Posts under ‘Accessibility Tricks’

Operating system accessibility features

I am often surprised at how few people are aware of the accessibility features that are built-in to modern operating systems. I thought it would be useful to put them all in one place.

Microsoft Developers Network accessibility page
Apple Developer Connection accessibility page
Sun’s accessibility page

There is also a book I edited: Accessibility for Everybody: [...]

Tiger has an on-screen keyboard

I installed Tiger this morning, and I think I have found my first accessibility nugget (at least I have never seen any mention of it on Apple’s Accessibility page.
In the “International” preference pane, on the “Input” tab, there is an option for “keyboard viewer”. This look and acts as an on-screen keyboard. I am pretty [...]

Google Mail has keyboard shortcuts

I just signed up for a Gmail account (never thought I would succumb to the fad–crazed marketing frenzy), but I was pleasantly surprised to find a keyboard shortcut feature clearly labeled.
Keyboard shortcuts save you time by allowing you to explore Gmail quickly without taking your hands off the keyboard to use the mouse. These shortcuts [...]

Open-source voice input

Although it’s only in Alpha, the announcement of Sphinx-4, an open-source voice input application looks promising
Sphinx-4 is a state-of-the-art, speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system written entirely in the Java programming language. Because it is written entirely in the Java,Sphinx-4 can run on a variety of platforms without requiring anyspecial compilation or changes. We’ve tested [...]

iTunes — my assistive technology

I talked about this a few years ago in an article I co-authored with Richard Wanderman and Monika Koethnig: Digital Independence, bur I think it is so cool that it warrants repeating.
iTunes is a major piece of assistive technology for me. I don’t do well with handling CDs. I used to have [...]

Repurposing Microsoft Office’s autocorrect feature

Starting with Office ‘97 (I think), Microsoft introduced a feature called autocorrect — a realtime spellchecker that automatically corrects common misspellings and other typos that touch typists often make — like “teh” instead of “the” and things like that.
But, since it is so easy to add to the list, I have created whole list [...]

Mouseless Googling

Ran across instrucstions on Google Labs that documents how to navigate its search results completely via keyboard. You must have javascript on, though

Natural Language Search Solution for Users with Disabilities

Agassa Net Technologies, Inc. has deployed a new, natural language search portal to multiple online federal government Web sites in response to the difficulties faced by people with disabilities accessing online government resources. Agassa is a provider of IT/Web accessibility solutions to government agencies. Visitors to the Information Technology Technical Assistance & Training Center’s (ITTATC) [...]