Colin Hughes

Freedom: the ability to do what I want to do, when I want to do it, with the minimum of fuss. It’s what I value most in life. And Speechware’s TwistMike means I get to enjoy a lot more freedom.

I have mus […]

Last year I reviewed the TwistMike by SpeechWare, a company with a strong reputation for professional microphones in the speech recognition industry. I was amazed at the accuracy of my voice dictation when using […]

At its WWDC event last week, Apple unveiled the latest versions of its major operating systems: iOS 15, iPadOS 15, MacOS Monterey and WatchOS 8. While these updates include some eagerly-anticipated new features — […]

Apple has just announced a range of new accessibility features that are designed for people with mobility, vision, hearing, and cognitive disabilities.

One of the most interesting concerns the Apple Watch. […]

Global Accessibility Awareness Day is in its tenth year of promoting digital access and inclusion for the more than one billion people worldwide with disabilities.

Apple is celebrating the day by making its […]

Nadhim Zahawi, the Minister for Covid-19 Vaccine Deployment, has said he is confident the government will meet its vaccine targets.

The first of these targets that government ministers have set themselves is to […]

For some, being forced to stay home and work remotely via Zoom during the Covid-19 pandemic has been a temporary reprieve from the daily commute. Employers have supported workers to work from home, and for those […]

After three months of beta testing over the summer Apple has released iOS 14 to the public. It includes a range of new features, including widgets on the Home screen, an all-new App Library, and much […]

SpeechWare is a Belgian company with a great reputation in the speech recognition industry for professional microphones that are regarded as among the very best you can get.
I have been using the company’s USB […]

Echo Frames are an Amazon Day 1 product released earlier this year. Day 1 products are pilot products for testing that may or may not get released to consumers.
In autumn 2019 Amazon announced it would be […]

I have been using an electric powered wheelchair for more than 40 years. In the 1980s powered wheelchairs were very basic and did little more than take you from A to B.

Thankfully, over the decades technology […]

iOS 14
1) Better Voice Control and dictation – support for UK English, and a beefed-up Siri speech-to-text engine. Fixing a bug that mangles text dictated into the main Google search text box.

2) Smarter Siri […]

We’re just a few hours away from WWDC 2020 — Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference. This year it is a completely online event due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The virtual keynote is later today where the c […]

Readers of Aestumanda may recall I had my electric door opener automated with Amazon Alexa voice control just before the UK went into Covid 19 lockdown earlier this year. Due to the lockdown I have had few […]

It’s a year since Apple first unveiled its flagship accessibility feature called Voice Control at WWDC 2019. With an inspiring short film the company showed Ian McKay, a disability advocate and outdoor enthusiast, […]

Please note: when Apple unveiled the latest version of macOS at WWDC 2020 in June it bumped the version number up to macOS 11.0
A couple of weeks ago Apple invited select developers to attend an accessibility […]

Last year I wrote about how the release of voice-activated hands-free hey Siri in the second-generation Airpods improved access to the Apple Watch for people with severe physical disabilities.

Where previously […]

Earlier this week I installed a fairly significant update to the iPhone’s operating system iOS 13.4. Whilst it included new features such as iCloud Drive folder sharing, and improvements to the Mail application […]