I dug my venerable Kindle out and dusted it off, after working with a variety of tablets over the last few months. I'd forgotten how much smaller & lighter it is, with battery life in months, not days. It's hard to see how to preserve those good traits of a e-reader while also loading it down with features to make it a desktop/laptop/netbook replacement, which seems to be where the tablet market has to go (or has already gone?).

I had to laugh when I saw Microsoft described as "doing well" in terms of accessibility for the blind. It's simply not true; their attempts at accessibility are token at best and largely ignored by the blind community. I know lots of blind people and I don't know a single one who uses a Windows desktop or mobile product without a third-party application such as JAWS for Windows, ZoomText or Nuance. Oh and while we're on the subject: Adobe's accessibility "features" are non-functional - not only are they totally inadequate standing alone, they also prevent those 3rd party applications from doing their jobs. PDFs and Flash are pretty much inaccessible to blind users. I am holding out hope for Pico on Android ... though I have yet to get it working on anything but the emulator that comes with the SDK.

No, I am simply suggesting that your visibility is better when going forward than backwards. When you pull up to a parking space (forwards) you can see whether it's clear to back in, and whether that situation is likely to change in the amount of time it takes to back in (i.e. pedestrians that you can see walking towards your space). Not saying it's foolproof, nothing is. Just saying that when you back out of a parking space you have very limited visibility side-to-side, compared to pulling out forwards. I guess it's less about the straight-backwards view - that is provided by the backlight ("rear window") if your vehicle has one (mine doesn't) or mirrors, or camera - it doesn't seem to me this is the limiting factor, once you have a straight, clear shot at backing into the spot. Or maybe I'm overthinking/overexplaining this?

Yeah I'm going to have to side with "encroachment" this time. You can dramatically increase your safety in a parking lot simply by either backing into a space or pulling through two adjacent spaces when available. That way when you exit, you're going forward and have maximum visibility. When you approach the space to enter it (either backwards or pulling through) you again have much better visibility and can assess the presence of obstacles such as children and the elderly. Seems like better driving practices could cut that 292/18K number down with no bogus technology injection.

Exactly, I could use a little freelance work myself, and I have a Liberal Arts degree - where do I sign up?

Letting people voluntarily make their web sites accessible certainly hasn't worked - for example, Flash content is the bane of visually impaired users but I don't see much of a movement to provide alternatives. I wonder if this means that popular OSs will have to provide real, working accessibility features and not bad jokes like Microsoft Narrator?

Hey what's not exciting about an automatically-piloted people pod? Then I could get another hour of slashdot in every commute!

Accessibility accommodations for all those materials are well known and currently in use. Try running a touch-screen device with a blindfold on sometime.

... insert standard comment about mainstream vendors' lack of commitment to accessibility features for the differently abled ... Can't "force" it on students who can't use it.

Their most recent direction has a decidedly "open source" feel to it ... and you still have a chance to submit proposals: http://www.darpa.mil/news/2010/SystemF6NewsRelease.pdf

Ever hear the expression "I'd rather write programs that help me write programs, than write programs?" Maybe you can get some enjoyment out of writing the code that helps you test the code you're writing. Write a perl script to test your C code, etc.