Playing cards is a favorite pastime for many people, and a fine way to spend time companionably during a nursing home or sick room visit when conversation lags. Depending on the game, even very young children and adults of all abilities can join in.
Category: Games/Recreation
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Acessibility for Computer Gamers
A group from The Netherlands, the Bartiméus Accessibility Foundation, has a website devoted to encouraging and facilitating accessibility to computer games for “gamers who function under limiting conditions . . . such as blindness, deafness, or mobility limitations.”
When a person’s ability to interact with the broader physical world is limited, creating intellectually and visually stimulating moments can become becomes much more difficult. At the same time, quality of life may depend even more on that kind of stimulation.
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Don’t Try This At Home
Ever watch Malcolm in the Middle? Remember the episode when Stevie runs away and ends up in a grocery cart being pushed through skid row? Remember another one when he doffs his wheelchair and becomes a luge-street-racer?
That was nuffin’, parents. Check this out, and then go and padlock your kid’s wheelchair:
World’s First Wheelchair Backflip
Yeah, I know — I should have titled this post ‘When Paraplegia Is Not Enough’.
Malcolm photo via AntonioGenna.com
Visits to a nursing home are a critical component of caring for a resident, and rewarding for everyone involved. There’s no denying, though, that they can be difficult as well. If the visits are daily, the difficulties compound — how do you make the time interesting rather than dull and repetitious? Conversation can falter, imagination fail. How do you make interactions mentally stimulating?
When coordination is difficult, whether from age, injury, surgery or a disability, playing can be the best medicine. These marble run sets are made of wooden blocks with grooves or holes. You stack and arrange the blocks so that marbles roll through them, practicing dexterity all the while.
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Accessible Geocaching
Last year my husband acquired another a new handheld device (as if he needed another one!) — a GPS, also known as a Global Positioning Device. If you’re not too concerned about privacy and freedom and stuff like that, you may have one in your car.
Standard wheelchairs, manual or powered, are a marvel of uninspired design. With the exception of technical sports chairs, the great body of modern wheelchairs seems purpose-built for times long past. Functionally speaking, they roll. Great. For whatever reason, Big Medical Supply has shown minimal interest in making any substantial improvements either in basic design or function over, say, the last four decades.
This one’s a little hard to categorize, but for you daredevil types out there who miss the thrills you used to know, Adaptive Engineering has a motorcycle for you.
Adaptive Engineering can equip your motorcycle with our unique automatic kickstand (AKS) (patent pending) that keeps the bike upright when you come to a stop. And with our hand controlled shifting system you’ll never miss a gear. Our system can be installed on just about any motorcycle.
I don’t know what kind of engineers these guys are, but model Erick is a little confused about equipment — his wheelchair’s wearing a helmet, but he isn’t.
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Jenga
When medicine and my dad first collided, it was a shock to him. His attitude toward his medical problems was, well, consumerist. He’d buy surgical services, and the surgeons would fix everything. End of story.