Colin Hughes

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 […]

Aside from the coronavirus threatening me and the rest of the world it has been a very positive start to 2020 as I continue extending my smart home to give me more independence, choice and control of my […]

The customer is king. Everyone takes that old saying as gospel. But is it still true today? Is the customer always right? I am really starting to wonder.

I ordered a new washing machine from Samsung, the old […]

iPhones are eye-wateringly expensive. The latest one, the iPhone 11 Pro, costs from £1,049 but is a product that is unrivalled for its size with a gold standard camera, great screen and 32-hour battery […]

As Labour’s election pledge suggests, digital technology is no longer seen as a luxury. Rolling out broadband for all has been likened to the great Victorian projects to provide clean water, or the building of t […]

In the year Apple has released its most significant accessibility initiative ever it may not be popular to express the idea that in some areas Apple is failing its most severely disabled consumers but it has to be […]

Full, fantastic, life-changing…this was one of the gushing headlines about Apple’s new Voice Control feature after it was announced at the tech giant’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on 7 June. […]