accessibility

ShareTool is a low-price application for remotely accessing Bonjour services on your home or office network--like music and file sharing--from anywhere you have an Internet connection. ShareTool also encrypts traffic through SSH, effectively creating a VPN. You can do nearly anything you could normally do on your own network from anywhere in the world, including watching movies from iTunes, grabbing files (with automatic compression for faster transfers), accessing your desktop and hard drive, and even initiating remote sleep and wake up.

The only potential downsides are that you have to enable remote log-in on your computer and keep ShareTool running … Read more

Lost in the shuffle of yesterday's myriad WWDC announcements, Apple unveiled iDisk, a free app that lets you view and share documents, videos, and the like.

If that sounds familiar, it's because these capabilities already exist in apps like Air Sharing, File Sharing, and Soonr.

So, what sets iDisk apart? For starters, it's exclusively for MobileMe subscribers. (Feel free to stop reading here and now.) So while the app itself is free, it'll actually cost you $99 annually to use.

iDisk offers two main functions. First, it lets you view your MobileMe-housed Office or iWork '09 … Read more

Q-Dir gives you the ability to view the properties of up to four files all at once for side-by-side comparisons. We were unimpressed by its tiny, unintuitive command buttons but, overall, it did its job well.

The user interface opens as four panels, each with the same commands, and each with the ability to browse for a specific file. At the top of the window reside tiny, almost microscopic buttons that let you choose your view. We had to hover our mouse over each one to learn its function. Still, we were able to quickly search for, and pull up, … Read more

Known for offering one of the biggest wireless mesh networks for regular hot spot users and being the first that brought Wireless-N to the outdoors, Meraki on Monday showed that it can also mean serious business with its new enterprise class wireless local area network (WLAN) solutions.

WLAN is nothing new. Buy a wireless router to set up at home and you have one. However, it's a lot more complicated and expensive when it comes to the enterprise-class WLAN, where both large coverage and high performance are needed.

What Meraki introduced offers just that, plus lower price points. For … Read more

8Start Launcher claims to be a program launching tool that alleviates desktop clutter. However, thanks to its lack of intuitiveness, we'd rather stick to launching programs the old-fashioned way.

Once activated, the program appears as a tiny, transparent black screen in the far left-hand corner of your desktop. The interface is skinnable, but you can't move it around your desktop. Our hard disk information was displayed in the window, but we had to squint to see the tiny text size. Not knowing where to go next, we paid a visit to the Settings menu, which only led to … Read more

One of the least appreciated conveniences MP3 players have given us is the capability to fit a library of audiobooks in our pocket. For those with vision impairment or blindness, the ease of instantly downloading digital audiobooks is especially liberating, compared with the days of CDs and cassettes. Unfortunately, most MP3 players simply aren't designed with accessibility in mind, keeping the convenience of digital audiobooks out of reach for those who would most appreciate it.

The HumanWare VictorReader Stream digital-audio player isn't particularly slim, attractive, or affordable ($349), but its unique design is made specifically for the needs of blind and vision-impaired users. The device is laid out similarly to a large mobile phone, complete with a spacious numerical keypad and dedicated volume buttons on the side. A numerical keypad may seem like an odd choice of navigation for a portable audio player, but in its defense, few other interfaces are as instantly and universally recognizable to the touch. The tricky part is remembering exactly what each key represents. For instance, repeatedly pressing the number one will cycle you though the Stream's main menu categories, each announced over your headphones or the internal speaker in a pleasant synthetic voice.

Below the keypad are basic playback controls (Play, Pause, Reverse, and Skip), each differentiated by the shape of its key. You'll also find an oval-shaped key above the play button that advances the built-in sleep timer in increments of 15 minutes, in case you have a tendency to doze off while listening to books.… Read more

Web Site Zapper claims to block questionable Web sites from view, but it worked a little too well and blocked us from sites we indicated were acceptable.

Once activated, the program appears in your taskbar, but we found a lag time whenever we tried to access it. A tiny window appeared with very vague instructions such as Learn Bad Sites and Learn Good Sites. The Configuration menu lets you add sites you wish to block and sites you wish to allow. We entered URLs into each category, but when we tried to surf the Web, we were blocked from any … Read more

VeriSign's VIP (VeriSign Identity Protection) Access for Mobile is a free app that lets you add an extra layer of security to your typical Web log-ins from your iPhone and iPod Touch. Popular sites such as eBay, AOL, GEICO, and PayPal all support the app, which is currently only available for the iPhone. The VIP Access application works by creating credentials that are tied to your iPhone--based on your number--and confirmed through SMS. After confirmation, the app generates a unique, six-digit token that changes every 30 seconds based on an algorithm associated with the credentials created. It's extremely … Read more