ATMac

Upgrading to Snow Leopard might not make your computer look enormously different, but the hidden guts of the operating system have been extensively worked on. This has implications for assistive technology users - you’ll need to check that your assistive technology will work with Snow Leopard.

The Firefox web browser offers an interesting alternative to Safari, but at the moment it’s not compatible with Apple’s accessibility API. VoiceOver users can’t use it, programs like the Dictionary and the services menu programs don’t work within it, and third party enhancements like Quicksilver can’t access it. Aaron Leventhal from the accessibility team at Mozilla explains some of the reasons the incompatibility hasn’t been fixed yet, and may take a long time to be fixed at all.

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.

One feature missing from the still-new MacSpeech Dictate program is the ability to control the mouse. This addition won’t let you control the movement of the mouse, but we can teach you how to use your voice for mouse clicks. For those who have the ability to move the mouse, this could make the difference between a usable computer system and an unusable computer system.