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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.

Drew is five and has SMA. He uses SmartNav to access his computer, using a switch for mouse clicks and moving his hand - with a reflective ring on it - to move the mouse pointer.

MacSpeech Dictate has finally been upgraded to version 1.2. The list of improvements and fixes is extensive, and essential function such as correction (they call it “phrase training”) and a spelling mode have been introduced.

Reading seems like a simple activity. One that is so simple that it’s probably taken for granted by most people. But if you’re somebody with severe physical limitations reading can become a chore. I’ve unexpectedly stumbled onto a device that I think is the best solution. Would you believe it’s the iPod touch?

It’s no surprise to most Mac users that you can use arrow keys to navigate through Finder windows. What many new Mac users don’t realize though is that there are Command versions of these arrow keys which also have useful functions.

MacBreakZ is an ergonomic assistant which prompts the computer user to take long and short breaks at regular times, depending on how heavily you use the computer. It prompts the users with ergonomic exercises during breaks and can be heavily customised to suit usage patterns.

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!

Most of the students with disabilities in an educational setting will have some type of print-related disability; having programs that support reading and writing available on all computers limits the stigma for students who need the help and makes these tools available to other students too. Access should be available to everybody.