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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