Mark Your Calendar

If you’re going to be in Atlanta or close in late October, mark your calendar for October 22-26, 2008.
The 2008 Touch the Future/Transition and SERID will be on those dates.

From the website:

Touch the Future/Transition and SERID (Southeast Regional Institute on Deafness) embody the spirit of cooperation and collaboration in presenting this conference. At its heart, the joint venture acknowledges that all people are unique individuals, and encourages them to celebrate their similarities and differences. While the conference will focus on the needs and priorities of people with disabilities, it aims to inspire all attendees to become a catalyst for positive long-term change in their communities.

For further information, visit 2008 Touch the Future/Transition and SERID

See you there – Look for us in the AT Solutions Lab

Word Is Broken

Not really, but in one aspect, it might as well be if you’re using Office 2003. Previous versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint could open and work with the newest versions of these programs. You could save a file in Word 2003 and use it in Word 97. With the release of Office 2007, Microsoft broke the compatibility with previous releases. You can’t open Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint files using earlier versions of Office.

Since the only version of Office now available is Office 2007, you’ll begin to notice this problem when you receive Office files you can’t open.

You have three options:

1. Upgrade to Office 2007 – Student Home edition is only $149 retail

2. Ask the person sending you the file to save it in the Office 97 – 2003 format

3. Download the Microsoft Compatibility Pack to allow older versions of Office to work With Office 2007.

Bioptics

Going beyond corrective lenses for those of us with low vision, are bioptic telescopes. These are designed to help the visually impaired see things further away. Among the drawbacks, they have been very conspicuous and a narrow field of view.

Dr. Eli Peli of Schepens Eye Research Institute has developed a bioptic telescope which is embedded in the lens itself, which makes it less conspicuous, easier to focus and the potential for mass production. More information can be found at Schepens Eye Research Institute.

Bioptic telescopes can be used to meet the driving vision requirements in a number of states. You should check with your state’s DMV since the requirements vary by state.

More information for some states can be found here:

http://www.lowvisioncare.com/visionlaws.htm

Universal Design Strikes Again

From Science Daily - new research about usability from the University of Manchester. Designs for accessibility will probably end up in the mainstream to help non-impaired users. Showing once again UDL works!

Mobile phone owners make similar mistakes to physically impaired computer users when using the technology, according to new research from The University of Manchester.

The first set of results from research funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) indicates that many able-bodied people make the same errors -- and with similar frequencies -- when typing and 'mousing' on mobile phones, as physically impaired users of desktop computers.

According to researchers in the School of Computer Science working on the RIAM (Reciprocal Interoperability between Accessible and Mobile Webs) project, mobile owners press the wrong key and press the same key repeatedly by mistake.

They also found mobile users tend to click the wrong area of the screen, click the screen multiple times in error, and make mistakes when trying to drag and drop information.

"These types of errors have been a big problem for physically impaired users for a long time," said Dr Yeliz Yesilada, a senior researcher on the project. "But solutions have been developed for all of these problems in the form of small assistive computer programmes, which supplement Windows and Mac operating systems."

Speech and Vista

Quick Post

Everybody’s down on Vista these days. If you’re installing new hardware broken drivers are a real issue.

There is one killer feature which might convince you to move away from XP – Speech Recognition. New and improved from speech recognition found in Office 2003. Definitely more command and control as well as improved dictation.

In the future, I’ll have a longer post about SR in Windows, but SR in Vista is moving Microsoft closer to Dragon Preferred.

AT Computer Solutions Lab

Thanks to everyone who visited us in the AT Computer Solutions Lab last week in Athens, GA. The 14 workstations with AT installed on them, gave all the visitors a good feel for how AT is not just for special needs but can assist everyone.

Text To Speech

Text to Speech – Make your computer TALK to You!

Text To Speech (TTS), also known as speech synthesis, can be a part of every Windows PC. TTS is also available for Mac and Linux, but this discussion will focus on Windows PC's. Text To Speech simply means that you can have your computer speak selected text, usually in a syhthezied voice.

In Windows, the TTS function is implemented through an API (Application Program Interface), in this case either Speech API 4 or 5. Because these API's are open to programmers, a number of programs are adding TTS to their applications. A more detailed explanation can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_synthesis.

For the moment, I'll mention a couple of programs which you can use for TTS. All of these have free versions. Usually, the main features you get with the paid version is the ability to covert the text directly to an audio file and the ability to access more voices.

NaturalReader http://www.naturalreaders.com/ converts any written text such as MS Word, Webpage, PDF files, and Emails into spoken words. The paid version of NaturalReader can also convert any written text into audio files such as MP3 or WAV for your CD player or Ipod.

yRead http://www.spacejock.com/yRead.html – uses the default SAPI5 voices but, you can install and use other voices. Nice feature is the ability to directly download ebooks from Project Gutenberg. Highlighting of text currently not working. Nice simple interface.

E-Text Reader http://www.premier-programming.com/download/free_trials.htm Most of the other programs at this site are demo's but the E-Text Reader is a full functioning text reader. You can also create your own text and have it read back to you.

Word 2003 If you have Office 2003 installed, it has TTS for Excel already installed. To use TTS in Word, here's the MS Knowledge Base article http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=287120

We'll talk later about SR (Speech Recognition) and sources for free digitized books.