AMIS DAISY Reader - Beta 4 now available!

AMIS 3, the free and open source DAISY player for Windows, has just reached its fourth beta release, which is likely to be the last beta before a stable release. This means it's the last chance to stress-test it before widespread distribution.

What's new in beta 4? Improvements were made to internationalization, accessibility, and overall reading experience; and specific requests have been implemented. There are two new notable features:

(1) AMIS supports text-only books now, in addition to full-text, full-audio and audio-TOC books; and
(2) there is a new piece of documentation, in DAISY format: the Keyboard Shortcuts book (found in the help menu).

To get AMIS 3 beta 4 and start testing, go to: http://daisy-trac.cvsdude.com/amis/wiki/BetaTesting
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New Items of Open Source Interest

Several new versions of old friends have appeared in the last few days - must be something about Columbus Day that brings out the update fever.

First up is Open Office 3.0. Kiss your Microsoft Office Suite good-bye - this is especially true if you have been saddled with Office 2007 and long for Office 2003 or XP. In fact, the excitement over this update was so great that the Oo Servers crashed from the demand. I have used Open Office for E-Text production for a couple of years now as it provides a much cleaner output than Word (as have others). But now there are more reasons to use it as a replacement for Microsoft.

Next is update to the Firefox Web Browser with the release of Firefox 3. Already known for its accessibility, the latest version of Firefox has a Full Zoom feature that may not have been designed specifically for low-vision access but provides very clear and sharp up-close rendering of webpages. Firefox is continuing its committment to accessibility by improving its ability to handle screenreaders and minimizing key strokes. Learn everything you would ever want to know about FireFox accessibility at AccessFireFox website.

From the 'now you see it ...' department comes the release of the AMIS 3.0 DAISY Reader. Available for one day, it was dicovered to have a couple of bugs and was quickly pulled by the development team (one of whom happens to be my friend and business partner). According to him the bugs are minor fixes and the program should be available again soon. What we did get to experience was impressive as the interface is cleaner than before, the navigation window provides better access to headers and page numbers, and (best of all) AMIS 3.0 can now carries voices. This is a major improvement because building Text-Only DAISY files that can use the voices on an end-users computer is much easier than Text-To-Speech encoding them.

Ifyou truly want to keep up with what is new and good in Open Source Assistive Technology, bookmark the OATSoft Website which contains a very nice listing of Accessibility Activities as well as an alphabetical repository of many many projects.
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Quickie Zooming Addons for Firefox

If you're a Firefox geek, like I am, you are always looking for ways to make it work better for you. It is one of the advantages of having something open source that lots of developers can work on. I know, the majority of the world still runs on Microsoft Internet Explorer, but like a good Firefox evangelist, I'm continually trying to convert people to the lighter side of the browser world.

That being said, I have daily contact with plenty of people that use Firefox add-ons to enhance their use of the browser. I'd like to point out a few of these add-ons today that my visually impaired students are using on a regular basis.

Text Size Toolbar
This add-on creates tools on your standard toolbar that gives you three quick links: to enlarge, to reduce, or to "equalize" or bring back to its default size. The tools are unobtrusive, easy to manage, and quick to use.

QuickZoom
Adds two buttons to the status bar that are the equivalent of the crtl+ and ctrl- commands. Right-clicking on either of the two buttons returns the view to its default size.

QuickZoomCM
Adds three menu items to the context menu (right-click menu) that allows you to enlarge, decrease, or return to default size.

Accessibar
Adds a complete toolbar that allows changes in font size, background and font colors, and line spacing. Also includes the ReadAloud text reader.

All of these add-ons are guaranteed to work with versions 1.5-2.x, and are also being reconfigured to work with Firefox 3.0, which is currently in beat. All of these add-ons can be located by visiting the Firefox Add-Ins Site.

By the way, I'm a new contributor to the ATHEN Blog. I may be better known as Susan Kelmer, and I am an adaptive technologist and campus lab coordinator at St. Louis Community College. Please feel free to leave comments, good or bad!

Wal-Mart selling Vista machine with Open Office

For UNDER $300!

I am by no means a fan of Wal-Mart being of the opinion that Sam Walton is single handedly responsible for gutting the main streets of small town America - but let's not go there because this is a family friendly politically free blog.

Every now and then I see them advertise something that entices me to seriously consider entering a Wal-Mart. This is one of those moments. I'm not sure what is more impressive - the use of Open Office as a selling tool, the price (a mere $298), the specs at this price (1.5 GHz processor, 1GB DDRII SDRAM, 80 GB SATA Drive, DVD-ROM/DVD+/-RW), or the fact that it is advertised without the proverbial 'crapware'.

Check out the website of the Everex® IMPACT® GC3502 and imagine what you could do with such a throw-away machine!

Announcing the OCRopus Open Source OCR System (Google Research)

From the good people of /. [Slashdot]

Google has just announced work on OCRopus, which it says it hopes will "advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies". The goal of the project is to advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies, and to deliver a high quality OCR system suitable for document conversions, electronic libraries, vision impaired users, historical document analysis, and general desktop use."

Google is "hoping for contributions by the open source community in areas such as adapting the system to additional languages, creating a Gnome desktop application, integration with Gnome desktop search, web-based tools for proofing and training, language modeling, additional character recognition engines, and other useful tools and add-ons."

Late last year Google announced their intention to release (re-release?) Tesseract OCR, an obscure open-source program apparently familiar to only the most ardent Linux developer.

What the world needs now -- is OCR ... sweet OCR....

The uber-geeks of Google have announced their intention to release (re-release?) Tesseract OCR. Interesting, but nothing to get very excited about at this point - unless you are truly into the whole open-source/linux movement. There may be promise here one day - especially considering that everything Google touches tends to turn to gold. The Google team brings to mind a slew of Indiana Jones types scouring the digital-Amazon (the river, not the shop-at-home site) for lost relics of a bygone era.

Outside of the announcement by Google I had a hellava time finding anything on "Tesseract OCR". Plenty of neat stuff on Tesseracts, but not much on the OCR namesake - and I have the library resources of a major university to play with. I am actually suprised I did not find more flash based sites with Tesseracts - it would seem that math types would spend more time creating little tessies and releasing them into the wild - but they are all probably playing with SodaRace.

I finally found something on Linux.com that provides a fairly decent overview of the program (history, what it does, tech notes, etc.). This article puzzles me as it seems like these folks have been hiding in a server closet for years having never heard of some of the exceptional commercial OCR programs available in 2006 instead of harkening back to a program that was "one of the top-tier performers at UNLV's OCR competition in 1995"

NINTEEN-NINETY-FIVE!!! Are you sh**ting me?!?! And there are people out in the world excited about resurrecting this thing. What - I ask - is the point! I remember OCR technology in 1995 and it sucked compared to what we have today. Give me my Abbyy Fine Reader and a sweet scanner anyday over some long forgotten OpenSource OCR program.

The SourceForge.net dowload site provides merely a one-line description: "A commercial quality OCR engine originally developed at HP between 1985 and 1995. In 1995, this engine was among the top 3 evaluated by UNLV. It was open-sourced by HP and UNLV in 2005." Of course it was open-sourced by UNLV - they were probably cleaning out old storage and figured something this good should not be tossed. Hey, I know - let's give it to Google (he, he) they'll take anything! After all - it did win their in-house competition more than a decade ago. And, of course, we all know how well things are going over at HP - they have bigger things to worry about then where UNLV tosses their trash. [off the record - UNLV will only acknowledge a long-term platonic relationship with Tesseract].

Thanks Google - but I'll pass. Please bring us more nifty stuff like the Google Personalized HomePage. I have basically shunned all other options and am working on moving several years worth of PDA dated into the trusted hands of Google. If you have not yet discovered the tabs in the GPHP you are truly missing out! I am also very much looking forward to where Google Scholar is headed - even the reference librarian for my program is excited.

Up In The Mornin' With The Risin' Sun ...!

or ... Dann Does Bootcamp!

I arrived back in the office earlier this week to find a pile of mail awaiting my attention and one rather large box from the good people of Cupertino, CA. After my joyous time spent picking apart the [in]accessibility of an Apple notebook running OSX 10.4 [Tiger], I had asked our local Apple Rep if I could get my hands on one of the new Intel-based MacBook Pros. Much to my delight [and surprise] there was a 17" top-o-the-line beauty waiting for me while I was still on a tech-high from the AHEAD conference.

The first night home I got it up and running and spent time with updates [it recognized and connected to my home wi-fi effortlessly] and played around to remind myself of how Mac interfaces differently than Windows. The unit came with what I thought at first was an iPod shuffle but turned out to be the mini-remote for the laptop and the FrontRow feature. A few minutes after popping in Disc 1 of the first season of Galactica I found myself amazed by not only the ease of use, but also the picture and sound quality. This is one sweeeet machine!

Last night I Boot-Camped that bad boy using a Windows XP [SP2] disc and a print out of the directions as recommended. The directions are clearly written for individuals more familiar with Macs then with PC's as they take a lot for granted in terms of an individuals knowledge of file locations, boot up operations, keystroke commands and such. Fortunately I know enough about Macs that I was able to work my way through the process. The BootCamp instructions are worded in such a manner as to be both tongue-and-cheek condescending towards Windows users and serve as a propaganda tool for Apple. Reading betwen the lines thay say "Now do you see why Macs are superior" and "What the heck took you so long to 'switch'?"

I've loaded [and reloaded] Windows plenty of times and I have to admit this was one of the faster and easier installs I have ever done - the 2GB of RAM and a lightening fast processor certainly helped. From start to finish it took less than two hours - and that includes doing the usual Windows updates and installing virus protection from my home institution. I partitioned myself a good chuck [20GB] on the Windows side of the harddrive and formatted in FAT as, according to the instructions, this should allow a crossover of saved and shared materials. I have my doubts - but what the heck - it's a loaner. Let's see what this baby can do!

Over the next few days I am going to load up the Windows side with the more common tools of my trade; including

• Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PPT, etc.]
• Dolphin EaseReader
• Dolphin Producer
• ZoomText
• JAWS
• Kurzweil 3000
• OpenBook

And whatever else I have kicking around the shop. I am hesitant to load EasePublisher - heaven forbid something happen to the HASP key - but curiosity will likely get the better of me. I also plan to load both the Mac and the Windows versions of OpenOffice as well as some of my other favorite Open Source apps such as FireFox, Freemind, Opera for browsing and GreatNews for RSS. More to come ...