maccessible

Spellex and Microsoft Office 2008 - :(

Spellex, the hero’s of aftermarket add-on spelling dictionaries for Office report that Office 2008 wont be supported for the foreseeable future. A call to Spellex revealed that M$ aren’t playing ball so all you doctors, lawyers, vets, dentist, botanist and scientists that require a specialist spell checking facility in Office 2008 are going to have to wait and continue on with Office 2004.

Spellex

Macworld Awards 2008 - conspicuous by its absentee's?

I received an email today saying that MindManager has been nominated for an award (again) in this years Macworld awards. While MindManager is a very good product I don't see why a products like Novamind have been nominated whilst Inspiration, Read&Write, Kurzweil and Claro are totally ignored. Where I work Inspiration for the Mac far out sells MindManager and I've not even heard of Novamind before (but I will be checking it out now).

Here's the nominee's:

Education product of the year
ConceptDraw MINDMAP Pro 5
Mindjet - MindManager 7
NovaMind - NovaMind 4
Rosetta Stone - Rosetta Stone 3
Starry Night - Starry Night
Apollo Wolfram - Mathematica 6

Macworld Awards

iVox gets an update

The best TTS voices available for the Mac just got updated, iVox from Holland’s Assistiveware is now running at v1.2. There's no patch or update route so you are going to have to download a whole new version and reinstall and at over 700mb it’s a bit of a beast. But in v1.2 you get the ability to add abbreviations or change the pronunciation of words. It works pretty well I personally prefer the US Heather voice in iVox but I don't want to hear words like aluminium pronounced in her native tongue so I can go into the Pronounciation Editor and have aluminium edited so that it sounds exactly like an English TTS would.

Also included in version 1.2 are a selection of new languages Eliska and Sabrine for Czech, Ania for Polish, Snorri for Icelandic, Sanna for Finnish, Elin for Swedish, and Baris and Ceren for Turkish. The Czech, Polish, Icelandic and Turkish voices require Mac OS X 10.5. The original voices require 10.3.9 or later.

You can download the full working version of iVox on a 30 day trial

Product Page
Listen to Samples
Download v1.2

Alphasmart Neo – Price Drop

Yep the long-lived Neo has just had a price drop in the UK of £20 to £149 + VAT, probably in response to the threat from the Asus eeePC. The release of the Asus must have had some wondering about the future of the Neo but it does have its place in the education market. First off is its battery life, a Neo can live of its AA batteries for a couple of thousand hours, it’s a tough little unit and there’s no security issues. So for some it’s more suitable than the webcam, email, wifi and games enabled Asus.

Rumour has it a supplemental Neo model will be release in the summer that will feature wireless printing and classroom voting buttons.

Neo product page

maccessible goes live!

Welcome to maccessible the online resource for assistive technology on the Mac. My aim is to provide a source for all the latest news and releases that will make your Mac a much friendlier place to be.

Assistive technologies primary goal is to help those with learning difficulties such as dyslexia and visual impairments but you will find that a lot of the applications will benefit anyone that uses their Mac for reading and writing digital content.

From simple spell checkers to the latest voice recognition there’s a whole host of solutions out there but which ones do what and are they any good?

I hope you’ll find maccessible useful.