Picture this: You fly off to Rome, head to the Coliseum and, using your iPhone, play a video that guides you around the ancient arena where gladiators and lions once roamed. Later, walk across Piazza del Colosseo to the Roman Forum and view a video tour of the sprawling Forum ruins, taking in what was once the center of ancient Rome. If you’re deaf or hard of hearing, you can turn on the captioning feature.

This vision will soon be a reality, thanks to Keen Guides, an up-and-coming Virginia-based company that’s in the process of creating and selling short-format GPS-based video and audio tours for the iPhone and later, BlackBerry and Android phones. These tours — available in app stores — will focus on museums and popular tourist attractions; your phone can recognize the ones nearest to you.

Best of all, Keen Guide’s audio and video content will be captioned for the deaf of hard and hearing. Audio that is created by third parties, such as DC on Foot, will be enhanced with relevant images. Other accessibility modules that will be explored include sign language and cued speech. Down the line, Keen Guides wants to add audio described tours for the visually impaired.

Video: Audio tour of Lincoln Memorial

“All of our content will be accessible to the deaf community, and If I have to hire a staff of captioners, I will,” says Catharine McNally, the founder of Keen Guides who started the company two years ago. McNally, a museum lover who also has been deaf since birth, knows a thing or two about accessible excursions.

After graduating from Wake Forest University in 2006, McNally began developing braille booklets (for the blind) and transcripts (for the deaf) to help make museums more accessible. She took her endeavors a step further when she connected with a Wake Forest alumna, and the two began developing guides on mobile platforms. So impressive is the company’s model, that Keen Guides won seed capital in 2009 from LaunchBox Digital, an early stage investment firm and incubator.

With smart phones and GPS rapidly gaining mass-market acceptance, McNally and her team see an opportunity to take advantage of these trends. “There will be an increasing demand for immediate, relevant, and local information,” says McNally, “from educational content to local retailers, businesses, and restaurants.”

In April, Keen Guides will launch a Beta pilot in three cities: Washington, D.C., Austin, Texas, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina – cities with high technology adoption rates, strong tourism levels, and significant college and university bases, McNally says. The company has also contracted with Wake Forest and Gallaudet universities to develop campus tours for prospective students and other visitors.

So next time you’re in Rome, make sure you’ve got your smart phone with you, along with the Keen Guides app. With these great downloadable tours, you won’t want to leave home without it.

Related Articles: Q&A with Catharine McNally

By Michael Janger

My favorite gadgets at this year’s Assistive Technology Industry Association conference, which featured more than 100 vendors, include two communications products and a new PDA for the blind. I also note some worthy mentions – gadgets that I liked because of their design or originality. Here’s the list.

ECO2

This eye-gaze system brings the latest in alternative input. For people who cannot use their limbs, nor speak (perhaps someone with ALS — Lou Gehrig’s Disease – or a person who has had a stroke), Prentke-Romich’s ECO2 is a great innovation. To calibrate ECO2, I followed a bouncing ball on screen while it recorded my eye movements – this takes all of 30 seconds. The program, a combination of words, phrases and pictures, can be operated using just the eyes, allowing someone to express their thoughts (and their gratitude for this program.) ($7,795)

Proloquo2go
An iPhone/iTouch app for people who have trouble communicating, Assistive Ware’s Proloquo2go is genius. Founder Samuel Sennot designed the app earlier this year, and it has received rave reviews, particularly among the autism community. Users press icons to express phrases, comments, or questions – and it is cooler and less bulky than a traditional speech-generating device. ($189 plus the cost of an iPhone or iTouch)

BrailleNote Apex
If you’re not blind, you might not grasp the importance of having an all-in-one personal digital assistant strapped to your waist 24 hours a day. Simple tasks, like fishing for a pen or paper to write down a person’s telephone number, can be difficult when you can’t see what’s around you. The BrailleNote Apex is the thinnest (less than an inch) and lightest (less than two pounds) notetaker on the market, and is the latest model to come out of HumanWare’s lab. This PDA takes notes, reads books, plays downloaded music, streams Internet radio, has a web browser, Braille (or QWERTY) keyboard, and makes snow cones. Just kidding on that last one. ($6,195)

Oratio
From HumanWare and Code Factory comes a the first-ever screen reader for the BlackBerry. It uses state of the art text-to-speech technology that makes the BlackBerry fully accessible to the visually impaired. Oratio is expensive, but there’s a discount for 50 or more license — making it a good choice for enterprise communications where the iPhone won’t do. ($449)

Worthy mentions

ChatterVox
Steven, a rep for ChatterVox, ebulliently demonstrated the power of this human-speech amplification system. While it looks like something you’d see on one of those fake-audience informercials at 3 a.m., ChatterVox really does boost a person’s voice up to xx decibels, allowing him to speak without straining – with no auditory feedback. This product is designed for those who can’t speak very loudly due to weakening vocal chords (many people with ALS have this condition). It also looks like it would come in handy for CEOS and teachers. ($285)

Optelec Compact Mini
Sure, you could just use a cheap magnifying glass to read those restaurant menus, but this thing is cooler. The Optalec Mini video magnifier is as small as an iPod and can increase font sizes up to 11 times with the press of a button. The FarView, its larger counterpart, has a built-in camera; take a snapshot of a far-away sign –- say, the train schedule at Grand Central station – and zoom in. You’ll catch your ride, without looking like Sherlock Holmes. (£295)

Read a 2009 New York Times article about the Optelec Mini.

Disability T-Shirts
I was hoping for edgier slogans, but these T-shirts from Dare2Dream were selling like hotcakes. Teenage boys had a preference for the black T-Shirt that read, Attitude Is The Real Disability. Rock on. ($12)

ATIA has officially come to an end. Dynavox Mayer-Johnson broke down their exhibit village. The communications device company showcased their popular V Max speech-generating device, which also has an eye-gaze version.

By Suzanne Robitaille

I didn’t get to too many workshops at the Assistive Technology Industry Association conference this year, because I only attended for one full day. I did stop into a presentation on speech-recognition for the deaf, led by Ed Rosenthal, CEO of Next Generation Technologies, a consulting firm.

Rosenthal is a certified partner, and been working for 20 years, with Nuance Communications Dragon NaturallySpeaking software, and says that the technology had its first real breakthrough about three years ago when it debuted its latest version — 10 Preferred ($199).

Now, Rosenthal says, he believes the speech-to-text program works well enough to be used as a real-time captioning tool for the deaf in the workplace. The Dragon program is said to work “three times faster than most people type, with accuracy rates of up to 99% right out of the box.”

In a demonstration, Rosenthal opened up a Word document and began speaking (into a wireless mike) at about 120 words per minute, pretending he was an executive at Toyota. Taking a page from the news – Toyota recently recalled 2.3 million cars — he spoke to a roomful of “Toyota salesmen” about the carmaker’s issues. The entire “meeting” was translated to perfection, with the exception of one line: “I’ve instructed all of our sales agents to stop selling our eight models until the Hollywood acceleration can be solved.”

Hollywood? Rosenthal quickly pulled up a word correction tool. The final document then read: “I’ve instructed all of our sales agents to stop selling our eight models until the problem with acceleration can be solved.”

Of course, Rosenthal (a has created an extensive profile for his voice, but says it takes around 20 minutes for anyone to set up a profile, which is done by reading a story out loud so NaturallySpeaking 10 can capture the speed, tone and inflection of a user’s voice.

Rosenthalsays he believes that for ad hoc meetings when an interpreter isn’t available for a deaf person, or if a hard of hearing person just wants some visual support at a meeting, then NaturallySpeaking can do the trick just fine.

I agree, that even with small mistakes, a person with a hearing impairment would welcome any kind of text to supplement a conference or meeting. I asked him about virtual conference calls – could an executive conceivably use NaturallySpeaking and push the text out via an instant message program? Rosenthal wasn’t sure, but he thinks it’s possible. At the very least, the executive (or his secretary) can email out a transcript of the call after it ends.

NaturallySpeaking works in Word, Excel, Corel WordPerfect and most other Windows-based applications. The Professional version ($899) is more ideal for the workplace because it also works in PowerPoint, Lotus Notes, and Microsoft Outlook. Either way, both versions can take advantage of corporate speak and save it in your profile. That’s great for when the boss needs those TPS reports by noon.

Though assistive tech isn’t really a topic to be taken lightly, sometimes it’s good to have some fun with it — and find the humorous side of things. Here’s hoping you smile with these photos taken today at the 2010 Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA) conference in Orlando:

Don’t touch that pony! A blind woman attended today’s session with her miniature horse in tow. Her husband, who helped train the horse near their home in Jacksonville, Fla., kept reminding gawkers that it’s not a pony — otherwise she would be riding it, not walking with it. I like the red bow on the horse’s head. Everyone wanted to pet the horse, but you’re not supposed to touch service animals.

Pardon me, Is it happy hour yet? Look closely here at the screen for Zingui, a new speech-generating device from Jabbla for people who have difficulty speaking. This device is set up with some fantastic phrases for young and old. My favorite is one that can be used over and over again at T.G.I. Friday’s: “Can I have a beer?” Keep this one out of the hands of kindergardeners.

He had me at Hola. The guy trying to extol the accolades of Tobii ATI’s speech-generating device couldn’t get it to switch from Spanish to English. Luckily I’ve completed ninth-grade Spanish and could make out the benefits of such a product:

I’m lovin’ it. This product from Adaptivation Software made me hungry. Underneath the McDonald’s hamburger and french fry box is a thin plastic sheet connected to a speech-generating machine. When the sheet is pressed, the machine speaks the words. It’s designed for those with cognitive disabilities who are trying to assimilate into culture and learn the language of the Golden Arches:

Why, yes, I like to lick camels, thank you. A new company, Ginger Software, makes some amazing word-correction software for students, complete with user reports to show teachers how their students are progressing. This made me giggle:

I have been to plenty of Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA) conferences, and this year has all the usual stuff (though gadgets are getting smaller every year!) As I walked the exhibit halls, I was haunted by the recent New York TImes Sunday Magazine article, Listening to Braille, where the author bemoans the decline of braille teaching in the classroom, which she says is contributing to higher illiteracy rates among the blind.

I kept an eye out for cool new Braille products, hoping to find the spark that would re-energize braille again.

For starers, I liked the sleek design of the Next Generation Perkins Brailler — a typewriter that outputs in braille instead of alpha-numeric. Perkins also just came out with a product called Top Braille. it’s a portable reader with a braille button on top. A user slides the device across printed text, and “feels” the braille button translating the words to them, one by one, at whatever speed is desired. It costs $1,950.

Top Braille

HumanWare, a maker of many braille products, has come out with a new, incredibly light braille notetaker called BrailleNote Apex. The sales rep, who is blind and wore one around his waist, rattled off everything this baby could do.

Running on Windows CE 6, it includes a word processor, book reader — for reading Braille or audio, web browser, e-mail, media player, streaming audio — for listening to Internet radio, instant messaging, and more.

The BrailleApex

I also had some fun with HumanWare’s Mountbatten Braille writer, in wacky colors like blue and yellow. It’s like a kiddie version of the Perkins Brailler, and is designed to “introduce students to Braille literacy in a fun and inclusive manner.”

With the Mountbatten writer, kids use one of six light-weight keys in various combinations to create braille documents. At the same time, the device speaks the words out loud to reinforce learning.

Mountbatten Braille Writer

Since I don’t know an iota of braille, I used the connecting QWERTY keyboard to type a braille Valentine’s message on ivory stationery for my fiancee. I hope he likes it!