ATMac

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

In the Apple Pro Profiles section there’s a great article about a group called the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) who use MacBooks and a variety of unusual input techniques and devices to make computer music.

The Finder, iTunes, and iPhoto all now let you browse through your materially visually if you wish, instead of looking at lines of text. The address book program Espy is a third party utility we reviewed that does the same for address book entries, and now we have Webbla which does the same for bookmarks.

Did you know that Mac OS X comes with a built in handwriting recognition system known as InkWell. If you have a pen and tablet for input, you can use it right away with no set-up needed! It’s known to be quirky and hasn’t been updated for a while, but Apple recently advertised for a handwriting engineer so there’s hope yet!

Did you know that you can change narrators automatically when you’re using GhostReader? It’s an undocumented feature, and only works with the voices from Infovox iVox or ConvenienceWare, but I’ve confirmed that it does work.

An Air Mouse is one you can hold in your hand and move around. This type of mouse moves the mouse cursor in response to the left/right and up/down movement of your hand holding the mouse. The Air Mouse application for the iPhone and iPod Touch turns your gadget into one of these types of mice.

Woopid is a website offering free short video tutorials on computer and gadget-related topics. Most of the tutorials focus on Mac computer topics, and there are many which are directly focussed on access related topics.

There are lots of very simple things which can improve the accessibility of iTunes for those with low vision and reading impairments. This tutorial will take you through them step by step.

Yesterday marked the first public release of Olearia - a free and open source DAISY digital talking book player for Mac OS X. Olearia is still in beta release, but is fully compatible with VoiceOver and plays DAISY 2.02 and DAISY/NISO 2005 audio or text+audio talking books. Future versions will also play text-only DAISY books and many other features are planned.

You probably click your mouse hundreds of times a day, thousands of times a week. ClickNoMo lets you rest your tendons while you continue to work and get things done by automatically clicking the mouse for you when you bring the mouse to a short stop in any one position. You can select left mouse click, right mouse click, double click, or even click-and-drag, as you need to.

Accenda, makers of the popular voice controlled universal remote control, has now brought that same technology to the iPod with a voice activated controller for your iPod.