We would also like to thank Steve Lee and OSS Watch for all their support with this our first open source project.  We have learnt so much about this community along the way and are now involved in two other open source projects – one for Computer Aid – building a magnifier for a pen drive and another very exciting application that will help those who have communication difficulties.

Garry Paxton has set up a Charitable Trust that is not only developing open source content in the form of the Mulberry symbol set to support those who have communication difficulties, but is now making it possible for Seb to develop an open source application for sharing it on the web – the project is called Picboard .

We will be revamping our Access technologies web pages next week to keep everyone updated on all the projects and LexDis is still open for more student strategies.  There is a quick screen cast of how you can add a lite version of the toobar to Internet Explorer.  Apologies for the poor sound quality… I need to replace my headset!

We have also created a button for the Toolbar that you can embed on your page to start the toolbar:

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GIF format

ATMac talks about making the iPhone your own personal library with Wattpad and Papers.

Sometime ago AssistiveWare announced the iphone can become an augmented communication device  – Proloquo2Go: AAC  in Your Pocket

Alan Lawrence has made a version of Dasher, the text prediction software, for the  iPhone.  It is now available for free from the iTunes Store.

Applestoreapps.com have a useful list of the  ‘Top 50 Free Education Apps‘  and when you search for spelling apps you may come across Brain Blaze Spelling which is a useful way to test whether you still have the ability to pick the correct word from a list of spelling corrections as if you were using a spell checker!

By the way we have been working with JISC TechDis on their new toolbar which can be seen in action on the front page of LexDis and with luck you may have noticed that it automatically loaded when you loaded this blog!

It allows you to have text to speech, spell checking, font resizing, colour changes and a dictionary and to reference a web page for your notes as you surf the internet.  It works with most browsers as a download or there is the lite version which is easiest to use as a bookmark as can be seen in the image below.

All the best for 2010!

As the press release says, Mike is “going to present the latest developments in his award-winning web-based Synote at a symposium at the IBM TJ Watson Research Centre, New York on Monday 9 November.

It will be the first time Synote will be shown with its additional ability to “synchronise live notes taken using Twitter with synchronised lecture recordings and transcripts created using IBM’s speech recognition software.”

E.A. is off to the 12th Annual Accessing Higher Ground – Accessible Media, Web and Technology Conference in Colorado on Thursday 12 November to show how Seb Skuse, Russell Newman and Chris Phethean have developed a suite of accessibility tools that can help to make access to the web easier. This work has come about as a result of the findings of the JISC funded LexDis project which, as someone said “refuses to die!” Students are still coming forward with new strategies for the way they cope with their “Technology Enhanced Learning” (to include e-learning and mobile learning) environments and E.A. is keen to continue with this work so that the database can be kept up to date with the latest ideas.

The press release ends by saying: “In her presentation, E.A. will highlight the need to enhance the knowledge of a wider network of ‘informal experts’ and academic staff to enable them to introduce disabled students to the many web-based tools which are currently emerging. This would allow disabled students to further develop their skills and perhaps in time also become informal experts who would be willing to share the strategies they have developed with others as can be seen on the LexDis website.”

The problem is if you use a normal spell checker that underlines all the errors you make it tends to disrupt your thought processes.  Neil discovered that if he used Microsoft Word’s AutoCorrect this speeded up his writing, however this did not work with every application.  This meant Neil was doing a lot of copy and pasting into Facebook and online emails to make sure they were correct.

The idea of making a program was borne out of frustration and Neil felt his spelling was not improving.  So Global AutoCorrect slowly developed from his ideas thanks to a series of IT tutorials and a considerable amount of time in front of his computer.  The results can now be seen on Neil’s website where there is a video explaining it all – tutorials can also be viewed via YouTube.

Neil is planning to release the first version of his program during Dyslexia Awareness Week November 1st – 7th 2009.   To find out more information or to contact Neil please go to the LexAble website.

Check out our presentation for all the details. Here is a PDF, 3MB:
Access Group 2009 Summer Showcase

Questions after each section highlighted some interesting possibilities for future development. Specifically:

• Web2Access Validation Toolkit: Can part of the work of checking a site be performed by our server automatically, thus removing the need for a human to do it?
• StudyBar Text-to-Speech: Could the server cache common sentences and/or websites? e.g. the BBC News site is likely to be a common request, so can we render it once then cache it?
• Access Menu: Development of a package download service would allow users to add new programs to their pen drives and keep existing ones up to date.

There are now many ways of changing the look and way your browser works when you are working within web pages. Depending on your chosen browser you can add a series of toolbars or additional menu buttons and even complete search bars such as the one offered by the Google toolbar for Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox users.

Mozilla Firefox appears to have the largest collection of add-ins that can help with zooming with Nosquint for example, colour changes with Accessibar, text to speech – FoxVox, dictionaries – the British Dictionary as well as evaluating web pages for accessibility with such tools as WAVE and the Firefox Accessibility Extension add-ons.

Tim O’Brien has a blog about “A Collection of Accessibility Add-ons” for Firefox.

Microsoft have a similar page of add-ons for Internet Explorer and the Web Accessibility toolbar developed by Vision Australia can help with web page evaluations. There is also iespell checker

Mashable have provided their top 10 safari plug-ins and there are many more for Mac users on PimpMySafari. The most useful ones that may make life a bit easier when surfing are found under the ‘interface section’.

We are still looking for ways to make us gain improved bounce rates and top search results!  We are also trying to find ways to make the content more useful and relevant to a wide audience with a revamped interface.  All ideas welcome!