ATMac

For users of Apple’s VoiceOver screen reader. VoiceOver is primarily used by blind users but some users with severe dyslexia use it, and some users who can’t use a traditional pointing device use it for navigation on the screen.

What would you do if you lost all your files because your computer’s hard drive failed? For less than $100 and with no technical knowledge you can have a backup of all the files on your computer, and you’ll never need to worry about hard drives failing and losing all your files.

Jitouch is an application which adds eight new sets of gestures to the MacBook multi-touch trackpads. New gestures include ones for window management and some specifically for web browsing.

The National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH has written guidelines for content providers who would like to create iTunes U media and general podcast media which is accessible for those people who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind or visually impaired.

Snow Leopard’s support for Braille displays is now fantastic, but did you know that you can install uncontracted multilingual braille output for Arabic, Danish, French, German, Greek/Coptic, Hebrew, Italian, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and even US Unicode?

Finally, multi-language continuous speech recognition is available for OS X. MacSpeech has released Dictate International, which offers recognition in US and UK English, French, German, and Italian. It has been implied that Spanish will soon be added also.

It can be a tough job to check out that your system is fully compatible with a new operating system before you install it. To help out assistive technology users, I’m compiling compatibility information for as much assistive technology and AT-related software as I can find.

Apple once stated that you could “Live the digital life in stylish simplicity.” This statement referred to the Mac Mini but it could easily encompass all of Apple’s products. What does this mean for the average end user? Moreover, what does this mean for the end user with a visual impairment?

Upgrading to Snow Leopard might not make your computer look enormously different, but the hidden guts of the operating system have been extensively worked on. This has implications for assistive technology users - you’ll need to check that your assistive technology will work with Snow Leopard.

Allison Greene is quadriplegic due to multiple sclerosis (MS) and must spend much of her day in bed. Bill Greene has ingeniously adapted his wife’s Mac-based computer system to allow her to use it either from her wheelchair or while in bed.

Snow Leopard is being billed by Apple as having most of the changes in “behind the scenes” things, but does this mean that there won’t be many enhancements for Universal Access users?