Rebecca's Blog
Computer Training and Assistive Technology
Looking for friendly personalised computer training?
Are you looking for training for somebody with a visual impairment?
Are you blind or partially sighted and looking for computer training?
Do have a disability and want help to make using a computer easier and more productive?
Do you use Jaws and want to shop on-line but don't know where to start?
Afraid of RSI, or suffering already and want to use the mouse less?
Do you want to know how to use Microsoft Office products more effectively -
- nee…
Renewing Car Tax Online
Just a quick one for car drivers out there in the UK. My car had its MOT recently. The DVLA has computerised the system, which meant that I was able to renew my car tax online instead of queueing in the Post Office. It was fab! and the new disk arrived within a week. Brill!
The place to do it is: http://www.vehiclelicence.gov.uk.
Skype is 3 years old
And a whole heap of people celebrated by going online - 7 million of us at one time. If you don't have Skype yet, it's worth looking at if you've got a broadband connection. You get calls to other Skype users in the whole world for free. And that's got to be good, I reckon. You can also use Skype to call "real" phones for a fraction of what most telecoms companies charge - they call this Skype Out. I think really is worth checking out.
There's also Skype In for those time when you haven't got a…
UN to finalise disability treaty
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.
Microsoft Word's Bulleted Lists
Here's a tip for Microsoft Word. It's a quick way of putting bullet points in your document.
Maximising a Window Without Using the Mouse
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).
For…
Personal Search Engine
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 thi…
Accessible Security Software
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 about…
Google tests Web search for blind - Yahoo! News UK
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…
Default Buttons in Dialog Boxc
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 and…
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