Top Tech Tidbits - Volume 169
The Week's News in Access Technology

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) The July, 2008 issue of accessWorld is now available. Articles include "Online Learning: What Works, What Doesn't", "Now Playing: A Review of the Accessibility of Digital Audio Players", "The Sky's the Limit: Accessible In-flight Entertainment and Information Systems May Be on the Way", and more:
http://www.afb.org/aw/main.asp

2) The world lost an affective an indefatigable teacher when it lost Dick Banks to cancer last month. In his honor, EASI has created the Dick Banks Memorial Scholarship Fund, through which they will provide scholarships to 3 clinics and courses next year. You can learn more about this on either of these pages, which also give information about upcoming courses:
http://easi.cc/clinic.htm
http://workshop.htm

3) This Fred's Head Companion post discusses LowBrowse, an add-on to the Firefox browser being created by San Francisco Lighthouse for the Blind which should provide greater access to the web for people with moderate to severe low vision.
http://www.fredshead.info/2008/07/lowbrowse-software-for-visually.html

4) And this one lists keystrokes (I didn't know some of these) and gives instruction for using windows Narrator, the free screen reader that comes with recent versions of Windows.
http://www.fredshead.info/2008/07/windows-narrator.html

5) Fred's Head Companion directs us to two services, either of which lets you create an RSS feed to any web page so you can easily know when the page has changed:
http://www.page2rss.com/
http://www.pagetiki.com/

6) Finally, from them, we learn about "100 Unbelievably Useful Reference Sites You've Never Heard Of":
http://www.teachingtips.com/blog/2008/07/07/100-unbelievably-useful-reference-sites-youve%20never-heard-of/

7) This is a corrected version of an item we posted a few weeks ago, reflecting the fact that the training is now free: A ZoomText Workshop will be given at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library's computer lab in Washington, DC, on August 6th from 5:30 - 7:30 pm. The workshop will be presented by Ai Squared's Maurie Hill. THERE IS NO CHARGE. Please e-mail Maurie for more information at:
mhill@aisquared.com

8) "Mobile Eyes, Basic and Professional, a Device that combines 9 functions in one product" will be the subject for Tek Talk on GMT Tuesday, 26 July at 00:00. To attend these weekly presentations, which are always later archived, you simply log in with your real name, no password is needed.
http://conference321.com/masteradmin/room.asp?id=rsc9613dc89eb2

9) Next Generation Technologies and T&T Consultancy announce the release of J-Say Pro version 6.1, the program which links JAWS and Naturally Speaking to allow blind users to effectively dictate to their computers. This version supports Office 2007, JAWS 9.0, and includes considerably more training materials and an easier way to select text by voice.
http://www.ngtvoice.com/products/software/tandt/jsay/pronew.htm

10) And finally, from last week, a corrected link. ATC now sells Mobileyes, the device which is a reading machine, audio player and PDA all in one, and they have a video demo of it you can download, just know that it is a large file!
http://www.atechcenter.net/downloads/MobilEyes.mpg

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