The Coburn Blog

boy, yesterday was certainly an interesting day.

First off, the taxi didn’t know to pick me up at 8am like it normally does when I goto Bristol. Normally, what happens, is my instructor calls my counselor to make arrangements for me to be picked up. She calls my counselor, and he calls the taxi and has them pick me up, so I don’t have to pay for it. I go there about once a week, I have been since April. Its my Blind training school. Living skills is what they call it.

Anyway, my counselor said he called the Taxi the day before and told them all the dates I would need picked up, including that day, but they had forgotten, so my counselor asked to speak to a manager, to find out why they had forgotten he talked to them, and the manager said it was because a new crew of people for the day came on, so he got rather irritated about that, and asked them if they ever write stuff down? hehe. I told him I says, the fast cabs taxi service does that to me all the time. I call ‘em like 2-3 hours in advance, cuz otherwise they won’t pick you up at all, and either they show up late, which would be ok, except other times they don’t show up at all, and we’re not talking a day, but a couple hours later, so I told him it does get rather frustrating, esp if a person has to take a taxi for work, being late to work looks bad on the employee, not the taxi service, so its rather frustrating to deal with.

but the KABS service, which is a bus, closest we have to public transportation here, is better at picking people up on time. in fact, there the oppisite, the only way they will take you anywhere, is if its for work or something, so like, taking them for rides to school will be out, because school schedule changes every semester, and the bus doesn’t like it when your schedule changes, so when you stop riding at that scheduled time from last semester, they no longer pick you up at all, but those are the only 2 choices we got here in Warsaw for public transportation, rather frustrating at times, esp because the bus service is only for disabled and retired people, but yet its rediculous how they treat retired and disabled people like that.

Anyway,I got to NILLS around 10pm, about an hour and a half late, but in this case wasn’t a big deal. She started me on keyboarding training and using the Zoomtext software.. I didn’t realize what all that Zoomtext software can do, it was really neat.

At first I thought I would just be using the magnification and contrast controls, but she showed me that the speech part can be very helpful too. For instance, and I think even 20/20 people can appreciate this, it has 2 options called an “appreader” and a “docreader”. The Docreader will simply just read your word, excel, access documents to you word by word. The appreader, is nice for web sites by reading the content inside internet explorer or firefox to you. It either skips over images, or reads the description of the image. so like, once it encounters an image, it reads whats in the alt=”" tags, so if the webmaster leaves the alt field blank, it skips over the image, but if they put in alt=”smiley face” then it’ll read the words “a smiley face” to you. cool eh? so it gave me a WHOLE different perspective on web development I tell yah, and how powerful those “alt” tags can be for images, because if you put in say, alt=”:)” it will say “colon left-bracket” which to a blind person, doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t even mean anything to me and I can see it. LOL, so it gave me a totally new perspective on using those alt tags correctly in websites.

Anyway that was really neat.. She was also explaining to me, that different software called “Jaws for WIndows” is better for the totally blind. Visually impaired usually like zoomtext better, because its got zooming, contrast, and speech controls, but for a totally blind person, zoomtext speech isn’t that good, so for totally blind they usually recommend Jaws. She was showing me that program too, and I agreed that I did like Zoomtext better, but I did like the speech much better on Jaws, its much clearer spoken, has different voices male or female, it sounds more like human speech rather then just a computer generated voice. plus, Jaws has options just for blind people, like zones, so like, you have complete control over what is read to you. both programs have options to control what is being read to you, like for instance, you can have it read “just” the content of a web page, and not the title bars, menu bars, or address bars. but Jaws has more controls for that then Zoomtext does, which is why its better for the totally blind, but still, Zoomtext still has alot of those, so like, if my eyes aren’t feeling very good one day, and I just want it to read my email for me, or a website for me, then it can word for word, its really neat.

so anyway, that was my fun yesterday. Of course Computers are always fun for me, but that speech software stuff, even someone with 20/20 can appreciate that, just have your email or documents or webpages read word for word to you, very cool stuff Zoomtext will even go as far as underlining, or wedge or circle, around the word thats being spoken, so you can follow along while sitting back in your chair.. Both programs were just updated to work with Microsoft Vista too, so there pretty up to date software for the most part. Costly, of course. I think Zoomtext was $595, and I can’t remember how much Jaws is, around that same price range, cheaper then zoomtext but not by much. Way beyond what I can afford, of course, but Voc rehab is going to get me a copy of Zoomtext for me to use for my Online classes, so when I get it in a few weeks, I’ll be able to use it for everyday stuff too, but mostly for the online classes, for I won’t have to get transportation to the school to take those classes when there given completely online.

Now I just need to figure out how to get ahold of a copy of Office 2003 or 2007 and I should be good to go for summer classes.  I may end up having to go into class to use the computers there, may not have a choice on that one, but if I can get ahold of a legal copy of Office somehow, then I can take the Access class this summer from home without having to try to deal with the taxi stuff..