Reid My Mind
Access Technology

This week Amazon announced that they are developing accessible menu navigation for the popular Kindle I-Book Reader. The talking menus will allow people who are blind and visually impaired to independently use the reader. As you may recall, Amazon’s Kindle contains a “Read to Me” feature that uses text to speech (TTS) to read books [...]

Continue reading “A Brother Just Wants to Read” »

Thanks  to Ron Graham from the AccessAbility Blog for giving RMM a shoutout!   He pointed us to a blog post by Marcus over at Engel’s Ensights titled Pardon My Geekiness.   Ok, first, a lesson to all, never ever apologize for your geekiness! I don’t care what kind of Geek you are, it’s all [...]

Continue reading “IS the iPhone A Threat to Access Technology Vendors” »

This was one of the slogans chanted during Tuesday’s protest  organized by the Reading Rights Coalition. The demonstration, held  outside of the NYC office of The Author’s Guild, seemed to be well attended both in person and virtually. Thanks to Mika Pyykhala and John Oliveira of the Association of Blind Citizens for streaming the event. [...]

Continue reading “No More Greed, We Want To Read!” »

Let me first say, I believe every consumer electronic product should be made accessible for all. No one community should be relegated to a specific brand or device based on a characteristic. There should not be computers, mp3 players or microwaves “for the blind.” These products and others should simply be universally designed with all [...]

Continue reading “Amazon Kindle vs. Victor Reader Stream” »

The folks at Fred’s Head Companion led me to a new comic book series based on the life of Helen Keller. Well sort of! Helen Killer, yes apparently this is true. From the site: At the dawn of the 20th Century, twenty-one year old college student Helen Keller has a dark secret science has restored [...]

Continue reading “Helen Keller Comic Book. Seriously.” »

When I was first introduced to screen readers a little less than five years ago, I had the impression that Freedom Scientifics’ JAWS was the only game in town. It wasn’t until I began feeling comfortable using the technology and made my way back on the web, that I realized there were other solutions available. [...]

Continue reading “Serotek – Going for the Lead” »

Have you ever read a review of a piece of software that sounds exactly like what you have been looking for to solve some problem? Maybe you were looking for a better way to accomplish a specific task you find yourself doing over and over again. So after reading a review you head on over [...]

Continue reading “AO: Action Outline, Accessible Out the Box” »

You’ll rarely catch me without my sweet Vicky AKA my Victor Reader Stream. I changed the otherwise masculine named device to a more feminine based on my strong feelings for her. Last week, Vicky and I expanded our relationship a bit. We tried a little experimentation, you know, just to keep things interesting.I brought Vicky [...]

Continue reading “Four’s Not a Crowd with Vicky” »

As the population of baby boomers ages, the number of people with visual impairments is expected to double. Advancements in technology are  assisting individuals in accomplishing everyday tasks and living independently.   According to the article: The SightMate LV920 vision tool can help approximately 40 to 60 percent of patients improve their visual acuity, and [...]

Continue reading “Sightmate: Technology Assisting People with Visual Impairments” »

An article from PC World points you to a download from Microsoft that enables you to convert Word documents to DAISY files.   The add-in allows users to save Open XML-based text files as DAISY XML, which in turn can converted into the DAISY Digital Talking Book (DTB) format using another software tool, Pipeline, the [...]

Continue reading “Microsoft offers a DAISY Add-in” »