In my previous post about Virtual Magnifying Glass, I neglected to mention that it is part of Acess Apps, an extensive suite of free applications that can be downloaded and run from a USB stick. Access Apps offers the user a convenient way of moving required assistive technology, along with other programs and files, from one computer to another. Today, I’m reviewing another program that is part of the Access Apps family.
Today’s post was prompted by a request earlier this week from one of the learners I support, a gifted 11th grader who is incapable of producing written output with pencil and paper. He asked me if I knew of software that he might use for drawing diagrams. There are countless learners in classrooms everywhere who can be far more effective on drawing tasks with digital tools, so I’m sharing the application from Access Apps that can be used for drawing diagrams.
Dia is free open source software for Linux and Windows that is intended for drawing diagrams. The developers say it is “roughly inspired” by Microsoft’s Visio. I have downloaded and installed the program, but I have neither the time nor the talent to test it extensively.
Dia appears to be a powerful but stratightforward program with an intuitive user interface. It comes with considerable built in help, including a Quickstart Guide. The user interface is shown below. Additional shapes can be downloaded from the Dia website and incorporated into diagrams as required.
Happy Twenty-Ten to ALL! A new year has begun, and it’s high time I resumed my blogging. I’ve posted so infrequently in recent months that I felt like a fraud when this blog made a list of the 50 Best Blogs for Special Ed Teachers in December. I’m hoping to do at least a little better in 2010!
In October of 2007 I wrote a post about Dragnifier, a handy little utility for the PC from Ed Halley that functions very effectively as a convenient magnifying glass for the computer screen. I’m fond of Dragnifier and just last week installed it on my dad’s computer.
Today I’m writing about Virtual Magnifying Glass, an impressive alternative to Dragnifier that is available for Mac, Linux, PC, and even Free BSD platforms.
Once installed and opened, the magnifying glass lives in the system tray, at least on a PC. It can then be activated by a simple mouse click. Since the icon in the system tray is rather small, there is also the helpful option of using a customizable keyboard command to activate magnification.
Virtual Magnifying Glass is remarkably customizable. Magnification can be adjusted from 1.5x to 16x. The lens can be set to cover as little or as much of the computer screen as desired–from 64 x 64 pixels to 1024 x 1600. There is also a setting that allows the user to invert the colors of whatever is viewed through the lens.
Once an individual’s preferred settings have been established, it is dead easy to lock them in as the default. When the lens is active, however, there is a set of keyboard shortcuts to make adjustments on the fly.
This is an invaluable piece of open source software. Even if you don’t normally face vision challenges, it would be worth installing Virtual Magnifying Glass on your computer, especially if you ever project your screen to relatively large audiences. You can use the lens to enlarge any part of your screen so that even participants in the back of the room can see what you are referring to onscreen.
Twitter has emerged as one of the world’s most widely used social networking services. Much of Twitter’s appeal lies in its simplicity, and in the way it fosters a sense of immediacy. Since “tweets” are limited to 140 characters, a huge bonus is that communication on Twitter must be brief and to the point; so it doesn’t have to take up a great deal of time. And yet, the power of sharing on Twitter is enormous.
As is the case with so many web-based applications, accessibility is a major problem with Twitter. That’s why Dennis Lembree has created Accessible Twitter. Lembree’s Twitter interface perhaps benefits blind users more than any other identifiable group, but I appreciate a comment made by Lembree in an interview posted on Accessify, “Web accessibility is for everyone, not only for the 10% or so of folks with some type of disability…” So Accessible Twitter can enhance accessibility for a wide range of Twitter users.
The site indicates that Accessible Twitter is still in “Alpha”, but it has functioned just fine for me without any glitches. As listed on the site, the accessibility features are:
All links are keyboard accessible.
DM, Favorite, Reply, Re-tweet, and Delete links are all visible by default.
Simple, consistent layout and navigation (and signed-in username always displayed).
Headings and page titles are implemented for optimal accessibility. This includes an H3 heading (for author screen name) added to tweets to assist with screen reader users.
Works great with or without JavaScript.
Ajax actions are concluded with an alert that notifies the user of the result of the action.
Large default text size and high color contrast. Layout/text resizes without breaking.
When entering tweets, audio cues indicate when the character limit is almost reached (in additon to character counter).
Forms and data tables are marked up for optimal accessibility.
Code is semantic, light, and adheres to best practices in Web Standards.
If a tweet is in response to another (and marked as such in the data), a clearer link is provided to the that tweet (not hidden). There’s also a more obvious link to the “permanent page” for the tweet.
A clearer link is provided for the “permanent” link for a tweet; the page containing only a single tweet.
Definitions of abbreviations are provided to certain acronyms in tweets such as IMHO (in my humble opinion).
Tested on all major browsers: IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome.
After a long blogging silence, I’m back with a free resource that I’m especially excited about. I’ve discovered an effective free option for turning scanned text into digital text that can then be used with a wide range of study tools, including text-to-speech. All previous attempts to create useful digital text from the PDF files made with standard flatbed scanners and their OCR software have yielded disappointing results. The results with ScannedPDFtoWord aren’t perfect, but they are very very good.
ScannedPDFtoWord does exactly what its name implies. It converts scanned PDF documents to Microsoft Word (.doc) files. The online conversion is quick, and the quality of the text is excellent when opened in Word. The conversion process could hardly be easier, and registration isn’t even required.
You simply upload the scanned PDF file and give an email address where you can download the converted file. Here’s what the user interface looks like.
Although the graphics were missing, once opened in MS Word the converted files retained original formatting. I was able to edit the scanned text easily. For example, there was no problem in selecting the entire document and changing the font. There were almost no errors that needed to be corrected in the scanned document.
I was especially pleased to confirm that WordTalk worked flawlessly with the scanned text. WordTalk is the versatile free add-on for MS Word that provides text-to-speech, a talking spell checker, conversion of text to MP3 audio format, etc. There are, of course, numerous other study tools built into MS Word that are available to a learner once a document has been scanned into MS Word via ScannedPDFtoWord.
Below is a sample of scanned text that was converted by ScannedPDFtoWord and opened in MS Word. I’ve highlighted the only errors I could find–the ‘f’ dropped from the word ‘first’ and the two dates, where the number 1 at the beginning of both dates was converted as the capital letter I. As I said at the outset, this isn’t perfect; but I think it’s very very good.
I just came across a video I made a couple of years ago about CLiCk,Speak. I’d forgotten all about it. That has prompted me to repeat a post I wrote aboutCLiCk,Speak in June of 2008. The resolution isn’t great, but I think the video does a pretty good job of demonstrating CLiCk,Speak in action and of showing how to install it. I’ve embedded the video at the conclusion of the post.
CLiCk,Speak is a FREE tool that I believe needs to be available to ALL learners who have any reason to go online. It is a powerful tool, and one that is extremely easy to use for anyone who can use a mouse. The CLiCk,Speak toolbar installs with three buttons, as shown here.
In order to have text from a web page read aloud, simply place the cursor where you want to begin reading and click the green button. To stop reading aloud, click the red button. If you wish to read a selection of text, click the white button after selecting the desired text.
Under the Firefox‘Tools’ Menu is an item called ‘CliCk,Speak Options’. You are able to adjust the reading rate and the pitch of the voice here.
As I repeat frequently, if schools are truly interested in supporting all learners, there is no excuse for continuing to insist on using Internet Explorer. If schools are really interested in trying to facilitate universal access, Firefox is a far superior browser because it is so much more accessible for countless learners. There is absolutely no monetary cost for using Firefox, but the potential to help learners with reading challenges is priceless!
