Kensington Expert Mouse

The Kensington Expert Mouse (http://us.kensington.com/html/2200.html) is a simple, elegantly designed trackball which has been popular in the assistive technology field. It has four buttons which can be programmed to perform various mouse and navigation functions. Typically, I open up the casing to switch adapt the buttons, so that any type of switch can be used to activate the buttons. This is especially important for a person who may have limited hand movement, or may be using his/her chin to use the trackball.

One gripe I have is with the wireless version of this device. The speed of the cursor movement is hard to control. Sometimes changing settings within the Kensington Control Panel has no effect at all on this function. In general, the Kensington software can be unpredictable at times.

Vista Speech Recognition

Did you know that Microsoft Vista has built in speech recognition?

(empty stare)

Microsoft has not marketed this feature at all, with good reason. My impressions since the early days of beta testing Vista to right now have been pretty much the same- it's a promising feature but is not quite ready to overtake the heavyweight leader in SR, Nuance's Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Many of the commands that you use in NatSpeak can be used in the Vista interface. (coincidence?) I recall talking with a Microsoft rep at a conference a few years back who was presenting on the accessibility features of Vista. When I mentioned about Dragon Naturally Speaking, he gave a sly grin and said, "What's that?".

Regardless, I'm hoping that a less buggy, more usable flavor of speech recognition will be available in the next version of Windows. We'll see what happens once the beta version comes out any day now.

What's next?

As a frequent reader of Gizmodo.com, I'm often pouring over the site looking for potential technology that would be appropriate for people with disabilities. Besides the enjoyment of looking over (fill in the blank) made of legos and funny shaped USB powered gadgets, I've come to appreciate the sheer enormity of this whole tech scene.

From time to time, I'll highlight something from this and other sites and give the assistive tech bent on it.

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The above picture is of a stair climbing robot developed by Japanese engineers... Looks like something out of a movie. Would be interesting to see how exactly a person with a disability could independently transfer in and out of this chair.

Tech Tool of the Day - E-triloquist

E-triloquist (http://www.etriloquist.com/) is a free text-to-speech program which is specifically designed for users with communication needs. I first encountered this program about 7 years ago through a former coworker of mine who had used it with one of his ALS clients. Since then, I've recommended it to numerous patients and clients as a resource to check out.

Nice Features:

- FREE

- Easy editing features for quick messages

- Ability to save text to a Word-compatible file
- Compatible with high quality commercial speech synthesizers which the user can purchase (AT&T, Neospeech, etc).

Features which need improvement:

- Interface a bit quirky

- Limited help guide

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Overall, this is a great FREE program. Visit the website (http://www.etriloquist.com/) for more info including the story behind the software.

Greetings!

The purpose of this journal is to help educate readers about assistive technology and point to resources that are available on the web.

I want to extend a special welcome to the ALSA 2008 Leadership and Clinical Conference attendees. I will be posting some reviews of software mentioned during my presentation in the upcoming weeks.

Andy