the side of his head. It was also a fun party trick to announce that my boyfriend’s head could stick to the fridge.

Not everyone likes a cyborg, however. In fact, many deaf people would be offended at the suggestion that they do something so drastic to artificially augment their hearing. Last year at Gallaudet, the federally chartered university for the deaf in DC, Josh and the writer Michael Chorost co-taught a class designed to address the deaf community’s division regarding the use of cochlear implants. There’s concern that the technology will eventually render an entire language—American Sign Language—obsolete.

A majority of deaf children are born to hearing parents, many who would sooner opt for insurance-covered implants for their kids than years of sign education, audiologist visits and hearing aids, which are pricey and usually are not covered by medical insurance. Those against CI argue that sign language is categorically better than oral language, and that orally educated deaf children with CIs are missing out on gaining entrance into a rich community and culture. If the CI business “cures” all deaf people, the implications for the signing community are dire.

Gallaudet is a signing university with a vociferous pro-ASL population. In 2006, a newly appointed president was voted out of office ostensibly because she had been educated orally and didn’t learn sign until her twenties. Mike and Josh’s class looked at how other minorities have dealt with “threats” to their communities and tried to apply the lessons from those experiences to suggest ways that signing deaf people can survive the increase use of CIs.

The other day I asked Mike—who wrote Rebuilt and the amazing cochlear implant story in Wired—what he thought was the most exciting stuff happening in the world of CIs right now. Really, I was fishing for things that would improve my life, should I ever date another half-bot: How about solar-charged receivers that don’t require batteries (which used to die so conveniently during fights)? A line of accessories that could keep the thing in place during snogging? A remote control that could allow me to manipulate his every move, want and desire?

Mike didn’t think there was that much to report—I was a little disappointed he didn’t mention cat CIs! The future, according to Mike, is technology that facilitates two-way communication. Hearing people who dream of super-human auditory abilities probably won’t be lining up to get CIs any time soon.

“The engineering is too difficult and the risks are too great,” Mike told me. He sees implantation surgery going in a more practical direction. “People might be willing to get them to facilitate new forms of communication that to us would seem like telepathy,” he said. “I don’t mean the transmission of speech; there’s no point to that, since we can do that. I’m talking about the transmission of brain states—fear, alertness, anger—and, in a certain sense, of memories.”

In short, CI technology, as crazy science-fiction-esque as it seems, is already looking like the old grandpa in the rocking chair, nodding knowingly while the pro-CI and anti-CI groups still battle on like so many Hatfields and McCoys. “The real breakthroughs in neurotech will come not from doing existing things better, but from doing entirely new things,” he said. From an outside perspective, it seems that, if the two sides were to unite and embrace implant technology, the deaf community could come out at the forefront of cyborg-ology. The deaf community has already been profoundly effected by neurotechnology. It’s a point of view Mike argued elegantly in a much-debated 2007 speech he gave at Gallaudet:

We are heading into a future where the technology is opening up profoundly new possibilities for communication and group awareness…Cochlear implants are the cutting edge of a field called neurotechnology—the science of developing completely new kinds of ways of interfacing with the body and the brain…Who better than the deaf community to actively seize the lead in developing communications technologies that interact directly with the nervous system? And to experiment with new social forms to explore their uses? We already have one foot—more than one foot—in that world.

Tomorrow, I may get a brain implant that will help me not repeat myself or remember where I put my keys. Or remember where I put my keys. A large part of the deaf community, however, have already ventured farther down that road than I may ever see. Or, for the matter, hear.

Anna Jane Grossman is the author of Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By (Abrams Image) and the creator of iamobsolete.net. Her writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Salon.com, the Associated Press, Elle and the Huffington Post. She has a complicated relationship with technology, but she does have an eponymous website: AnnaJane.net. Follow her on Twitter at @AnnaJane.

We all remember the Power Glove as basically a broken promise. Well, here’s your chance to have that grip-control fantasy fulfilled: the AcceleGlove is a control interface that senses your fingers’ positions via accelerometers and uses them to control, say, that oversized Armatron they’ve got there in the video.

Remember Armatron?

Ah yeah.

Anyway, the AcceleGlove is, as you may guess from the guy’s spiel in the video, actually aimed at professional and military situations where a lightweight but precise control mechanism is needed for some basic navigational work with, say, a packbot. You probably won’t see it as an accessory any time soon, although the Peregrine Glove will be available soon if you feel the need to do some hand-based control.

The AcceleGlove, unfortunately, only detects things like bending your fingers, making a fist and so on, no waving or sign-language detection here. It comes with an open-source SDK, however, so you can always try hacking on some Wiimote parts.

[via OhGizmo and PC World]