top tech tidbits for Thursday, May 10, 2007
I know, it isn't thursday anywhere now. A half-hour evening commitment became a three-hour one, and I decided everybody could survive a slight calendar change this week.
1. the May, 2007 issue of Braille Monitor contains an article entitled Accessible Personal Data Assistance Reviews and contains reviews of five PDA's.
http://www.nfb.org/Images/nfb/Publications/bm/bm07/bm0705/bm070508.htm
2. this week, we benefit from the efforts of several competent volunteers. To start, as part of Blind Access Journal, Darrell Shandrow and wife Karen created a podcast and demonstrated the capabilities of RIM, the product from Serotek that allows blind users to carry out remote technical support with speech output
http://www.shandrow.com/audio/podcast/serotek_rim_demo_1.mp3
3) David Bailes continues to write free VIP Accessibility Guides. His latest contribution is a guide to windows Media Player 11 for JAWS users, though its usefulness is not limited to users of JAWS. this 8,000-word guide can be had here
http://vip.chowo.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/jaws/Windows-Media-Player-11-Guide.html
and you can visit the software guides page here:
http://vip.chowo.co.uk/
4) Jamal Mazrui continues to update several of his projects: FileDir, TextPal, and the Homer Library. Download links to all these have been given before, and are unchanged. If you have FireDir or TextPal, you can "elevate" to the latest version by hitting F11. Links to Jamal's projects and documentation compilations, as well as a lot of other useful information, much of it but not all oriented to programmers, can be found at
http://grabbag.alacorncomputer.com/
5) Moving out of the volunteer arena, but not totally, the Gw Micro blog has a very useful article concerning the inaccessibility of the new version of Hotmail, now known as windows Live Hotmail, as well as suggestions for using the new version with window-Eyes.
http://gwmicro.com/blog/index.php/all/2007/05/09/title_1
6) Gw Micro remains the only company I know that provides a reasonable way for a user to buy a full-featured screen reader. they have replaced their lease-to-own program with two payment plans. the long-term option allows a user to pay $41 down plus shipping and $39 per month for 31 months.
http://www.gwmicro.com/paymentplan.
7) Gw Micro has added an article to its Knowledge Base: Understanding Window-Eyes Video Support
http://gwmicro.com/Support/Knowledge_Base/?kbnumber=GWKB1073
8) the May, 2007 issue of AccessWorld is now online. It includes reviews of CCTV's, discussions of accessible household appliances, a summary of the CSUN conference, and more.
http://www.afb.org/accessworld
9) A paper on the history of speech synthesis, with some audio examples, is found here:
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/eecs225d/klatt.html
10) Useful Information for Navigating and Bidding on eBay will be the topic for the Accessible World training to take place on GMT Tuesday, 15 May at 00:00.
http://www.accessibleworld.org
11) Here is the link to the Google Accessibility presentation at CSUN long with the documentation they provided at the conference.
http://easi.cc/podcasts/conference/conference.htm
12) It is still possible, since Internet radio has not yet been curtailed, to listen to over 100 free music channels on AOL Radio by simply providing your screen name and password. The accessibility difficulties with the listening process can be overcome somewhat.
http://www.aol.com
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