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.

Amongst updates to the iMac series of computers, Apple yesterday announced an external bluetooth trackpad. This works exactly like the MacBook’s built-in multi-touch trackpad but has a working area of approximately 4.3 by 4.3 inches (11cm by 11cm). A full set of gestures, including the VoiceOver “trackpad as screen” gesture control are available.

Digit-Eyes uses your printer to print barcode labels which you can then associate with text or audio recordings. To read the labels back, you photograph the labels with your iPhone camera and then the iPhone will read the text or replay the audio for you.

Jane Farrall has constructed a great table listing all the important features about all the known assistive/adaptive communication (AAC) applications for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. She’s actively updating the table in response to feedback, this is a great resource for those looking for information about AAC out there.

Switching to the Dvorak keyboard layout doesn’t cost anything and can help you type more easily once you learn to use the layout. Here’s how to go about it using Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

There have been a lot of articles on a lot of websites about accessibility and disability and assistive technology as they relate to the iPad since the specifications were first released. Now that people obtain the iPads to use themselves, the pace of articles is still increasing.

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.