Top Tech Tidbits for Thursday, July 12, 2007
1) EASI's August 4-part fee-based course is Accessible Internet Multimedia: Podcasts and Vodcast. Anybody who takes it gets free admission to the September course, Accessible Vodcasts, Making Captions for a Personal Portable Player.
http://easi.cc/workshops/mmedia.htm
Another August offering is a four-week Train the Trainer course.
http://easi.cc/workshops/train.htm
2) Sound RTS is a real-time strategy game based on games like Warcraft and Civilization. Bryan Smart has created a recorded introduction and brief tutorial. You can get the tutorial from
http://www.bryansmart.com/files/SoundRTSDemonstration.mp3
and the game site is
http://jlpo.free.fr/soundrts/
3) Lots of reviews of portable devices appear in the July, 2007 issue of AccessWorld. Besides an article on blind students using technology, there are reviews of the Icon, Mobile and Zooms cell phone magnifiers and Mobile speak Smartphone.
http://www.afb.org/accessworld
4) Loadstone GPS is a free gps program for visually impaired users of Symbian Series 60 phones. the folks behind the program have written an article comparing the efficacy of three currently-available GPS receivers using their program.
http://www.loadstone-gps.com/articles/test3rec/
5) ABISee, Inc. sells two reading devices. Zoomex is a portable stand and camera which, attached to a desktop or laptop, can provide either rapid OCR of documents or magnify and display them. ZoomTwix takes Zoomex and adds the ability to act as a cctv.
http://www.abisee.com
6) Mike Calvo of Serotek was a guest on the Computer america program, 10 July, hour 2. You can download the program segment here:
http://archives.warpradio.com/btr/computeramerica/071023.mp3
7) A publication called Blogger and podcaster Magazine makes contents of its monthly issues available as podcasts.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/BloggerAndPodcaster
8) Hadley School will hold an online seminar focusing on all aspects of employment for the blind and vidually impaired. The free event will take place on Saturday, 28 MJuly, at 16:00 GMT. pre-registration is required.
http://www.hadley.edu/seminar/
9) the dulcet tones of yours truly will invade the net on GMT Tuesday 17 July at 00:00, as Accessible World's Tech Talk presents a discussion of the many facets of Jamal Mazrui's powerful FileDir file manager.
http://www.accessibleworld.org
10) The Information Technologists' Network has published a free guide, the IT Director's guide to Accessible IT.
http://www.publictechnology.net/downloads/index.php?IT_Directors_Guide_to_Accessible_IT.pdf
11) iZoom Web is a web-based screen magnifier with many features. You can download a free public beta to test it.
http://www.issist.com/
12) If you want to hear the speech used in Humanware's forthcoming Victor Reader Stream mentioned last week, this page offers a link to a sound sample.
http://www.humanware.com/en-canada/products/digital_talking_books/portable_cd_and_flash_player/_details/id_81/victorreader_stream.html
13) Insight Radio is a new bbc radio station directed toward the blind and visually impaired, on fm in Glasgow and online.
http://www.viponair.com
14) Accessibility reviews of Avast Antivirus version 4.7, Internet Alarm Clock version 1.0.0, CallBurner version 1.0.0.30 and blue voda website builder version 1.0 have been added to the AccessWatch database.
http://www.accesswatch.info
15) Target Corporation is seeking a JAWS scripting specialist for a two-month project in Minneapolis, MN, UsA. E-mail resume in word format and other pertinent information to
deepak.v.ilink@tajtech.com
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