ATMac

Users with cognitive impairments not covered by other categories. This include specific learning disabilities, dyslexia, dyscalculia, autism, attention deficit disorder, memory and concentration problems, and others.

The Laboratory for Understanding Collaborative Technology at Northwestern University is working on a project to build and evaluate new original technologies for users with disabilities. They are currently recruiting subjects with a variety of impairments (cognitive, sensory or motor) from the Chicago area.

Dejal Narrator is a text to speech toold which allows you to set with different voices for different sections of text. It allows for multiple chapters in each document to help organize the story, uses a word replacement dictionary to fine-tune the pronunciation, and can export the story to a sound file or direct to iTunes.

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.

Ever realised that you can set up your computer so it will do different things depending on whether you are close with your Bluetooth phone, and on what wireless networks are available.

Do you have problems with getting distracted by the other windows on your screen, but you don’t want to hide them completely from view? Isolater and Menu Eclipse might be just what you need.

There’s a great tip on the MacOSXHints website about using a specific set of smart playlists in iTunes to learn memorisation exercises with audio flashcards.

Mindmaps are diagrams used to represent ideas - they use pictures, colours, position on the page and text together. MindNode is a free mindmapping application which is simple to use but does the job extremely well. It is fully keyboard accessible and the developer is interested to receive information about any access problems.

Firefox version 3 has been released for a while now, so a lot of users are exploring its possibilities. One of the great accessibility-related things new to Firefox 3 is full page zoom, where zooming in enlarges not just the text but also the images and the whole layout of the page - so it’s more like magnifying the page than just enlarging the text. I wanted to tweak it to my specific requirements though - here’s how.

MacWorld has released a great new article which has a bunch of productivity tips for those using Leopard. If your disability impacts your computer use then it will take longer for you to get things done, so making sure you’re saving as much time as possible can make a big difference in how much you can do.

AlphaOmega Software’s Function Keys Mapper guides you to set your function keys to launch applications or open specific files or websites.