Posted by Darrell Hyatt on August 29, 2010
Podcast: Play in new window
| Download (Duration: 5:34 — 5.1MB)
Hello and welcome to the enabling abilities to appear podcast I. found a rather interesting application for my ipad recently, it’s one that I have looked at before and had not bothered to actually install and use because I thought I would have to pay for a lot of the items.
The application that I’m referring to is the iBooks application, this is a book reading application and when I first looked at it I thought there not that I have any free books so I won’t bother tying up space on my ipad.
Well I looked at it recently and found that there was a wealth of free books available on almost any topic you want and even if you’re looking at a paid book they are the same cost as if you had gone out and purchased them from a bookstore.
However I find having books on my ipad much more convenient, much easier to read because I can adjust the size of the text on the page which makes it easier for me to read. There’s also the convenience of having the books available to me any time anywhere as long as I have my ipad with me which has now become an indispensable item.
When I looked through the list of free books I found that a lot of be classics such as Moby Dick, Three Musketeers, Grimms Fairy Tales, The Art of War, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes were all available.
This leads me to the thought that having an ipad with iBooks may be particularly useful for children and teens with disabilities who have difficulty manipulating a book, and have difficulty say turning the pages or even holding onto an actual physical book.
Having an ipad with these books loaded on it may make it significantly easier and more enjoyable for these individuals to actually sit down and read the books which in turn will open up new worlds and new possibilities for them.
Overall I think the iBooks application is a very good one it’s very well-thought-out and is a good tool for anyone who likes to read and likes to have that material readily available to them any time they need it.
if you have any questions, comments, or concerns please feel free to e-mail me at darrellh@enablingabilities.com. you can also visit my website which www.enablingabilities.com. Thank you very much.
Posted by Darrell Hyatt on July 1, 2010
Podcast: Play in new window
| Download (Duration: 6:13 — 5.7MB)
Welcome to the enabling abilities to appear podcast I’m going to continue my series on the Ease of Access Center which is part of Windows 7. It used to be cold accessibility options in earlier versions of Windows, in my last podcast I talk to will be on screen keyboard.
In the this episode I’m going to talk about the magnifier in earlier versions of this particular application you could magnify the screen anywhere from 1 to 9 times, which was a significant amount if you were an individual who had minor difficulty seeing items that were particularly small such as icons this was quite sufficient.
You had significant options as well in terms of whether you want to follow cursor all those sorts of things you could do, the magnification area itself could be adjusted in size to cover approximately half of the screen it did take some getting used to.
In the new version of this particular program you have the option of having the magnification area docked at the top and you can drag it to any size you want including the entire screen. Docked is the way the magnifier worked in earlier versions.
You also have here the option of what’s called a lens and that is simply the same as if you are carrying around a magnifying glass and looking at various options, it will follow the mouse etc you can make the lens any size you want tall or thin and long. whatever basically suits your needs the best.
The new version also allows you to go to full screen magnification which by far is my favourite of the options and this allows you to have the whole screen magnified and so there’s no separate area where the magnification shows up and another area where you are moving your mouse that’s the standard regular size of everything which some users had found disconcerting and hard to get used to.
One of the other things that I noticed in your version of the software is that the magnification is simply done in percentages rather than times magnified from 2 to 9, now it’s 100% 200% etc. you can go all way up to 1600 times which is very very significant and makes things extremely large but then the graphics themselves are very jagged and somewhat unclear.
I would find it very hard to use the software with the magnification that high, over all I find the new version of the magnifier very well done has some nice enhancements gives you a lot more flexibility in not only what you can do with the magnifier, but how you use it and where you have it on your screen. You can also invert the colors with this version and it’s very neat very crisp and again a nice enhancement.
If have any comments, questions, or concerns please feel free to e-mail me at darrellh@enablingabilities.com or visit my website which is www.enablingabilities.com Thank you very much.
Posted by Darrell Hyatt on June 1, 2010
Podcast: Play in new window
| Download (Duration: 6:27 — 5.9MB)
Welcome to the Enabling Abilities to Appear podcast, being able to use the computer and a variety of ways has always been very important as well as difficult for those people with disabilities or hand control issues, vision issues etc. and Microsoft has tried to make some of those things easier with the accessibility options in earlier versions of Windows and I thought I would look at some of those options which are available in the newest operating system from Microsoft that being Windows 7.
The first thing I noticed was they changed the name from “accessibility options” to “ease of access” once you enter the ease of access center you have very similar options to what you had in earlier versions of Windows and one of the first topics that I wanted to talk about in this multipart series was how do we enter information into the computer itself?
How do we use some of the other application are available eg how do we type in to the various programs if we cannot use a standard keyboard. now Windows 7 still has the on screen keyboard but they have made a few very significant changes in the application.
The first one is that you can now actually re-size the keyboard and make the keys significantly larger, in earlier versions of the on screen keyboard yes you could physically make keyboard larger by clicking on the corners and dragging it to whatever size you wanted but the actual size of the physical keys on the keyboard did not change in size. It was only the space around the keys to her on the edge of the keyboard itself that grew larger.
In the new version that’s part of Windows 7 however, as you drag a corner to make the keyboard larger the keys themselves all only come larger which means they are a much easier target for individuals to hit there’s less chance that you’re going to accidentally hit the wrong key.
One of the other things that I notice which is also very beneficial is they have now got word prediction built into this onscreen keyboard which means as you type several letters in the word it’s going to make some guesses as to what words you want and will put five of them up across the top of the keyboard. If one of the words shown there is a word that you want you simply go up and click on it and it will complete that word for you.
This keyboard also has the various input methods available to you that we’re in earlier versions you can use the mouse and click on the key’s, this does require good manual dexterity and good use of the mouse. We have the hover or dwell click is there so if you simply leave your mouse still over a key for a given period of time which is adjustable you will type the letters. There is a scanning method as well and you can use a variety of keys such as the spacebar to activate the scanning.
So there are quite a few options available for anyone that needs this particular piece of technology and I’m glad to see that they made the enhancements because in earlier versions that usually meant having to go to a third party on-screen keyboard which had the word prediction and completion in it. This feature along with the ability to resize the actual keys is going to make it useful for a significant number of people.
If you have any questions, comments or concerns please feel free to e-mail me at darrellh@enablingabilities.com please feel free to stop by my website which www.enablingabilities.com. Thank you very much.
Posted by Darrell Hyatt on February 16, 2009
Podcast: Play in new window
| Download (Duration: 7:01 — 3.2MB)
Hello welcome to the enabling abilities to appear podcast. My name is Darrell Hyatt, in this episode I wanted to talk about digital voice recorders having a digital voice recorder was one of the things I wanted for quite a while and this year at Christmas my wife bought me one.
It turned out to be a very useful item not only is it useful for business individuals to remember items or jot down ideas when you’re away from the office say on the skytrain or on a bus, but it’s also useful for those of us with disabilities who use speech recognition software because I can dictate notes or whatever into the voice recorder and then when I get home using Dragon NaturallySpeaking I can transcribe the notes using the transcription feature in Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
Which means I don’t have to retype the material I simply make any corrections and edits based on the recognition factor that I get through Dragon, there are however a few interesting things that I would like to point out for those of you who are considering purchasing a voice recorder especially if you are going to be using it for voice recognition.
I have: an Olympus vn 4100 PC recorder it works very well with Dragon the recognition with minimal training is somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 to 70%. This particular recorder has many different recording modes and each particular mode gives you a certain amount of dictation time so depending on what you do, how many notations you take on a daily basis you may want to look for a recorder that has a long recording time.
With this particular recorder for example in its long play mode you get approximately 144 hours of notation however if you are using it in conjunction with voice recognition I highly recommend he high quality mode which most voice recorders now have and that time is significantly shorter with this particular model I get approximately 2 hours of dictation time at high quality which works best for transcription purposes.
The other thing that you may want to look at is how easy are the buttons to operate, are they mostly on the front of the recorder or or or some of them on the side which may make it more difficult to use those buttons. You also want to make sure that the recorder fits comfortably in your hand.
One of the features that I like of this particular voice recorder is the fact that I can leave it sitting on my desk near me and take my notes, this is particularly helpful when I’m working on a project and I’m using the computer at the same time I still have both hands free to use the mouse and the computer and I can be taking the notes as I’m working and then from the voice recording I can make any notes that I want to use for later on for example as students handouts etc.
One of the other points I would suggest is to pick a recorder and check with where ever you purchase it make sure that you can return it if you find that it doesn’t work for you for what ever reason. This one also has a USB connection to allow me to connect it to the computer and so I can move my note files over on the computer for storage purposes so that maybe something that may be useful for you as well.
If you have any questions, comments or concerns or show ideas you’d like to hear about on this podcast please send me an e-mail at darrellh@enablingabilities.com. Feel free to visit my website which is www.enablingabilities.com for further information. Thank you very much.