ATMac

Accessible technology has changed Juergen Manthey’s life. Usually, somebody with his disabilities would be expected to exist in a nursing home and watch daytime television which they couldn’t even turn on or off without somebody’s help. Instead, Juergen is really living.

OS X only offers US English text-to-speech voices, and they are not of a very high quality. Leopard’s “Alex” voice is a great improvement, but even that voice is jarring and mechanical to listen to for more than a few minutes and only offers American English. So what are your alternatives for text to speech?

Trying to learn to use a new program and memorise many commands at the same time as you are learning the art of dictation is always going to be difficult. Happily, there is one thing which you can do that will greatly increase the chances that you will learn to use MacSpeech Dictate usefully.

Spark is a powerful, and easy to use shortcuts manager. You can use it to set “hot keys” to open applications and documents, execute AppleScripts, control iTunes, trigger menu items, and more.