Open Source Programs for Students with Print

Impairments

Who needs them?

Where can I find them?

How can they help my students?

What is Free and Open Source Software?

(FOSS)Software whose source code is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying fees.

More simply: Free programs with no restrictions

Who Needs Them?

Students who don’t have major programs like MS Office or Word

Students who need an alternative way to access expensive applications

(and incidentally, teachers who are seeking the same thing)

Where Can I Find Them?osalt.com (open source as alternative)

Need an image editing program but don’t have Photoshop? Try Krita or Seashore.Need a flowchart program or a way to draw diagrams? Try Dia or OpenOffice Draw.

www.opensourcemac.org All things Macintosh: Mozilla Firefox; Bean or AbiWord (word processing), Audacity (sound recording), Cyberduck (ftp program), and Skim (a PDF reader and note-taker).

Sourceforge.net – chock full of OS programs

How Can They HelpMy Students?

They don’t cost a thing.

They’re great alternatives to power-house programs like Microsoft Office.

They’re easy to find and download.

Spotlight on OS Programs

OpenOffice.org 3: the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, and databases. Available in many languages and works on all common computers. Can be used to read and write files from other common office software packages.

Spotlight on OS Programs

OOo4Kids: an OpenOffice program for kids ages 7 to 12 (download.ooo4kids.org)

Based on the source code of OO.org Offers simplified wizards and optionsWorks on all platformsHas tutorials and support for kids

eSpeak Text to Speech: speech synthesizer for English (Windows only)

Spotlight on OS Programs

Songbird: A cross-platform, multiple format audio player (plays mp3 files) and file management program

NVDA (Non Visual Desktop Access): An open source screen reader for the Windows OS.

7-Zip: A packing and unpacking compression program (Windows)

Spotlight on OS Programs

iPodDisk (Mac only): another open source program that lets you sync your computer with your iPod – mp3 files from your iPod can be put on your computer. It’s a backwards synching option; take files from your school computer to your iPod to your home computer

Just for fun…

Barack Obama’s election campaign website ran Open Source software

John McCain’s website ran proprietary software.

Just the facts; no party-pitch.

Questions?

This presentation resides at the Web Resources page of our NIMAC website: www.uwyo.edu/wind/nimas

Email: nimas@uwyo.edu

Phone: (307) 766-5770