Access Technology Skills

The PRCVI outreach team attended the Getting in Touch with Literacy Conference in Seattle, WA from November 14-16, 2019. We've prepared an overview of the sessions we attended along with links to presentation notes and resources. Turning on Touch Thinking: From Tactile Discrimination to Braille Letter Identification This presentation by Donna McNear focused on teaching tactil ...

Have you seen the new LEGO Audio and Braille Instructions? LEGO has made four popular building block sets accessible by creating step-by-step audio instructions as well as screen reading-friendly and refreshable braille display-friendly instructions! Of the four building block sets that have been adapted with audio and refreshable braille display-friendly instructions, PRCVI ha ...

This week is National AccessAbility Awareness Week in Canada. The week, which lasts from May 26 to June 1, celebrates and raises awareness about the importance of accessibility and inclusive design in areas such as work, school, leisure activities, and communities. Activities and events are being held in provinces across Canada, including virtual celebrations through the #Acces ...

Do you have a student working towards independent access to print? One option for on-the-go access to print is using a mobile app. While there are many apps out there that perform OCR (optical character recognition) to convert images to text, here are several that have been designed specifically for individuals with visual impairments. These apps can be used on their own, or in ...

More and more devices have been incorporating accessibility features throughout the past decade. First the Mac, then iOS devices, then Android devices, and finally Windows incorporated screen reader and magnification features. Windows made major updates to Narrator, its built-in screen reader, with the release of Windows 8 and Windows 10. And with the latest update to Windows 1 ...

Adam and I were discussing Chromebook accessibility recently as part of an outreach visit. Chromebooks, like most modern operating systems, has many built-in accessibility features that may not be obvious. Here's an overview of some of Chromebook's accessibility features as they relate to students with visual impairments. Magnification Chromebooks have several ways of enlargi ...

On Friday afternoon Steve Barclay from Canadian Assistive Technology presented to our O&M Sharing Session on the new Victor Reader Trek from HumanWare. We've created a page on the PRCVI site with all of the resources, links, and handouts from that day. This page not only includes Steve's presentation about the Trek, but also all the fantastic resources shared by O&M spe ...

Last week I attended the Annual Meeting of the American Printing House for the Blind. PRCVI has makes many APH products available to our TSVI colleagues in BC through the library catalogue. It is always great to see what new items are on the horizon and to provide feedback to APH on existing products as well as product ideas for development. Some of the new products on the hori ...

Webinars can be a helpful resource to learn about technology, especially when they provide detailed step-by-step instructions for how to use programs. Freedom Scientific has run paid webinars for many years, but has recently made archives of these webinars available free to everyone. The previously paid webinars now available for free include: PowerPoint 365/2016 with JAWS ...

Over the past month, PRCVI has been exploring ways to extend our coding project. This past week Colton and I had the opportunity to explore some of our ideas with a high school student and her teacher of students with visual impairments.  Apple developed the Swift Playgrounds app for the iPad to teach programming concepts and the Swift programming language through interactive ...