Apple’s Entrance into Digital Textbooks: revolutionary? Apple announced its entrance into digital textbooks, now selling through its iTunes and iBooks online. Though this has been somewhat expected, it’s exciting news. Believe me, this is not even the tip of the iceberg. I’ve already downloaded samples of the 8 textbooks listed in the iBooks store. While [...]
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wohnai/flickr From Good.is The average community college student in Washington spends about $1,200 per year on textbooks. I know that as a society we’re probably in the infancy of this movement to digitize textbooks and in a variety of ways, bring down the costs of textbooks to students. I don’t understand how they deal with [...]
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Image: Courtesy of Christian Boer I’ve heard of this before and can’t quite make up my mind about it. This article in Scientific American describes a typographic font created by a graphic designer from the Netherlands, that supposedly makes reading print easier for some people with dyslexia. I suppose if it’s helpful to some then [...]
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I’ve recently begun working with a 10 year old boy who has dyslexia. That’s not unusual for me. It’s an important part of what I do in my educational consulting practice, and I’ve been doing it for years. What’s new is that the young boy and his family live about four and a half hours [...]
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There’s plenty of posts and testimonials about Steve Jobs, as there should be. I wanted to say here how much he truly did for the worldwide community of people with various disabilities and learning differences. Apple’s ease of use and its features that help all of us, but particularly help people with disabilities was never [...]
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Darren Murph has written a clear and easy to understand review about Dragon Dictate 2.5 by Nuance for Macs, in this Engadget piece. I occasionally use this software when I’m writing reports, and when I do I’m very satisfied. I’ve been tracking this speech recognition software (turning human speech into text on a screen) for [...]
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New Link for Disability support: High Speed Disability Access Guide for various disabilities.
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Recordings For the Blind and Dyslexic, which has the largest collection of digitized textbooks and literature (64,000 titles) in the world, finally will make that available through iTunes. I, along with many others, have been waiting for this for a while. I hope the app (which is selling for $19.95) will be worth the wait. [...]
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Google scribe Fantastic auto-complete writing support. Useful for all sorts of tasks. It will be interesting to see how well it learns over time. I plan to use it for a while. I wish the autocomplete on iOS worked as well for me. [via David Clark]
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iHelp for Autism Though there are other computers designed for children with autism, a growing number of experts say that the iPad is better. It’s cheaper, faster, more versatile, more user-friendly, more portable, more engaging, and infinitely cooler for young people. “I just couldn’t imagine not introducing this to a parent of a child who [...]
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Social Networks a Lifeline for the Chronically Ill Alan Brightman who ran the Disabilities Solutions Group at Apple did a lot of work early on in this particular area. Reminds me of the presentation and article David Clark, Monika Koethnig and I did a while ago: Digital Independence which we did long before the current [...]
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Pen vs. Keyboard vs. Newton vs. Graffiti vs. Treo vs. iPhone This is a great review. It’s not a scientific test but it explores these different methods of getting text into a device in a way that will help anyone think about the future of text encoding on a variety of devices in a broader [...]
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