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Stand Up comedian with iPad communication aid

Posted by 14 on the 17th February, 2012

Here's a first! Lee Ridley is a young chap with CP and severe motor speech impairment using an iPad as an AAC system, to deliver his stand-up comedy routine. Brilliant, good luck to him!

SQA Answer Booklets in Word format are now available

Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 3rd February, 2012

One of the requests from the staff who attended the Digital Papers Focus Group meeting in October 2011 was for SQA to provide answer booklets in Microsoft Word format. While answer booklets have been provided as PDF documents, some staff felt that the Word format would be more suitable for some ca...

Windows 7 Ease of Access Centre Guide free to download

Posted by Craig Mill on the 2nd February, 2012

Ease of Access Centre Guide Microsoft has included a range of accessibility features (Accessibility Options) in its operating systems since Windows 95. Windows 7 incorporates several improvements such as a change of name from 'Accessibility Options' to 'Ease of Access Centre'. These features pr...

iBooks 2, iBooks Author and digital textbooks

Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 20th January, 2012

Yesterday Apple launched iBooks 2, a new version of the iBooks app for iThingys; iBooks Author, a program for the Mac which is for writing and designing iBooks, and a range of interactive textbooks. The video about the interactive textbooks video a well worth a look - very promotional but also ins...

Orang utans and iPads

Posted by 14 on the 17th January, 2012

Well - the iPad is truly everywhere these days. Watch these fascinating videos - turns out that orangutans also like iPads! They like to watch videos, paint, play kids' Apps, watch other orang utans via Skype, ebooks etc. I have always been very interested in primate language studies and...

Including All Children in the Scottish Children\'s Book Awards

Posted by Robert Stewart on the 16th January, 2012

The 2011 Scottish Children's Book Awards is an innovative nationwide reading project in which children and young people from every corner of Scotland read and vote for their favourite Scottish children's books of the year. Votes MUST reach Scottish Book Trust by 5.30pm on Friday 27th January ...

New TeeJay secondary books on the Books for All Database

Posted by Paul Nisbet on the 8th December, 2011

We have just uploaded the six TeeJay Maths secondary books to the Books for All Database, which means that all the TeeJay textbooks are now available for pupils with print disabilities to use. The files have been kindly supplied to us by Tom and John at TeeJay, and there are strict terms and condi...

Can you use an App on multiple iPads?

Posted by Robert Stewart on the 6th December, 2011

A question I was asked recently is how many iPads (or iPod Touch and iPhone) can you put an App on? The answer to that would be as many as you want. However, that doesn't mean that these devices can then be used by a clasroom of pupils at the same time if only 1 licence for that App has been purc...

New text-based communication aid from Toby Churchill

Posted by 14 on the 28th November, 2011

Toby Churchill Ltd. are preparing to launch a new communication aid, the Lightwriter Swift - a pocket sized dedicated text-to-speech communication device - reportedly the smallest device of its type in the world. You can see the new device on it's UK Launch Tour, in Edinburgh, at the ...

Games and Toys for Christmas?