ATMac

Users are the people with a disability. Most posts will have the users as the intended audience!

Optimism is a program that helps you identify and keep track of things that impact your mental health. It helps you track possible triggers, symptoms, and strategies for staying well, and record your mood, coping, exercise, medication compliance, and sleep for each day.

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.

The irregular weekend post for all those bits and pieces not big enough for their own post. There’s a new AT Blog Carnival edition, there’s a new categories page, and a new poll.

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.

Many of Mac OS X’s standard keyboard shortcuts, such as “New Folder” (Shift + Command + N), “Save As” (Shift + Command + S), and “Paste and Match Style” (Option + Shift + Command + V), require pressing multiple keys simultaneously. While this isn’t very difficult to do with KeyStrokes or SwitchXS, it would be much easier if you could save yourself two or three clicks by triggering complex commands like these with one button. Fortunately, LayoutKitchen makes this possible … and it couldn’t be easier!

David Niemeijer of AssistiveWare has put together some videos demonstrating the “Spoken Menus” facility in the new iPod Nano 4G in both French and British English.

Speech-to-text software, sometimes known as dictation software, is something that lets you talk to the computer in some form and have the computer react appropriately to what you are saying. Here’s a rundown on the types of speech-to-text software that exist and what’s available for Mac OS X in these areas.

A round-up of bits and pieces we haven’t had time for, including Apple’s own accessibility website being updated, new guides for VoiceOver users mastering GarageBand, and some old Apple advertisements featuring American sign language.

Have you ever wanted to make phone calls on the net using a synthetic computer generated voice? If you’re an AAC user, then this is a great way to communicate with people remotely. This article will show you how to set up Wiretap Anywhere to send your speech voice to Skype’s internet phone system.

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.