[Blindtlk] A Couple of Questions About Braille Watches and a Little Humorous Irony

[Szostak, Christine]

Hi All,
  I just have a two quick questions regarding braille watches.

  I have used them from time-to-time and as many here know, I recently ordered one that both talks and uses braille.

  My first, and most important question is this: although I have typically been relatively accurate at telling time on the braille watch, I  nearly always seem to be off by 1-3 minutes (since there are no tick marks between the 12 main numbers okay, technically dots:)). What I was wondering about is whether anyone here who uses a braille watch has gotten really good at accuracy both in setting and reading the braille watch (i.e., accurate to the minute) or if I should just expect  myself to just assume that I am going to be nearly accurate but not perfec:) because of the lack of the tick marks? Hopefully that made some sense.

  I was using a vibrating watch, but switched to the braille watch simply because the vibrations require more time to tell time and I do not want to use speech on a watch when I am in professional settings such as when at work.

 My second question is whether anyone knows why it is called a braille watch when it is actually not braille. Are there actually braille watches with real braille and not just 1-3 dots on them?

Ok, so now for my little bit of humorous irony. I received my new braille/talking watch and it came with printed (but not braille or audio) instructions. Does anyone else see the irony here. If you are going to make a watch for the blind, why would you only provide printed instructions? Ok,  so many of us, myself included, I am aware have programs like OpenBook and/or the KNFB Reader,:) but I am guessing that the printed instructions probably show images to assist the individual reading them which would not work with those programs.
Happy weekend all!
Chris

Dr. Christine M. Szostak
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Department of Social Sciences
Shorter University
Rome, Georgia
szostak.1 at osu.edu<mailto:szostak.1 at osu.edu>
cszostak at shorter.edu