Don’t let the word “assistive” instantly turn you off just because you’re not old or medically frail.
An iPhone app developed by Waikiki resident Gerd Graumann may let you catch up on your reading as you drive to work, and help your mom make sure she’s taking the right medication, even without her glasses on, by reading the label to her aloud.
Graumann, a Waikiki resident and founder of San Diego-based Speech Technology Group, was among several technology folk who appeared earlier this month before executives at Bayer Healthcare in Berlin, where he demonstrated his iPhone app called BigFONT. He was awarded $13,000 from Bayer’s Grants4Apps initiative.
Settings on iPhones already allow you to adjust type size, also called font, for built-in functions such as emails, text messages, contacts, calendars and notes. However, mobile websites generally appear with one size font, and many don’t allow users to zoom to increase text size. Even then, formatting doesn’t always adjust to fit the screen, so you have to scroll back and forth to read the desired material.
It is those sorts of mobile sites for which BigFONT was created, Graumann said.
Beyond those with serious vision impairments, Graumann had different types of users in mind. See if you’re among them (get it?): You have numerous pairs of reading glasses but they vanish when needed. You really should wear glasses but don’t want to, and you regularly find your arms to be of insufficient length.
The Bayer execs liked that BigFONT reformats mobile site text so users need only scroll up and down to read, without side-to-side scrolling.
The app includes a feature that transforms the user’s iPhone into a magnifying glass that can zoom up to eight times the original size.
The grant allowed Graumann’s Speech Technology Group to add, at Bayer’s encouragement, an optical character recognition reader, "which is a pretty cool thing," Graumann said. Take a picture of text, say, on a prescription bottle, and the OCR reader "extracts the text and puts it on the iPhone screen in large font."
"You can have the app also read back to you what it says," in case of more serious vision impairment or those darned missing reading glasses.
This also is where you could catch up on your reading while driving to work. Say you don’t have time to read "TheBuzz" before you leave for work, "you can take a picture of it, and sit in the car and listen to it at your convenience," Graumann said.
BigFONT is a dollar-a-holler, or technically 99 cents, in the app store.
As for the Hawaii-based founder of a San Diego-based company, Graumann and his wife started their family in Hawaii years ago. Both their daughters were born here, but they moved away in 2000. Now that they have returned, one daughter just started college.
"Sometimes you have to leave … to realize and appreciate what you left behind," he said.
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On the Net:
» www.Bigfont.net
Windward Hokulani
Cupcakes and cookies popular with Honolulu residents and Waikiki visitors will be available at Windward Mall on Nov. 1 when Hokulani Bake Shop expands into a 468-square-foot space.
The new shop, to open near Center Court, will be Hokulani’s fourth Oahu store and its first in Windward Oahu. The shop prides itself on using real butter and real sugar versus fake stuff, and for winning an episode of "Cupcake Wars" on Food Network in February 2012.
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On the Net:
» www.hokulanibakeshop.com
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Reach Erika Engle at 529-4303, erika@staradvertiser.com, or on Twitter as @erikaengle.
