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Volume 14, No. 2, Spring 2006 |
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The AT Bargain Basement
Marvin Williams, AT Specialist
Kent County ATRC
Hello true believers, and welcome to this installment of the AT Bargain Basement. This is the place where I, your humble AT Specialist, strive to find all of the assistive technology I can bring to you for under $100. If you happen to find any bargains, make sure you send them along to me, and I’ll enshrine them in the Bargain Basement! Now, let’s get to the bargains!
The first bargain comes to us from Linda Heller from the Hearing Loss Association of Delaware, and Linda’s bargain is cellular jewelry. These fancy bracelets actually light up and flash when your cell phone rings. I have seen watches that do this at Wal-Mart, but I haven’t seen anything as attractive as these bracelets. These are great for cell phone users who are hearing impaired and are unable to be alerted by the vibration of the phone (if it’s in a purse or coat pocket). Do note that currently the jewelry only works with GSM cell phones, so make sure that is the type of phone you have. The jewelry sells for $19.99 and is available through Potomac Technology. Their phone/TTY number is (800) 433-2838 and their web address is www.potomactech.com.
My next bargain was brought to my attention by DATI’s own Sussex County AT Specialist, Dan Fendler. Dan suggested a nice low-priced MP3 player which would have a lot of educational uses given the recent boom in podcasting. Podcasting is the new 21st Century way of providing information and a more specialized education to students. I like podcasts as a means of listening to Meet the Press and other shows while I crank out The Basement. Basically, a podcast is an audio recording of material that one can listen to on an Apple iPod or other MP3 player. Well, Dan hipped me to some nice low cost MP3 players, one of which I bring to you today. The IROCK-930 is a great little MP3 player that also has a secure digital card reader (those tiny memory cards that go into your digital camera). This makes the player’s memory expandable to 2 GB of storage with the proper secure digital card. The nice thing though, is that this MP3 player is not expensive, selling for $25.99 on www.amazon.com. Now don’t be confused if you do a search on the IROCK-930 and it shows you the EZMP3 player 128 Mb. They are the same model. So if Podcasts or MP3 casts are your thing, you may want to give this bargain a try. Do note that not all MP3 players are compatible with Apple’s iTunes format, the default format for podcasts. While this one is not, it is still a good bargain for listening to MP3s of classes and the like.
The next bargain is a real deal. It’s the GE Reveal light bulb. Yes, a light bulb. The GE Reveal is a full-spectrum bulb, which provides better, "cleaner” light than regular incandescent or fluorescent bulbs. The Reveal bulbs have an element called neodymium in the glass. It gives the bulbs a distinctive blue color and acts to filter out the parts of light that may be taxing on the eyes. Normally, you would expect to pay top dollar for such lighting, but by replacing existing bulbs with GE Reveals, you can get the benefit for as little as $2.50 for a four pack. Yes, you read correctly: $2.50. What’s more, you can get them at Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and Lowe’s, so they are easily available. While there is still some debate over the health benefits of full spectrum lighting, I have found that using the lights does make a difference in how text appears on the page and computer screen. While the ATRCs don’t have the GE Reveal bulbs for you to try, we do have other full spectrum lamps you can try free of charge, as usual.
My next bargain is some really nice software called EasyOffice. This software isn’t a pirated version of Microsoft Office. It’s software that is compatible with Office programs like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It can also be used to create PDF documents instead of spending more than $400 on Adobe Acrobat. While it doesn’t offer all of the capabilities of Acrobat, it can still make a pretty useful PDF. It also has EasySpeaker, a text-to-speech program, bundled with it. EasySpeaker will read most every type of file EasyWord can open even if it’s not opened in EasyWord. It can also read web pages. EasySpeller is an interactive dictionary and thesaurus that EasyOffice gives you. It also comes with EasyVoice for speech recognition to rival IBM’s Via Voice. While it’s no Dragon Naturally Speaking, it is extremely good given its low price tag. EasyOffice has all of these programs and too many more to name here, all for $59. Now, this money goes towards the development costs and the cost of giving you everything on CD. While $59 may still seem like a lot of money, you should check out the website, http://easyofficepremium.com/, to see why it is indeed a steal at $59.
And that will bring to a close this installment of the AT Bargain Basement. As usual, please send along any bargains you may find so that I can credit you and share them with everyone else here. So until next time remember, just because it’s a bargain, doesn’t mean it’s cheap!
