Top Software Picks

High-quality text-to-speech voices for use with VoiceOver and your Mac’s other speech services.

Infovox IVox provides voice synthesis in superb quality for a wide variety of languages, including, but not limited to, English, French, Spanish, German, Swedish, and Dutch.

The most powerful and accessible OCR solution for the Mac. Scan and read printed documents with ease!

VisioVoice extends VoiceOver functionality and provides multi-lingual support, text magnification, enlarged cursors, and more.

Louis for Mac is an advanced Braille translation and embossing utility. It provides both forward and backward translation for Grade 2 English, as well as Braille translation for a wide variety of other languages.

The Internet’s largest repository for cross-platform interactive fiction and text adventure games.

Listen to on the fly or create audio books with the Mac’s text-to-speech capabilities, and assign different voices to different characters and parts.

Remember all those great text adventure games you used to play? Wouldn’t it be fun to relive those titles and some great new works of interactive fiction in a fit of pure nostalgia? Zoom is one of the best interactive fiction interpreters for any platform

This popular alternative to Apple’s iChat is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X. With Adium, you can connect to any number of messaging accounts on any combination of supported messaging services, including AIM, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, and more

This 100% VoiceOver compatible application lets you write, preview, and publish without a web browser, and that’s just the beginning.

A full-featured FTP client, Transmit makes uploading and downloading files to your web site and other servers fast and painless.

This utility is designed similarly to iTunes, but is meant for cataloguing and keeping track of your book library. It can automatically fetch details about titles you enter, and you can even link Etexts to entries.

This innovative application will help you fall asleep at night, battle insomnia, induce energizing naps, or just relax. It produces new and different soothing audio each time you use it which has been scientifically proven to relax the listener.

Have Microsoft Windows programs that you need to run on your Mac? Virtualization allows you to run Windows and Mac OS X side-by-side on Intel-based Macs. VMWare Fusion is the most accessible one out there, and it works great with VoiceOver.

A powerful multitrack audio editor supporting a variety of formats including MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, Apple Lossless, AIFF, Wave and more.

Thisapplication allows you to record audio from any sources on your Mac, even singling out the audio output from specific applications. Want to record a Skype call? What about the audio from your favorite Internet radio stream? It’s never been easier.

Fission is an audio editing tool for Mac OS X which allows the fine-tuning of your audio files with ease and precision. Fission supports a wide-array of popular audio formats and is the perfect companion to Audio Hijack Pro.

This great plug-in provides playback of Windows Media content within Quicktime on your Mac. You can also view or listen to these types of media files in your browser as well.

This free and open source tool will extract video content from your DVD’s for your personal use. Prepare video with ease for viewing on your computer, your iPod, your AppleTV, and more. Handbrake can even preserve 5.1 surround sound audio.

Turn your text files into audio books using the high quality text-to-speech included on your Mac, or using the third-party voice synthesis solutions which are compatible with Apple’s Speech API. Prepare novels, textbooks, or even web sites for easy listen

Listen to on the fly or create audio books with the Mac’s text-to-speech capabilities, and assign different voices to different characters and parts.

Did your hard drive crash? Is all the music you’ve painstakingly ripped from those thousands of CD’s, which are now boxed up in your basement, trapped on your iPod? Never fear! Senuti can retrieve your music from your iPod and save it to your hard disk.

This light-weight DVD authoring tool is fully compatible with VoiceOver, , and you can create simple DVD’s playable on your living room DVD player. It’ll even convert many video formats to the appropriate standard DVD format and create a simple DVD menu.

A powerful spreadsheet application with many advanced functions, the ability to import Excel spreadsheets, and much more.

This freeware word processing application provides more extensive tools for formatting and creating documents than OS X’s built-in TextEdit. It supports a wide variety of common formats, provides the ability to create tables, and much more.

Word processing application with advanced formatting and other features. Available in both Pro and Express versions.

The most powerful and accessible OCR solution for the Mac. Scan and read printed documents with ease!