Dear AccessWorld Readers,
It seems like the summer flies by every year. In just a few short weeks, less for some, the students among us will be returning to school. For our July issue, we bring you content of particular interest to students, but topics that would be interesting to those of us who have completed our educations as well.
To open this issue, we bring you two book reviews in one. If you've sought a book that will help you navigate the massive amount of options available when designing the appearance of your documents, Deborah Kendrick brings us a book review of Judy Dixon's latest book, Designing Documents for Appearance, which does just that. In the second half of this book review double feature, Steve Kelley reviews the book The Beauty of Dusk by Frank Bruni. Frank's book takes you through the journey of losing his vision and the unexpected beauty he found in what most consider to be a profoundly negative experience.
The United States government has identified the most accessible COVID-19 at-home test on the market and made it accessible to people with vision loss. Bill Holton explains how to access the tests and provides a review of the test itself.
In his second article in this issue, Bill also details a new method for making charts and graphs more accessible called VoxLense. This method is unique in that it only relies on a developer to add a single line of code to their graph or chart to make it accessible with VoxLense.
Next, Janet Ingber brings us a comparison of two OCR scanning apps specifically designed for people with vision loss, Voice Dream Scanner and OneStep Reader.
Bookshare is now available as a skill for the Amazon Echo, making it more accessible to more people than before and adding another platform where you can enjoy your books. The skill is in beta, and Steve Kelley brings us a review of its current features.
To close out the issue, Steve Kelley brings us two more reviews, A review of Senior Sidekick, a Microsoft Surface tablet designed to be easy to use by seniors, and the new Voice Dream Reader app for the Mac.
As always, I would like to give a shout out to our wonderful authors for their constant work bringing us excellent articles each month as well as to you, AccessWorld readers, for reading our magazine.
Sincerely,
Aaron Preece
AccessWorld Editor and Chief
American Foundation for the Blind
This article is made possible in part by generous funding from the James H. and Alice Teubert Charitable Trust, Huntington, West Virginia.
