Disabilities and Computing Program

There are recent or planned upgrades for three of the main software packages offered at the DCP. We plan to have them available for our Lab and laptops by the end of the Fall Quarter. Once we have done our own testing, we will be happy to help individuals on campus with training or questions about purchase and installation.

Dragon

Nuance has released Version 10 of the Dragon NaturallySpeaking software for speech recognition. New features include faster processing of dictated text, better recognition of regional accents, and support for the Firefox Web browser. New commands use simple phrases to search quickly for items on popular sites, including Wikipedia, Youtube and eBay. For more details, read the What’s New in Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10  and Dragon Product Comparison Matrix.

DCP has ordered the software and it will be arriving soon.

Kurzweil 3000

Kurzweil 3000 Version 11 is now out. New features concentrate on writing assistance, with tools for brainstorming, organizing and preparing final documents. There is also a new Web-based license management system. A series of videos demonstrates the changes:
New Features in Kurzweil 3000 for Windows Version 11.

We are in the process of coordinating orders for the campus.

JAWS

Version 10 of the JAWS screen reader for blind users is in a public beta. The final version is scheduled for release in early November. Improvements include support for Internet Explorer 8, automatic detection of edit fields on Web pages, and a subscription service allowing users to connect two computers running JAWS (for example, to facilitate troubleshooting). For all the details, please read What’s New in JAWS 10 Public Beta with JAWS Tandem!

We will receive the upgrade as soon as it becomes official. Testing so far has been extremely successful.

Stefan Grothkopp has written an unofficial alternative interface to Google. It uses Javascript to create an interface similar to a Unix shell, with a text input box at the bottom of the screen and results displayed above.

The advantage is that you can use single letters or words (”news”, “images”, etc.) to search Google’s other sites, and Wikipedia as well. This is simpler for some people than using the Google Toolbar application.

Search hits are shown using table markup, so screen reader users can move through the results quickly with table navigation commands. However, it currently only shows the top four results for any search.

The service is still in beta testing, but anyone interested can try out the Goosh interface.

Web designer Christian Heilmann has reworked the interfaces for Youtube and Flickr. (”hacking the API” sounds so ugly! …) He has simplified the screens and added several accessibility features, most useful for users with learning disabilities or visual impairment.

Easy Flickr has a very simple search interface. Pictures are displayed one at a time. (Keyboard-accessible Next and Previous buttons were added shortly after the original launch of the service.) Easy Flickr can be hosted on other servers (using PHP and cURL). The author provides background info about Easy Flickr.

Easy Youtube is more robust. It offers accessible controls for the media player, a more manageable display of search results, and even a way to send someone a specific playlist. It requires users to have Javascript running. Web administrators can download the player and host it on their web servers. Heilmann’s June 12 update contains all the details on Easy Youtube.

The Disabilities and Computing Program now has a new web page design, based upon the UCLA look and feel. This design change has been coupled with a migration to a Wordpress blog format to improve the ability for us to maintain and update content, while providing readers the ability to follow a particular topic of interest to them.

Some of the features of our new design:

• Adopted the new UCLA look and feel
• Included a sidebar of navigation options to filter down to information of interest
• A search form (located in the sidebar) to search our website for specific information

Stay tuned for additional changes!

A general warning to all users interested in purchasing MacSpeech Dictate: One of our DCP clients reported having a problem with the program crashing upon trying to create a user. This of course, is a pretty essential step to using speech recognition software.

Upon further searching online, we found numerous sources pointing to this being an error related to a faulty English Language data disc (the other cd provided in the MacSpeech package). These sources claim this can be resolved by calling MacSpeech support and getting said disc replaced.