Accessibility

Literacy & Learning

Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard provides a wide variety of applications and alternative communication methods that offer language and communication assistance.

Built-in Dictionary and Thesaurus

Mac OS X Leopard includes a powerful Dictionary application that provides access to such resources as the New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus, Apple Dictionary, and the Internet-based encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

Dictionary also provides additional content from the New Oxford American Dictionary, including grammar, spelling, and pronunciation guides and such reference materials as the chemical elements, weights and measures, and conversions.

Japanese-English Dictionary

The Dictionary application in Mac OS X Leopard also comes with an industry-leading Japanese dictionary and thesaurus provided by Shogakukan. The dictionary contains over 200,000 words with rich descriptions and examples, and the thesaurus contains 25,000 words covering 6,000 categories. Using Dictionary, you can even translate English to Japanese and vice versa. Use the Preferences window in Dictionary to activate and deactivate the Japanese-English dictionaries.

Spelling and Grammar Checking

In Mac OS X Leopard, the Apple Cocoa Text engine provides universal spelling and grammar checking. Since all the applications access the same dictionaries, you’re assured of consistency from one application to the next. And if you add a new word to the spelling or grammar dictionary in one application, it’s automatically added to the universal dictionary. Best of all, spelling and grammar checking works the same in every application. Learn it once. Use it everywhere.

Word Completion

To avoid mistakes and reduce keystrokes, you can have Mac OS X Leopard complete your words for you. After typing a few characters, simply press the Escape key. Leopard displays a list of words beginning with the characters you typed. Double-click the word you want to complete your partially typed word.

Text to Speech

Mac OS X includes various male, female, and novelty voices you can use to speak a selection or text or an entire document. A highly useful solution for those with cognitive disabilities, Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology allows them to hear a word as well as see it onscreen. TTS works with all applications that support the Mac OS X Speech engine, including Mail, iChat, and TextEdit.

The latest version of the OS — Mac OS X Leopard — features a new voice called Alex. A human-sounding voice that sounds just as good at high speed as at normal speaking rates, Alex is so natural that he even breathes when speaking long passages.

Mac OS X lets you adjust the voice and speaking rate for all voices, and you can easily and affordably add non-English voices by purchasing them from third-party vendors.

Grapher

A full-featured graphic calculator, Grapher enables the real-time analysis and visualization of mathematical equations. It can display single or multiple equations in one graph, and it supports 2D and 3D rendering and animation. Grapher lets you save and export animations as QuickTime files.