Being an insatiable bookworm and busy student means I read an awful lot of books. Many of those books are in the dreaded PDF format, which has a nasty habit of being partially or wholly inaccessible at worst and a demon to navigate at best. Simply mentioning PDF documents might be followed by a sharp intake of breath or a pained groan from many a blind person; it really is that bad. While Adobe Reader and Acrobat are usable in a pinch, they’re by no means convenient, and on my system at least, they enjoy crashing. So, when I discovered a beautifully accessible eBook reader called QRead, my life got easier in a real hurry. Suddenly, wading through academic journals and complicated course outlines wasn’t quite the ordeal it used to be. I no longer felt the urge to snuggle up to a bottle of wine each time an instructor sent me an assignment in PDF. I only lament that I spent so long grappling with Adobe!

Accessible Apps, the company behind QRead, is also responsible for a range of accessible software that is designed with the blind in mind, if you’ll pardon the cliché. They have everything from an RSS Feed reader, to a Twitter client (which I adore), among others. There are plenty of blind developers working on similar projects, but I haven’t integrated as much of their software into my life as I have with this source. I find myself stopping to be grateful each time I open a PDF in QRead or scroll through tweets with Chicken Nugget, the afore-mentioned Twitter client (no, I don’t know why they called it that, either). Their mission statement proclaims that they create “useful, innovative software,” and I have to agree. They develop no-frills, practical tools that focus on ease of use rather than impressive features nobody will use.

So, thanks, Accessible Apps. You’ve made this busy bee much more productive, which frees her up to do fun things like drink coffee and blog about all the ways the world really sucks. Keep it up!