ATMac

I thought I’d pass on the news that MacWorld just published an interesting news item about one of our very own, Giesbert Nijhuis. Giesbert has started selling his own line of T-Shirts under the label, AssistiveWear. Congratulations Giesbert!
You can check out the full article here.
- Paul Natsch

MacSpeech Dictate is a great program but learning so many commands at once can be intimidating. I’ve put together two documents to help you learn and remember all the global commands found in Dictate version 1.2.1.

VoiceOver is a screen reader primarily used by blind Mac OS X users, but sighted people also use it for a variety of reasons, either for themselves or to better support a blind user. So, where would one start with learning to use it?

Power’s what assistive technology gives us, really. The power to communicate, to read, to type, to plan, to play, to control things. The power to achieve things that we couldn’t otherwise achieve. Here are some ideas for gifts to empower assistive technology users.

Most of the students with disabilities in an educational setting will have some type of print-related disability; having programs that support reading and writing available on all computers limits the stigma for students who need the help and makes these tools available to other students too. Access should be available to everybody.

Have you ever wanted to make phone calls on the net using a synthetic computer generated voice? If you’re an AAC user, then this is a great way to communicate with people remotely. This article will show you how to set up Wiretap Anywhere to send your speech voice to Skype’s internet phone system.

OS X only offers US English text-to-speech voices, and they are not of a very high quality. What alternatives are available?

Keeping your CD and DVD collections on the computer can make them much easier to access and use. ITunes makes it easy to keep music from your CDs on the computer - just use the iTunes “import” command and your music is copied to the computer. Keeping a DVD collection on the computer is a little trickier, but you don't have to be a geek to do it.