ATMac

Educators who teach and work with people with disabilities as a part of their job, including special education teachers, teachers with mainstreamed students in their classrooms, assistive technology specialists, and so on.

MacSpeech Dictate is a great program but learning so many commands all at once can be very intimidating. I’ve put together a full list of all the known commands for MacSpeech Dictate 1.5.*, ordered by their function, to help you learn and remember them.

How would you organise an iPod so an child with autism could listen to his favourite music during car journeys but not accidentally press the buttons and turn off the music? I thought of a couple of methods, and would love to hear about others you’ve come up with yourself!

When Apple announced the iPad the first thing I thought was “how, as a quadriplegic with limited use of my arms, will I be able to use this device?”. Fortunately I immediately already had a pretty good idea on how this could be accomplished being that I’ve been an iPod Touch 2G user for almost 18 months. Ultimately the iPad is probably going to be able to do quite a bit more than the iPod Touch but the iPod Touch is still essentially the iPad’s “little brother”. So I thought I’d share the methods I use to access my iPod Touch in hopes that these ideas may be useful for people with physical disabilities hoping to get an iPad.

As expected, at their press gathering this morning Apple announced their new product: the iPad. So what’s an iPad? Will the iPad be accessible, and what will it mean for accessibility in general?

It’s the last day of 2009, and I have some gifts for my wonderful ATMac readers. A LayoutKitchen resources page for KeyStrokes, Proloquo, and SwitchXS users, and five free postcards (real physical postcards!) to you can spread the new year cheer with your friends.

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.

Parental Controls are a feature of OS X which are intended to help parents limit and monitor a child’s computer use. Due to their ability to simplify the computer’s interface they also have potential as an accessibility aid for cognitively impaired users.

Everybody has different positioning needs, and people are surprisingly creative about it when they need to be.

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.

iPrompts is an iPod Touch/iPhone program which offers visual prompting tools for people with developmental disorders and language impairments. Kate has written a great review of the program.