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Top Tech Tidbits - Volume 159

Distributed by Flying Blind, LLC
http://www.flying-blind.com/

For questions and comments regarding Tidbits, please e-mail Dean Martineau at dean@topdotenterprises.com. Dean Martineau provides adaptive technology training by phone, online, and in person, with flexible arrangements, and at affordable prices.

1) Movies for the Blind takes public-domain movies and adds audio description to them, making them available for free listening or download.
http://moviesfortheblind.com/

2) A comparative review of many firewall programs, not dealing with their accessibility, is available here:
http://www.matousec.com/projects/firewall-challenge

3) Blind Mice Mart sells an array of cookbooks in electronic format, your choice of floppy disk, CD, or e-mail. Proceeds from sales benefit a scholarship fund for blind students.
http://www.blindmicemart.com/default.asp?dept_id=7251&nopopup=1

4) Assistive Technology Center offers more $50 online trainings during May. All are on Thursdays for two hours starting at 21:00 GMT. 8 May: Internet BootCamp 2; 15 May: No HTML Website Development; 22 May: Introduction to System Access & Satogo.com; 29 May: Using Audible.com. Preregistration is required, and seems only to be accepted by phone: (916) 381-5011 Ext 3. Information about previous trainings, available for sale on CD, is here:
http://www.atechcenter.net/

5) VIP Conduite is launching a talking book service. Audio books will be played over the web site at predetermined times, and anybody with a free membership to the service can listen.
http://www.vipconduit.com/

6) Owners of HumanWare notetakers living in the US or Canada can, until 31 October, trade their device for the chance to buy a Pac Mate Omni from Freedom Scientific at roughly half price.
http://www.freedomscientific.com/news/pressroom/2008/PACMate-Open-Plan-Trade-in.asp

7) Here's a posting from Fred's Head Companion giving some web sites for family reading time:
http://www.fredshead.info/2008/05/websites-for-family-reading-time.html

8) Here's one offering a couple web sites concerning food safety:
http://www.fredshead.info/2008/05/food-safety-websites.html

9) Here's one with information and a unique resource for BitTorrent downloads:
http://www.fredshead.info/2006/09/what-is-bittorrent-and-how-does-it.html

10) This one lists web sites of potential interest to senior citizens:
http://www.fredshead.info/2008/05/websites-of-interest-to-seniors.html

11) Finally, this is a compilation of accessible online libraries:
http://www.fredshead.info/2005/11/accessible-online-libraries-and.html

12) This posting from the NFB Access Technology blog discusses the difficulties encountered when trying to gain information about data plans for PDA's and Smart Phones:
http://www.nfb.org/nfb/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=321&SnID=1332588961

13) "Choosing and Using An MP3 Player" will be the topic for the Tek Talk free audio training on GMT Tuesday, 20 May at 00:00.
http://conference321.com/masteradmin/room.asp?id=rsc9613dc89eb2

14) The San Francisco Lighthouse for the Blind will present another of its free technology seminars, in which people can participate either in person, via conference call or over the Internet. This one is called Affordable Technology Solutions and will take place on Friday, 6 June starting at 20:00 GMT. You need to RSVP to take part on the phone or on the net; e-mail:
info@lighthouse-sf.org

15) A podcast demonstrating the accessible installation of Ubuntu Linux with the Orca screen reader, and further demonstrating the operating system, can be had here:
http://www.digitaldarragh.com/linux/installing-ubuntu-8-04-with-orca.mp3

This and other Linux-based recordings are available on this page:
http://www.digitaldarragh.com/linuxat.asp

16) GMA Games has produced a fully-accessible MUD client, allowing for the playing of many multi-player games.
http://wwww.GMAGames.com/vipmud100.exe

17) The first official release of the Microsoft Save as DAISY plug-in for Microsoft Word has been released:
http://www.daisy.org/projects/save-as-daisy-microsoft/

18) Fred's Head Companion informs us of the newly-updated site for the organization Vision Loss Resources:
http://www.visionlossresources.org/

19) They also tell us about AudioPoint, a new service intended to make e-mail and web-based information available over the phone:
http://www.audiopoint.net/

20) Yet another gleaning from that blog is the program Audio/Video to EXE, which lets you turn sound and video files into self-executing programs for easy transfer to other users, and also lets you convert files from one format to another:
http://www.f2ko.de/English/a2e/index.php

21) Finally from there, two sites which claim to be music search engines:
http://www.ssmunch.com/
http://www.dorble.com/

22) A good deal of recent mailing list traffic has discussed the fact that the new edition of the popular free antivirus program AVG appears to be less accessible with screen readers, so it is timely that an accessibility review of AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition version 8.0.1 build 100 has been added to the AccessWatch database.
http://www.accesswatch.info

23) Stephen Jolley does his best to keep track of available audio streams of live sport, particularly cricket, tennis and athletics.
http://members.optusnet.com.au/stephenjolley/livestreams

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