ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY BLOG | INVENTIONS FOR PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES

Wow! Amazon announced today that they will be shipping on November 15th the Kindle Fire with a 7 inch color multi-touch screen for $199 dollars. With all the speculation it looks like they delivered on their promise of a highly functional reader complete with access to the web,...

Many combination locks are hard to use for people who are blind or have cognitive challenges. Master Lock has a few locks that are more accessible then conventional combination locks.The first is the 1500iD lock which can be opened without looking at the lock. Conventional combination locks use a number dial that makes it impossible...

It is easy to capture our students' imagination and attention when we use visuals in our teaching. Of all the things we can do in the classroom non-linguistic representation of ideas has been demonstrated to be linked to achievement and retention of information....

Jeff Bezos will take the stage this coming Wednesday at 10:00 am in NYC and will unveil the latest Kindle offering. From following the bloggers, it looks like we will see a 7 inch back-lit touch screen color Kindle that will be running a customized version...

Mock up of possible iPhone 5 designApple's next iPhone is rumored to be announced in a couple of weeks. What will the new iPhone mean for assistive technology? The iPhone is a powerful tool for people with a variety of disabilities. It has built in text-to-speech,...

Signed Stories is free service that provides sign and read aloud books. The books are signed for the deaf child and read aloud simultaneously for the non deaf parent or vice verse. There are many stories available for young kids. The stories can help parents who...

While Adobe Captivate 5.5 is an easy to use tool- it is great that Adobe will be offering free eSeminars to walk you through the finer points.  To register for one of the seminars just click in the link. Enjoy! BrianAlternate Reporting and Quiz Result Analyzer in Adobe...

One of the shortcomings of the Kindle platform is that it does not support the ever popular ePub format which made it next to impossible to borrow ebooks from the public library. But all that has changed and as of today, patrons of the public library can now take out Kindle eBooks...

WikiSummarizer is a free website that summarizes Wikipeadia articles. WikiSummarizer can summarize any Wikipeadia article in seconds. Recently WikiSummarizer was updated to allow users to view the summarized article in a visual tree view in addition to the old bulleted list...

This week Google announced a number of accessibility upgrades for various services. Among the services that were upgraded were Google+, Google Docs and Google Calendar. The Google Docs and Google Calendar update improves their compatibility with...

San Francisco – September 13, 2011 — Mindjet®, the company that improves how people work together, today announced the release of Mindjet MindManager® 2012 Professional for Windows®, the most powerful version of the world’s leading visual information software. MindManager 2012 is designed for today’s professionals who need to spark ideas and collaborate...

Acquires social collaboration innovator Cohuman for optimized team accountability and launches Mindjet Connect, a free online service to improve how people work togetherSan Francisco – September 12, 2011 — Mindjet®, the company that improves how people work together, today announced new Mindjet Connect® collaborative work management software to...

Bookshare's Read2Go app was recently updated with more features and better performance. If you are unfamiliar with Bookshare click here. The Read2Go app allows Bookshare members to download books directly their iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch. Once books are downloaded you can read them using built in text-to-speech. For more on Read2Go click...

Context Discovery  Inc. the developers of WikiSummarizer today released the Visual Summary View for their leading on-line summarization tool, WikiSummarizer. Now right within the browser you can get a visual overview of key information on any topic within Wikipedia without the...

Although I haven't had time to completely review some of the new releases this week, I wanted to let you know that the folks at Mindomo have released their web based mind mapping application Mindomo 6 which is a major release and rewrite of the application. Mindomo 6 is a very...

For Immediate Release  Contact: Valerie C. Chernek 410-871-2670  vchernek@donjohnston.com  Bookstream™: New Cloud-Based Library Delivers eBooks toStudents' iPads, Smartphones, and LaptopsSeptember 6, 2011- Volo, IL – This school year,...

A feature in OneNote 2010 and 2007 allows users to take audio or video content while taking notes. The feature allows a student to make an audio recording of a lecture while still taking notes. The audio or video notes are then available for playback from within the notebook. The audio and video notes are time coded and allow you to...

As much as I enjoy the power of desktop mind mapping applications and use them all of time in the work that I do, one of the tools that I am relying on more these days is Comapping, an online mind mapping collaboration tool. Comapping can be accessed from any computer and browser that is connected to the Internet and gives me the flexibility to organize...

As much as I enjoy using my iPad-one of the few drawbacks of the iPad is its inability to play Flash. With the rapid adoption of HTML 5 it is unlikely that we will ever see Flash on the iPad. Hoverer, there are some clever solutions out there that can help you play Flash on your...

The National Center on Universal Design for Learning (UDL) has a compiled a list of free assistive technology devices and services. To see the list click here. The list includes information about free text-to-speech, voice recognition, audio books, writing tools and much...