ATMac

You are browsing the archives of productivity.

Keyboard shortcuts are a quick way of getting many things done without needing to access the menus or the mouse. If you know to press command-s to save your work, you’ve used a keyboard shortcut. For people who primarily use a keyboard or a switch interface, using keyboard shortcuts can save a lot of time and effort.

BBAutoComplete adds word auto-completion to scriptable applications. You type the start of a word, press a key, and BBAutoComplete types the letters to complete the word. If BBAutoComplete guessed wrong, you can keep pressing the key to cycle through other possible completions.

Text expansion tools are exactly suited to automatically add the accents, graves, and acutes to words as you type. TextExpander offers a free expansion pack to add a list of accented English words automatically, but you could add them to any text expansion tool yourself.

MacWorld has released a great new article which has a bunch of productivity tips for those using Leopard. If your disability impacts your computer use then it will take longer for you to get things done, so making sure you’re saving as much time as possible can make a big difference in how much you can do.

This small application disables internet access for a specified period of time - up to 3 hours. Can be very helpful to those who have trouble staying on task - which at times is all of us!

Dustin Oakley from The Crass Pip blogged about Mac based Text Expansion tools in the last AT Carnival:
Text Expansion: Wasting Time Trying to Save Time tells of my travails as I tried several tools to improve my typing speed. I recently added an addendum, Text Expanders Revisited. While this reads too much like an [...]

VoiceCommander helps you expand Mac OS X built-in speech recognition technology to control any application.

When ATMac wrote about KeyCue in October last year I wrote to the company and asked about adapting KeyCue to make it more accessible for users with vision problems. Ergonis, who produce KeyCue, were very receptive to the idea and I’m happy to report that today KeyCue 4.1 was released with new themes especially designed [...]

I already wrote about TextExpander, but here’s a little more information from Lifehacker about what text expansion is and why it can save keyboard users time and energy:
Save Time With Text Substitution is a general introduction which mentions both Mac and Windows programs for text substitution.
TextExpander Gets Even Better is an in-depth look at the [...]

San Francisco, CA — October 16, 2007 — SmileOnMyMac has released TextExpander 2.0, a new version of its customizable typing shortcut tool for Mac OS X. With TextExpander, users can define abbreviations for frequently-used text strings and images, also known as snippets. When an abbreviation is typed, it expands automatically to the full snippet. The [...]