Thanks to Christian Heilmann
for blogging about Launchy, the open source keystroke launcher for Windows
which allows you to open pretty much anything just by typing its name, including applications, files and folders, web searches or just about anything else you can think of. perform the default keystroke of alt+space type what you want and press enter. if you pause typing a list of suggestions (which is visually there on the right the whole time) takes focus and can be arrowed up and down, press enter to choose your selection. you can add variables by pressing hte tab key and then typing. the manual suggests typing weather press tab and then type the name of your town/city, unfortunately for Brits Launchy currently uses weather.com for weather searches and this only gives US data but after a quick skim of the manual I think it should be pretty easy to set up a uk bespoke route to a preferred UK centric site.. if all this weren’t grand enough you can also run Launchy off a USB drive (by following instructions in the manual) so this makes it one of a small breed of accessible portable apps or portable assistive technologies if you like along with NVDA, and very few others although it is a very high calibre stable with the front runner to date being Mozilla Live
which is a suite of Firefox, FireVox, and NVDA all of which can run footprint free from a USB drive or CD. Note the Mozilla live Link points to the downloadable ISO (190MB) from which you can burn your own Mozilla Live CD.
Launchy open virtually anything just by typing its name
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