The BBC is reporting on a new technology being developed by a team of Japanese researchers which uses focused ultrasonic waves to produce the illusion of solid objects in mid-air to the sense of touch.

While still in its infancy, the researchers believe the technique could be used in video games to provide a more immersive experience. Audio and visual sensory input has been a major part of gaming for years, but the sense of touch has been hard to fully tap into. This technology could provide a way to more fully realized virtual experience.

However, to the blind, this technology could mean more. As the technology matures, it is easy to envision ways in which it may be used to provide tactile cues on touch screen devices like the iPhone or iPod Touch, or provide a less expensive and more easily maintained alternative to current Braille display technologies.

Last week, the National Federation of the Blind settled out of court with Target Stores Inc. regarding access for the blind and visually impaired to its website and online store for an amount in excess of $6M.

In an insightful entry to their blog, Disability Nation points out the shortfalls of this settlement, particularly where the NFB stands to gain. Most notable to VoiceOver users on the Macintosh platform is that this settlement only pertains to access to the Target.com site with Jaws for Windows from Freedom Scientific. This fails to take into account the millions of visually impaired users of alternative access solutions such as VoiceOver, GW Micro’s Window-Eyes, or any number of other commercial or open source screen access products.

Check out the entry by clicking here. Let us know what you think.

Through the unconventional medium of a comic book, Google announced a new open source web browser called Chrome. The browser is scheduled to debut on Wednesday, 03/September, and it uses the same HTML rendering engine as Apple’s Safari browser. That engine is the open source project WebKit.

Although no details on what platforms the browser will be available for, it is very possible that this browser will be compatible with VoiceOver, as it will be sharing key components with Safari, if it is indeed available for Mac OS X.

Google and Apple have a history of strong ties, so we do expect a Macintosh version of Chrome to be available.

As soon as we know whether or not it is accessible with VoiceOver, we will report. The browser, along with additional information, will be available later from www.Google.com/chrome

The popular cross-platform OCR and scanning application VueScan from Hamrick Software is now completely accessible with VoiceOver and Mac OS X.

VueScan has a myriad of powerful scanning features. The OCR (Optical Character Recognition) feature being the most obviously useful to the blind and visually impaired. It supports eighteen languages and is available in Standard and Professional editions for $39.95 and $79.95 respectively. To find out more click here.