Top Tech tidbits for Thursday, August 2, 2007
1) the Assistive Technology Center will offer several online trainings during August. A two-hour training on optical character recognition (OCR) software on 30 August from 20;00-22:00 GMT and one-hour sessions on the Small Talk Ultra, Tuesday, 14 August at 20:00 GMT and a comparative Analysis of screen readers, Thursday, 16 August at 20:00 GMT, will be free. Other two-hour sessions on window-Eyes, thursday, 21 August from 20:00-22:00 GMT and the Braille Sense, Tuesday, 28 August from 20:00-22:00 GMT, will cost $50.00 per session, considerably less than the usual cost.
http://www.atechcenter.net/events.htm
2) If you're looking for the online stream of a radio station, here are one knowledgeable user's three favorite places to look, seemingly the most up-to-date databases with continuous updates:
http://streamingradioguide.com
http://www.radiotime.com
http://www.mikesradioworld.com
3) In this posting to the Blind Confidential blog, Chris explains how users of System Access may soon be able to effectively use windows Vista's voice recognition capability.
http://blindconfidential.blogspot.com/2007/08/vista-speech-recognition-and-latest.html
4) the July 31 posting to the Gw Micro blog explains one way to extract audio from flash video files, those commonly used on sites such as YouTube, so you can listen to that audio on your computer or in a portable device.
http://www.gwmicro.com/blog/
5) Thanks to The Fred's Head Companion, we learn about The Low Vision Gateway, a compendium of low vision information available on the Internet.
http://www.lowvision.org
6) That same source uncovered an interesting site you can use, I do now know in which countries if any besides the US, to assemble many of the businesses located within walking distance of a given address in one place and get its "walk score."
http://www.walkscore.com/
7) Thanks initially to the work of David Truong and others, JAWS users have excellent access to the features of winamp for listening to audio. However, recent changes to winamp have rendered the Winamp library largely unusable. David has written scripts which should work with JFW versions 7 or 8 and which fix the library problem and also offer more flexibility in moving through audio files. No support is offered for these scripts, but they work where they have been tested.
http://members.optusnet.com.au/bnfiles/winamp4jfw.zip
8) the Tek Talk training for GMT Tuesday 7 August at 00:00 GMT (later that day in Australia, Monday evening in North America) will be entitled The Voice Sense: A PDA With Extras.
http://www.accessibleworld.org
9) I am producing this week's newsletter using EdSharp, Jamal Mazrui's latest free text editor, which should work in virtually all versions of Windows and which is now up to version 1.0, ready for general use.
http://www.EmpowermentZone.com/edsetup.exe
10) the Friends of Bookshare community meets on North America tuesday evenings, GMT Wednesdays at 00:00. On Wednesday 8 August at 00:00 GMT, the topic for discussion will be Bookshare.org for schools and groups: 101. Use this direct link to enter the online room, full name required.
http://67.19.90.10/masteradmin/room.asp?id=rs7867a2369e0e
11) IRTI has produced a $9.00 self-voicing utility called Audio Safeguard, that lets a user easily reset the audio on a computer in cases where a family member has used it and muted the audio.
http://www.irti.net
Note that I and many other screen reader users employ a free program called QuickMix to restore muted audio and manage other audio settings, but this program may not run under windows Vista, and the IRTI solution may be easier for some to use.
http://www.ptpart.co.uk/quickmix/
12) Traveleyes is a British travel service that aims to provide holidays for both blind/visually impaired and sighted travellers, journeying together in a spirit of mutual independence. they are also providing text versions of a few of the Lonely Planet travel guides, with more to come.
http://www.traveleyes.co.uk/
13) DIALOGUE: A WORLD OF IDEAS FOR VISUALLY IMPAIRED PEOPLE OF ALL AGES is a magazine available, among other formats, via e-mail. Subscriptions are $42 per year. Here is the contents for the July-August, 2007 issue; some sample articles are available online.
http://www.blindskills.com/jul_aug_2007_toc.html
An individually-mailed text version of Tidbits is available to those who want it or have difficulty receiving the usual html version. Write to me to request it.
Visit the Tidbits page at www.topdotenterprises.com/tidbits.htm where you can subscribe to the rss feed and grab back issues. All that welcome information for future issues can come to me at dean@topdotenterprises.com.