ATMac

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

Have you ever wished that you could have one copy of Safari for Facebook, and a different copy for your “serious” work? With Fluid, you can! Fluid is a nifty utility which lets you create site-specific web browsers (SSBs). These are web browsers which only work on one (or a few) specific websites. If you click on a link for any other website, it will open in your regular browser.

Ventrilo is a free speech-based chat server that you can set up on your home network so that people can communicate using speech between different computers in the same house. It doesn’t access the internet to work, so even if your net connection is broken Ventrilo will still work.

If you’re a digital cable TV subscriber in the United States you may have noticed the FireWire port on the back of your cable box. The most common assumption about this port is that it’s something for service technicians only but it’s actually something you can use to control your cable box, if you ask the right questions!

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.

The TandemMaster Morse-2-USB interface is a fantastic device which converts morse code entered by two switches into keyboard presses and mouse movements. It gives the user complete control of a computer, as much as any regular keyboard/mouse user would have and can be used on any computer, with no drivers or software needed to be installed on the computer itself.

Firefox generally doesn’t let you use a lot of OS X’s accessibility features, including the services menu and some of OS X’s regular keyboard shortcuts. Setting your Mac up to speak highlighted text when you press a key also doesn’t work in Firefox. The Firefox extension SpeakingFox fills this gap with some nifty context menu options to fill this gap.

It’s been announced that the MacSpeech company has been purchased by Nuance. Nuance are the company behind the Windows product “Dragon NaturallySpeaking“ and other recent Dragon products for iPod Touch and iPhone. So what does this mean for MacSpeech Dictate and the other MacSpeech products? What would you like to happen?

One of the major things that the MacSpeech Dictate family has been lacking is the ability to take pre-recorded files and convert them to text. Not any more: MacSpeech Scribe will do just that for you, with up to 99% accuracy.

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?