ATMac

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Eagle eyed readers may notice I’ve added some Amazon.com links to the sidebar you’ll see when you view a single ATMac post on a page. In theory, these ads should show things which are relevant to ATMac users. My first impressions are that the damm thing is significantly slowing down the page loading, which isn’t good! I’d love to hear feedback about whether these are showing things relevant to you, and if they’re causing any problems for anybody. If they work well, it may be a way to help cover the operating costs of ATMac which would obviously be very helpful!

Have a great weekend.

- Ricky Buchanan

The Finder, iTunes, and iPhoto all now let you browse through your materially visually if you wish, instead of looking at lines of text. The address book program Espy is a third party utility we reviewed that does the same for address book entries, and now we have Webbla which does the same for web page bookmarks:

If you like to handle your music and photos with iTunes and iPhoto, Webbla is the right application to handle your bookmarks.

Webbla is an application for Mac OS X Leopard that helps you in organizing your bookmarks visually. It also offers you an easy way to keep track of website updates.

Instead of remembering your bookmarks by title, Webbla gives you a new way to remember them visually. Personalizing your bookmarks with tags or keeping them in different categories will help you to come back to them easily.

As well as OS X’s standard Safari browser, Webbla will import bookmarks from Firefox, OmniWeb, Camino, Opera, and other browsers. Webbla also integrates with OS X’s Spotlight and Quick Look functions.

Website: Webbla

- Ricky Buchanan, ATMac

Did you know that Mac OS X comes with a built in handwriting recognition system known as InkWell. If you have a pen and tablet for input, you can use it right away with no set-up needed! It’s known to be quirky and hasn’t been updated for a while, but Apple recently advertised for a handwriting engineer so there’s hope yet!

You can read about Inkwell on the Singapore Apple website - this page is now missing from the general Apple website although it used to be there. The only place I can find InkWell mentioned on the main Apple website is in the Accessibility section under Physical & Motor Skills assistance. InkWell only recognises separated hand printing, not handwriting where the letters are joined up, which limits its usefulness for writing long stretches of text. Most information I could find seemed to agree that it would be most appropriate as a secondary input source rather than for primary use.

If you’re wondering what this looks like when it’s being used, check out Antony’s handwriting in action which includes a QuickTime movie demo of InkWell at work. The primary internet resource is the InkSpatter blog which is occasionally updated with irreverent but helpful information from an InkWell user. There are few enough posts on InkSpatter that you can probably read through them all, but these two struck me as most helpful for somebody just getting going:

• Inkwell Accuracy Tip: Take Time to Turbo Calibrate Word Spacing
• 3 Simple Tips to Tweak Your Tablet for Inkwell

In terms of software which takes best advantage of InkWell, the only piece I could find was this:

inkBook lets you use a tablet and InkWell handwriting recognition technology to write notes by hand. The notes remain visible as handwritten ink, but can be searched, copied to other applications, and exported to a text file.

Because InkWell hasn’t recently been updated, there’s not any “buzz” about it’s use and not much updated information on the net. I think it’s still a usable resource for people with certain disabilities though, especially those impairments which mean switching between input technologies is helpful.

- Ricky Buchanan, ATMac

Did you know that you can change narrators automatically when you’re using GhostReader? It’s an undocumented feature, and only works with the voices from Infovox iVox or ConvenienceWare, but I’ve confirmed that it does work.

The biggest catch is that you can only switch between voices which are the same voice type and the same voice category. The voice type is either ‘Infovox iVox’ or ‘ConvenienceWare’, the ConvenienceWare voices can only be used within GhostReader whereas the iVox voices can be used with any programs. The voice categories are ‘HD’ and ‘HQ’ or ‘HQM’ (these two appear to be the same). To find out which voices are in which category, look on these pages:

• ConvenienceWare Voices lists the category and gender in brackets for each ConvenienceWare voice.
• Infovox iVox Voices does the same for the iVox voices.

We can see from this, for example, that the American English voices “Heather”, “Laura”, “Ryan”, “Kenny”, and “Nelly” are all HQ/HQM voices so we can swap between these.

To do the voice change, you put this command in your text:

\vce=speaker=newspeaker\

Instead of the word “newspeaker” you need to use the name of the voice you want, but the rest has to be exact - including the last backslash. So if you’re using American English voices, try using this text:

\vce=speaker=heather\Are you coming along?
\vce=speaker=ryan\Sure I am, I'd love to!
\vce=speaker=laura\I will come along too.

It will start out with Heather, then switch to Ryan and then to Laura. If you have the British English voices, you could use this text instead instead:

\vce=speaker=Lucy\Are you coming along?
\vce=speaker=Peter\Sure I am, I'd love to!
\vce=speaker=Graham\I will come along too.

I only own the British English InfoVox iVox voices so I haven’t tried to see if this works when switching between languages. If it does, it could be a really useful thing for when you have a document that changes from one language to another.

Remember, this is an undocumented command, and the speech synthesis system doesn’t really “know” you’ve changed voices so it won’t automatically change back to your default voice for more speech afterwards. For example, my default system voice is Peter, but after using the snippet above (which finishes with Graham speaking) any speech synthesis afterwards will still use the Graham voice. To fix this, add another switching command for your default system voice at the end of your document. So to switch back to my default Peter voice, the above text becomes this:

\vce=speaker=Lucy\Are you coming along?
\vce=speaker=Peter\Sure I am, I'd love to!
\vce=speaker=Graham\I will come along too.\vce=speaker=Peter\

It doesn’t matter that there’s no text after the last voice switch, it just tells the speech synth to switch back to Peter. So when my computer next announces the time, or I ask it to speak a block of text, it will be back to speaking in the Peter voice.

Can you think of any fun uses for this? Leave a comment!

- Ricky Buchanan, ATMac

An Air Mouse is one you can hold in your hand and move around. This type of mouse moves the mouse cursor in response to the left/right and up/down movement of your hand holding the mouse. The most commonly used Air Mouse I know of is the MX Air Rechargeable Cordless Air Mouse from Logitec, costing US$150. The Air Mouse application for the iPhone and iPod Touch turns your gadget into one of these types of mice for just US$7.99.

Air Mouse uses the built in accelerometer to translate your hand motions into mouse movements on your screen. It can also operate as a touchpad, allowing you to control your computer with a single fingertip.

This demo from the iPhone/iPod Touch Lab shows Air Mouse controlling a Windows computer but it works identically on a Mac computer. The demo has background music but no narration:

Website: Air Mouse

- Ricky Buchanan, ATMac

Woopid is a website offering free short video tutorials on computer and gadget-related topics. Most of the tutorials focus on Mac computer topics, and there are many which are directly focussed on access related topics.

Increase The Text Size in Leopard - Seven short videos about increasing text size or screen magnification in different areas in Leopard.

Make Your Computer Easier to Use - Eight short videos on different areas of universal access.

You Speak, Computer Listens - Five short videos about the “command and control” style speech to text system built into OS X.

You can check out the topics covered by Woopid by seeing the different bundles on offer, or browse or search the whole library for individual titles. There are plenty of others which are also related in some way to access and assistive technology.

- Ricky Buchanan, ATMac

There are lots of very simple things which can improve the accessibility of iTunes for those with low vision and reading impairments. This tutorial will take you through them step by step.

Here’s the original iTunes screen when I open it up to my own library. The print’s small and there’s not many visual clues aside from the text - but we can fix those things.

First, open the preferences window and set the source text and list text to “Large”, as shown here with the red boxes. The “Source Text” is the text in the sidebar on the left, the “List Text” is text in the main window.

Compared with the first image, this is decidedly more readable, but there’s still not much to help us differentiate the tracks from each other.

Open the iTunes Preferences again and select the “Store” icon at the top. Now select “Automatically download missing album artwork”, you’ll get a box warning you that iTunes needs to tell Apple the names of your tracks so it can get the right artwork so just press enter to confirm that’s OK. iTunes will use your internet connection to do this, and it may take some time.

Depending on how obscure your musical tastes are, some of your album artwork may not be found by iTunes. It can only find artwork for music sold at the iTunes Store. To fill in the missing artwork, I suggest you use some of the “Managing Album Artwork” scripts from Doug’s AppleScripts. There are other fancy ways to fill in album artwork that iTunes can’t find but most of them cost money and this script is free. If you would prefer a more automatic solution, VersionTracker lists several programs which are related to iTunes Album Artwork.

Adding album artwork makes this much better visually! And once you have your cover art in order, investigate the buttons above the word “View” to the right in the header - you can check out different ways to view your music which are even more visual.

There’s still a lot of text in the left sidebar though, so let’s do something about that.

These checkboxes control which sources will be visible under the “Library” heading at the top of the sidebar. I don’t put movies or TV shows into iTunes, so I’ve deselected those. “Applications” here refers to applications for the iPhone or iPod Touch, so you can deselect that if you don’t have one. Some of these will pop up a warning sign if you deselect them, explaining that unclicking the “Show” button means they won’t be shown in iTunes - you can ignore the redundant warning.

If you don’t use the iTunes Store, you can open the “Parental Control” section of preferences with the icon on the top row, and disable the iTunes Store also. You can always come back and turn it back on if you decide to use it later. You may have to delete the “Purchased” playlist also if you’ve used the iTunes Store before - just command click/right click on the playlist’s name in the sidebar and select “delete”. It won’t remove those songs from iTunes, it’ll just delete that playlist.

There’s definitely less clutter there on the left now, and if I unplug my iPod then the “Devices” section will disappear too. There are a lot of playlists though. Some of them are old and can be deleted now, others I can put into folders. Select “New Playlist Folder” from the File menu in iTunes to create a folder, then name it and you can drag playlists or other folders into it.

Wow! This is much more clear and usable than our original iTunes setup was. The new playlist folders can be toggled between showing and hiding their contents by clicking the triangle to the left of the small folder icon when I need the playlists in them. And all of these changes are completely reversible by going back to the Preferences and changing things back, if you decide you don’t like the change.

- Ricky Buchanan, ATMac

Yesterday marked the first public beta release of Olearia, a free and open source DAISY talking book player for Mac OS X Leopard. DAISY is an international standard for digital talking books for the blind and print disabled. Previously, there was no actively developed and supported DAISY player available for OS X users, so the release of Olearia is fantastic news for those with all types of print disabilities.

Olearia is a DAISY digital talking book player for the Macintosh computer platform. Olearia will play DAISY version 2.02 and DAISY/NISO 2005 digital talking book. This version 0.90b will play audio only and full text full audio books. The final version of Olearia will support text only DAISY books as well. Olearia supports VoiceOver. Olearia requires MacOS X version 10.5 or better.

The Olearia team have also converted their user manual to a DAISY book which is available at the same website.

Olearia is currently only available in English localisations but the team are actively looking for people to translate the interface into other languages - contact details are available on their web page.

Website: Olearia

- Ricky Buchanan, ATMac

Mice and other pointing devices are often culprits in repetitive strain injuries and other overuse syndromes which cause pain. A significant part of this problem is not just moving the mouse but clicking the buttons - ClickNoMo is a small piece of software which can help this problem by clicking the mouse for you.

ClickNoMo senses your mouse movements as you move your cursor around the screen. When you move your cursor to the position where you would like to click and bring your mouse to a stop for a short amount of time, ClickNoMo generates a click for you. ClickNoMo can single click, double click, right click and also do mouse dragging.

There is a small palette which sits on your screen - it can be transparent so it doesn’t get in your way - and when you need to do a right click, double click, or mouse dragging, you hold your mouse over the button you want and the next click generated by ClickNoMo will be of the type selected. It’s quite quick once you get used to it.

Website: ClickNoMo

- Ricky Buchanan, ATMac