ATMac

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The ATMac team have been working hard all year and now we’re exhausted! We will be taking a break for Christmas and to come up with more great information and articles for you next year. There’ll also be a competition to give away some great software. We’ll be back in January, so don’t forget to check up on us.

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.

Keyboard shortcuts are a quick way of getting many things done without needing to access the menus or the mouse. If you know to press command-s to save your work, you’ve used a keyboard shortcut. For people who primarily use a keyboard or a switch interface, using keyboard shortcuts can save a lot of time and effort.

My husband got me an iPod Touch for Christmas last year. I have no arms but I can use the iPod touch with my foot. We had thought at first that one would be able to type on the screen using anything with a sharp tip. I noticed on the first day that this was not the case - it was happy with me using my nose, but not using the top of a pen!

ATMac has a new poll and is available on Twitter. MacUpdate has a new Winter Promo bundle available. Throwboy have some fantastic Apple-themed cushions. Ricky’s been reading interesting articles and shares them, including David Barnes explaining why he doesn’t love Apple products.

Mage Software has released version 2.0 of their inkBook program which takes advantage of OS X’s InkWell handwriting recognition technology to let you search, copy, and export notes handwritten with a tablet and stylus.

Create simple communication boards using digital images with the free PHOTOsyms application. Your image grid can contain between 2 and 54 photos so within the grid limitations there’s quite a lot of room for customisation.