I recently took a call from someone asking if we had any switch adapted toys designed for young children with special needs. I told her about Dream-Racer and Dream-Gamer but she was looking for toys designed with a younger age group in mind. Ideally for children aged 3 to 7 years old.

As we spoke it became clear that this person was finding it difficult to source stimulating toys designed for young partially sighted, hard-of-hearing children other special needs.

That got us going and since them I've visited the toy section at Spring Fair and Mark has been investigating how to make switch adapted toys. Dancing Shrek is the first toys we have adapted

I've sourced four more electrical toys that we are sure we can modify to make switch accessible.

Take a look at the Shrek video at the top of the blog and the pictures of the switch adapted Dream-Toys we will have available once our modifications have been CE certified.

Mother bear recites nursery rhymes, worker bear sings "working on the railroad", Yellow chic sings "splish splash taking a bath" while dancing and white rabbit sings "bunny hop rock" and flaps his ears in time to the music.

I'm sure we'll have lots of fun working with these guys ...

Mike

This is the link to the video produced by the organisers of BETT 2008.

http://eventsreview.com/clients/bett/2008/review/

Anyone that has picked up on the earlier posts to this blog will know that in 2007 we had a very active product development programme underway.

We developed and commercialised Dream-Racer, Dream-Gamer and Dream-Mouse plus a range of other special Dream-Projects for children and young adults with physical disabilities.

Welcome Chris.

Chris is an electronics engineer working alongside Mark and developing his own adapted / assistive technology projects for disabled individuals.

One thing is certain, 2008 will be another busy year. We currently have four new assistive technology switch projects all at the proof-of-concept stage and we are only into early February.

I have two challenges:

• Keeping up with all the new ideas being work on and,
• Building up or sales and distribution network in Europe - initially in Germany, France and The Netherlands.

On a final note we have decided to produce a range of switch adapted toys for younger children - more on this later.

Mike

SpecialEffect is a new Oxfordshire based charitable organisation dedicated to helping ALL young people with disabilities to enjoy computer games. 

Roadshow events are planned that will provide advice support and a chance for young people with disabilities to try out a range of empowering technology for themselves that will enable them to try and play the same games as their able bodied peers.

Young volunteers will be invited from Oxfordshire universities and youth organisations to share their gaming knowledge with the disabled young people they meet and be taught about the new gaming technology by SpecialEffect's experts.

Take a look at the SpecialEffect community on Facebook.

Barrie Ellis at Oneswitch.org told us about SpecialEffect and suggested we may like to get involved by donating a couple of Dream-Gamer adapted PlayStation controllers - they shipped today.

We are looking forward to taking part in some of the roadshows.

Mike