Bookshare is a free service that offers access to more than 42,000 digital books, textbooks, teacher-recommended reading, periodicals and assistive technology tools. It's mostly open to USA residents with a print disability, and some sections are available to those with print disabilities outside the USA.

Among the changes to the website:

• Use the site's new accessible features
• Find a book with new search and browse features
• Download a book with more steamlined processes
• Use new volunteer features
• Access free reader software

While Bookshare's digital books are generally formatted for text-to-speech applications they also can be converted for use with desktop ebook software like Stanza and iPhone/iPod Touch ebook apps like Stanza and Bookshelf.

Head over to the new sleek-looking Bookshare.org website and check it out!

- Paul Natsch

Something as simple as tapping the screen of an iPhone or iPod Touch can be a big problem for people with physical disabilities. If you have any wrist or finger movement you might be able to handle this without any additional help. I can move my right arm pretty well but I do not have any wrist or finger movement. For an activity as simple as reading an e-book on my iPod touch I can get away with just using my knuckles to tap the screen on the left or right hand side. But that's not very accurate so there's not much else I can do on my iPod touch using that method.

The Pogo Stylus was designed for people with thick fingers, people who wear gloves in cold climates, or anyone who might simply prefer a stylus over using their fingers. It is a difference maker for me. It uses a special material that mimics the touch of a finger and it works quite well. I've attached it to the splint on my right hand and can do just about everything everybody else can do with their iPod touches. The catch is a tiny part of the stylus must be touching your skin somewhere. If it isn't it doesn't work. I'm not exactly sure why this is but it probably has something to do with the electrical impulses generated by the skin. So if you're going to give this a try when you attach it to your hand splint make sure a tiny part of it is barely touching your skin somewhere. People with physical limitations are generally pretty resourceful. We have to be in order to come up with solutions to make our everyday life easier. This is no exception so one way or another you should probably be able to find a way to attach this to a splint on your hand or something and get it to work for you.

[Edited to add: Later testing by others seems to reveal that no skin contact is needed for the pogo stylus to work.]

But what about if you have no movement at all but can use a mouth stick or a head pointer? Well I've done some experimenting and you're in luck! I took some aluminum foil and wrapped it around the tip of one of my mouth sticks (covering the entire eraser tip). Then I pressed the tip of the mouth stick up against a flat, hard surface to flatten out the aluminum foil at the tip. Would you believe this worked? It doesn't work as well as the stylus but if you play around with it a little bit it's certainly enough to operate simple applications such as Stanza. On occasion, I have actually gotten it to work well enough that I could do swipe gestures and even type messages with the on-screen keyboard! When using an iPod touch in this manner you want it to be on a flat, hard surface and you might need to actually press a little bit as opposed to just lightly tapping like one would do with a stylus or a finger.

One of the eReader demonstration videos features an application of this idea. Watch for the robot with the aluminum covered arm at the end of this clip:

[embed width="640" height="385"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXHVwuDpH78[/embed]

- Paul Natsch

The iPhone and iPod touch come with very accurate accelerometers - the programs which are running can know when the device is being moved, and how much/how far/which direction it's being moved. Game developers have taken advantage of this capability to develop some games which just rely on the device being moved or shaken!

This is not a type of input that's been used before for games, as far as I know, and I think it has great assistive technology implications. Here are some games I could find which use shaking or moving as their main or only input type:

SPORE: Origins

Eat-or-be-Eaten in SPORE: Origins! Put your iPhone's motion-sensing accelerometer to the test by tilting, turning and twisting your creature through the primordial ooze. Feast on the weak and flee from the strong to survive 2 exciting modes and 35 challenging levels. Evolve from a single-cell weakling into a ruthless predator with the Creature Editor. Customize your texture, shape and body parts to improve your offense, defense, perception and movement. Rule the tidal pool with SPORE: Origins.

Super Monkey Ball

With each monkey inside of a transparent ball, you must tilt the device to roll the monkey past a range of obstacles such as gaps, slopes, narrow ledges and moving platforms. With a pinpoint control mechanism, players will simply tilt and turn the device to maneuver their monkey, accelerating and decelerating as they make their way through the colorfully animated world.

MotionX Poker

A flick of the wrist is all you need to get your dice rolling. And if you're using an iPhone, specifically, you'll feel the device buzz and vibrate as if the dice were rattling around inside. (You can turn this option off, if you don't want to waste your battery, but where's the fun in that?)

Dizzy Bee

Guide a friendly bee by tilting and turning the iPhone or iPod touch. Lead him through windmills, bumpy bumpers, avoid the baddies, rescue the fruits and bring them to safety.

Tilt Fighter

In Tilt Fighter, you tilt your iPhone / iPod Touch left and right to manuever your space ship past asteroids and through enemy fire. Then touch the screen using gestures such as taps and pinches to unleash your arsenal of weapons, such as your Laser Cannon and Anti-Matter Bombs.

If you go to the iTunes story and search for "accelerometer" you'll get a long list of games and other programs that use this type of input, but the list is not complete. It will only pick up programs that use that word in the description or title. Do you know any other games that use moving the iPhone/iPod Touch for input? Are they any good?

- Ricky Buchanan

There was a special Apple event in San Francisco yesterday and Apple unveilled a bunch of updated hardware and software. There were plenty of accessibility highlights - some of which were even announced on stage by Steve Jobs which is great for the general public's awareness of accessibility being an issue!

There's a streaming video version of this September Special Event available from Apple's website, or you can save bandwidth and read a transcript of MacWorld's liveblogging of the event, written by two MacWorld reporters as they watched.

Here are the highlights in terms of accessibility:

iTunes 8 Available

iTunes 8 has been released, along with an upgraded version of QuickTime. iTunes 8 sports a "Genius" playlist creator which will find songs that go well with what you're playing, and a new grid view to scroll through album covers, amongst other things. Accessibility aspects of iTunes 8 are many:

The Mac OS X iTunes is fully accessible on Leopard systems. This includes creating new iTunes Store accounts, purchasing full albums, accessing iTunes U, and renting movies - all of which were stumbling points previously.

Ironically, the only inaccessible feature of iTunes 8 that anybody has reported so far on the MacVisionaries mailing list is that the installation agreement that shows up when you launch iTunes for the first time is not visible to VoiceOver users! There's an easy workaround for anybody who wants to read it - the "print" and "save" buttons are functional, so just print it as a PDF or save as an RTF file and read it before you click the "Agree" button.

iTunes 8 will install and run on systems still running the Tiger operating system (10.4.9 and above, specifically) but anecdotal reports suggest that it doesn't appear to have the accessibility improvements that Leopard allows.

The Windows version of iTunes is now accessible to those with Window Eyes 7.0 beta 3! GW Micro announced on their public mailing list today that they had been working closely with Apple to pull this off, and it's certainly a wonderful thing for iTunes to be accessible on Windows.

Lioncourt.com has reported that iTunes accessibility under Windows is accomplished by fully implementing MSAA (Microsoft Active Accessibility in iTunes, which means that other Windows accessibility solutions - such as the screen reader JAWS - should be able to take advantage of the accessibility features very quickly.

iPod Nano 4G Released

A new iPod Nano 4G was announced, with new features such as a larger and brighter screen which works in landscape or portrait mode. It also features accelerometers like the iPod Touch and iPhone - to shuffle music you actually shake the device!

The biggest accessibility boon is that the new iPod will have speech enabled menus for both regular headings and song information! The speech will actually be pre-generated by the user's computer, so your iPod will use whichever system voice you have. Lioncourt.com has spoken to Mike Shebanek - head of Accessibility at Apple - about how the iPod Nano 4G speaks, for those who want more details.

The technical specifications page for the iPod Nano 4G also list an alternative large font option, and adjustable contrast and backlight on the screen which should help low vision users. The Nano will also display captions when they are present, although I'm not sure how readable captions will be on a screen that's less than 2 inches wide.

The new Nano also has headphones which have a tiny volume controls and a button which controls pause/play, next song (double click) and previous song (triple click) as well as having a tiny microphone for voice recordings to the Nano. I suspect that adding an external switch to make these headphones properly accessible to switch users would not be an incredibly difficult thing to do - perhaps a single switch accessible iPod Remote is closer than we think?

iPod Touch/iPhone Updates

Upgrades to the iPod Touch were also announced, as well as firmware upgrades to the iPhone and existing iPod Touch devices. I don't immediately see any accessibility implications for these though.

What did you think of the new announcements? What did I miss? Leave comments below!

- Ricky Buchanan

pearPad is a two-part application that lets you use your iPhone or iPod Touch as a wireless trackpad or keyboard for your Mac. There is a program you run on the Mac - available for Tiger or Leopard - and a program from the iTunes App Store which is run on the iPhone or iPod Touch.

It supports configurable swipe-gestures (quick strokes across the iPhone/iPod Touch screen, for example convenient to quickly switch photos in iPhoto or Aperture), mouse cursor positioning (like a trackpad), scrolling with two fingers, text-entry using the default virtual keyboard, or key-combinations (like Command, Shift, Control) provided by a special onscreen-pad, for example for sending keyboard-shortcuts.

From the screenshots available on the pearPad website, the trackpad mode takes up the full screen so once set up it could be used without needing to look at the screen of the device.

I have been wanting a wireless external trackpad for years... just a pity that I would never get one funded that's so expensive!

- Ricky Buchanan