Skip to main content

Favorite Assistive Technology Apps & Products of 2012


As 2012 comes to a close I decided to make a run down of my favorite assistive technology apps and products that I have been using this year. This list is in no particular order.

Click read more view the list.





The Sky WiFi Smartpen is easy to use and seamless. It has a built in recorder and camera that, when used with specialized paper, syncs audio and written notes in the cloud. To read the Sky WiFi Smartpen review click here.


iPad mini is a great tablet because of its size, app selection, and accessibility. The lower price point makes it even more compelling. Most of all iPad mini runs all the apps that the full size iPad does and has accessibility features second to none. Click here to read more about the iPad mini.



While iOS 6 many have been short on mainstream features it has several useful accessibility features including Guided Access, highlighting with Speak Selection, Siri improvements, and VoiceOver improvements. Click here to learn more about iOS 6.


This update included great new voice search feature that I found to be better and faster than Siri. Click here to learn more about the Google Search App for iOS.



This app has a really nice interface and good scan quality which made it my favorite scanning app of 2012. Click here to learn more.


Prizmo is hands down the best OCR app for iPhone that I have used. Just take a picture of a document and it will read it to you in a matter of seconds. Click here to download or learn more about Prizmo.


A great reader of Bookshare books that allows you to read your books portably without a computer. Bookshare is an online accessible library avalible to qualified people. Click here to download or learn more about Read2Go.


Kurzweil isn't new to 2012 but it is a program I use everday. It helps me tremendously and it deserves a spot on this list. Click here to learn more about Kurzweil 3000.


Good app for listening to Learning Ally Audio books. The free app is available for all iOS devices. I would like to see the app include new features such as background audio in 2013. Click here to learn more.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Emergent Cloud Computing Business Models

The last year I wrote quite a few posts on the business models around SaaS and cloud computing including SaaS 2.0 , disruptive early stage cloud computing start-ups , and branding on the cloud . This year people have started asking me – well, we have seen PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS but what do you think are some of the emergent cloud computing business models that are likely to go mainstream in coming years. I spent some time thinking about it and here they are: Computing arbitrage: I have seen quite a few impressive business models around broadband bandwidth arbitrage where companies such as broadband.com buys bandwidth at Costco-style wholesale rate and resells it to the companies to meet their specific needs. PeekFon solved the problem of expensive roaming for the consumers in Eurpoe by buying data bandwidth in bulk and slice-it-and-dice-it to sell it to the customers. They could negotiate with the operators to buy data bandwidth in bulk because they made a conscious decision not to st...

Reveiw: Celluon Epic Laser Keyboard

The Celluon Epic is a Bluetooth laser keyboard. The compact device projects a QWERTY keyboard onto most flat surfaces. (Glass tabletops being the exception) You can connect the Epic to vertically any device that supports Bluetooth keyboards including devices running iOS , Android , Windows Phone, and Blackberry 10. On the back of the device there is a charging port and pairing button. Once you have the Epic paired with your device it acts the same as any other keyboard. For any keyboard the most important consideration is the typing experience that it provides. The virtual keyboard brightness is adjustable and is easy to see in most lighting conditions. Unfortunately the brightness does not automatically adjust based on ambient light. With each keystroke a beeping sound is played which can be turned down. The typing experience on the Epic is mediocre at best. Inadvertently activating the wrong key can make typing frustrating and tiring. Even if you are a touch typist you'll still ...

Rise Of Big Data On Cloud

Growing up as an engineer and as a programmer I was reminded every step along the way that resources—computing as well as memory—are scarce. The programs were designed on these constraints. Then the cloud revolution happened and we told people not to worry about scarce computing. We saw rise of MapReduce, Hadoop, and countless other NoSQL technology. Software was the new hardware. We owe it to all the software development, especially computing frameworks, that allowed developers to leverage the cloud—computational elasticity—without having to understand the complexity underneath it. What has changed in the last two to three years is a) the underlying file systems and computational frameworks have matured b) adoption of Big Data is driving the demand for scale out and responsive I/Os in the cloud. Three years back, I wrote a post, The Future Of The BI In Cloud  where I had highlighted two challenges of using cloud as a natural platform for Big Data. The first one was to create a lar...