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According to Slashdot , there is now a Bionic Eye Telescope To Treat Macular Degeneration. This visual aid actually goes inside the eye. It sounds a bit frightening, actually, but exciting at the same time. External vision aids are bulky, often uncomfortable and easy to lose or break. This one avoids all those issue. If...
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Notes from a small field posted a neat idea for iPhone accessibility a couple of years back. He proposes an accessibility mode, where the iPhone (or any touch screen device) engages a very simple interface for the disabled. A while ago, I posted about a similar concept for the desktop computer, but that has...
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It has been a while since I have posted about my campaign for more unabridged audiobooks. I have not abandoned my quest, but I have not made much progress either. I did hear back this week from one of my favorite new fantasy authors, Joe Abercrombie, about the bogged down negotiations for the audio...
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Facebook, despite its ubiquity, has naver been very accessible. The pages are densely cluttered with an overload of information. Since the company is not doing much about it, there is now a Facebook Accessibility project going on at the volunteer developer group, Project Possibility. But I digress. Facebook has developed a free app, Facebook...
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The Victoria and Albert Museum offers via Photographs Described for Blind and Partially Sighted Visitors. Currently this online collections has four historical images with descriptions for perusal. This section of the website looks at four very different historic photographs from the V&A’s collection. Each photograph is reproduced in colour and is accompanied by an...
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In today’s Pogue’s Posts Blog, Pogue repeats a question from one of his readers; “Why Are PDFs Still in Portrait Orientation?” It is a question tha t I have been asking for a while not, but one for which I offer a better solution: reflow is better than landscape. Why Are PDFs Still in...
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Fred’s Head blog just posted about Sight-Free Dialing with the iPhone. This caught my attention and brought me to the iHear Dialer app from KayZee Solutions. This is a great new accessibility app for the iPhone. iHear Dialer allows you to dial phone numbers without looking at the keypad. As you move your hand...
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Speeding up a recording used to make it sound like Alvin & the Chipmunks. Growing up, I had a cassette player for the blind that had a variable speed playback control. Being a kid, I used it mainly for entertainment value. Fun...
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Recently I wrote about the first accessible iPhone app. BigNames, a large print, high contrast contacts directory app, is due for a review upon its upcoming update release, when it will be available for the Touch. I asked the developer, Jason Moore,  to share a little about himself and developing accessible apps fro the...
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Britain’s Victoria and Albert Museum ran a photography course for some of its visually impaired patrons. The museum has put together the results in a nice website: Photographs by Blind and Partially Sighted Visitors. This is a collection of photographs taken by blind and partially sighted visitors to the Victoria and Albert Museum during...
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WritePad is a handwriting recognition engine for the iPhone from Phatware. WritePad is the free basic app that powers Phatware’s more functional suite of apps, WritePad Affairs, WritePad Events and WritePad Notes. WritePad Supports iPhone and iPod Touch 2.0 or later WritePad is a new custom editor for iPhone that utilizes handwriting recognition input...
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As seen on Mac-ccessibility, there are some engineers at University of Washington’s AIM research group working a neat project to make mobile devices with touch screens, like the iPhone, more accessible to blind users. Slide Rule: Making Touch Screens Accessible to Blind Users Shaun K. Kane (iSchool), Jeffrey P. Bigham (CSE), and Jacob O....
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I downloaded the beta version of the next iteration of Google’s Chrome browser. The big accessibility improvement is the switch from text zoom to full page zoom. From the Zoom – Google Chrome Help page. If you’re using Google Chrome Beta, try out the new full-page zoom functionality. Go to the Page menu and...
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A fun way to liven up your computer screen is to add a favorite photo as the desktop background. The problem is the your family portrait or pet collage make the icons difficult to make out and the text hard to read. Moving to a solid color background, such as black, makes for a...
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Spotted on The Mac-cessibility Site, Anazon’s Kindle team is working on some accessibility improvements. The main focus seems to be on voice feedback during navigation. The lack of an audio interface meant that the Kindle text-to-speech feature, Talk to Me, would not be accessible to blind users without the help of a sighted person....
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