CDesk: An Accessible Collection Of Applications For PC

For people who have visual and/or cognitive disabilities and are heavy users of computers, CDesk, a suite of computer applications, may be a tremendous help.

CDesk is a high contrast, large print, and fully speech enabled collection of eight applications that can help people with disabilities perform computer related tasks in a very simple fashion. The collection consists of programs specifically for email, a special browser for the Internet (with reduced clutter) and special filters that will remove all images and links form the page to make reading easy (this is true for the email program too), a media and books section that consists of internet radio and downloadable books/periodicals, a simple to use word processor, and its own speech recognition tool called PEGGY, to name a few. CDesk also stores contacts, provides calendar/spreadsheet/calculator options and has the ability to support approximately 30 more languages. Currently, CDesk is available only for the Windows platform (speech recognition works only with Windows 7 and 8).

A lot of supporting material in the form of videos are available on CDesk's website. They also provide free technical support from 7AM to 5PM Pacific time to answer questions and provide help with CDesk.

A 15 day trial version can be downloaded from here or by going to CDesk's website and clicking the "Download CDesk Trial" button. The pricing for CDesk starts at $395.

Watch this video to get an overview of what all CDesk can do.

Read more about CDesk on the AFB AccessWorld Magazine website.

CDesk website: Adaptive Voice

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Adobe Flash CS4 Accessibility

There is a great (short) animated video on Adobe's website that provides some quick tips on how to make Flash videos accessible. This video consists of 5 "slides", and each slide discusses various accessibility features that can be added for different types of users. The main points this video touches are:

For blind users:

-  Setting reading order.
- Audio description (as audio or transcripts).
- Screen magnifier for users with low vision.

Keyboard access:

- Setting the tab index (same as reading order; cannot tab to text field).
- Setting programmed shortcuts.

For deaf users:

- Adding captions.
- Adding video of an ASL interpreter for younger children.

Extra resources

- Link to Adobe Accessible Resource Center.
- Link to Adobe Flash Accessibility Design Guidelines.

Click  the "D))" button at the bottom right corner to see how they use audio descriptions in this video.

Here is the video.

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