Rebecca's Blog

Thought this might be interesting for you to read: UN to finalise disability treaty from the BBC news page. About time too if you ask me. The report highlights the fact that in developing countries, 90 percent of disabled children don't go to school.

Countries that sign up to the resolution will have to enact laws and other measures to improve disability rights and also agree to get rid of legislation, customs and practices that discriminate against disabled people.

Here's a tip for Microsoft Word. It's a quick way of putting bullet points in your document.

One of the questions that people often ask me is about the keyboard equivalent of clicking on the buttons in the top right hand corner of a Window to minimise or maximise it. Well what you need to do is to access a special menu which is often called the "application control menu".

You do this by pressing alt + the spacebar. The menu drops down from the top left hand corner and gives you a number of options each with its own access key (the underlined letter) :

• maximise (x),
• minimise (n).
…

If you're anything like me, you've got more and more files on your computer. Keeping track of exactly where you saved something can be a bit of a nightmare, even with the best folder/directory structure in the world. Well, some of the big players in the Internet Search Engine business are looking to give us the same sort of service looking for our own files on our computers.

I heard about this on BBC World's ClickOnline Programme. (Thanks to my sister Julia in Cardiff for pointing me towards this…

A number of my readers have asked whether the programmes I talked about in a previous blog are keyboard accessible. Well ZoneAlarm certainly is. The messages it brings up are in HTML type format, so you can use your normal Internet strategies for reading and responding to them, like tabbing and looking for short cut keys. I'm afraid to say that Ad-Aware isn't so friendly. My apologies. However, there is there an alternative.

Thanks to Neil, one of my New Zealand readers, I can now tell you abou…

Came across this news recently. It seems that Google are looking into the possibility of checking websites for their accessibiiyt for people who use screen readers - software that enables blind and partialyy sighted computer users to access inter pages.

These software packages, such as Jaws, Hal, Window-Eyes, have spicific things that make web pages accessible. By the way, research has shown that web pages that are accessible to screen readers are also much easier for all website readers.

Anywa…

In the vast majority of dialog boxes there is a button that looks slightly different to any other buttons, maybe with more of a 3D look or maybe a slightly different colour.

This is what can be described as the default button. This means that this is the button that gets pressed when you press the ENTER key, no matter which control has "focus".

So for example, when you close a document you may get a message asking whether you want to save changes, you will probably have 3 buttons - yes, no a…

Microsoft Word. Did you know that CTRL+D opens the font dialog? It's an awful lot quicker than finding the mouse, moving it to the "format" menu, clicking on it, and clicking on "font".

Astute readers will notice that this is the same as a recent keystroke, but for a different application. How green can you get - we can even recycle keystrokes!

I was with a client this week whose computer - a new-ish one running Windows XP - was running really, really slowly. I ran a full scan of her virus guard which did pick up one virus but this made only marginal difference to the speed of the machine. Then I ran a programme that looks for other nasties like spyware and such things...

It came up with 384 nasties! Fortunately, the software also got rid of them. But that's not all.

To stop too many more of these nasties getting onto this comp…

Did you know that you can take a snapshot of how your screen looks?

You can copy the currently active window to the clipboard by pressing ALT + PrintScreen or you can copy the whole screen with CTRL + Print Screen. You can then paste the picture into your Word Processor or Graphics software. Why might you want to do that? Well one reason is to capture those error messages to pass on to someone who might be able to help sort it out without you having to remember the jargon of the message.

Anoth…