From raniaismail04 at gmail.com  Fri Jan  1 02:30:14 2010
From: raniaismail04 at gmail.com (Rania)
Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 21:30:14 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] happy newyear
Message-ID: <001c01ca8a8a$5ade52c0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>

Wishing everyone a Happy new year!
Rania,
"For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
See you at the finish line."
~Christopher Reeve

From jessica.trask.reagan at gmail.com  Fri Jan  1 03:12:01 2010
From: jessica.trask.reagan at gmail.com (Jess)
Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:12:01 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities
In-Reply-To: <006001ca8967$f7a39490$e6eabdb0$@net>
References: <SNT128-W54B5E0D696C9F3EAA7C4C8A47D0@phx.gbl>	<4b36cb80.cf02be0a.6afd.20ad@mx.google.com>	<COL107-DS22765050240EBBCF0D158EB57C0@phx.gbl>	<423e6e460912271655y699a0e51le81c02e0f39d8e2e@mail.gmail.com><4b38f686.8802be0a.1c1c.467d@mx.google.com>
	<006001ca8967$f7a39490$e6eabdb0$@net>
Message-ID: <06F00756B0E348549B3019FA592D63C2@Jessica>

Denna,
Most colleges use Internet Explorer.  I haven't heard of any colleges using 
Google Chrome because as far as I know because I've also used it myself it's 
not accessible with any of the screen readers currently out. I used to use 
Firefox an  awful a lot but now I'm using IE 8.  In fact, when I was 
attending the community college I actually installed Firefox on couple of 
the computers I was using and I didn't get in trouble for it which was odd 
because usually a student isn't allowed to install anything on the 
computers.  I've also installed Safari on my computer but, I don't know what 
I'm doing wrong if anything. Because I thought it was also supposed to be 
accessible on  the PC side as well..
Jessica
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Denna Lambert" <dlambert at aristotle.net>
To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Cc: <lori.a.simmons at nasa.gov>
Sent: Wednesday, December 30, 2009 10:51 AM
Subject: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities


> Got a quick question for everyone (geeks and non-geeks alike).  Do your
> universities or professors require the use of any of these products?
>
> FireFox 3.0 or greater;
> Safari 4.0 or greater;
> Chrome 3 or greater,
>
> Are these web browsers accessible?  What has been your experience with 
> them?
>
>
> Any help you can be would be great.
>
> Denna
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jessica.trask.reagan%40gmail.com 




From trev.saunders at gmail.com  Fri Jan  1 03:15:08 2010
From: trev.saunders at gmail.com (trev.saunders at gmail.com)
Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:15:08 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities
In-Reply-To: <006001ca8967$f7a39490$e6eabdb0$@net>
References: <SNT128-W54B5E0D696C9F3EAA7C4C8A47D0@phx.gbl>
	<4b36cb80.cf02be0a.6afd.20ad@mx.google.com>
	<COL107-DS22765050240EBBCF0D158EB57C0@phx.gbl>
	<423e6e460912271655y699a0e51le81c02e0f39d8e2e@mail.gmail.com>
	<4b38f686.8802be0a.1c1c.467d@mx.google.com>
	<006001ca8967$f7a39490$e6eabdb0$@net>
Message-ID: <E1NQXym-0003re-JA@main>

Hi,

I'm rather confused, why would anyone care what browser people use?

personally I prefer firefox.
firefox is accessible, and so is afari on macs.

tbsaunde	


From l.sterling0 at gmail.com  Fri Jan  1 03:42:03 2010
From: l.sterling0 at gmail.com (lsterling0)
Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 21:42:03 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Happy new years
Message-ID: <000401ca8a94$62794cb0$276be610$@com>

Hi all, hope everyone has a great new year.
Have a safe new years eve.
Lou

Owner of vipspouses a list for visually impaired and blind individuals to
discuss frustrations in their lives.
for an invitation To join contact 
lsterling0 at gmail.com






From tealbloodworth at gmail.com  Fri Jan  1 04:18:07 2010
From: tealbloodworth at gmail.com (Teal Bloodworth)
Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:18:07 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities
References: <SNT128-W54B5E0D696C9F3EAA7C4C8A47D0@phx.gbl>	<4b36cb80.cf02be0a.6afd.20ad@mx.google.com>	<COL107-DS22765050240EBBCF0D158EB57C0@phx.gbl>	<423e6e460912271655y699a0e51le81c02e0f39d8e2e@mail.gmail.com><4b38f686.8802be0a.1c1c.467d@mx.google.com><006001ca8967$f7a39490$e6eabdb0$@net>
	<COL107-DS6A3079384ED9324916DA0B5780@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <1D5B65339BA447B08632CB9E97AFF037@teal6e6857f643>

what about the new google chrome?
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jacob Struiksma" <lawnmower84 at hotmail.com>
To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2009 2:21 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities


> Mozilla Firefox  works find with jaws.  I use Mozilla Firefox all the time
> with jaws 11
> From
> Jacob Struiksma
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On 
> Behalf
> Of Denna Lambert
> Sent: Wednesday, December 30, 2009 7:52 AM
> To: 'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'
> Cc: lori.a.simmons at nasa.gov
> Subject: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities
>
> Got a quick question for everyone (geeks and non-geeks alike).  Do your
> universities or professors require the use of any of these products?
>
> FireFox 3.0 or greater;
> Safari 4.0 or greater;
> Chrome 3 or greater,
>
> Are these web browsers accessible?  What has been your experience with 
> them?
>
>
> Any help you can be would be great.
>
> Denna
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/lawnmower84%40hotmai
> l.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com 



From dandrews at visi.com  Fri Jan  1 04:34:22 2010
From: dandrews at visi.com (David Andrews)
Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:34:22 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities
In-Reply-To: <006001ca8967$f7a39490$e6eabdb0$@net>
References: <SNT128-W54B5E0D696C9F3EAA7C4C8A47D0@phx.gbl>
	<4b36cb80.cf02be0a.6afd.20ad@mx.google.com>
	<COL107-DS22765050240EBBCF0D158EB57C0@phx.gbl>
	<423e6e460912271655y699a0e51le81c02e0f39d8e2e@mail.gmail.com>
	<4b38f686.8802be0a.1c1c.467d@mx.google.com>
	<006001ca8967$f7a39490$e6eabdb0$@net>
Message-ID: <auto-000133517041@mailfront1.g2host.com>

Well, to a certain extent it may depend on your access 
technology.  Generally, Firefox is accessible.  I don't think Chrome 
is at all, and are you talking about Safari on the Mac, or on Windows 
-- or somewhere else -- not sure what other platforms it runs on -- 
if any.  I think it is fine on Mac, don't know about anywhere else.

Dave

At 09:51 AM 12/30/2009, you wrote:
>Got a quick question for everyone (geeks and non-geeks alike).  Do your
>universities or professors require the use of any of these products?
>
>FireFox 3.0 or greater;
>Safari 4.0 or greater;
>Chrome 3 or greater,
>
>Are these web browsers accessible?  What has been your experience with them?
>
>
>Any help you can be would be great.
>
>Denna



From bookwormahb at earthlink.net  Fri Jan  1 04:47:20 2010
From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net (bookwormahb at earthlink.net)
Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:47:20 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
Message-ID: <BD63F8D1339C4CFF990AF9B581E63D1B@Ashley>

Hi All,

I'm getting a VR stream.  I'd like to hear from users of it about your experiences and what it does.  What do you use it for?  I know you can download digital talking books; now I use the traditional cassettes.  What's the site to download books?  

What navigation capabilities does it have?  Can you search by words?  I know on the VR Wave you can go to bookmarks as well as chapters and pages.  

If you record stuff can you transfer it to your computer?  What functions does the MP3 player portion have?  Can you create playlists?  Can you jump to certain songs by name or singer like with regular mp3 players?  

What are some of the cons of it?
I will likely use it for recording notes such as phone numbers and lists.  I will also use the books feature to download books from RFB and digital talking books.

Thanks.
Ashley

From dandrews at visi.com  Fri Jan  1 06:05:35 2010
From: dandrews at visi.com (David Andrews)
Date: Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:05:35 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities
In-Reply-To: <E1NQXym-0003re-JA@main>
References: <SNT128-W54B5E0D696C9F3EAA7C4C8A47D0@phx.gbl>
	<4b36cb80.cf02be0a.6afd.20ad@mx.google.com>
	<COL107-DS22765050240EBBCF0D158EB57C0@phx.gbl>
	<423e6e460912271655y699a0e51le81c02e0f39d8e2e@mail.gmail.com>
	<4b38f686.8802be0a.1c1c.467d@mx.google.com>
	<006001ca8967$f7a39490$e6eabdb0$@net> <E1NQXym-0003re-JA@main>
Message-ID: <auto-000133519977@mailfront1.g2host.com>

Well, I can think of at least one example, I am sure there are 
others.  If it is a web development class it would be important to 
see how a certain page coding behaved under different browsers.

Dave

At 09:15 PM 12/31/2009, you wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I'm rather confused, why would anyone care what browser people use?
>
>personally I prefer firefox.
>firefox is accessible, and so is afari on macs.
>
>tbsaunde



From lilrichie411 at gmail.com  Fri Jan  1 06:26:24 2010
From: lilrichie411 at gmail.com (Jordan Richardson)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 00:26:24 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Happy new years
In-Reply-To: <000401ca8a94$62794cb0$276be610$@com>
References: <000401ca8a94$62794cb0$276be610$@com>
Message-ID: <ca301f5e0912312226m29e3f0e6r3258dcc279d994bf@mail.gmail.com>

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL!!!

I hope y'all have a happy new year!   un ano prospero y con felicidad.

Jordan
2nd VP, MnABS

2009/12/31 lsterling0 <l.sterling0 at gmail.com>

> Hi all, hope everyone has a great new year.
> Have a safe new years eve.
> Lou
>
> Owner of vipspouses a list for visually impaired and blind individuals to
> discuss frustrations in their lives.
> for an invitation To join contact
> lsterling0 at gmail.com
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/lilrichie411%40gmail.com
>



-- 
Jordan Richardson
2nd Vice President, Minnesota Association of Blind Students
lilrichie411 at gmail.com
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

From commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net  Fri Jan  1 07:30:44 2010
From: commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net (Kevin Wassmer)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 00:30:44 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] alarm clocks
References: <B3C0E9D55915488EAABED6519E305BD2@kevin9ee0841f6>
	<648100921DD94275A921B45D130E4AE4@Hope>
Message-ID: <1C4A43337186431FBCBFB29B7956FE4F@kevin9ee0841f6>

Where did you get it?
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Hope Paulos" <hope.paulos at maine.edu>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2009 9:13 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] alarm clocks


>I have an atomic clock that I won somewhere. It's really loud and it's 
>dependable-- as long as the batteries don't go dead.
> Hope and Beignet
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Kevin Wassmer" <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2009 7:16 AM
> Subject: [nabs-l] alarm clocks
>
>
>> Hello folks. I was wondering what alarm clocks you like. I need something 
>> that is nice and loud. This is because I am a heavy sleeper. I use my 
>> Braille Note as an Alarm Clock. However, that doesn't always work because 
>> it does crash sometimes. What would you recomend?
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/hope.paulos%40maine.edu
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/commanderlumpy2003%40earthlink.net 



From alberto.2500 at gmail.com  Fri Jan  1 08:58:57 2010
From: alberto.2500 at gmail.com (Alberto Arreola)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 01:58:57 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities
In-Reply-To: <06F00756B0E348549B3019FA592D63C2@Jessica>
References: <SNT128-W54B5E0D696C9F3EAA7C4C8A47D0@phx.gbl>	<4b36cb80.cf02be0a.6afd.20ad@mx.google.com>	<COL107-DS22765050240EBBCF0D158EB57C0@phx.gbl>	<423e6e460912271655y699a0e51le81c02e0f39d8e2e@mail.gmail.com><4b38f686.8802be0a.1c1c.467d@mx.google.com>	<006001ca8967$f7a39490$e6eabdb0$@net>
	<06F00756B0E348549B3019FA592D63C2@Jessica>
Message-ID: <4b3db94f.5444f10a.30b0.fffff4f0@mx.google.com>

No you are incorrect on that one it isn't accessible yet.

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Jess
Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2009 8:12 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities

Denna,
Most colleges use Internet Explorer.  I haven't heard of any colleges using 
Google Chrome because as far as I know because I've also used it myself it's

not accessible with any of the screen readers currently out. I used to use 
Firefox an  awful a lot but now I'm using IE 8.  In fact, when I was 
attending the community college I actually installed Firefox on couple of 
the computers I was using and I didn't get in trouble for it which was odd 
because usually a student isn't allowed to install anything on the 
computers.  I've also installed Safari on my computer but, I don't know what

I'm doing wrong if anything. Because I thought it was also supposed to be 
accessible on  the PC side as well..
Jessica
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Denna Lambert" <dlambert at aristotle.net>
To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Cc: <lori.a.simmons at nasa.gov>
Sent: Wednesday, December 30, 2009 10:51 AM
Subject: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities


> Got a quick question for everyone (geeks and non-geeks alike).  Do your
> universities or professors require the use of any of these products?
>
> FireFox 3.0 or greater;
> Safari 4.0 or greater;
> Chrome 3 or greater,
>
> Are these web browsers accessible?  What has been your experience with 
> them?
>
>
> Any help you can be would be great.
>
> Denna
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jessica.trask.reagan
%40gmail.com 



_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/alberto.2500%40gmail
.com



From jessica.trask.reagan at gmail.com  Fri Jan  1 12:04:31 2010
From: jessica.trask.reagan at gmail.com (Jess)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 07:04:31 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Happy new years
In-Reply-To: <ca301f5e0912312226m29e3f0e6r3258dcc279d994bf@mail.gmail.com>
References: <000401ca8a94$62794cb0$276be610$@com>
	<ca301f5e0912312226m29e3f0e6r3258dcc279d994bf@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <47309011B07640B299ADB2A3853659A2@Jessica>

Happy New Year to all.
Jessica
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jordan Richardson" <lilrichie411 at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 1:26 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Happy new years


> HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL!!!
>
> I hope y'all have a happy new year!   un ano prospero y con felicidad.
>
> Jordan
> 2nd VP, MnABS
>
> 2009/12/31 lsterling0 <l.sterling0 at gmail.com>
>
>> Hi all, hope everyone has a great new year.
>> Have a safe new years eve.
>> Lou
>>
>> Owner of vipspouses a list for visually impaired and blind individuals to
>> discuss frustrations in their lives.
>> for an invitation To join contact
>> lsterling0 at gmail.com
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/lilrichie411%40gmail.com
>>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Jordan Richardson
> 2nd Vice President, Minnesota Association of Blind Students
> lilrichie411 at gmail.com
> "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
> --Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jessica.trask.reagan%40gmail.com 




From jessica.trask.reagan at gmail.com  Fri Jan  1 12:09:29 2010
From: jessica.trask.reagan at gmail.com (Jess)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 07:09:29 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities
In-Reply-To: <E1NQXym-0003re-JA@main>
References: <SNT128-W54B5E0D696C9F3EAA7C4C8A47D0@phx.gbl><4b36cb80.cf02be0a.6afd.20ad@mx.google.com><COL107-DS22765050240EBBCF0D158EB57C0@phx.gbl><423e6e460912271655y699a0e51le81c02e0f39d8e2e@mail.gmail.com><4b38f686.8802be0a.1c1c.467d@mx.google.com><006001ca8967$f7a39490$e6eabdb0$@net>
	<E1NQXym-0003re-JA@main>
Message-ID: <20995B08244749DAAB8661EBBFAA69BC@Jessica>

Trev,
Keep in mind most colleges just use Internet Explorer since it comes on 
Windows machines already.
Jessica
----- Original Message ----- 
From: <trev.saunders at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>; "Denna Lambert" <dlambert at aristotle.net>
Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2009 10:15 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities


> Hi,
>
> I'm rather confused, why would anyone care what browser people use?
>
> personally I prefer firefox.
> firefox is accessible, and so is afari on macs.
>
> tbsaunde
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jessica.trask.reagan%40gmail.com 




From trev.saunders at gmail.com  Fri Jan  1 14:32:08 2010
From: trev.saunders at gmail.com (trev.saunders at gmail.com)
Date: Fri, 01 Jan 2010 09:32:08 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities
In-Reply-To: <auto-000133519977@mailfront1.g2host.com>
References: <SNT128-W54B5E0D696C9F3EAA7C4C8A47D0@phx.gbl>
	<4b36cb80.cf02be0a.6afd.20ad@mx.google.com>
	<COL107-DS22765050240EBBCF0D158EB57C0@phx.gbl>
	<423e6e460912271655y699a0e51le81c02e0f39d8e2e@mail.gmail.com>
	<4b38f686.8802be0a.1c1c.467d@mx.google.com>
	<006001ca8967$f7a39490$e6eabdb0$@net> <E1NQXym-0003re-JA@main>
	<auto-000133519977@mailfront1.g2host.com>
Message-ID: <E1NQiXw-0005VP-Fz@main>

hi,

good point, didn't think of that.

tbsaunde


From serenacucco at verizon.net  Fri Jan  1 16:11:00 2010
From: serenacucco at verizon.net (Serena)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 11:11:00 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] happy newyear
References: <001c01ca8a8a$5ade52c0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>
Message-ID: <007601ca8afd$02540460$0201a8c0@Serene>

You, too!

Serena


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rania" <raniaismail04 at gmail.com>
To: "nabs" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2009 9:30 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] happy newyear


> Wishing everyone a Happy new year!
> Rania,
> "For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
> For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
> For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
> See you at the finish line."
> ~Christopher Reeve
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net 



From commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net  Fri Jan  1 16:12:17 2010
From: commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net (Kevin Wassmer)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 09:12:17 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] Happy new year
Message-ID: <39DF86EABD824D30844906FF15A180B0@kevin9ee0841f6>

I want to wish you all a happy new year. This year is going to be very interesting.

From commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net  Fri Jan  1 16:11:16 2010
From: commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net (Kevin Wassmer)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 09:11:16 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
Message-ID: <FEEA069F9B104DB9BB28822D9BF9C3BB@kevin9ee0841f6>

Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a discussion on here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at Verizon Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is rewarding. I am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it socialist insecurity. But that's another story.

                I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs back in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because the thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I would always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their number. This was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I use to have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like that. My question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your note taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I believe a Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the night club sidereal. What would you have done?

From tealbloodworth at gmail.com  Fri Jan  1 16:59:44 2010
From: tealbloodworth at gmail.com (Teal Bloodworth)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 10:59:44 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities
References: <SNT128-W54B5E0D696C9F3EAA7C4C8A47D0@phx.gbl><4b36cb80.cf02be0a.6afd.20ad@mx.google.com><COL107-DS22765050240EBBCF0D158EB57C0@phx.gbl><423e6e460912271655y699a0e51le81c02e0f39d8e2e@mail.gmail.com><4b38f686.8802be0a.1c1c.467d@mx.google.com><006001ca8967$f7a39490$e6eabdb0$@net>
	<E1NQXym-0003re-JA@main>
Message-ID: <7B9CBB1B23534D748B665FE4A5B420E3@teal6e6857f643>

this is a good question and somebody before said they liked fire fox but i 
dont because Jaws always says the name and it just gets on my nerves
----- Original Message ----- 
From: <trev.saunders at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>; "Denna Lambert" <dlambert at aristotle.net>
Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2009 9:15 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities


> Hi,
>
> I'm rather confused, why would anyone care what browser people use?
>
> personally I prefer firefox.
> firefox is accessible, and so is afari on macs.
>
> tbsaunde
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com 



From Rachel at BeckerConsultants.com  Fri Jan  1 19:00:41 2010
From: Rachel at BeckerConsultants.com (Rachel Becker)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 14:00:41 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities
In-Reply-To: <006001ca8967$f7a39490$e6eabdb0$@net>
Message-ID: <FHENLGICKACMNOHLGEFJEEGACKAA.Rachel@BeckerConsultants.com>

Hi it's Rachel. We met on the way to national convention last year. I hope
everything is going well for you. I've never had to use a specific web
browser for a course.
Happy New Year all.
Rachel

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org]On
Behalf Of Denna Lambert
Sent: Wednesday, December 30, 2009 10:52 AM
To: 'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'
Cc: lori.a.simmons at nasa.gov
Subject: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities


Got a quick question for everyone (geeks and non-geeks alike).  Do your
universities or professors require the use of any of these products?

FireFox 3.0 or greater;
Safari 4.0 or greater;
Chrome 3 or greater,

Are these web browsers accessible?  What has been your experience with them?


Any help you can be would be great.

Denna



_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/rachel%40beckerconsu
ltants.com



From katie.Wang at yale.edu  Fri Jan  1 20:54:26 2010
From: katie.Wang at yale.edu (Katie Wang)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 15:54:26 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] on-line survey regarding experiences of students with
	disabilities
Message-ID: <076D5EAC650147A38F41B26A7B152C0F@Prometheus>

Hello, fellow list members,
  happy New Year to all! I'm a psychology graduate student at Yale University and have a small request. I'm 
conducting an on-line study on the cognitive styles and strategies of college students with disabilities to better understand their campus experiences, and I would greatly appreciate your input by taking a 15-minute, anonymous survey. Anyone who is an undergraduate or graduate/professional student with a permanent disability (blind or otherwise) and is 18 years or older is welcome to participate. In exchange for your participation, you will be entered into a prize drawing for a $25 Amazon.com gift certificate, with the odds of winning ranging from 1 in 25 to 1 in 40 (please follow the instructions on the last page of the survey to enter this prize drawing).

  If you are interested, please click on the link below, which will take you directly to the survey. If you have questions about this research project, please do not hesitate to contact me at Katie.wang at yale.edu. If you know of anyone else who might be interested in participating, feel free to distribute this message. Thank you so much in advance for your time and assistance!

   Sincerely,

     Katie Wang

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DS89CZF

From thebluesisloose at gmail.com  Fri Jan  1 21:24:21 2010
From: thebluesisloose at gmail.com (Beth)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 16:24:21 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
In-Reply-To: <FEEA069F9B104DB9BB28822D9BF9C3BB@kevin9ee0841f6>
References: <FEEA069F9B104DB9BB28822D9BF9C3BB@kevin9ee0841f6>
Message-ID: <4383d01d1001011324t3cd47accqdb1bda8ea9bcdc88@mail.gmail.com>

Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers are
not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
is a good option.
Beth

On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a discussion on
> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at Verizon
> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is rewarding. I
> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it socialist
> insecurity. But that's another story.
>
>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs back
> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because the
> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I would
> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their number. This
> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I use to
> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like that. My
> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your note
> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I believe a
> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the night club
> sidereal. What would you have done?
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>


From adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com  Fri Jan  1 21:54:00 2010
From: adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com (Adrianne Dempsey)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 16:54:00 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
References: <FEEA069F9B104DB9BB28822D9BF9C3BB@kevin9ee0841f6>
	<4383d01d1001011324t3cd47accqdb1bda8ea9bcdc88@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <5E47F1F4CDE447AFA8217A8B8945191B@YOUR314E04A90B>

I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even bring 
my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want to 
set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it.  In 
fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with it on 
the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted guide.  I 
hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go with 
other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel silly 
with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having someone 
ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it yourself.  But 
my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and it 
brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit O.K. 
again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in the 
name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have a 
bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your number. 
This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell phones 
now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if you can 
get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful with 
this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you move 
funny or if your pants are tight.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers are
> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
> is a good option.
> Beth
>
> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a discussion on
>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at Verizon
>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is 
>> rewarding. I
>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it 
>> socialist
>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>>
>>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs 
>> back
>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because the
>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I would
>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their number. 
>> This
>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I use 
>> to
>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like that. 
>> My
>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your note
>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I believe a
>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the night 
>> club
>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
> 


From daydreamingncolor at gmail.com  Fri Jan  1 22:05:20 2010
From: daydreamingncolor at gmail.com (Aziza C)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 14:05:20 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
In-Reply-To: <5E47F1F4CDE447AFA8217A8B8945191B@YOUR314E04A90B>
References: <FEEA069F9B104DB9BB28822D9BF9C3BB@kevin9ee0841f6>
	<4383d01d1001011324t3cd47accqdb1bda8ea9bcdc88@mail.gmail.com>
	<5E47F1F4CDE447AFA8217A8B8945191B@YOUR314E04A90B>
Message-ID: <632092011001011405s2e0dfdd5r7e73f69a834a7438@mail.gmail.com>

I don't see a problem with asking the person to write down their
number and having someone read it later. I do that all the time, no
matter the situation if I'm not prepared to take it down myself, why
lose the opportunity to build a relationship of any sort? A woman came
up to me in the store one day and began asking me how best to educate
a blind person, she was a teacher who was about to have a blind child
in her class, I told her she could call me and we'd talk about the
resources, but she said she'd just write her number for me so I could
call her on my time, which worked because I didn't have anything to
take the number down with, so she wrote it and I asked a friend to
read it later. Its simple, and only requires you to have a pen and
paper which isn't that big of a deal to carry around. A friend of mine
always has a digital recorder with him.
Aziza

On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even bring
> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want to
> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it.  In
> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with it on
> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted guide.  I
> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go with
> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel silly
> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having someone
> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it yourself.  But
> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and it
> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit O.K.
> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in the
> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have a
> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your number.
> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell phones
> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if you can
> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful with
> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you move
> funny or if your pants are tight.
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers are
>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>> is a good option.
>> Beth
>>
>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a discussion on
>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at Verizon
>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>> rewarding. I
>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>> socialist
>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>>>
>>>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs
>>> back
>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because the
>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I would
>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their number.
>>> This
>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I use
>>> to
>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like that.
>>>
>>> My
>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your note
>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I believe a
>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the night
>>> club
>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/daydreamingncolor%40gmail.com
>


From dandrews at visi.com  Fri Jan  1 22:26:27 2010
From: dandrews at visi.com (David Andrews)
Date: Fri, 01 Jan 2010 16:26:27 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
In-Reply-To: <FEEA069F9B104DB9BB28822D9BF9C3BB@kevin9ee0841f6>
References: <FEEA069F9B104DB9BB28822D9BF9C3BB@kevin9ee0841f6>
Message-ID: <auto-000133323289@mailfront2.g2host.com>

I would take a slate and stylus.  There are small ones that Braille 
on cards.  Using one makes you independent -- having someone put a 
number in your cell phone seems more dependent to me.

Dave

At 10:11 AM 1/1/2010, you wrote:
>Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a 
>discussion on here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have 
>a job at Verizon Wireless working at a call center. It is 
>challenging. How it is rewarding. I am glad to finely get off of 
>social security soon. Or as I call it socialist insecurity. But 
>that's another story.
>
>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night 
> clubs back in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with 
> me because the thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded 
> strange. But I would always have a problem if I met someone and 
> wanted to get their number. This was because the music was so loud 
> that it was hard to communicate. I use to have people program 
> numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like that. My question 
> to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your note 
> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I 
> believe a Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some 
> like the night club sidereal. What would you have done?



From daydreamingncolor at gmail.com  Fri Jan  1 22:41:17 2010
From: daydreamingncolor at gmail.com (Aziza C)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 14:41:17 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
In-Reply-To: <auto-000133323289@mailfront2.g2host.com>
References: <FEEA069F9B104DB9BB28822D9BF9C3BB@kevin9ee0841f6>
	<auto-000133323289@mailfront2.g2host.com>
Message-ID: <632092011001011441u3295eed5h5144b06e498f156d@mail.gmail.com>

I agree with Dave, but isn't letting someone put their number in your
phone what sighted people do too? I've seen my sister trade phones
with her new friends and they input their numbers in each others
phones. Or, one person will input the number in the other's phone,
then the person will call them and the first person will save the
number when it shows up on the missed call list.
Aziza

On 1/1/10, David Andrews <dandrews at visi.com> wrote:
> I would take a slate and stylus.  There are small ones that Braille
> on cards.  Using one makes you independent -- having someone put a
> number in your cell phone seems more dependent to me.
>
> Dave
>
> At 10:11 AM 1/1/2010, you wrote:
>>Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a
>>discussion on here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have
>>a job at Verizon Wireless working at a call center. It is
>>challenging. How it is rewarding. I am glad to finely get off of
>>social security soon. Or as I call it socialist insecurity. But
>>that's another story.
>>
>>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night
>> clubs back in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with
>> me because the thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded
>> strange. But I would always have a problem if I met someone and
>> wanted to get their number. This was because the music was so loud
>> that it was hard to communicate. I use to have people program
>> numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like that. My question
>> to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your note
>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I
>> believe a Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some
>> like the night club sidereal. What would you have done?
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/daydreamingncolor%40gmail.com
>


From dandrews at visi.com  Fri Jan  1 22:50:15 2010
From: dandrews at visi.com (David Andrews)
Date: Fri, 01 Jan 2010 16:50:15 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities
In-Reply-To: <1D5B65339BA447B08632CB9E97AFF037@teal6e6857f643>
References: <SNT128-W54B5E0D696C9F3EAA7C4C8A47D0@phx.gbl>
	<4b36cb80.cf02be0a.6afd.20ad@mx.google.com>
	<COL107-DS22765050240EBBCF0D158EB57C0@phx.gbl>
	<423e6e460912271655y699a0e51le81c02e0f39d8e2e@mail.gmail.com>
	<4b38f686.8802be0a.1c1c.467d@mx.google.com>
	<006001ca8967$f7a39490$e6eabdb0$@net>
	<COL107-DS6A3079384ED9324916DA0B5780@phx.gbl>
	<1D5B65339BA447B08632CB9E97AFF037@teal6e6857f643>
Message-ID: <auto-000133324105@mailfront2.g2host.com>

Chrome is apparently not accessible at this point.

Dave

At 10:18 PM 12/31/2009, you wrote:
>what about the new google chrome?
>----- Original Message ----- From: "Jacob Struiksma" <lawnmower84 at hotmail.com>
>To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'" 
><nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2009 2:21 AM
>Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities
>
>
>>Mozilla Firefox  works find with jaws.  I use Mozilla Firefox all the time
>>with jaws 11
>>From
>>Jacob Struiksma
>>
>>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
>>Of Denna Lambert
>>Sent: Wednesday, December 30, 2009 7:52 AM
>>To: 'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'
>>Cc: lori.a.simmons at nasa.gov
>>Subject: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities
>>
>>Got a quick question for everyone (geeks and non-geeks alike).  Do your
>>universities or professors require the use of any of these products?
>>
>>FireFox 3.0 or greater;
>>Safari 4.0 or greater;
>>Chrome 3 or greater,
>>
>>Are these web browsers accessible?  What has been your experience with them?
>>
>>
>>Any help you can be would be great.
>>
>>Denna



From raniaismail04 at gmail.com  Fri Jan  1 23:02:31 2010
From: raniaismail04 at gmail.com (Rania)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 18:02:31 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] happy newyear
References: <001c01ca8a8a$5ade52c0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>
	<007601ca8afd$02540460$0201a8c0@Serene>
Message-ID: <002701ca8b36$8087f8d0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>

Thanks Cerina!
Rania,
"For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
See you at the finish line."
~Christopher Reeve

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Serena" <serenacucco at verizon.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 11:11 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] happy newyear


> You, too!
>
> Serena
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Rania" <raniaismail04 at gmail.com>
> To: "nabs" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2009 9:30 PM
> Subject: [nabs-l] happy newyear
>
>
>> Wishing everyone a Happy new year!
>> Rania,
>> "For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
>> For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
>> For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
>> See you at the finish line."
>> ~Christopher Reeve
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaismail04%40gmail.com 



From jessica.trask.reagan at gmail.com  Fri Jan  1 23:08:19 2010
From: jessica.trask.reagan at gmail.com (Jess)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 18:08:19 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities
In-Reply-To: <1D5B65339BA447B08632CB9E97AFF037@teal6e6857f643>
References: <SNT128-W54B5E0D696C9F3EAA7C4C8A47D0@phx.gbl>	<4b36cb80.cf02be0a.6afd.20ad@mx.google.com>	<COL107-DS22765050240EBBCF0D158EB57C0@phx.gbl>	<423e6e460912271655y699a0e51le81c02e0f39d8e2e@mail.gmail.com><4b38f686.8802be0a.1c1c.467d@mx.google.com><006001ca8967$f7a39490$e6eabdb0$@net><COL107-DS6A3079384ED9324916DA0B5780@phx.gbl>
	<1D5B65339BA447B08632CB9E97AFF037@teal6e6857f643>
Message-ID: <E655F275DBEE41EBA5F13C2102DB46B5@Jessica>

Teal,
Google Chrome isn't accessible with screen readers.
Jessica
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Teal Bloodworth" <tealbloodworth at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2009 11:18 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities


> what about the new google chrome?
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Jacob Struiksma" <lawnmower84 at hotmail.com>
> To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2009 2:21 AM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities
>
>
>> Mozilla Firefox  works find with jaws.  I use Mozilla Firefox all the 
>> time
>> with jaws 11
>> From
>> Jacob Struiksma
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On 
>> Behalf
>> Of Denna Lambert
>> Sent: Wednesday, December 30, 2009 7:52 AM
>> To: 'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'
>> Cc: lori.a.simmons at nasa.gov
>> Subject: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities
>>
>> Got a quick question for everyone (geeks and non-geeks alike).  Do your
>> universities or professors require the use of any of these products?
>>
>> FireFox 3.0 or greater;
>> Safari 4.0 or greater;
>> Chrome 3 or greater,
>>
>> Are these web browsers accessible?  What has been your experience with 
>> them?
>>
>>
>> Any help you can be would be great.
>>
>> Denna
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/lawnmower84%40hotmai
>> l.com
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jessica.trask.reagan%40gmail.com 




From brice.smith319 at gmail.com  Fri Jan  1 23:16:45 2010
From: brice.smith319 at gmail.com (Brice Smith)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 18:16:45 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
In-Reply-To: <5E47F1F4CDE447AFA8217A8B8945191B@YOUR314E04A90B>
References: <FEEA069F9B104DB9BB28822D9BF9C3BB@kevin9ee0841f6>
	<4383d01d1001011324t3cd47accqdb1bda8ea9bcdc88@mail.gmail.com>
	<5E47F1F4CDE447AFA8217A8B8945191B@YOUR314E04A90B>
Message-ID: <679a273c1001011516q5b68a367r91d8abe6f8671cb6@mail.gmail.com>

I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is the
last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell phone,
and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
happens.

To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything extra
that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
trouble.

Brice
On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even bring
> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want to
> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it.  In
> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with it on
> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted guide.  I
> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go with
> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel silly
> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having someone
> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it yourself.  But
> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and it
> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit O.K.
> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in the
> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have a
> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your number.
> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell phones
> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if you can
> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful with
> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you move
> funny or if your pants are tight.
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers are
>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>> is a good option.
>> Beth
>>
>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a discussion on
>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at Verizon
>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>> rewarding. I
>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>> socialist
>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>>>
>>>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs
>>> back
>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because the
>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I would
>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their number.
>>> This
>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I use
>>> to
>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like that.
>>>
>>> My
>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your note
>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I believe a
>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the night
>>> club
>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com
>


From bookwormahb at earthlink.net  Fri Jan  1 23:34:02 2010
From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net (Ashley  Bramlett)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 18:34:02 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Happy new year
References: <39DF86EABD824D30844906FF15A180B0@kevin9ee0841f6>
Message-ID: <0678C4E024FC4D46A5632CABF1EF4AD0@Ashley>

Hi All,
Years fly by.  I can't believe we are starting another new year.  To make 
some substance to this how about sharing a goal or resolution you have for 
the upcoming year.
I graduated last year with a BA in liberal studies which meant I studied 
psychology and communication.
My goals include making healthy eating choices, exercise, some weight loss, 
making time to relax so I'm not too stressed, and finding a fulfilling job 
or volunteer experience.

Happy new year!
Ashley

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kevin Wassmer" <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 11:12 AM
Subject: [nabs-l] Happy new year


>I want to wish you all a happy new year. This year is going to be very 
>interesting.
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
> 



From hope.paulos at maine.edu  Sat Jan  2 01:11:02 2010
From: hope.paulos at maine.edu (Hope Paulos)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 20:11:02 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities
References: <SNT128-W54B5E0D696C9F3EAA7C4C8A47D0@phx.gbl><4b36cb80.cf02be0a.6afd.20ad@mx.google.com><COL107-DS22765050240EBBCF0D158EB57C0@phx.gbl><423e6e460912271655y699a0e51le81c02e0f39d8e2e@mail.gmail.com><4b38f686.8802be0a.1c1c.467d@mx.google.com><006001ca8967$f7a39490$e6eabdb0$@net><E1NQXym-0003re-JA@main>
	<7B9CBB1B23534D748B665FE4A5B420E3@teal6e6857f643>
Message-ID: <D23F41BB57264028884C132658653500@Hope>

Firefox, at least with Leopard with voice  over, is not accessible with the 
mac.  It might be with snow leopard, I don't know. If I'm using a mac, I'll 
use safari. If using a PC I'll either use firefox or Internet Explorer. I 
hardly use firefox anymore, since solona.net exists to solve captias.
Hope and Beignet
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Teal Bloodworth" <tealbloodworth at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 11:59 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities


> this is a good question and somebody before said they liked fire fox but i 
> dont because Jaws always says the name and it just gets on my nerves
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: <trev.saunders at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>; "Denna Lambert" <dlambert at aristotle.net>
> Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2009 9:15 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities
>
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm rather confused, why would anyone care what browser people use?
>>
>> personally I prefer firefox.
>> firefox is accessible, and so is afari on macs.
>>
>> tbsaunde
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/hope.paulos%40maine.edu 



From hope.paulos at maine.edu  Sat Jan  2 01:18:00 2010
From: hope.paulos at maine.edu (Hope Paulos)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 20:18:00 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
References: <BD63F8D1339C4CFF990AF9B581E63D1B@Ashley>
Message-ID: <F6118304A8DF437DA3B51844BA09BDE7@Hope>

Hi Ashley. I've found it extremely useful for recording classes. Both 
classes I attend and classes I teach. It allows me to then transfer the 
recordings to the computer. I've not played around with the music portion of 
the vr stream, so would be interested in hearing more about that from 
another subscriber.  You cansearch for a word if the book is in txt format. 
Otherwise, you can navigate to chapter or page.
Hth.
Hope and Beignet
----- Original Message ----- 
From: <bookwormahb at earthlink.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2009 11:47 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons


> Hi All,
>
> I'm getting a VR stream.  I'd like to hear from users of it about your 
> experiences and what it does.  What do you use it for?  I know you can 
> download digital talking books; now I use the traditional cassettes. 
> What's the site to download books?
>
> What navigation capabilities does it have?  Can you search by words?  I 
> know on the VR Wave you can go to bookmarks as well as chapters and pages.
>
> If you record stuff can you transfer it to your computer?  What functions 
> does the MP3 player portion have?  Can you create playlists?  Can you jump 
> to certain songs by name or singer like with regular mp3 players?
>
> What are some of the cons of it?
> I will likely use it for recording notes such as phone numbers and lists. 
> I will also use the books feature to download books from RFB and digital 
> talking books.
>
> Thanks.
> Ashley
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/hope.paulos%40maine.edu 



From hope.paulos at maine.edu  Sat Jan  2 01:28:33 2010
From: hope.paulos at maine.edu (Hope Paulos)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 20:28:33 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
References: <FEEA069F9B104DB9BB28822D9BF9C3BB@kevin9ee0841f6><4383d01d1001011324t3cd47accqdb1bda8ea9bcdc88@mail.gmail.com><5E47F1F4CDE447AFA8217A8B8945191B@YOUR314E04A90B>
	<679a273c1001011516q5b68a367r91d8abe6f8671cb6@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <2708D4B09DB642E1878C889DF47F2C61@Hope>

I' with Brice. I'd definitely bring a cane, if that is your travel aid of 
choice. I  use a guide dog, but won't take her to the clubs. I'll most 
likely bring a folding cane or my telescopic  cane. The cane I have gets 
really small.
Hope and Beignet
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 6:16 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


>I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
> others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is the
> last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
> whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
> friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell phone,
> and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
> this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
> ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
> keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
> happens.
>
> To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything extra
> that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
> anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
> trouble.
>
> Brice
> On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even 
>> bring
>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want to
>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it.  In
>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with it 
>> on
>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted guide. 
>> I
>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go 
>> with
>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel silly
>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having someone
>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it yourself. 
>> But
>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and it
>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit O.K.
>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in 
>> the
>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have a
>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your number.
>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell 
>> phones
>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if you 
>> can
>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful with
>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you move
>> funny or if your pants are tight.
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>
>>
>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers are
>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>>> is a good option.
>>> Beth
>>>
>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a discussion 
>>>> on
>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at Verizon
>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>> rewarding. I
>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>> socialist
>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>>>>
>>>>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs
>>>> back
>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because the
>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I 
>>>> would
>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their number.
>>>> This
>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I 
>>>> use
>>>> to
>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like 
>>>> that.
>>>>
>>>> My
>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your 
>>>> note
>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I believe 
>>>> a
>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the night
>>>> club
>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/hope.paulos%40maine.edu 



From daydreamingncolor at gmail.com  Sat Jan  2 02:22:02 2010
From: daydreamingncolor at gmail.com (Aziza C)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 18:22:02 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
In-Reply-To: <679a273c1001011516q5b68a367r91d8abe6f8671cb6@mail.gmail.com>
References: <FEEA069F9B104DB9BB28822D9BF9C3BB@kevin9ee0841f6>
	<4383d01d1001011324t3cd47accqdb1bda8ea9bcdc88@mail.gmail.com>
	<5E47F1F4CDE447AFA8217A8B8945191B@YOUR314E04A90B>
	<679a273c1001011516q5b68a367r91d8abe6f8671cb6@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <632092011001011822w4f1847c4hd0df430009177bd5@mail.gmail.com>

I like Brice's comments. I dont mind doing sighted guide, but I like
having my cane and phone with me anyways, just in case something
happens.
Aziza

On 1/1/10, Brice Smith <brice.smith319 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
> others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is the
> last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
> whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
> friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell phone,
> and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
> this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
> ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
> keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
> happens.
>
> To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything extra
> that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
> anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
> trouble.
>
> Brice
> On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even bring
>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want to
>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it.  In
>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with it on
>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted guide.  I
>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go with
>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel silly
>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having someone
>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it yourself.
>> But
>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and it
>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit O.K.
>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in the
>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have a
>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your number.
>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell phones
>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if you
>> can
>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful with
>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you move
>> funny or if your pants are tight.
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>
>>
>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers are
>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>>> is a good option.
>>> Beth
>>>
>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a discussion
>>>> on
>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at Verizon
>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>> rewarding. I
>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>> socialist
>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>>>>
>>>>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs
>>>> back
>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because the
>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I would
>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their number.
>>>> This
>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I use
>>>> to
>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like
>>>> that.
>>>>
>>>> My
>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your note
>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I believe a
>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the night
>>>> club
>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/daydreamingncolor%40gmail.com
>


From katie.Wang at yale.edu  Sat Jan  2 03:49:47 2010
From: katie.Wang at yale.edu (Katie Wang)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 22:49:47 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] on-line survey regarding experiences of students with
	disabilities
References: <000401ca8a94$62794cb0$276be610$@com>
	<ca301f5e0912312226m29e3f0e6r3258dcc279d994bf@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <709BD949B0A845A68E60273332CFF16B@Prometheus>

Hello, fellow list members,
  happy New Year to all! I'm a psychology graduate student at Yale 
University and have a small request. I'm
conducting an on-line study on the cognitive styles and strategies of 
college students with disabilities to better understand their campus 
experiences, and I would greatly appreciate your input by taking a 
15-minute, anonymous survey. Anyone who is an undergraduate or 
graduate/professional student with a permanent disability (blind or 
otherwise) and is 18 years or older is welcome to participate. In exchange 
for your participation, you will be entered into a prize drawing for a $25 
Amazon.com gift certificate, with the odds of winning ranging from 1 in 25 
to 1 in 40 (please follow the instructions on the last page of the survey to 
enter this prize drawing).

  If you are interested, please click on the link below, which will take you 
directly to the survey. If you have questions about this research project, 
please do not hesitate to contact me at Katie.wang at yale.edu. If you know of 
anyone else who might be interested in participating, feel free to 
distribute this message. Thank you so much in advance for your time and 
assistance!

   Sincerely,

     Katie Wang

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DS89CZF

PS: I'm new to this mailing list and am not quite sure how it works, so my 
apologies to all of you if you got a duplicate of this message.




From bookwormahb at earthlink.net  Sat Jan  2 03:55:28 2010
From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net (bookwormahb at earthlink.net)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 22:55:28 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
Message-ID: <F431BF0F5666406EA29732BC870B6651@Ashley>

Hi all,

How do you handle cafeterias?  If your university is like mine, and most are standard setups, you have various stations.  For instance mine had an entree line, grill, sandwich area, salad bar and more.  Did you have an employee help you?  I chose to do that since it was most efficient.  We walked to the various places and they told me the food and I selected what I wanted.  

Do you carry your own tray?  I always struggled with that; its hard to balance and keep level.  A mobility instructor showed me but its hard; always seems to wobble in my hand.  I either place my hand across the tray or under the tray and grasp it from underneath.  I usually opt for someone to carry it.  

Happy New year!
Ashley 

From bookwormahb at earthlink.net  Sat Jan  2 04:31:00 2010
From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net (Ashley  Bramlett)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 23:31:00 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities
References: <SNT128-W54B5E0D696C9F3EAA7C4C8A47D0@phx.gbl><4b36cb80.cf02be0a.6afd.20ad@mx.google.com><COL107-DS22765050240EBBCF0D158EB57C0@phx.gbl><423e6e460912271655y699a0e51le81c02e0f39d8e2e@mail.gmail.com><4b38f686.8802be0a.1c1c.467d@mx.google.com><006001ca8967$f7a39490$e6eabdb0$@net><E1NQXym-0003re-JA@main>
	<20995B08244749DAAB8661EBBFAA69BC@Jessica>
Message-ID: <CD5227F2401B43329EB113EAB72D1C33@Ashley>

My university also used internet explorer.  This was good since I had it on 
my home PC and was familiar with it with jaws.  I heard fire fox worked okay 
but the commands are different.

Ashley
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jess" <jessica.trask.reagan at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 7:09 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities


> Trev,
> Keep in mind most colleges just use Internet Explorer since it comes on 
> Windows machines already.
> Jessica
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: <trev.saunders at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>; "Denna Lambert" <dlambert at aristotle.net>
> Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2009 10:15 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities
>
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm rather confused, why would anyone care what browser people use?
>>
>> personally I prefer firefox.
>> firefox is accessible, and so is afari on macs.
>>
>> tbsaunde
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jessica.trask.reagan%40gmail.com
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
> 



From bookwormahb at earthlink.net  Sat Jan  2 04:33:55 2010
From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net (Ashley  Bramlett)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 23:33:55 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
References: <FEEA069F9B104DB9BB28822D9BF9C3BB@kevin9ee0841f6><auto-000133323289@mailfront2.g2host.com>
	<632092011001011441u3295eed5h5144b06e498f156d@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <5F0A86A3D6CA4F51BBFCE95DEEEEA927@Ashley>

Aziza,
Yes sighted people trade phones for that.  My brother did that.  At a  club 
I want as less as I can manage so having someone put a number in my phone 
wouldn't bother me.  Another option is for them to write it down and you 
have someone read it to you later.  I don't go to clubs much so this hasn't 
been an issue but that's what I'd do.

Ashley
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Aziza C" <daydreamingncolor at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:41 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


>I agree with Dave, but isn't letting someone put their number in your
> phone what sighted people do too? I've seen my sister trade phones
> with her new friends and they input their numbers in each others
> phones. Or, one person will input the number in the other's phone,
> then the person will call them and the first person will save the
> number when it shows up on the missed call list.
> Aziza
>
> On 1/1/10, David Andrews <dandrews at visi.com> wrote:
>> I would take a slate and stylus.  There are small ones that Braille
>> on cards.  Using one makes you independent -- having someone put a
>> number in your cell phone seems more dependent to me.
>>
>> Dave
>>
>> At 10:11 AM 1/1/2010, you wrote:
>>>Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a
>>>discussion on here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have
>>>a job at Verizon Wireless working at a call center. It is
>>>challenging. How it is rewarding. I am glad to finely get off of
>>>social security soon. Or as I call it socialist insecurity. But
>>>that's another story.
>>>
>>>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night
>>> clubs back in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with
>>> me because the thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded
>>> strange. But I would always have a problem if I met someone and
>>> wanted to get their number. This was because the music was so loud
>>> that it was hard to communicate. I use to have people program
>>> numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like that. My question
>>> to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your note
>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I
>>> believe a Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some
>>> like the night club sidereal. What would you have done?
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/daydreamingncolor%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
> 


From dsmithnfb at gmail.com  Sat Jan  2 05:14:02 2010
From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 21:14:02 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
In-Reply-To: <632092011001011441u3295eed5h5144b06e498f156d@mail.gmail.com>
References: <FEEA069F9B104DB9BB28822D9BF9C3BB@kevin9ee0841f6>
	<auto-000133323289@mailfront2.g2host.com>
	<632092011001011441u3295eed5h5144b06e498f156d@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <409c235c1001012114x7f9b3c62t55fc90ef06ce53a6@mail.gmail.com>

 Interesting topic to be sure.
 I'm a little split on the cane  thought, but I would  probably lean
with the cane  over not having one and certainly over a dog in this
situation.  when I go to "the club" I  have brought a folding cane  or
 telescopic cane for it's portability and compactness.
  As for bringing my braille note; I would not bring it at all for any
reason.  To me bringing a expensibve piece of technology is asking for
trouble and I just would  not want  to be in that situation should
something bad happen.  This said, I would  be perfectly fine with
having someone write down their info  and I get someone  I know with
vision to tell me the information and I write it in my braille note or
in some sort of    medium that I can more easily get to.
 Another  good way is  having someone put the info in your cell phone,
or having somebody call and  leave their number  on your missed calls
list; some people like having  folks leave a voicemail as well.
  these are ideas that  others have mentioned along this string and I
think that they are all good; I just  of course have my  little
opinion  based upon this string.
  Happy New  Year!!
  Darian


On 1/1/10, Aziza C <daydreamingncolor at gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree with Dave, but isn't letting someone put their number in your
> phone what sighted people do too? I've seen my sister trade phones
> with her new friends and they input their numbers in each others
> phones. Or, one person will input the number in the other's phone,
> then the person will call them and the first person will save the
> number when it shows up on the missed call list.
> Aziza
>
> On 1/1/10, David Andrews <dandrews at visi.com> wrote:
>> I would take a slate and stylus.  There are small ones that Braille
>> on cards.  Using one makes you independent -- having someone put a
>> number in your cell phone seems more dependent to me.
>>
>> Dave
>>
>> At 10:11 AM 1/1/2010, you wrote:
>>>Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a
>>>discussion on here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have
>>>a job at Verizon Wireless working at a call center. It is
>>>challenging. How it is rewarding. I am glad to finely get off of
>>>social security soon. Or as I call it socialist insecurity. But
>>>that's another story.
>>>
>>>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night
>>> clubs back in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with
>>> me because the thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded
>>> strange. But I would always have a problem if I met someone and
>>> wanted to get their number. This was because the music was so loud
>>> that it was hard to communicate. I use to have people program
>>> numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like that. My question
>>> to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your note
>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I
>>> believe a Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some
>>> like the night club sidereal. What would you have done?
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/daydreamingncolor%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>


-- 
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
before us;
if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
past and future generations,
then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
done, and
usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama


From katie.Wang at yale.edu  Sat Jan  2 07:02:26 2010
From: katie.Wang at yale.edu (Katie Wang)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 02:02:26 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
References: <BD63F8D1339C4CFF990AF9B581E63D1B@Ashley>
	<F6118304A8DF437DA3B51844BA09BDE7@Hope>
Message-ID: <792946F19AAB4FC8A47E8AD7D54E1AC7@Prometheus>

Hi, Ashley,
  The site for downloading talking books is nlsbard.loc.gov. You will need 
to create a user name and password the first time you visit the site, and 
your state NLS library will approve your account in a few days. After that 
you can download books onto your computer and transfer them to the Stream. I 
just got a Stream myself and haven't played with it much, but I have heard 
many good things about it. A good resource you can check out is the Access 
World journal published on-line by AFB; I have seen several detailed product 
reviews of various talking book players, including the Stream. Hope that 
helps!
   Katie

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Hope Paulos" <hope.paulos at maine.edu>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 8:18 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons


> Hi Ashley. I've found it extremely useful for recording classes. Both 
> classes I attend and classes I teach. It allows me to then transfer the 
> recordings to the computer. I've not played around with the music portion 
> of the vr stream, so would be interested in hearing more about that from 
> another subscriber.  You cansearch for a word if the book is in txt 
> format. Otherwise, you can navigate to chapter or page.
> Hth.
> Hope and Beignet
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: <bookwormahb at earthlink.net>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2009 11:47 PM
> Subject: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
>
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I'm getting a VR stream.  I'd like to hear from users of it about your 
>> experiences and what it does.  What do you use it for?  I know you can 
>> download digital talking books; now I use the traditional cassettes. 
>> What's the site to download books?
>>
>> What navigation capabilities does it have?  Can you search by words?  I 
>> know on the VR Wave you can go to bookmarks as well as chapters and 
>> pages.
>>
>> If you record stuff can you transfer it to your computer?  What functions 
>> does the MP3 player portion have?  Can you create playlists?  Can you 
>> jump to certain songs by name or singer like with regular mp3 players?
>>
>> What are some of the cons of it?
>> I will likely use it for recording notes such as phone numbers and lists. 
>> I will also use the books feature to download books from RFB and digital 
>> talking books.
>>
>> Thanks.
>> Ashley
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/hope.paulos%40maine.edu
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/katie.wang%40yale.edu
> 



From thebluesisloose at gmail.com  Sat Jan  2 14:05:22 2010
From: thebluesisloose at gmail.com (Beth)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 09:05:22 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
In-Reply-To: <792946F19AAB4FC8A47E8AD7D54E1AC7@Prometheus>
References: <BD63F8D1339C4CFF990AF9B581E63D1B@Ashley>
	<F6118304A8DF437DA3B51844BA09BDE7@Hope>
	<792946F19AAB4FC8A47E8AD7D54E1AC7@Prometheus>
Message-ID: <4383d01d1001020605i5a8a723al11c4f3fe91448c6b@mail.gmail.com>

My VR stream is the bomb!  I love the MP3 player portion of it because
it's better than the inaccessibility of the I-pod and I-tunes.
Although I know the I-pod and I-tunes are getting there, I hope
they're getting optimally there.  But as for the VR stream, I like
downloading books from RFBD using the Download manager you have to
download.  I also get the DAISY books from Bookshare as well.  I get
mostly the newspaper from there, and then I download the books to a
little flash card which I can insert into my computer's reader.  I
figured it all out when I got the thing.  The only thing I don't like
about the VR stream is that you have to get a user key for it unless
your state agency paid for it.  Which mine did and I didn't know it.
Also, with RFBD you have to get a user key forthe BrailleNote because
if I wanted to read the books on my BrailleNote, I couldn't because
the VR's user key doesn't work on the BN.
Beth

On 1/2/10, Katie Wang <katie.Wang at yale.edu> wrote:
> Hi, Ashley,
>   The site for downloading talking books is nlsbard.loc.gov. You will need
> to create a user name and password the first time you visit the site, and
> your state NLS library will approve your account in a few days. After that
> you can download books onto your computer and transfer them to the Stream. I
> just got a Stream myself and haven't played with it much, but I have heard
> many good things about it. A good resource you can check out is the Access
> World journal published on-line by AFB; I have seen several detailed product
> reviews of various talking book players, including the Stream. Hope that
> helps!
>    Katie
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Hope Paulos" <hope.paulos at maine.edu>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 8:18 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
>
>
>> Hi Ashley. I've found it extremely useful for recording classes. Both
>> classes I attend and classes I teach. It allows me to then transfer the
>> recordings to the computer. I've not played around with the music portion
>> of the vr stream, so would be interested in hearing more about that from
>> another subscriber.  You cansearch for a word if the book is in txt
>> format. Otherwise, you can navigate to chapter or page.
>> Hth.
>> Hope and Beignet
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: <bookwormahb at earthlink.net>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2009 11:47 PM
>> Subject: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
>>
>>
>>> Hi All,
>>>
>>> I'm getting a VR stream.  I'd like to hear from users of it about your
>>> experiences and what it does.  What do you use it for?  I know you can
>>> download digital talking books; now I use the traditional cassettes.
>>> What's the site to download books?
>>>
>>> What navigation capabilities does it have?  Can you search by words?  I
>>> know on the VR Wave you can go to bookmarks as well as chapters and
>>> pages.
>>>
>>> If you record stuff can you transfer it to your computer?  What functions
>>>
>>> does the MP3 player portion have?  Can you create playlists?  Can you
>>> jump to certain songs by name or singer like with regular mp3 players?
>>>
>>> What are some of the cons of it?
>>> I will likely use it for recording notes such as phone numbers and lists.
>>>
>>> I will also use the books feature to download books from RFB and digital
>>> talking books.
>>>
>>> Thanks.
>>> Ashley
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/hope.paulos%40maine.edu
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/katie.wang%40yale.edu
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>


From albertyoo1 at hotmail.com  Sat Jan  2 14:28:09 2010
From: albertyoo1 at hotmail.com (Albert Yoo)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 09:28:09 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
In-Reply-To: <2708D4B09DB642E1878C889DF47F2C61@Hope>
References: <FEEA069F9B104DB9BB28822D9BF9C3BB@kevin9ee0841f6><4383d01d1001011324t3cd47accqdb1bda8ea9bcdc88@mail.gmail.com><5E47F1F4CDE447AFA8217A8B8945191B@YOUR314E04A90B>,
	<679a273c1001011516q5b68a367r91d8abe6f8671cb6@mail.gmail.com>,
	<2708D4B09DB642E1878C889DF47F2C61@Hope>
Message-ID: <BAY139-W24517C87D9FF0041A79E378B760@phx.gbl>


What did you like about the club? The music would be too loud for you and the person sitting next to you to hear each other. How did people deal with this? I never been before. It would be something to try one time experience. 
 
> From: hope.paulos at maine.edu
> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 20:28:33 -0500
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
> 
> I' with Brice. I'd definitely bring a cane, if that is your travel aid of 
> choice. I use a guide dog, but won't take her to the clubs. I'll most 
> likely bring a folding cane or my telescopic cane. The cane I have gets 
> really small.
> Hope and Beignet
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 6:16 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
> 
> 
> >I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
> > others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is the
> > last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
> > whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
> > friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell phone,
> > and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
> > this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
> > ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
> > keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
> > happens.
> >
> > To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything extra
> > that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
> > anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
> > trouble.
> >
> > Brice
> > On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea. I don't even 
> >> bring
> >> my purse because it is just something to carry around. You don't want to
> >> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it. In
> >> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with it 
> >> on
> >> the dance floor. I usually go with a friend and just go sighted guide. 
> >> I
> >> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do. If I go 
> >> with
> >> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel silly
> >> with it at the club. As far as phone numbers... I think having someone
> >> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it yourself. 
> >> But
> >> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it. I just hit o.k. and it
> >> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact. I hit O.K.
> >> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in 
> >> the
> >> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is. Another option is to have a
> >> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your number.
> >> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell 
> >> phones
> >> now but it is a thought. The slate and stylist is a good idea to if you 
> >> can
> >> get a hold of one of those ninny slates. But you have to be careful with
> >> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you move
> >> funny or if your pants are tight.
> >>
> >>
> >> ----- Original Message -----
> >> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
> >> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
> >> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> >> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
> >> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
> >>
> >>
> >>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject. I would've taken the notetaker just
> >>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information. The numbers are
> >>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
> >>> is a good option.
> >>> Beth
> >>>
> >>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> >>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a discussion 
> >>>> on
> >>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at Verizon
> >>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
> >>>> rewarding. I
> >>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
> >>>> socialist
> >>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
> >>>>
> >>>> I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs
> >>>> back
> >>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because the
> >>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I 
> >>>> would
> >>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their number.
> >>>> This
> >>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I 
> >>>> use
> >>>> to
> >>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like 
> >>>> that.
> >>>>
> >>>> My
> >>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your 
> >>>> note
> >>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I believe 
> >>>> a
> >>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the night
> >>>> club
> >>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
> >>>> _______________________________________________
> >>>> nabs-l mailing list
> >>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> >>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> >>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> >>>> nabs-l:
> >>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> nabs-l mailing list
> >>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> >>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> >>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> >>> nabs-l:
> >>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
> >>>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> nabs-l mailing list
> >> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> >> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> >> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> >> nabs-l:
> >> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com
> >>
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > nabs-l mailing list
> > nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> > To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> > nabs-l:
> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/hope.paulos%40maine.edu 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/albertyoo1%40hotmail.com
 		 	   		  
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From albertyoo1 at hotmail.com  Sat Jan  2 15:24:07 2010
From: albertyoo1 at hotmail.com (Albert Yoo)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 10:24:07 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
In-Reply-To: <F431BF0F5666406EA29732BC870B6651@Ashley>
References: <F431BF0F5666406EA29732BC870B6651@Ashley>
Message-ID: <BAY139-W2879DFA03A79856BB852568B760@phx.gbl>


 

It is okay to ask some one to help you carry the tray in my opinion because it wobbles and it can tip over very easily. You can not carry the cane and control the try safely. It is very hard to do this with out spilling. Stay warm from all the wind. 
 
> From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net
> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 22:55:28 -0500
> Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> How do you handle cafeterias? If your university is like mine, and most are standard setups, you have various stations. For instance mine had an entree line, grill, sandwich area, salad bar and more. Did you have an employee help you? I chose to do that since it was most efficient. We walked to the various places and they told me the food and I selected what I wanted. 
> 
> Do you carry your own tray? I always struggled with that; its hard to balance and keep level. A mobility instructor showed me but its hard; always seems to wobble in my hand. I either place my hand across the tray or under the tray and grasp it from underneath. I usually opt for someone to carry it. 
> 
> Happy New year!
> Ashley 
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/albertyoo1%40hotmail.com
 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail: Powerful Free email with security by Microsoft.
http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/171222986/direct/01/

From albertyoo1 at hotmail.com  Sat Jan  2 15:19:20 2010
From: albertyoo1 at hotmail.com (Albert Yoo)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 10:19:20 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
In-Reply-To: <BD63F8D1339C4CFF990AF9B581E63D1B@Ashley>
References: <BD63F8D1339C4CFF990AF9B581E63D1B@Ashley>
Message-ID: <BAY139-W21AE684AE573F83766B95E8B760@phx.gbl>


go to nlstalkingbooks.org to download talking books to the victor reader stream 
 
> From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net
> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:47:20 -0500
> Subject: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> I'm getting a VR stream. I'd like to hear from users of it about your experiences and what it does. What do you use it for? I know you can download digital talking books; now I use the traditional cassettes. What's the site to download books? 
> 
> What navigation capabilities does it have? Can you search by words? I know on the VR Wave you can go to bookmarks as well as chapters and pages. 
> 
> If you record stuff can you transfer it to your computer? What functions does the MP3 player portion have? Can you create playlists? Can you jump to certain songs by name or singer like with regular mp3 players? 
> 
> What are some of the cons of it?
> I will likely use it for recording notes such as phone numbers and lists. I will also use the books feature to download books from RFB and digital talking books.
> 
> Thanks.
> Ashley
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/albertyoo1%40hotmail.com
 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail: Powerful Free email with security by Microsoft.
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From steve.jacobson at visi.com  Sat Jan  2 16:00:00 2010
From: steve.jacobson at visi.com (Steve Jacobson)
Date: Sat, 02 Jan 2010 10:00:00 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
In-Reply-To: <BD63F8D1339C4CFF990AF9B581E63D1B@Ashley>
Message-ID: <auto-000133605073@mailfront1.g2host.com>

Ashley,

Given the scope of your questions and the fact that you are getting a Stream, it might be worth your time to get the 
manual ahead of time and start reading it to get your questions answered.  In my household, we have both a VR Stream 
and a BookSense, and I would be hard pressed to give either of them up.  Recently I had to get a book on cassette 
because it was not available in digital format, and it just seemed so inconvenient to have to deal with cassettes again.  
Of course, one will have to deal with cassettes some for a good while because some books may only be available that 
way, but one very quickly gets spoiled by having multiple digital talking books available right there in the Stream or the 
BookSense.

The stream records pretty well.  I would not say that it records as well as some of the little recorders that are available 
from companies like Olympus, but I think you would find its ability to record to be more than adequate for lectures and 
voice notes.  You can transfer them to a PC using the Humanware Companion program.

Unfortunately, what you can search for or navigate to is not solely a function of the Stream but how each book is 
prepared.  If a book has actual text associated with it, you can search for text.  If a DAISY book has the pages indexed, 
you can move page by page.  However, NLS books do not support page navigation in general, so you cannot navigate 
by page on those books.  You can move around, even on NLS books, by various time units which helps.

You can play MP3 music files and some other formats as well, but I have not done much with play lists.

In short, there is a good bit to learn to use any device of this type, but I think you are going to find your Stream very 
useful.  Good luck!

Best regards,

Steve Jacobson  

On Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:47:20 -0500, bookwormahb at earthlink.net wrote:

>Hi All,

>I'm getting a VR stream.  I'd like to hear from users of it about your experiences and what it does.  What do you use it 
for?  I know you can download digital talking books; now I use the traditional cassettes.  What's the site to download 
books?  

>What navigation capabilities does it have?  Can you search by words?  I know on the VR Wave you can go to 
bookmarks as well as chapters and pages.  

>If you record stuff can you transfer it to your computer?  What functions does the MP3 player portion have?  Can you 
create playlists?  Can you jump to certain songs by name or singer like with regular mp3 players?  

>What are some of the cons of it?
>I will likely use it for recording notes such as phone numbers and lists.  I will also use the books feature to download 
books from RFB and digital talking books.

>Thanks.
>Ashley
>_______________________________________________
>nabs-l mailing list
>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/steve.jacobson%40visi.com






From hope.paulos at maine.edu  Sat Jan  2 16:14:48 2010
From: hope.paulos at maine.edu (Hope Paulos)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 11:14:48 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] alarm clocks
References: <B3C0E9D55915488EAABED6519E305BD2@kevin9ee0841f6><648100921DD94275A921B45D130E4AE4@Hope>
	<1C4A43337186431FBCBFB29B7956FE4F@kevin9ee0841f6>
Message-ID: <8DF4AB4AD61A4E39956188B02629E563@Hope>

I won it at a local blindness convention. I think Blind Mice Mart has 
several clocks to choose from. I'd google "atomic clock" and see what you 
came up with. I'm sorry-- I was so surprised I won it I didn't even ask 
which company it came from.

Hope and Beignet
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kevin Wassmer" <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 2:30 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] alarm clocks


> Where did you get it?
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Hope Paulos" <hope.paulos at maine.edu>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2009 9:13 AM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] alarm clocks
>
>
>>I have an atomic clock that I won somewhere. It's really loud and it's 
>>dependable-- as long as the batteries don't go dead.
>> Hope and Beignet
>> ----- Original Message ----- 
>> From: "Kevin Wassmer" <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2009 7:16 AM
>> Subject: [nabs-l] alarm clocks
>>
>>
>>> Hello folks. I was wondering what alarm clocks you like. I need 
>>> something that is nice and loud. This is because I am a heavy sleeper. I 
>>> use my Braille Note as an Alarm Clock. However, that doesn't always work 
>>> because it does crash sometimes. What would you recomend?
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/hope.paulos%40maine.edu
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/commanderlumpy2003%40earthlink.net
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/hope.paulos%40maine.edu 



From astrochem119 at gmail.com  Sat Jan  2 17:24:56 2010
From: astrochem119 at gmail.com (Chelsea Cook)
Date: Sat, 02 Jan 2010 12:24:56 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] VR Stream pros and cons
Message-ID: <4b3f802c.8602be0a.4f9a.fffff1ea@mx.google.com>

Ashley,

  I love my Stream! At first I was reluctant to get one, but then 
I found out what it can do.  I use it all the time for reading 
books from NLS and RFBD.  It is easy to get authorization keys 
from these places.  If you have a Web Braille account or are 
affiliated with your library, you should be able to complete an 
application for the new download site.  With RFBD, go to your My 
Account on the online version and select "Authorize New Player." 
Then you just type in the serial number.  I don't use it for 
recording as much now, but that may change.
  There is a program that comes with it called HumanWare Stream 
Companion.  This makes your talking books from NLS easy to 
transfer.  RFBD is more tedious, but I'm trying to see if there's 
an easier way to do it.  You can create bookmarks and transfer 
notes (recordings), to your computer with this program.  I've 
never tried playlists, but I love the Random music feature, 
similar to the concept of the IPod shuffle.  You can't navigate 
by song title and artist, per se, but if you know how your music 
structure is laid out, you can find a specific song by knowing 
its file and folder coordinates.  The Stream will accept those.  
The only other problem I face sometimes is with the NLS books, 
you can't do page navigation.  It doesn't support Word documents 
yet.  Only t x t, b r f, and Html.  You can do word searches in 
these documents, and it makes it easier if you know how to text 
because it uses those same conventions for numbers.  I haven't 
had the practice yet.
  Overall: If you're in college and use NLS and RFBD for most of 
your reading, it's an excellent, all-in-one device.  You can put 
up to a 16 gig HC SD.  card in it (I hear it has issues with 
anything higher), as well as USB flash drives.
Hope this helps,
Chelsea
"I ask you to look both ways.  For the road to a knowledge of the 
stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom 
has been reached through the stars."
Sir Arthur Eddington, British astrophysicist (1882-1944), Stars 
and Atoms (1928), Lecture 1


From astrochem119 at gmail.com  Sat Jan  2 17:24:58 2010
From: astrochem119 at gmail.com (Chelsea Cook)
Date: Sat, 02 Jan 2010 12:24:58 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] NLS Site
Message-ID: <4b3f802f.8602be0a.4f9a.fffff1eb@mx.google.com>

Here is the primary link for NLS.  There should be something on 
this page to take you to a new application.
Chelsea

 ---- Original Message ------
From: Chelsea Cook <astrochem119 at gmail.com
Subject: NLS Site
Date sent: Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:51:15 -0500

Here is the link.  Favorite-place this right away, read it, and 
then do
what it says.
give it a try.

https://nlsbard.loc.gov/cgi-bin/nlsbardprod/index.cgi
C^2
--
"I ask you to look both ways.  For the road to a knowledge of the
stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom 
has
been reached through
the stars."
Sir Arthur Eddington, British astrophysicist (1882-1944), Stars 
and
Atoms (1928), Lecture 1


From tealbloodworth at gmail.com  Sat Jan  2 17:28:16 2010
From: tealbloodworth at gmail.com (Teal Bloodworth)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 11:28:16 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
References: <FEEA069F9B104DB9BB28822D9BF9C3BB@kevin9ee0841f6>
	<4383d01d1001011324t3cd47accqdb1bda8ea9bcdc88@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <DDCB53110F4E4F1196A69F0CD9740BC1@teal6e6857f643>

hmm i would take my slaton stylus. I have never been fluent with braille or 
owned a braille note though.

            -Teal
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 3:24 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers are
> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
> is a good option.
> Beth
>
> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a discussion on
>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at Verizon
>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is 
>> rewarding. I
>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it 
>> socialist
>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>>
>>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs 
>> back
>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because the
>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I would
>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their number. 
>> This
>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I use 
>> to
>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like that. 
>> My
>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your note
>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I believe a
>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the night 
>> club
>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com 



From harryhogue at yahoo.com  Sat Jan  2 17:34:57 2010
From: harryhogue at yahoo.com (Harry Hogue)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 09:34:57 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
In-Reply-To: <BAY139-W2879DFA03A79856BB852568B760@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <873850.45018.qm@web33504.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

This may be a singularly unhelpful comment, but nevertheless it is what I do, about trays, etc.

I just carry them.  Overthinking things leads to all kinds of frustrations.  I used to think it was impossible, as well, until I did it.  The same goes with getting a fountain drink.  It was impossible.    Once I was shown, that was it.  Ice is in the middle, and the main ddrink is usually at either end (if they ahve coke products it would probably be coke, etc).

Hope that helps.  I just carry that tray steady and sure, and just don't worry about it.  Confidence will actually help you carry it level, and if nothing else, practice certainly will.

Have an employee help you around the various stations, if you wish, but certainly carry your own tray, if possible.

Harry

--- On Sat, 1/2/10, Albert Yoo <albertyoo1 at hotmail.com> wrote:

> From: Albert Yoo <albertyoo1 at hotmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> Date: Saturday, January 2, 2010, 9:24 AM
> 
>  
> 
> It is okay to ask some one to help you carry the tray in my
> opinion because it wobbles and it can tip over very easily.
> You can not carry the cane and control the try safely. It is
> very hard to do this with out spilling. Stay warm from all
> the wind. 
>  
> > From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net
> > To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> > Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 22:55:28 -0500
> > Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
> > 
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > How do you handle cafeterias? If your university is
> like mine, and most are standard setups, you have various
> stations. For instance mine had an entree line, grill,
> sandwich area, salad bar and more. Did you have an employee
> help you? I chose to do that since it was most efficient. We
> walked to the various places and they told me the food and I
> selected what I wanted. 
> > 
> > Do you carry your own tray? I always struggled with
> that; its hard to balance and keep level. A mobility
> instructor showed me but its hard; always seems to wobble in
> my hand. I either place my hand across the tray or under the
> tray and grasp it from underneath. I usually opt for someone
> to carry it. 
> > 
> > Happy New year!
> > Ashley 
> > _______________________________________________
> > nabs-l mailing list
> > nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> > To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your
> account info for nabs-l:
> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/albertyoo1%40hotmail.com
>     
>         
>           
>   
> _________________________________________________________________
> Hotmail: Powerful Free email with security by Microsoft.
> http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/171222986/direct/01/
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your
> account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/harryhogue%40yahoo.com
> 


      


From tealbloodworth at gmail.com  Sat Jan  2 17:42:25 2010
From: tealbloodworth at gmail.com (Teal Bloodworth)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 11:42:25 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
References: <BD63F8D1339C4CFF990AF9B581E63D1B@Ashley>
Message-ID: <934CF60437464CD5BD64F40446FD4885@teal6e6857f643>

Hi Ashley

i have only been using my stream since the beginning of last semester and i 
love it. Its the best thing since google. you can transfer text files and it 
reads them so like recipes or important information or even books like if 
you were to get an accessible format of a book through the publisher and it 
is an electronic copy of the text. Yes you can download books from RFB&D 
with this same feature and it is much more convienant of a format than the 
digital daisy books because it can be accessed on your computer if you 
needed the speling of a word or somthing. Then there is NLS downloadable 
books which i am fond of. For RFB&D you need to get a UAK for the stream to 
read them and then NLS authorization is needed to read those. You need to 
register on NLS.Org then its pretty simple from there.

There is also a podcast feature on the stream however i hae not had a use 
for this. The notes section is where your recorded files will be. I like 
this because i usually record my classes and with a long lasting battery and 
space for storage it can stay on without the tape having to be flipped over 
or the batteries dieing as long as i have charged it for the whole hour and 
fifteen minutes.

 Then the music. With my stream i took my SD card and played around with it 
on the companion program. I was able to gett most of my itunes library on it 
and then some saved files that i downloaded using limewire. I was not able 
to make playlists but i am still a newer user of the stream and not really 
able to jump around in the songs however it does read you the song name, 
artist, and amount of time or however you have it on your computer.

Congrats on the stream though. I had to wait until my second year of college 
to get one and i dont know how i used a VR wave or vibe all that time and a 
little mini cassette tape recorder.

            -Teal
----- Original Message ----- 
From: <bookwormahb at earthlink.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2009 10:47 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons


> Hi All,
>
> I'm getting a VR stream.  I'd like to hear from users of it about your 
> experiences and what it does.  What do you use it for?  I know you can 
> download digital talking books; now I use the traditional cassettes. 
> What's the site to download books?
>
> What navigation capabilities does it have?  Can you search by words?  I 
> know on the VR Wave you can go to bookmarks as well as chapters and pages.
>
> If you record stuff can you transfer it to your computer?  What functions 
> does the MP3 player portion have?  Can you create playlists?  Can you jump 
> to certain songs by name or singer like with regular mp3 players?
>
> What are some of the cons of it?
> I will likely use it for recording notes such as phone numbers and lists. 
> I will also use the books feature to download books from RFB and digital 
> talking books.
>
> Thanks.
> Ashley
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com 



From tealbloodworth at gmail.com  Sat Jan  2 20:29:19 2010
From: tealbloodworth at gmail.com (Teal Bloodworth)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 14:29:19 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
References: <FEEA069F9B104DB9BB28822D9BF9C3BB@kevin9ee0841f6><4383d01d1001011324t3cd47accqdb1bda8ea9bcdc88@mail.gmail.com><5E47F1F4CDE447AFA8217A8B8945191B@YOUR314E04A90B>
	<679a273c1001011516q5b68a367r91d8abe6f8671cb6@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <020C781234C542B98222A0200F793B02@teal6e6857f643>

hmm no i wouldnt take my guide dog since music would be loud and there would 
just be too  much activity but i never really take a cane either. I think 
the first time i went to a bar since my vision loss or a  club yes i had my 
cell and my cane but after the first time i left it and went with friends 
sighted guide.

here is another question alittle off topic. What if you went sighted guide 
and your guide ended up drinking. do you drink too? what if you wanted to 
drink, would you do it in a nightblub or bar or even alittle further in 
public?

            -Teal
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:16 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


>I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
> others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is the
> last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
> whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
> friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell phone,
> and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
> this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
> ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
> keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
> happens.
>
> To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything extra
> that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
> anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
> trouble.
>
> Brice
> On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even 
>> bring
>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want to
>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it.  In
>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with it 
>> on
>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted guide. 
>> I
>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go 
>> with
>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel silly
>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having someone
>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it yourself. 
>> But
>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and it
>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit O.K.
>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in 
>> the
>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have a
>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your number.
>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell 
>> phones
>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if you 
>> can
>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful with
>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you move
>> funny or if your pants are tight.
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>
>>
>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers are
>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>>> is a good option.
>>> Beth
>>>
>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a discussion 
>>>> on
>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at Verizon
>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>> rewarding. I
>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>> socialist
>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>>>>
>>>>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs
>>>> back
>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because the
>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I 
>>>> would
>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their number.
>>>> This
>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I 
>>>> use
>>>> to
>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like 
>>>> that.
>>>>
>>>> My
>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your 
>>>> note
>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I believe 
>>>> a
>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the night
>>>> club
>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com 



From bookwormahb at earthlink.net  Sat Jan  2 23:16:18 2010
From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net (Ashley  Bramlett)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 18:16:18 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
References: <FEEA069F9B104DB9BB28822D9BF9C3BB@kevin9ee0841f6><4383d01d1001011324t3cd47accqdb1bda8ea9bcdc88@mail.gmail.com><5E47F1F4CDE447AFA8217A8B8945191B@YOUR314E04A90B><679a273c1001011516q5b68a367r91d8abe6f8671cb6@mail.gmail.com>
	<020C781234C542B98222A0200F793B02@teal6e6857f643>
Message-ID: <3AED18CD505E4F4D8CA0A33E8EEF2316@Ashley>

Teal,
I would also go sighted guide in that environment but I'd also have a 
folding cane.  Its a crowded environment and hard to keep track of someone 
when you can't hear their voice clearly due to other noises.

As for drinking, its a personal preference.  If you are being guided don't 
go with someone who will get drunk!  That would be a safety problem.  Go 
with friends you trust.  Also go with people who do mild drinking so you 
don't get in trouble with them.  Yes If I wanted to drink, I'd do so in a 
bar or night club.  But not in
public! Personally I'm not much into drinking.  If I do, I stick to the 
fruit drinks such as a strawberry dackory.

Ashley

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Teal Bloodworth" <tealbloodworth at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 3:29 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


> hmm no i wouldnt take my guide dog since music would be loud and there 
> would just be too  much activity but i never really take a cane either. I 
> think the first time i went to a bar since my vision loss or a  club yes i 
> had my cell and my cane but after the first time i left it and went with 
> friends sighted guide.
>
> here is another question alittle off topic. What if you went sighted guide 
> and your guide ended up drinking. do you drink too? what if you wanted to 
> drink, would you do it in a nightblub or bar or even alittle further in 
> public?
>
>            -Teal
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:16 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>>I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
>> others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is the
>> last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
>> whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
>> friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell phone,
>> and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
>> this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
>> ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
>> keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
>> happens.
>>
>> To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything extra
>> that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
>> anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
>> trouble.
>>
>> Brice
>> On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even 
>>> bring
>>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want 
>>> to
>>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it. 
>>> In
>>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with it 
>>> on
>>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted guide. 
>>> I
>>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go 
>>> with
>>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel silly
>>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having someone
>>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it yourself. 
>>> But
>>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and 
>>> it
>>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit O.K.
>>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in 
>>> the
>>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have a
>>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your number.
>>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell 
>>> phones
>>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if you 
>>> can
>>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful 
>>> with
>>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you move
>>> funny or if your pants are tight.
>>>
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>
>>>
>>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers are
>>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>>>> is a good option.
>>>> Beth
>>>>
>>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a discussion 
>>>>> on
>>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at 
>>>>> Verizon
>>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>>> rewarding. I
>>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>>> socialist
>>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>>>>>
>>>>>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs
>>>>> back
>>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because 
>>>>> the
>>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I 
>>>>> would
>>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their number.
>>>>> This
>>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I 
>>>>> use
>>>>> to
>>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like 
>>>>> that.
>>>>>
>>>>> My
>>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your 
>>>>> note
>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I believe 
>>>>> a
>>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the 
>>>>> night
>>>>> club
>>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
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> 



From loneblindjedi at samobile.net  Sat Jan  2 23:17:30 2010
From: loneblindjedi at samobile.net (Jedi)
Date: Sat, 02 Jan 2010 18:17:30 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
Message-ID: <20100102231730.20914.38693@web1.serotek.com>

you should always carry a cane with you even if you use a dog. You 
never know when you will want or need to get somewhere independently.

If you have a dog or want to avoid the inconvenience of a straight cane 
(when dancing for example), use a telescoping cane or folding cane. A 
night club is the last place a young lady or gentleman should be 
without a traveling tool of some kind.

Respectfully,
Jedi)

PS. I would not take a notetaker to a club nor would I just hand over 
my phone. If your phone is hnaccessible, just call yourself and leave a 
message with your rontact's info for later filing.


Original message:
> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even bring
> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want to
> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it.  In
> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with it on
> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted guide.  I
> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go with
> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel silly
> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having someone
> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it yourself.  But
> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and it
> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit O.K.
> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in the
> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have a
> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your number.
> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell phones
> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if you can
> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful with
> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you move
> funny or if your pants are tight.


> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers are
>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>> is a good option.
>> Beth

>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a discussion on
>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at Verizon
>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>> rewarding. I
>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>> socialist
>>> insecurity. But that's another story.

>>>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs
>>> back
>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because the
>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I would
>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their number.
>>> This
>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I use
>>> to
>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like that.
>>> My
>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your note
>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I believe a
>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the night
>>> club
>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com


>> _______________________________________________
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>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com


> _______________________________________________
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From raniaismail04 at gmail.com  Sat Jan  2 23:24:56 2010
From: raniaismail04 at gmail.com (Rania)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 18:24:56 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
References: <873850.45018.qm@web33504.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <009d01ca8c02$cc8d0e60$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>

I just ballance the tray with my arm across the bottom and gripping it with 
the hand that is ballancing the tray and walk using my cane in the other 
hand.
Rania,
"For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
See you at the finish line."
~Christopher Reeve

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Harry Hogue" <harryhogue at yahoo.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 12:34 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays


This may be a singularly unhelpful comment, but nevertheless it is what I 
do, about trays, etc.

I just carry them.  Overthinking things leads to all kinds of frustrations. 
I used to think it was impossible, as well, until I did it.  The same goes 
with getting a fountain drink.  It was impossible.    Once I was shown, that 
was it.  Ice is in the middle, and the main ddrink is usually at either end 
(if they ahve coke products it would probably be coke, etc).

Hope that helps.  I just carry that tray steady and sure, and just don't 
worry about it.  Confidence will actually help you carry it level, and if 
nothing else, practice certainly will.

Have an employee help you around the various stations, if you wish, but 
certainly carry your own tray, if possible.

Harry

--- On Sat, 1/2/10, Albert Yoo <albertyoo1 at hotmail.com> wrote:

> From: Albert Yoo <albertyoo1 at hotmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> Date: Saturday, January 2, 2010, 9:24 AM
>
>
>
> It is okay to ask some one to help you carry the tray in my
> opinion because it wobbles and it can tip over very easily.
> You can not carry the cane and control the try safely. It is
> very hard to do this with out spilling. Stay warm from all
> the wind.
>
> > From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net
> > To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> > Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 22:55:28 -0500
> > Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
> >
> > Hi all,
> >
> > How do you handle cafeterias? If your university is
> like mine, and most are standard setups, you have various
> stations. For instance mine had an entree line, grill,
> sandwich area, salad bar and more. Did you have an employee
> help you? I chose to do that since it was most efficient. We
> walked to the various places and they told me the food and I
> selected what I wanted.
> >
> > Do you carry your own tray? I always struggled with
> that; its hard to balance and keep level. A mobility
> instructor showed me but its hard; always seems to wobble in
> my hand. I either place my hand across the tray or under the
> tray and grasp it from underneath. I usually opt for someone
> to carry it.
> >
> > Happy New year!
> > Ashley
> > _______________________________________________
> > nabs-l mailing list
> > nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> > To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your
> account info for nabs-l:
> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/albertyoo1%40hotmail.com
>
>
>
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Hotmail: Powerful Free email with security by Microsoft.
> http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/171222986/direct/01/
> _______________________________________________
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> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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> account info for nabs-l:
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From bookwormahb at earthlink.net  Sat Jan  2 23:29:52 2010
From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net (Ashley  Bramlett)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 18:29:52 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
References: <BD63F8D1339C4CFF990AF9B581E63D1B@Ashley>
	<F6118304A8DF437DA3B51844BA09BDE7@Hope>
Message-ID: <2C35D4AA908347E691E1C68588CA13DB@Ashley>

Hi Hope,

How is the sound quality?  I also record some classes in additon to taking 
notes on the Braille Note.  Do you have to be up front to get the 
professor's or speaker's voice?  How do you find the recording?  Is each 
file labeled by date or something?  I guess the mannual will explain
how to transfer it to the computer.  That is something I want to do for 
future reference.

Katie, where do I find the Access World journal you referenced?

Thanks all for sharing your thoughts.
Ashley
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Hope Paulos" <hope.paulos at maine.edu>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 8:18 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons


> Hi Ashley. I've found it extremely useful for recording classes. Both 
> classes I attend and classes I teach. It allows me to then transfer the 
> recordings to the computer. I've not played around with the music portion 
> of the vr stream, so would be interested in hearing more about that from 
> another subscriber.  You cansearch for a word if the book is in txt 
> format. Otherwise, you can navigate to chapter or page.
> Hth.
> Hope and Beignet
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: <bookwormahb at earthlink.net>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2009 11:47 PM
> Subject: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
>
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I'm getting a VR stream.  I'd like to hear from users of it about your 
>> experiences and what it does.  What do you use it for?  I know you can 
>> download digital talking books; now I use the traditional cassettes. 
>> What's the site to download books?
>>
>> What navigation capabilities does it have?  Can you search by words?  I 
>> know on the VR Wave you can go to bookmarks as well as chapters and 
>> pages.
>>
>> If you record stuff can you transfer it to your computer?  What functions 
>> does the MP3 player portion have?  Can you create playlists?  Can you 
>> jump to certain songs by name or singer like with regular mp3 players?
>>
>> What are some of the cons of it?
>> I will likely use it for recording notes such as phone numbers and lists. 
>> I will also use the books feature to download books from RFB and digital 
>> talking books.
>>
>> Thanks.
>> Ashley
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/hope.paulos%40maine.edu
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
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> 



From bookwormahb at earthlink.net  Sat Jan  2 23:38:20 2010
From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net (Ashley  Bramlett)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 18:38:20 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
References: <BD63F8D1339C4CFF990AF9B581E63D1B@Ashley><F6118304A8DF437DA3B51844BA09BDE7@Hope><792946F19AAB4FC8A47E8AD7D54E1AC7@Prometheus>
	<4383d01d1001020605i5a8a723al11c4f3fe91448c6b@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <E752EE9B966E453BB7579ADB020E1ADD@Ashley>

Beth,
To download books from RFB, do you download to a card  on your computer and 
place that in the Stream?  Other than purchasing a user key from RFB, is 
there other charges to download books?

Ashley
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 9:05 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons


> My VR stream is the bomb!  I love the MP3 player portion of it because
> it's better than the inaccessibility of the I-pod and I-tunes.
> Although I know the I-pod and I-tunes are getting there, I hope
> they're getting optimally there.  But as for the VR stream, I like
> downloading books from RFBD using the Download manager you have to
> download.  I also get the DAISY books from Bookshare as well.  I get
> mostly the newspaper from there, and then I download the books to a
> little flash card which I can insert into my computer's reader.  I
> figured it all out when I got the thing.  The only thing I don't like
> about the VR stream is that you have to get a user key for it unless
> your state agency paid for it.  Which mine did and I didn't know it.
> Also, with RFBD you have to get a user key forthe BrailleNote because
> if I wanted to read the books on my BrailleNote, I couldn't because
> the VR's user key doesn't work on the BN.
> Beth
>
> On 1/2/10, Katie Wang <katie.Wang at yale.edu> wrote:
>> Hi, Ashley,
>>   The site for downloading talking books is nlsbard.loc.gov. You will 
>> need
>> to create a user name and password the first time you visit the site, and
>> your state NLS library will approve your account in a few days. After 
>> that
>> you can download books onto your computer and transfer them to the 
>> Stream. I
>> just got a Stream myself and haven't played with it much, but I have 
>> heard
>> many good things about it. A good resource you can check out is the 
>> Access
>> World journal published on-line by AFB; I have seen several detailed 
>> product
>> reviews of various talking book players, including the Stream. Hope that
>> helps!
>>    Katie
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Hope Paulos" <hope.paulos at maine.edu>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 8:18 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
>>
>>
>>> Hi Ashley. I've found it extremely useful for recording classes. Both
>>> classes I attend and classes I teach. It allows me to then transfer the
>>> recordings to the computer. I've not played around with the music 
>>> portion
>>> of the vr stream, so would be interested in hearing more about that from
>>> another subscriber.  You cansearch for a word if the book is in txt
>>> format. Otherwise, you can navigate to chapter or page.
>>> Hth.
>>> Hope and Beignet
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: <bookwormahb at earthlink.net>
>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2009 11:47 PM
>>> Subject: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
>>>
>>>
>>>> Hi All,
>>>>
>>>> I'm getting a VR stream.  I'd like to hear from users of it about your
>>>> experiences and what it does.  What do you use it for?  I know you can
>>>> download digital talking books; now I use the traditional cassettes.
>>>> What's the site to download books?
>>>>
>>>> What navigation capabilities does it have?  Can you search by words?  I
>>>> know on the VR Wave you can go to bookmarks as well as chapters and
>>>> pages.
>>>>
>>>> If you record stuff can you transfer it to your computer?  What 
>>>> functions
>>>>
>>>> does the MP3 player portion have?  Can you create playlists?  Can you
>>>> jump to certain songs by name or singer like with regular mp3 players?
>>>>
>>>> What are some of the cons of it?
>>>> I will likely use it for recording notes such as phone numbers and 
>>>> lists.
>>>>
>>>> I will also use the books feature to download books from RFB and 
>>>> digital
>>>> talking books.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks.
>>>> Ashley
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/hope.paulos%40maine.edu
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/katie.wang%40yale.edu
>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
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> 



From bookwormahb at earthlink.net  Sat Jan  2 23:43:18 2010
From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net (Ashley  Bramlett)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 18:43:18 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] VR Stream pros and cons
References: <4b3f802c.8602be0a.4f9a.fffff1ea@mx.google.com>
Message-ID: <ABBD27AE5DE4443086B0C8C4197CB32D@Ashley>

Chelse,
Thanks for this information.  Good to know about the download process.  I do 
have web braille.
Does Human ware stream come with the VR stream unit?  What does it do?

Ashley

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chelsea Cook" <astrochem119 at gmail.com>
To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 12:24 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] VR Stream pros and cons


> Ashley,
>
>  I love my Stream! At first I was reluctant to get one, but then I found 
> out what it can do.  I use it all the time for reading books from NLS and 
> RFBD.  It is easy to get authorization keys from these places.  If you 
> have a Web Braille account or are affiliated with your library, you should 
> be able to complete an application for the new download site.  With RFBD, 
> go to your My Account on the online version and select "Authorize New 
> Player." Then you just type in the serial number.  I don't use it for 
> recording as much now, but that may change.
>  There is a program that comes with it called HumanWare Stream Companion. 
> This makes your talking books from NLS easy to transfer.  RFBD is more 
> tedious, but I'm trying to see if there's an easier way to do it.  You can 
> create bookmarks and transfer notes (recordings), to your computer with 
> this program.  I've never tried playlists, but I love the Random music 
> feature, similar to the concept of the IPod shuffle.  You can't navigate 
> by song title and artist, per se, but if you know how your music structure 
> is laid out, you can find a specific song by knowing its file and folder 
> coordinates.  The Stream will accept those.  The only other problem I face 
> sometimes is with the NLS books, you can't do page navigation.  It doesn't 
> support Word documents yet.  Only t x t, b r f, and Html.  You can do word 
> searches in these documents, and it makes it easier if you know how to 
> text because it uses those same conventions for numbers.  I haven't had 
> the practice yet.
>  Overall: If you're in college and use NLS and RFBD for most of your 
> reading, it's an excellent, all-in-one device.  You can put up to a 16 gig 
> HC SD.  card in it (I hear it has issues with anything higher), as well as 
> USB flash drives.
> Hope this helps,
> Chelsea
> "I ask you to look both ways.  For the road to a knowledge of the stars 
> leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been 
> reached through the stars."
> Sir Arthur Eddington, British astrophysicist (1882-1944), Stars and Atoms 
> (1928), Lecture 1
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
> 



From thebluesisloose at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 00:05:07 2010
From: thebluesisloose at gmail.com (Beth)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 19:05:07 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
In-Reply-To: <2C35D4AA908347E691E1C68588CA13DB@Ashley>
References: <BD63F8D1339C4CFF990AF9B581E63D1B@Ashley>
	<F6118304A8DF437DA3B51844BA09BDE7@Hope>
	<2C35D4AA908347E691E1C68588CA13DB@Ashley>
Message-ID: <4383d01d1001021605o37dfc83ayc2f18887e4def699@mail.gmail.com>

There are no additional charges to download the Daisy books.  You
download books onto your hard drive, then from a certain folder on
your hard drive, what I do is copy the file I want, which is a folder,
onto the little card which can be commercially bought.  It's a high
capacity SD card.  Also, I have a SD card reader on my computer, which
makes it a lot easier to handle the SD card thing.
Beth

On 1/2/10, Ashley  Bramlett <bookwormahb at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Hi Hope,
>
> How is the sound quality?  I also record some classes in additon to taking
> notes on the Braille Note.  Do you have to be up front to get the
> professor's or speaker's voice?  How do you find the recording?  Is each
> file labeled by date or something?  I guess the mannual will explain
> how to transfer it to the computer.  That is something I want to do for
> future reference.
>
> Katie, where do I find the Access World journal you referenced?
>
> Thanks all for sharing your thoughts.
> Ashley
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Hope Paulos" <hope.paulos at maine.edu>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 8:18 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
>
>
>> Hi Ashley. I've found it extremely useful for recording classes. Both
>> classes I attend and classes I teach. It allows me to then transfer the
>> recordings to the computer. I've not played around with the music portion
>> of the vr stream, so would be interested in hearing more about that from
>> another subscriber.  You cansearch for a word if the book is in txt
>> format. Otherwise, you can navigate to chapter or page.
>> Hth.
>> Hope and Beignet
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: <bookwormahb at earthlink.net>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2009 11:47 PM
>> Subject: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
>>
>>
>>> Hi All,
>>>
>>> I'm getting a VR stream.  I'd like to hear from users of it about your
>>> experiences and what it does.  What do you use it for?  I know you can
>>> download digital talking books; now I use the traditional cassettes.
>>> What's the site to download books?
>>>
>>> What navigation capabilities does it have?  Can you search by words?  I
>>> know on the VR Wave you can go to bookmarks as well as chapters and
>>> pages.
>>>
>>> If you record stuff can you transfer it to your computer?  What functions
>>>
>>> does the MP3 player portion have?  Can you create playlists?  Can you
>>> jump to certain songs by name or singer like with regular mp3 players?
>>>
>>> What are some of the cons of it?
>>> I will likely use it for recording notes such as phone numbers and lists.
>>>
>>> I will also use the books feature to download books from RFB and digital
>>> talking books.
>>>
>>> Thanks.
>>> Ashley
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/hope.paulos%40maine.edu
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
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>


From adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 00:33:43 2010
From: adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com (Adrianne Dempsey)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 19:33:43 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
References: <FEEA069F9B104DB9BB28822D9BF9C3BB@kevin9ee0841f6><4383d01d1001011324t3cd47accqdb1bda8ea9bcdc88@mail.gmail.com><5E47F1F4CDE447AFA8217A8B8945191B@YOUR314E04A90B><679a273c1001011516q5b68a367r91d8abe6f8671cb6@mail.gmail.com>
	<020C781234C542B98222A0200F793B02@teal6e6857f643>
Message-ID: <68464948D09C444B84029A6652359D89@YOUR314E04A90B>

I say drink if you want.  I do, but make sure you don't drink past the point 
of no return, and their is no reason both you and your friends shouldn't be 
able to all drink.  You just have to know your limits, but that gos for 
anyone blind sighted or what have you.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Teal Bloodworth" <tealbloodworth at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 3:29 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


> hmm no i wouldnt take my guide dog since music would be loud and there 
> would just be too  much activity but i never really take a cane either. I 
> think the first time i went to a bar since my vision loss or a  club yes i 
> had my cell and my cane but after the first time i left it and went with 
> friends sighted guide.
>
> here is another question alittle off topic. What if you went sighted guide 
> and your guide ended up drinking. do you drink too? what if you wanted to 
> drink, would you do it in a nightblub or bar or even alittle further in 
> public?
>
>            -Teal
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:16 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>>I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
>> others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is the
>> last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
>> whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
>> friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell phone,
>> and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
>> this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
>> ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
>> keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
>> happens.
>>
>> To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything extra
>> that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
>> anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
>> trouble.
>>
>> Brice
>> On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even 
>>> bring
>>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want 
>>> to
>>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it. 
>>> In
>>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with it 
>>> on
>>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted guide. 
>>> I
>>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go 
>>> with
>>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel silly
>>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having someone
>>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it yourself. 
>>> But
>>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and 
>>> it
>>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit O.K.
>>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in 
>>> the
>>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have a
>>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your number.
>>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell 
>>> phones
>>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if you 
>>> can
>>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful 
>>> with
>>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you move
>>> funny or if your pants are tight.
>>>
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>
>>>
>>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers are
>>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>>>> is a good option.
>>>> Beth
>>>>
>>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a discussion 
>>>>> on
>>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at 
>>>>> Verizon
>>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>>> rewarding. I
>>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>>> socialist
>>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>>>>>
>>>>>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs
>>>>> back
>>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because 
>>>>> the
>>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I 
>>>>> would
>>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their number.
>>>>> This
>>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I 
>>>>> use
>>>>> to
>>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like 
>>>>> that.
>>>>>
>>>>> My
>>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your 
>>>>> note
>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I believe 
>>>>> a
>>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the 
>>>>> night
>>>>> club
>>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
> 



From adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 00:48:48 2010
From: adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com (Adrianne Dempsey)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 19:48:48 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
References: <20100102231730.20914.38693@web1.serotek.com>
Message-ID: <195AE691A98A46F78D322723F2D7A4A9@YOUR314E04A90B>

If you bring your cane to a bar or night club, what do you do with it on the 
dance floor?  Even the telescoping and folding canes are to big to just tuck 
away somewhere.  You can't just hold it when your dancing because that looks 
ridiculous even if it is compacted.  You can't put it on the table and leave 
it because you can't keep a table at a club unless one friend sits and 
watches the table and stuff at it, and that leaves them out of the fun.  An 
identification cane would be easier to deal with but it still leaves you 
with the same problem of what do you do with it.  If you brot your purse it 
might fit in it but I don't bring a purse for the same reason, what do you 
do with it?  Also I don't want it to get stolen.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jedi" <loneblindjedi at samobile.net>
To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 6:17 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


> you should always carry a cane with you even if you use a dog. You never 
> know when you will want or need to get somewhere independently.
>
> If you have a dog or want to avoid the inconvenience of a straight cane 
> (when dancing for example), use a telescoping cane or folding cane. A 
> night club is the last place a young lady or gentleman should be without a 
> traveling tool of some kind.
>
> Respectfully,
> Jedi)
>
> PS. I would not take a notetaker to a club nor would I just hand over my 
> phone. If your phone is hnaccessible, just call yourself and leave a 
> message with your rontact's info for later filing.
>
>
> Original message:
>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even 
>> bring
>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want to
>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it.  In
>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with it 
>> on
>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted guide. 
>> I
>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go 
>> with
>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel silly
>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having someone
>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it yourself. 
>> But
>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and it
>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit O.K.
>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in 
>> the
>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have a
>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your number.
>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell 
>> phones
>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if you 
>> can
>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful with
>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you move
>> funny or if your pants are tight.
>
>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers are
>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>>> is a good option.
>>> Beth
>
>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a discussion 
>>>> on
>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at Verizon
>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>> rewarding. I
>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>> socialist
>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>
>>>>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs
>>>> back
>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because the
>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I 
>>>> would
>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their number.
>>>> This
>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I 
>>>> use
>>>> to
>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like 
>>>> that.
>>>> My
>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your 
>>>> note
>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I believe 
>>>> a
>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the night
>>>> club
>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>
>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>
>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net
>
> -- 
> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit 
> www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
> 



From katie.Wang at yale.edu  Sun Jan  3 01:37:45 2010
From: katie.Wang at yale.edu (Katie Wang)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 20:37:45 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
References: <BD63F8D1339C4CFF990AF9B581E63D1B@Ashley><F6118304A8DF437DA3B51844BA09BDE7@Hope>
	<2C35D4AA908347E691E1C68588CA13DB@Ashley>
Message-ID: <C3E2E8AB495243A0BA5A2A4E52114161@Prometheus>

Ashley,
  You can find the Access World journal by going to www.afb.org and click on 
the Access World link. You will then see the most recent issue of the 
journal as well as a search box, where you will be able to search for Victor 
Reader Stream or any other information related to assistive technology you 
may be interested in.
   Katie
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ashley Bramlett" <bookwormahb at earthlink.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 6:29 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons


> Hi Hope,
>
> How is the sound quality?  I also record some classes in additon to taking 
> notes on the Braille Note.  Do you have to be up front to get the 
> professor's or speaker's voice?  How do you find the recording?  Is each 
> file labeled by date or something?  I guess the mannual will explain
> how to transfer it to the computer.  That is something I want to do for 
> future reference.
>
> Katie, where do I find the Access World journal you referenced?
>
> Thanks all for sharing your thoughts.
> Ashley
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Hope Paulos" <hope.paulos at maine.edu>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 8:18 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
>
>
>> Hi Ashley. I've found it extremely useful for recording classes. Both 
>> classes I attend and classes I teach. It allows me to then transfer the 
>> recordings to the computer. I've not played around with the music portion 
>> of the vr stream, so would be interested in hearing more about that from 
>> another subscriber.  You cansearch for a word if the book is in txt 
>> format. Otherwise, you can navigate to chapter or page.
>> Hth.
>> Hope and Beignet
>> ----- Original Message ----- 
>> From: <bookwormahb at earthlink.net>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2009 11:47 PM
>> Subject: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
>>
>>
>>> Hi All,
>>>
>>> I'm getting a VR stream.  I'd like to hear from users of it about your 
>>> experiences and what it does.  What do you use it for?  I know you can 
>>> download digital talking books; now I use the traditional cassettes. 
>>> What's the site to download books?
>>>
>>> What navigation capabilities does it have?  Can you search by words?  I 
>>> know on the VR Wave you can go to bookmarks as well as chapters and 
>>> pages.
>>>
>>> If you record stuff can you transfer it to your computer?  What 
>>> functions does the MP3 player portion have?  Can you create playlists? 
>>> Can you jump to certain songs by name or singer like with regular mp3 
>>> players?
>>>
>>> What are some of the cons of it?
>>> I will likely use it for recording notes such as phone numbers and 
>>> lists. I will also use the books feature to download books from RFB and 
>>> digital talking books.
>>>
>>> Thanks.
>>> Ashley
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/hope.paulos%40maine.edu
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/katie.wang%40yale.edu
> 



From dlawless86 at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 01:46:43 2010
From: dlawless86 at gmail.com (Domonique Lawless)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 19:46:43 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
In-Reply-To: <195AE691A98A46F78D322723F2D7A4A9@YOUR314E04A90B>
References: <20100102231730.20914.38693@web1.serotek.com>
	<195AE691A98A46F78D322723F2D7A4A9@YOUR314E04A90B>
Message-ID: <423e6e461001021746q2c0a935bjf0de8ab3441fad7b@mail.gmail.com>

Hi everyone,

You can always ask someone at the front counter or  one of the bar
tenders to slide a cane behind the counter for you and always make
sure that you know where the counter or bar is in relationship to
where you are. That way you can still have freedom to dance without
worrying about what to do with your cane and you'll always know that
it is close by if you need it. Usually bar tenders  or bouncers are
willing to stash it for you. I hope this helps.

Domonique

On 1/2/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
> If you bring your cane to a bar or night club, what do you do with it on the
> dance floor?  Even the telescoping and folding canes are to big to just tuck
> away somewhere.  You can't just hold it when your dancing because that looks
> ridiculous even if it is compacted.  You can't put it on the table and leave
> it because you can't keep a table at a club unless one friend sits and
> watches the table and stuff at it, and that leaves them out of the fun.  An
> identification cane would be easier to deal with but it still leaves you
> with the same problem of what do you do with it.  If you brot your purse it
> might fit in it but I don't bring a purse for the same reason, what do you
> do with it?  Also I don't want it to get stolen.
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jedi" <loneblindjedi at samobile.net>
> To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 6:17 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>> you should always carry a cane with you even if you use a dog. You never
>> know when you will want or need to get somewhere independently.
>>
>> If you have a dog or want to avoid the inconvenience of a straight cane
>> (when dancing for example), use a telescoping cane or folding cane. A
>> night club is the last place a young lady or gentleman should be without a
>>
>> traveling tool of some kind.
>>
>> Respectfully,
>> Jedi)
>>
>> PS. I would not take a notetaker to a club nor would I just hand over my
>> phone. If your phone is hnaccessible, just call yourself and leave a
>> message with your rontact's info for later filing.
>>
>>
>> Original message:
>>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even
>>> bring
>>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want to
>>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it.  In
>>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with it
>>> on
>>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted guide.
>>> I
>>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go
>>> with
>>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel silly
>>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having someone
>>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it yourself.
>>> But
>>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and it
>>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit O.K.
>>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in
>>> the
>>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have a
>>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your number.
>>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell
>>> phones
>>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if you
>>> can
>>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful with
>>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you move
>>> funny or if your pants are tight.
>>
>>
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>
>>
>>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers are
>>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>>>> is a good option.
>>>> Beth
>>
>>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a discussion
>>>>> on
>>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at Verizon
>>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>>> rewarding. I
>>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>>> socialist
>>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>>
>>>>>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs
>>>>> back
>>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because the
>>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I
>>>>> would
>>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their number.
>>>>> This
>>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I
>>>>> use
>>>>> to
>>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like
>>>>> that.
>>>>> My
>>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your
>>>>> note
>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I believe
>>>>> a
>>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the night
>>>>> club
>>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>
>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>>
>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net
>>
>> --
>> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit
>> www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dlawless86%40gmail.com
>


From dandrews at visi.com  Sun Jan  3 02:06:07 2010
From: dandrews at visi.com (David Andrews)
Date: Sat, 02 Jan 2010 20:06:07 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
In-Reply-To: <BAY139-W2879DFA03A79856BB852568B760@phx.gbl>
References: <F431BF0F5666406EA29732BC870B6651@Ashley>
	<BAY139-W2879DFA03A79856BB852568B760@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <auto-000133630047@mailfront1.g2host.com>

Actually, there are techniques a blind person can use to safely carry 
a tray, and still use a cane.

One method involves kind of wrapping your arm around the tray along 
its edge, and pressing the other side against your body, and holding 
it that way.  Your hand can also extend past the edge of the tray, 
into they tray where it can hold your drink for stability.

Another method involves making your arm into an angle and setting the 
tray on top of your arm.

I probably aren't explaining very well, but it can be done with 
practice.  It is something most of us as blind people are nervous 
about in one way or another.

Dave

At 09:24 AM 1/2/2010, you wrote:

>
>
>It is okay to ask some one to help you carry the tray in my opinion 
>because it wobbles and it can tip over very easily. You can not 
>carry the cane and control the try safely. It is very hard to do 
>this with out spilling. Stay warm from all the wind.
>
> > From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net
> > To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> > Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 22:55:28 -0500
> > Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
> >
> > Hi all,
> >
> > How do you handle cafeterias? If your university is like mine, 
> and most are standard setups, you have various stations. For 
> instance mine had an entree line, grill, sandwich area, salad bar 
> and more. Did you have an employee help you? I chose to do that 
> since it was most efficient. We walked to the various places and 
> they told me the food and I selected what I wanted.
> >
> > Do you carry your own tray? I always struggled with that; its 
> hard to balance and keep level. A mobility instructor showed me but 
> its hard; always seems to wobble in my hand. I either place my hand 
> across the tray or under the tray and grasp it from underneath. I 
> usually opt for someone to carry it.
> >
> > Happy New year!
> > Ashley



From spangler.robert at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 02:36:04 2010
From: spangler.robert at gmail.com (Robert Spangler)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 21:36:04 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
In-Reply-To: <auto-000133630047@mailfront1.g2host.com>
References: <F431BF0F5666406EA29732BC870B6651@Ashley>
	<BAY139-W2879DFA03A79856BB852568B760@phx.gbl>
	<auto-000133630047@mailfront1.g2host.com>
Message-ID: <19ccaa051001021836n63c46436i908ae1c91647a986@mail.gmail.com>

It can be done and I do it sometimes, especially if I'm familiar with
where I am eating, but if I am not I usually have someone assist me
who works there for the sake of time and preventing accidents.

On 1/2/10, David Andrews <dandrews at visi.com> wrote:
> Actually, there are techniques a blind person can use to safely carry
> a tray, and still use a cane.
>
> One method involves kind of wrapping your arm around the tray along
> its edge, and pressing the other side against your body, and holding
> it that way.  Your hand can also extend past the edge of the tray,
> into they tray where it can hold your drink for stability.
>
> Another method involves making your arm into an angle and setting the
> tray on top of your arm.
>
> I probably aren't explaining very well, but it can be done with
> practice.  It is something most of us as blind people are nervous
> about in one way or another.
>
> Dave
>
> At 09:24 AM 1/2/2010, you wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>It is okay to ask some one to help you carry the tray in my opinion
>>because it wobbles and it can tip over very easily. You can not
>>carry the cane and control the try safely. It is very hard to do
>>this with out spilling. Stay warm from all the wind.
>>
>> > From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net
>> > To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> > Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 22:55:28 -0500
>> > Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
>> >
>> > Hi all,
>> >
>> > How do you handle cafeterias? If your university is like mine,
>> and most are standard setups, you have various stations. For
>> instance mine had an entree line, grill, sandwich area, salad bar
>> and more. Did you have an employee help you? I chose to do that
>> since it was most efficient. We walked to the various places and
>> they told me the food and I selected what I wanted.
>> >
>> > Do you carry your own tray? I always struggled with that; its
>> hard to balance and keep level. A mobility instructor showed me but
>> its hard; always seems to wobble in my hand. I either place my hand
>> across the tray or under the tray and grasp it from underneath. I
>> usually opt for someone to carry it.
>> >
>> > Happy New year!
>> > Ashley
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/spangler.robert%40gmail.com
>


-- 
Robert Spangler
The University of Toledo
Student Senator - Administrative Affairs Committee Chair, College of
Arts and Sciences


From spangler.robert at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 02:39:01 2010
From: spangler.robert at gmail.com (Robert Spangler)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 21:39:01 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
In-Reply-To: <423e6e461001021746q2c0a935bjf0de8ab3441fad7b@mail.gmail.com>
References: <20100102231730.20914.38693@web1.serotek.com>
	<195AE691A98A46F78D322723F2D7A4A9@YOUR314E04A90B>
	<423e6e461001021746q2c0a935bjf0de8ab3441fad7b@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <19ccaa051001021839t479336fh28d30a1976709ff5@mail.gmail.com>

I just got back from hanging out with a friend who has a cane holster
on his belt loop.  He has a folding cane so I am not sure how it would
work for telescoping canes.  If you have a rigid cane the idea of a
bar tender stashing it may be best.

On 1/2/10, Domonique Lawless <dlawless86 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> You can always ask someone at the front counter or  one of the bar
> tenders to slide a cane behind the counter for you and always make
> sure that you know where the counter or bar is in relationship to
> where you are. That way you can still have freedom to dance without
> worrying about what to do with your cane and you'll always know that
> it is close by if you need it. Usually bar tenders  or bouncers are
> willing to stash it for you. I hope this helps.
>
> Domonique
>
> On 1/2/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>> If you bring your cane to a bar or night club, what do you do with it on
>> the
>> dance floor?  Even the telescoping and folding canes are to big to just
>> tuck
>> away somewhere.  You can't just hold it when your dancing because that
>> looks
>> ridiculous even if it is compacted.  You can't put it on the table and
>> leave
>> it because you can't keep a table at a club unless one friend sits and
>> watches the table and stuff at it, and that leaves them out of the fun.
>> An
>> identification cane would be easier to deal with but it still leaves you
>> with the same problem of what do you do with it.  If you brot your purse
>> it
>> might fit in it but I don't bring a purse for the same reason, what do you
>> do with it?  Also I don't want it to get stolen.
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Jedi" <loneblindjedi at samobile.net>
>> To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 6:17 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>
>>
>>> you should always carry a cane with you even if you use a dog. You never
>>> know when you will want or need to get somewhere independently.
>>>
>>> If you have a dog or want to avoid the inconvenience of a straight cane
>>> (when dancing for example), use a telescoping cane or folding cane. A
>>> night club is the last place a young lady or gentleman should be without
>>> a
>>>
>>> traveling tool of some kind.
>>>
>>> Respectfully,
>>> Jedi)
>>>
>>> PS. I would not take a notetaker to a club nor would I just hand over my
>>> phone. If your phone is hnaccessible, just call yourself and leave a
>>> message with your rontact's info for later filing.
>>>
>>>
>>> Original message:
>>>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even
>>>> bring
>>>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want
>>>> to
>>>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it.
>>>> In
>>>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with it
>>>> on
>>>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted guide.
>>>> I
>>>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go
>>>> with
>>>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel silly
>>>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having someone
>>>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it yourself.
>>>> But
>>>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and
>>>> it
>>>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit O.K.
>>>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in
>>>> the
>>>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have a
>>>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your number.
>>>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell
>>>> phones
>>>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if you
>>>> can
>>>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful
>>>> with
>>>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you move
>>>> funny or if your pants are tight.
>>>
>>>
>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>
>>>
>>>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers are
>>>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>>>>> is a good option.
>>>>> Beth
>>>
>>>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a discussion
>>>>>> on
>>>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at
>>>>>> Verizon
>>>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>>>> rewarding. I
>>>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>>>> socialist
>>>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>>>
>>>>>>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs
>>>>>> back
>>>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I
>>>>>> would
>>>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their number.
>>>>>> This
>>>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I
>>>>>> use
>>>>>> to
>>>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like
>>>>>> that.
>>>>>> My
>>>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your
>>>>>> note
>>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I believe
>>>>>> a
>>>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the
>>>>>> night
>>>>>> club
>>>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>
>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>>>
>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net
>>>
>>> --
>>> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit
>>> www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dlawless86%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/spangler.robert%40gmail.com
>


-- 
Robert Spangler
The University of Toledo
Student Senator - Administrative Affairs Committee Chair, College of
Arts and Sciences


From brileyp at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 02:44:13 2010
From: brileyp at gmail.com (Briley Pollard)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 20:44:13 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
In-Reply-To: <20100102231730.20914.38693@web1.serotek.com>
References: <20100102231730.20914.38693@web1.serotek.com>
Message-ID: <AD707351-BBF2-490B-AB22-ABDE1EB1D1EE@gmail.com>

I also don't recomend going to a club without a mobility aid. I will bring a folding or telescoping cane usually. Sometimes I check it at the door with my coat or leave it at my table, (dancing with a cane is a little awkward). As far as phone numbers, if you're comfortable just having the person call your phone and you can save it later, that might work.

I can't help but add that if you have a guide dog, taking them to a really loud environment like a club isn't in their best interest. Of course it is always at the owner's discretion, but a place where people are drinking, bodies are packed together, and the music is so loud it is bound to hurt their incredibly sensitive ears is highly stressfull for them as well as the owner.

That is my 20 cents.



On Jan  2, 2010, at 5:17 PM, Jedi wrote:

> you should always carry a cane with you even if you use a dog. You never know when you will want or need to get somewhere independently.
> 
> If you have a dog or want to avoid the inconvenience of a straight cane (when dancing for example), use a telescoping cane or folding cane. A night club is the last place a young lady or gentleman should be without a traveling tool of some kind.
> 
> Respectfully,
> Jedi)
> 
> PS. I would not take a notetaker to a club nor would I just hand over my phone. If your phone is hnaccessible, just call yourself and leave a message with your rontact's info for later filing.
> 
> 
> Original message:
>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even bring
>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want to
>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it.  In
>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with it on
>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted guide.  I
>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go with
>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel silly
>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having someone
>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it yourself.  But
>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and it
>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit O.K.
>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in the
>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have a
>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your number.
>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell phones
>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if you can
>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful with
>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you move
>> funny or if your pants are tight.
> 
> 
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
> 
> 
>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers are
>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>>> is a good option.
>>> Beth
> 
>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a discussion on
>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at Verizon
>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>> rewarding. I
>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>> socialist
>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
> 
>>>>                I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs
>>>> back
>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because the
>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I would
>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their number.
>>>> This
>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I use
>>>> to
>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like that.
>>>> My
>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your note
>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I believe a
>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the night
>>>> club
>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
> 
> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
> 
> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net
> 
> -- 
> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com



From ginisd at sbcglobal.net  Sun Jan  3 03:23:10 2010
From: ginisd at sbcglobal.net (V Nork)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 19:23:10 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
References: <BD63F8D1339C4CFF990AF9B581E63D1B@Ashley><F6118304A8DF437DA3B51844BA09BDE7@Hope>
	<2C35D4AA908347E691E1C68588CA13DB@Ashley>
Message-ID: <CF7276152F3547E180D985AD9E3A9D08@windows4c0ed96>

Hi Ashley and all, I want to just chime in and say what a practical and 
powerful tool for a college student the VR stream is  I was skeptical, but I 
am a fan now.  There are sso many aspects to the stream, for example, 
setting highlight  and audio bookmarks in notes and books. .  About the 
sound, I used it this last semester in my literature class to record all the 
lectures, and it was fine, especially since  the stream is so small and 
convenient..  For me, the pick up could have been slightly better, we had a 
number of soft spoken students  in the classand I did not always hear them 
in the class, but I found that when I plugged in some headphones and put the 
volume up, most of the softer speaking students could be heard.   And the 
professor's voice was clear, even when I sat three rows back from the 
front.  I also converted the lectures  using the Humanware Companion so I 
could store them in my computer.  I also am getting another tape recorder, 
an Olympus 50, for two reasons:  it may have a bit better pick up, and I 
personally am a bit absent minded, and I would rather leave my stream at 
home, in relative safety, since I have so many books and audio notes it 
would be hard to lose.  But I really think  the sound pick up is adequate, 
but I do not know how it would do in a large classroom if I sat in the back. 
I found a great pair of headphones at an electronic chain in San Diego that 
are super.  They are lightweight, flat small  and circular that stay in 
place and are so comfortable I wear them to sleep often.  It also makes the 
sound richer with more nuances.  My Nls books and RfB and D books are more 
pleasant to listen to.  The headphones cost under twenty dollars, and are 
called "flaties" which is the brand name I think.."  You can get them in 
pink (smile.)-----  I have had my stream for about five months, enjoy 
yours, it is bvery intuitive and so many people have them you can usually 
find help as a first timer if you need some coaching but you may be fine 
with just the documentation the VR stream comes with..  Best, GinnyOriginal 
Message ----- 
From: "Ashley Bramlett" <bookwormahb at earthlink.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 3:29 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons


> Hi Hope,
>
> How is the sound quality?  I also record some classes in additon to taking 
> notes on the Braille Note.  Do you have to be up front to get the 
> professor's or speaker's voice?  How do you find the recording?  Is each 
> file labeled by date or something?  I guess the mannual will explain
> how to transfer it to the computer.  That is something I want to do for 
> future reference.
>
> Katie, where do I find the Access World journal you referenced?
>
> Thanks all for sharing your thoughts.
> Ashley
> ----- Original Message ----- 
        > From: "Hope Paulos" <hope.paulos at maine.edu>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 8:18 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
>
>
>> Hi Ashley. I've found it extremely useful for recording classes. Both 
>> classes I attend and classes I teach. It allows me to then transfer the 
>> recordings to the computer. I've not played around with the music portion 
>> of the vr stream, so would be interested in hearing more about that from 
>> another subscriber.  You cansearch for a word if the book is in txt 
>> format. Otherwise, you can navigate to chapter or page.
>> Hth.
>> Hope and Beignet
>> ----- Original Message ----- 
>> From: <bookwormahb at earthlink.net>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Thursday, December 31, 2009 11:47 PM
>> Subject: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
>>
>>
>>> Hi All,
>>>
>>> I'm getting a VR stream.  I'd like to hear from users of it about your 
>>> experiences and what it does.  What do you use it for?  I know you can 
>>> download digital talking books; now I use the traditional cassettes. 
>>> What's the site to download books?
>>>
>>> What navigation capabilities does it have?  Can you search by words?  I 
>>> know on the VR Wave you can go to bookmarks as well as chapters and 
>>> pages.
>>>
>>> If you record stuff can you transfer it to your computer?  What 
>>> functions does the MP3 player portion have?  Can you create playlists? 
>>> Can you jump to certain songs by name or singer like with regular mp3 
>>> players?
>>>
>>> What are some of the cons of it?
>>> I will likely use it for recording notes such as phone numbers and 
>>> lists. I will also use the books feature to download books from RFB and 
>>> digital talking books.
>>>
>>> Thanks.
>>> Ashley
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/hope.paulos%40maine.edu
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/ginisd%40sbcglobal.net 



From bookwormahb at earthlink.net  Sun Jan  3 03:36:43 2010
From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net (Ashley  Bramlett)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 22:36:43 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
References: <F431BF0F5666406EA29732BC870B6651@Ashley><BAY139-W2879DFA03A79856BB852568B760@phx.gbl>
	<auto-000133630047@mailfront1.g2host.com>
Message-ID: <E9A0F11F1598440F8F043CFF2020611E@Ashley>

Dave,
Yes there are techniques and thanks for sharing.  As you see though some of 
us have trouble with it.  Someone said the tray wobbles and if the tray is 
heavy this is a problem.
I tried the second way of sliding your arm under the tray and placing the 
tray on top  of your arm.  This didn't work for me because one side did not 
have stability.  The tray fell down.  Fortunately, I was practicing and the 
tray was empty.

I have tried the first way and it works a little better for me.  Its hard to 
describe what to do, but there are probably several ways.  So if you all 
have ideas share them.

Ashley
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Andrews" <dandrews at visi.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 9:06 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays


> Actually, there are techniques a blind person can use to safely carry a 
> tray, and still use a cane.
>
> One method involves kind of wrapping your arm around the tray along its 
> edge, and pressing the other side against your body, and holding it that 
> way.  Your hand can also extend past the edge of the tray, into they tray 
> where it can hold your drink for stability.
>
> Another method involves making your arm into an angle and setting the tray 
> on top of your arm.
>
> I probably aren't explaining very well, but it can be done with practice. 
> It is something most of us as blind people are nervous about in one way or 
> another.
>
> Dave
>
> At 09:24 AM 1/2/2010, you wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>It is okay to ask some one to help you carry the tray in my opinion 
>>because it wobbles and it can tip over very easily. You can not carry the 
>>cane and control the try safely. It is very hard to do this with out 
>>spilling. Stay warm from all the wind.
>>
>> > From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net
>> > To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> > Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 22:55:28 -0500
>> > Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
>> >
>> > Hi all,
>> >
>> > How do you handle cafeterias? If your university is like mine,
>> and most are standard setups, you have various stations. For instance 
>> mine had an entree line, grill, sandwich area, salad bar and more. Did 
>> you have an employee help you? I chose to do that since it was most 
>> efficient. We walked to the various places and they told me the food and 
>> I selected what I wanted.
>> >
>> > Do you carry your own tray? I always struggled with that; its
>> hard to balance and keep level. A mobility instructor showed me but its 
>> hard; always seems to wobble in my hand. I either place my hand across 
>> the tray or under the tray and grasp it from underneath. I usually opt 
>> for someone to carry it.
>> >
>> > Happy New year!
>> > Ashley
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
> 



From pdonahue1 at sbcglobal.net  Sun Jan  3 03:58:13 2010
From: pdonahue1 at sbcglobal.net (Peter Donahue)
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 21:58:13 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
References: <20100102231730.20914.38693@web1.serotek.com>
	<AD707351-BBF2-490B-AB22-ABDE1EB1D1EE@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <003101ca8c28$f9097ed0$4001a8c0@yourfsyly0jtwn>

Good evening everyone,

    And then wonder why your cell phone got robbed. This is a very bad idea 
and doesn't reflect positively on us as competent and independent blind 
individuals. I never hand my cell phone to strangers. Depending on where I 
am and what I have on me I'll either put their contact information in my 
Braille-N Speak, call my cell phone number and have the contact dictate the 
information to me or use the good old slate and stylist to protect my 
valuable belongings and to present a positive image of the blind.

    As far as dancing and such folding canes can be clipped to one's person 
in some fashion, the straight cane or a guide dog can be stowed/tethered in 
close proximity to the dance floor or left with a friend to hold while we're 
dancing.     These suggestions will also be of help in other situations 
where one must stoe or tie their mobility aid when performing particular 
tasks.

Peter Donahue


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Briley Pollard" <brileyp at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 8:44 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


I also don't recomend going to a club without a mobility aid. I will bring a 
folding or telescoping cane usually. Sometimes I check it at the door with 
my coat or leave it at my table, (dancing with a cane is a little awkward). 
As far as phone numbers, if you're comfortable just having the person call 
your phone and you can save it later, that might work.

I can't help but add that if you have a guide dog, taking them to a really 
loud environment like a club isn't in their best interest. Of course it is 
always at the owner's discretion, but a place where people are drinking, 
bodies are packed together, and the music is so loud it is bound to hurt 
their incredibly sensitive ears is highly stressfull for them as well as the 
owner.

That is my 20 cents.



On Jan  2, 2010, at 5:17 PM, Jedi wrote:

> you should always carry a cane with you even if you use a dog. You never 
> know when you will want or need to get somewhere independently.
>
> If you have a dog or want to avoid the inconvenience of a straight cane 
> (when dancing for example), use a telescoping cane or folding cane. A 
> night club is the last place a young lady or gentleman should be without a 
> traveling tool of some kind.
>
> Respectfully,
> Jedi)
>
> PS. I would not take a notetaker to a club nor would I just hand over my 
> phone. If your phone is hnaccessible, just call yourself and leave a 
> message with your rontact's info for later filing.
>
>
> Original message:
>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even 
>> bring
>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want to
>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it.  In
>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with it 
>> on
>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted guide. 
>> I
>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go 
>> with
>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel silly
>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having someone
>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it yourself. 
>> But
>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and it
>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit O.K.
>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in 
>> the
>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have a
>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your number.
>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell 
>> phones
>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if you 
>> can
>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful with
>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you move
>> funny or if your pants are tight.
>
>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers are
>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>>> is a good option.
>>> Beth
>
>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a discussion 
>>>> on
>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at Verizon
>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>> rewarding. I
>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>> socialist
>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>
>>>>                I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs
>>>> back
>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because the
>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I 
>>>> would
>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their number.
>>>> This
>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I 
>>>> use
>>>> to
>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like 
>>>> that.
>>>> My
>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your 
>>>> note
>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I believe 
>>>> a
>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the night
>>>> club
>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>
>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>
>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net
>
> -- 
> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit 
> www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
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_______________________________________________
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To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
nabs-l:
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From jessica.trask.reagan at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 11:07:55 2010
From: jessica.trask.reagan at gmail.com (Jess)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 06:07:55 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] VR Stream pros and cons
In-Reply-To: <ABBD27AE5DE4443086B0C8C4197CB32D@Ashley>
References: <4b3f802c.8602be0a.4f9a.fffff1ea@mx.google.com>
	<ABBD27AE5DE4443086B0C8C4197CB32D@Ashley>
Message-ID: <7B095004529C4F6799671A7279AA23D9@Jessica>

Ashley,
>From following this thread. Yes the Humanware Companion Software does come 
with the VR Stream. Because from my understanding it transfers the files 
between the VR Stream and the computer.
Jessica
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ashley Bramlett" <bookwormahb at earthlink.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 6:43 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] VR Stream pros and cons


> Chelse,
> Thanks for this information.  Good to know about the download process.  I 
> do have web braille.
> Does Human ware stream come with the VR stream unit?  What does it do?
>
> Ashley
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Chelsea Cook" <astrochem119 at gmail.com>
> To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 12:24 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] VR Stream pros and cons
>
>
>> Ashley,
>>
>>  I love my Stream! At first I was reluctant to get one, but then I found 
>> out what it can do.  I use it all the time for reading books from NLS and 
>> RFBD.  It is easy to get authorization keys from these places.  If you 
>> have a Web Braille account or are affiliated with your library, you 
>> should be able to complete an application for the new download site. 
>> With RFBD, go to your My Account on the online version and select 
>> "Authorize New Player." Then you just type in the serial number.  I don't 
>> use it for recording as much now, but that may change.
>>  There is a program that comes with it called HumanWare Stream Companion. 
>> This makes your talking books from NLS easy to transfer.  RFBD is more 
>> tedious, but I'm trying to see if there's an easier way to do it.  You 
>> can create bookmarks and transfer notes (recordings), to your computer 
>> with this program.  I've never tried playlists, but I love the Random 
>> music feature, similar to the concept of the IPod shuffle.  You can't 
>> navigate by song title and artist, per se, but if you know how your music 
>> structure is laid out, you can find a specific song by knowing its file 
>> and folder coordinates.  The Stream will accept those.  The only other 
>> problem I face sometimes is with the NLS books, you can't do page 
>> navigation.  It doesn't support Word documents yet.  Only t x t, b r f, 
>> and Html.  You can do word searches in these documents, and it makes it 
>> easier if you know how to text because it uses those same conventions for 
>> numbers.  I haven't had the practice yet.
>>  Overall: If you're in college and use NLS and RFBD for most of your 
>> reading, it's an excellent, all-in-one device.  You can put up to a 16 
>> gig HC SD.  card in it (I hear it has issues with anything higher), as 
>> well as USB flash drives.
>> Hope this helps,
>> Chelsea
>> "I ask you to look both ways.  For the road to a knowledge of the stars 
>> leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been 
>> reached through the stars."
>> Sir Arthur Eddington, British astrophysicist (1882-1944), Stars and Atoms 
>> (1928), Lecture 1
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jessica.trask.reagan%40gmail.com 




From albertyoo1 at hotmail.com  Sun Jan  3 14:00:24 2010
From: albertyoo1 at hotmail.com (Albert Yoo)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 09:00:24 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
In-Reply-To: <E9A0F11F1598440F8F043CFF2020611E@Ashley>
References: <F431BF0F5666406EA29732BC870B6651@Ashley><BAY139-W2879DFA03A79856BB852568B760@phx.gbl>,
	<auto-000133630047@mailfront1.g2host.com>,
	<E9A0F11F1598440F8F043CFF2020611E@Ashley>
Message-ID: <BAY139-W12BC7A63FF419CB8EE600B8B750@phx.gbl>


What was the other way you tried of holding the tray? Did you hold it with your fingertips? I would think this way wouldn't be good either because you could tip the food or drink that is on the tray. You hold the tray in the middle and then would you slide your cane so you have control over your tray? How would you find the with the tray in your hand and your cane in your hand as well? 
 
> From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net
> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 22:36:43 -0500
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
> 
> Dave,
> Yes there are techniques and thanks for sharing. As you see though some of 
> us have trouble with it. Someone said the tray wobbles and if the tray is 
> heavy this is a problem.
> I tried the second way of sliding your arm under the tray and placing the 
> tray on top of your arm. This didn't work for me because one side did not 
> have stability. The tray fell down. Fortunately, I was practicing and the 
> tray was empty.
> 
> I have tried the first way and it works a little better for me. Its hard to 
> describe what to do, but there are probably several ways. So if you all 
> have ideas share them.
> 
> Ashley
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "David Andrews" <dandrews at visi.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 9:06 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
> 
> 
> > Actually, there are techniques a blind person can use to safely carry a 
> > tray, and still use a cane.
> >
> > One method involves kind of wrapping your arm around the tray along its 
> > edge, and pressing the other side against your body, and holding it that 
> > way. Your hand can also extend past the edge of the tray, into they tray 
> > where it can hold your drink for stability.
> >
> > Another method involves making your arm into an angle and setting the tray 
> > on top of your arm.
> >
> > I probably aren't explaining very well, but it can be done with practice. 
> > It is something most of us as blind people are nervous about in one way or 
> > another.
> >
> > Dave
> >
> > At 09:24 AM 1/2/2010, you wrote:
> >
> >>
> >>
> >>It is okay to ask some one to help you carry the tray in my opinion 
> >>because it wobbles and it can tip over very easily. You can not carry the 
> >>cane and control the try safely. It is very hard to do this with out 
> >>spilling. Stay warm from all the wind.
> >>
> >> > From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net
> >> > To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> >> > Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 22:55:28 -0500
> >> > Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
> >> >
> >> > Hi all,
> >> >
> >> > How do you handle cafeterias? If your university is like mine,
> >> and most are standard setups, you have various stations. For instance 
> >> mine had an entree line, grill, sandwich area, salad bar and more. Did 
> >> you have an employee help you? I chose to do that since it was most 
> >> efficient. We walked to the various places and they told me the food and 
> >> I selected what I wanted.
> >> >
> >> > Do you carry your own tray? I always struggled with that; its
> >> hard to balance and keep level. A mobility instructor showed me but its 
> >> hard; always seems to wobble in my hand. I either place my hand across 
> >> the tray or under the tray and grasp it from underneath. I usually opt 
> >> for someone to carry it.
> >> >
> >> > Happy New year!
> >> > Ashley
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > nabs-l mailing list
> > nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> > To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> > nabs-l:
> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
> > 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/albertyoo1%40hotmail.com
 		 	   		  
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From dsmithnfb at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 14:25:11 2010
From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 06:25:11 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
In-Reply-To: <E9A0F11F1598440F8F043CFF2020611E@Ashley>
References: <F431BF0F5666406EA29732BC870B6651@Ashley>
	<BAY139-W2879DFA03A79856BB852568B760@phx.gbl>
	<auto-000133630047@mailfront1.g2host.com>
	<E9A0F11F1598440F8F043CFF2020611E@Ashley>
Message-ID: <409c235c1001030625j7c92a234wa1dab122d8d2b2b8@mail.gmail.com>

hey,
  I  have done a few things in this situation; I've  asked someone for
the general layout of the area  and have gone about it from there,  I
have also listened to the sound of people congragating in lines and
have  used those sound cues   to find out where I should be going.
  I think the easiest thing is just to  go with a student who might be
headed in that direction to get to  the line  you  need to get to and
then  ask someone around  as you need about  the lay out of the foods
in relation  to you (bread is in front of you, salid to  the left of
it, salid dressing to  it's left and so-on).   As for holding a trey;
I usually hold the trey on my left side (non-cane using side) with my
arm securing the trey aginst my side and  looping my index finger and
thumb around the cup if I have one.  I can still use my cane in this
way and  I just make sure to clear  the path of travel with my cane as
always.
   Best,
  Darian


On 1/2/10, Ashley  Bramlett <bookwormahb at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Dave,
> Yes there are techniques and thanks for sharing.  As you see though some of
> us have trouble with it.  Someone said the tray wobbles and if the tray is
> heavy this is a problem.
> I tried the second way of sliding your arm under the tray and placing the
> tray on top  of your arm.  This didn't work for me because one side did not
> have stability.  The tray fell down.  Fortunately, I was practicing and the
> tray was empty.
>
> I have tried the first way and it works a little better for me.  Its hard to
> describe what to do, but there are probably several ways.  So if you all
> have ideas share them.
>
> Ashley
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "David Andrews" <dandrews at visi.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 9:06 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
>
>
>> Actually, there are techniques a blind person can use to safely carry a
>> tray, and still use a cane.
>>
>> One method involves kind of wrapping your arm around the tray along its
>> edge, and pressing the other side against your body, and holding it that
>> way.  Your hand can also extend past the edge of the tray, into they tray
>> where it can hold your drink for stability.
>>
>> Another method involves making your arm into an angle and setting the tray
>>
>> on top of your arm.
>>
>> I probably aren't explaining very well, but it can be done with practice.
>> It is something most of us as blind people are nervous about in one way or
>>
>> another.
>>
>> Dave
>>
>> At 09:24 AM 1/2/2010, you wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>It is okay to ask some one to help you carry the tray in my opinion
>>>because it wobbles and it can tip over very easily. You can not carry the
>>>cane and control the try safely. It is very hard to do this with out
>>>spilling. Stay warm from all the wind.
>>>
>>> > From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net
>>> > To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> > Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 22:55:28 -0500
>>> > Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
>>> >
>>> > Hi all,
>>> >
>>> > How do you handle cafeterias? If your university is like mine,
>>> and most are standard setups, you have various stations. For instance
>>> mine had an entree line, grill, sandwich area, salad bar and more. Did
>>> you have an employee help you? I chose to do that since it was most
>>> efficient. We walked to the various places and they told me the food and
>>> I selected what I wanted.
>>> >
>>> > Do you carry your own tray? I always struggled with that; its
>>> hard to balance and keep level. A mobility instructor showed me but its
>>> hard; always seems to wobble in my hand. I either place my hand across
>>> the tray or under the tray and grasp it from underneath. I usually opt
>>> for someone to carry it.
>>> >
>>> > Happy New year!
>>> > Ashley
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>


-- 
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
before us;
if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
past and future generations,
then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
done, and
usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama


From dsmithnfb at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 14:35:06 2010
From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 06:35:06 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Happy new years
In-Reply-To: <47309011B07640B299ADB2A3853659A2@Jessica>
References: <000401ca8a94$62794cb0$276be610$@com>
	<ca301f5e0912312226m29e3f0e6r3258dcc279d994bf@mail.gmail.com>
	<47309011B07640B299ADB2A3853659A2@Jessica>
Message-ID: <409c235c1001030635u6cd6a3fay5a230e85535ee57a@mail.gmail.com>

Here's wishing  everybody a very positive, productive and empowering
2010. May you accomplish all that you've set out to do and more than
you've thought you could.  May you  continue to  inspire others and be
inspired  yourself.
  best wishes,
  Darian Smith
  board member- National Association of Blind Students

On 1/1/10, Jess <jessica.trask.reagan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Happy New Year to all.
> Jessica
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jordan Richardson" <lilrichie411 at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 1:26 AM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Happy new years
>
>
>> HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL!!!
>>
>> I hope y'all have a happy new year!   un ano prospero y con felicidad.
>>
>> Jordan
>> 2nd VP, MnABS
>>
>> 2009/12/31 lsterling0 <l.sterling0 at gmail.com>
>>
>>> Hi all, hope everyone has a great new year.
>>> Have a safe new years eve.
>>> Lou
>>>
>>> Owner of vipspouses a list for visually impaired and blind individuals to
>>> discuss frustrations in their lives.
>>> for an invitation To join contact
>>> lsterling0 at gmail.com
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>>
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/lilrichie411%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Jordan Richardson
>> 2nd Vice President, Minnesota Association of Blind Students
>> lilrichie411 at gmail.com
>> "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
>> --Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jessica.trask.reagan%40gmail.com
>>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>


-- 
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
before us;
if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
past and future generations,
then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
done, and
usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama


From hope.paulos at maine.edu  Sun Jan  3 17:04:39 2010
From: hope.paulos at maine.edu (Hope Paulos)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 12:04:39 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
References: <F431BF0F5666406EA29732BC870B6651@Ashley><BAY139-W2879DFA03A79856BB852568B760@phx.gbl><auto-000133630047@mailfront1.g2host.com><E9A0F11F1598440F8F043CFF2020611E@Ashley>
	<409c235c1001030625j7c92a234wa1dab122d8d2b2b8@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <13466A2F09A64B24955AF0AE6484E94B@Hope>

This technique makes sense for a cane user. Can those students with dogs 
explain how they carry a tray, please? I'm also interested. I usually carry 
my drink in my right hand and ask someone to carry my tray. My dog is 
trained with both hand signals and verbal  commands. Any assistance would be 
appreciated.
Hope and Beignet
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Darian Smith" <dsmithnfb at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 9:25 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays


> hey,
>  I  have done a few things in this situation; I've  asked someone for
> the general layout of the area  and have gone about it from there,  I
> have also listened to the sound of people congragating in lines and
> have  used those sound cues   to find out where I should be going.
>  I think the easiest thing is just to  go with a student who might be
> headed in that direction to get to  the line  you  need to get to and
> then  ask someone around  as you need about  the lay out of the foods
> in relation  to you (bread is in front of you, salid to  the left of
> it, salid dressing to  it's left and so-on).   As for holding a trey;
> I usually hold the trey on my left side (non-cane using side) with my
> arm securing the trey aginst my side and  looping my index finger and
> thumb around the cup if I have one.  I can still use my cane in this
> way and  I just make sure to clear  the path of travel with my cane as
> always.
>   Best,
>  Darian
>
>
> On 1/2/10, Ashley  Bramlett <bookwormahb at earthlink.net> wrote:
>> Dave,
>> Yes there are techniques and thanks for sharing.  As you see though some 
>> of
>> us have trouble with it.  Someone said the tray wobbles and if the tray 
>> is
>> heavy this is a problem.
>> I tried the second way of sliding your arm under the tray and placing the
>> tray on top  of your arm.  This didn't work for me because one side did 
>> not
>> have stability.  The tray fell down.  Fortunately, I was practicing and 
>> the
>> tray was empty.
>>
>> I have tried the first way and it works a little better for me.  Its hard 
>> to
>> describe what to do, but there are probably several ways.  So if you all
>> have ideas share them.
>>
>> Ashley
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "David Andrews" <dandrews at visi.com>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 9:06 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
>>
>>
>>> Actually, there are techniques a blind person can use to safely carry a
>>> tray, and still use a cane.
>>>
>>> One method involves kind of wrapping your arm around the tray along its
>>> edge, and pressing the other side against your body, and holding it that
>>> way.  Your hand can also extend past the edge of the tray, into they 
>>> tray
>>> where it can hold your drink for stability.
>>>
>>> Another method involves making your arm into an angle and setting the 
>>> tray
>>>
>>> on top of your arm.
>>>
>>> I probably aren't explaining very well, but it can be done with 
>>> practice.
>>> It is something most of us as blind people are nervous about in one way 
>>> or
>>>
>>> another.
>>>
>>> Dave
>>>
>>> At 09:24 AM 1/2/2010, you wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>It is okay to ask some one to help you carry the tray in my opinion
>>>>because it wobbles and it can tip over very easily. You can not carry 
>>>>the
>>>>cane and control the try safely. It is very hard to do this with out
>>>>spilling. Stay warm from all the wind.
>>>>
>>>> > From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net
>>>> > To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> > Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 22:55:28 -0500
>>>> > Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
>>>> >
>>>> > Hi all,
>>>> >
>>>> > How do you handle cafeterias? If your university is like mine,
>>>> and most are standard setups, you have various stations. For instance
>>>> mine had an entree line, grill, sandwich area, salad bar and more. Did
>>>> you have an employee help you? I chose to do that since it was most
>>>> efficient. We walked to the various places and they told me the food 
>>>> and
>>>> I selected what I wanted.
>>>> >
>>>> > Do you carry your own tray? I always struggled with that; its
>>>> hard to balance and keep level. A mobility instructor showed me but its
>>>> hard; always seems to wobble in my hand. I either place my hand across
>>>> the tray or under the tray and grasp it from underneath. I usually opt
>>>> for someone to carry it.
>>>> >
>>>> > Happy New year!
>>>> > Ashley
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>>
>
>
> -- 
> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>
>
> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
> before us;
> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
> past and future generations,
> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
> done, and
> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/hope.paulos%40maine.edu 



From troubleclark at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 17:45:38 2010
From: troubleclark at gmail.com (Nathan Clark)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 12:45:38 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] College Math / Algebra with a reader
Message-ID: <fc8eb2b1001030945o15478aa9s9405625ad88317e9@mail.gmail.com>

Dear Nabsters,

I will be starting college in the fall and would like to correspond
with someone who had to primarily rely on a reader for math related
courses. I have been told it is very difficult to get Math college
textbooks in Braille so I believe my option is limited to a reader.

I would appreciate any advice and would like to ask you some
questions, maybe off list.

Thanks

Nathan


From djdrocks4ever at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 18:04:39 2010
From: djdrocks4ever at gmail.com (David Dunphy)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 13:04:39 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] The First Djd Invasion Show of 2010 Airs Tonight
In-Reply-To: <409c235c1001030635u6cd6a3fay5a230e85535ee57a@mail.gmail.com>
References: <000401ca8a94$62794cb0$276be610$@com><ca301f5e0912312226m29e3f0e6r3258dcc279d994bf@mail.gmail.com><47309011B07640B299ADB2A3853659A2@Jessica>
	<409c235c1001030635u6cd6a3fay5a230e85535ee57a@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <9CDBA011E15249F2B933927C223D31F1@djdrocksPC>

Greetings All!
Want to find out how your birthday could win you a 40-dollar visa card?
Want to hear an interesting mix of pop, country, oldies, and other
interesting surprises that make The Djd Invasion musically unique?
Or maybe you just want to escape boring Sunday night television and football
games!
What ever the case is, join me, Will, and friends live from Will's
comfortable studios in Massachusetts, as we present the first Djd Invasion
show of 2010!
The fun begins at 7 PM eastern on Radio360.
During the show, you can contact us with comments and requests
By email, msn messenger, or aol instant messenger at the address
live at radio360.us
or when the lines are open, give us a call by skype at the address
radio360usa
or by telephone at
516-717-4425
Any time Will and I collaborate, the unexpected often happens, so to have
some fun, hear a unique music mix, and learn how you can win some cash, save
this email, and at 7 PM eastern, (6 PM central, 5 pM mountain, 4 PM pacific)
go to
http://www.radio360.us/players/playerselection.shtml
to connect and listen to the show.
And to learn more about Radio360, check us out on the web at
http://www.radio360.us
Here's to an exciting year for Radio360, and a good start to a new year for
The Djd Invasion. Hope to see you all there!
Best regards,
David Dunphy, host of The Djd Invasion on Radio360
 

__________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature
database 4740 (20100103) __________

The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.

http://www.eset.com
 



From brileyp at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 18:23:34 2010
From: brileyp at gmail.com (Briley Pollard)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 12:23:34 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
In-Reply-To: <13466A2F09A64B24955AF0AE6484E94B@Hope>
References: <F431BF0F5666406EA29732BC870B6651@Ashley><BAY139-W2879DFA03A79856BB852568B760@phx.gbl><auto-000133630047@mailfront1.g2host.com><E9A0F11F1598440F8F043CFF2020611E@Ashley>
	<409c235c1001030625j7c92a234wa1dab122d8d2b2b8@mail.gmail.com>
	<13466A2F09A64B24955AF0AE6484E94B@Hope>
Message-ID: <AE58DD5B-6E19-4E2B-948A-735E435C4D8E@gmail.com>

I usually use the same technique  of holding the tray against my hip or side, even when I'm using my dog.  As long as I have a firm grasp on the drink, and steady down the dog, I have no problems. Good luck.
On Jan 3, 2010, at 11:04 AM, Hope Paulos wrote:

> This technique makes sense for a cane user. Can those students with dogs explain how they carry a tray, please? I'm also interested. I usually carry my drink in my right hand and ask someone to carry my tray. My dog is trained with both hand signals and verbal  commands. Any assistance would be appreciated.
> Hope and Beignet
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Darian Smith" <dsmithnfb at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 9:25 AM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
> 
> 
>> hey,
>> I  have done a few things in this situation; I've  asked someone for
>> the general layout of the area  and have gone about it from there,  I
>> have also listened to the sound of people congragating in lines and
>> have  used those sound cues   to find out where I should be going.
>> I think the easiest thing is just to  go with a student who might be
>> headed in that direction to get to  the line  you  need to get to and
>> then  ask someone around  as you need about  the lay out of the foods
>> in relation  to you (bread is in front of you, salid to  the left of
>> it, salid dressing to  it's left and so-on).   As for holding a trey;
>> I usually hold the trey on my left side (non-cane using side) with my
>> arm securing the trey aginst my side and  looping my index finger and
>> thumb around the cup if I have one.  I can still use my cane in this
>> way and  I just make sure to clear  the path of travel with my cane as
>> always.
>>  Best,
>> Darian
>> 
>> 
>> On 1/2/10, Ashley  Bramlett <bookwormahb at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>> Dave,
>>> Yes there are techniques and thanks for sharing.  As you see though some of
>>> us have trouble with it.  Someone said the tray wobbles and if the tray is
>>> heavy this is a problem.
>>> I tried the second way of sliding your arm under the tray and placing the
>>> tray on top  of your arm.  This didn't work for me because one side did not
>>> have stability.  The tray fell down.  Fortunately, I was practicing and the
>>> tray was empty.
>>> 
>>> I have tried the first way and it works a little better for me.  Its hard to
>>> describe what to do, but there are probably several ways.  So if you all
>>> have ideas share them.
>>> 
>>> Ashley
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "David Andrews" <dandrews at visi.com>
>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 9:06 PM
>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> Actually, there are techniques a blind person can use to safely carry a
>>>> tray, and still use a cane.
>>>> 
>>>> One method involves kind of wrapping your arm around the tray along its
>>>> edge, and pressing the other side against your body, and holding it that
>>>> way.  Your hand can also extend past the edge of the tray, into they tray
>>>> where it can hold your drink for stability.
>>>> 
>>>> Another method involves making your arm into an angle and setting the tray
>>>> 
>>>> on top of your arm.
>>>> 
>>>> I probably aren't explaining very well, but it can be done with practice.
>>>> It is something most of us as blind people are nervous about in one way or
>>>> 
>>>> another.
>>>> 
>>>> Dave
>>>> 
>>>> At 09:24 AM 1/2/2010, you wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> It is okay to ask some one to help you carry the tray in my opinion
>>>>> because it wobbles and it can tip over very easily. You can not carry the
>>>>> cane and control the try safely. It is very hard to do this with out
>>>>> spilling. Stay warm from all the wind.
>>>>> 
>>>>> > From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net
>>>>> > To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> > Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 22:55:28 -0500
>>>>> > Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
>>>>> >
>>>>> > Hi all,
>>>>> >
>>>>> > How do you handle cafeterias? If your university is like mine,
>>>>> and most are standard setups, you have various stations. For instance
>>>>> mine had an entree line, grill, sandwich area, salad bar and more. Did
>>>>> you have an employee help you? I chose to do that since it was most
>>>>> efficient. We walked to the various places and they told me the food and
>>>>> I selected what I wanted.
>>>>> >
>>>>> > Do you carry your own tray? I always struggled with that; its
>>>>> hard to balance and keep level. A mobility instructor showed me but its
>>>>> hard; always seems to wobble in my hand. I either place my hand across
>>>>> the tray or under the tray and grasp it from underneath. I usually opt
>>>>> for someone to carry it.
>>>>> >
>>>>> > Happy New year!
>>>>> > Ashley
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>> 
>> 
>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>> before us;
>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>> past and future generations,
>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>> done, and
>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/hope.paulos%40maine.edu 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com



From clb5590 at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 19:11:26 2010
From: clb5590 at gmail.com (Cindy Bennett)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 14:11:26 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] College Math / Algebra with a reader
In-Reply-To: <fc8eb2b1001030945o15478aa9s9405625ad88317e9@mail.gmail.com>
References: <fc8eb2b1001030945o15478aa9s9405625ad88317e9@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <3fea3c411001031111w5df04672kda52aeacec45632a@mail.gmail.com>

I have used a reader for college algebra and statistics and found it
very helpful. You can email me off list if you would like.
clb5590 at gmail.com

Cindy

On 1/3/10, Nathan Clark <troubleclark at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Nabsters,
>
> I will be starting college in the fall and would like to correspond
> with someone who had to primarily rely on a reader for math related
> courses. I have been told it is very difficult to get Math college
> textbooks in Braille so I believe my option is limited to a reader.
>
> I would appreciate any advice and would like to ask you some
> questions, maybe off list.
>
> Thanks
>
> Nathan
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>


From dsmithnfb at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 19:37:13 2010
From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 11:37:13 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
In-Reply-To: <AE58DD5B-6E19-4E2B-948A-735E435C4D8E@gmail.com>
References: <F431BF0F5666406EA29732BC870B6651@Ashley>
	<BAY139-W2879DFA03A79856BB852568B760@phx.gbl>
	<auto-000133630047@mailfront1.g2host.com>
	<E9A0F11F1598440F8F043CFF2020611E@Ashley>
	<409c235c1001030625j7c92a234wa1dab122d8d2b2b8@mail.gmail.com>
	<13466A2F09A64B24955AF0AE6484E94B@Hope>
	<AE58DD5B-6E19-4E2B-948A-735E435C4D8E@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <409c235c1001031137m7ea8975fpbe192e456230c21c@mail.gmail.com>

This technique seemed to make sense to me for dog handlers at first
thought, but my question is  What if you need to   give a correction?

On 1/3/10, Briley Pollard <brileyp at gmail.com> wrote:
> I usually use the same technique  of holding the tray against my hip or
> side, even when I'm using my dog.  As long as I have a firm grasp on the
> drink, and steady down the dog, I have no problems. Good luck.
> On Jan 3, 2010, at 11:04 AM, Hope Paulos wrote:
>
>> This technique makes sense for a cane user. Can those students with dogs
>> explain how they carry a tray, please? I'm also interested. I usually
>> carry my drink in my right hand and ask someone to carry my tray. My dog
>> is trained with both hand signals and verbal  commands. Any assistance
>> would be appreciated.
>> Hope and Beignet
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Darian Smith" <dsmithnfb at gmail.com>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 9:25 AM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
>>
>>
>>> hey,
>>> I  have done a few things in this situation; I've  asked someone for
>>> the general layout of the area  and have gone about it from there,  I
>>> have also listened to the sound of people congragating in lines and
>>> have  used those sound cues   to find out where I should be going.
>>> I think the easiest thing is just to  go with a student who might be
>>> headed in that direction to get to  the line  you  need to get to and
>>> then  ask someone around  as you need about  the lay out of the foods
>>> in relation  to you (bread is in front of you, salid to  the left of
>>> it, salid dressing to  it's left and so-on).   As for holding a trey;
>>> I usually hold the trey on my left side (non-cane using side) with my
>>> arm securing the trey aginst my side and  looping my index finger and
>>> thumb around the cup if I have one.  I can still use my cane in this
>>> way and  I just make sure to clear  the path of travel with my cane as
>>> always.
>>>  Best,
>>> Darian
>>>
>>>
>>> On 1/2/10, Ashley  Bramlett <bookwormahb at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>> Dave,
>>>> Yes there are techniques and thanks for sharing.  As you see though some
>>>> of
>>>> us have trouble with it.  Someone said the tray wobbles and if the tray
>>>> is
>>>> heavy this is a problem.
>>>> I tried the second way of sliding your arm under the tray and placing
>>>> the
>>>> tray on top  of your arm.  This didn't work for me because one side did
>>>> not
>>>> have stability.  The tray fell down.  Fortunately, I was practicing and
>>>> the
>>>> tray was empty.
>>>>
>>>> I have tried the first way and it works a little better for me.  Its
>>>> hard to
>>>> describe what to do, but there are probably several ways.  So if you all
>>>> have ideas share them.
>>>>
>>>> Ashley
>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>> From: "David Andrews" <dandrews at visi.com>
>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>> Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 9:06 PM
>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> Actually, there are techniques a blind person can use to safely carry a
>>>>> tray, and still use a cane.
>>>>>
>>>>> One method involves kind of wrapping your arm around the tray along its
>>>>> edge, and pressing the other side against your body, and holding it
>>>>> that
>>>>> way.  Your hand can also extend past the edge of the tray, into they
>>>>> tray
>>>>> where it can hold your drink for stability.
>>>>>
>>>>> Another method involves making your arm into an angle and setting the
>>>>> tray
>>>>>
>>>>> on top of your arm.
>>>>>
>>>>> I probably aren't explaining very well, but it can be done with
>>>>> practice.
>>>>> It is something most of us as blind people are nervous about in one way
>>>>> or
>>>>>
>>>>> another.
>>>>>
>>>>> Dave
>>>>>
>>>>> At 09:24 AM 1/2/2010, you wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> It is okay to ask some one to help you carry the tray in my opinion
>>>>>> because it wobbles and it can tip over very easily. You can not carry
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> cane and control the try safely. It is very hard to do this with out
>>>>>> spilling. Stay warm from all the wind.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> > From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net
>>>>>> > To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> > Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 22:55:28 -0500
>>>>>> > Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
>>>>>> >
>>>>>> > Hi all,
>>>>>> >
>>>>>> > How do you handle cafeterias? If your university is like mine,
>>>>>> and most are standard setups, you have various stations. For instance
>>>>>> mine had an entree line, grill, sandwich area, salad bar and more. Did
>>>>>> you have an employee help you? I chose to do that since it was most
>>>>>> efficient. We walked to the various places and they told me the food
>>>>>> and
>>>>>> I selected what I wanted.
>>>>>> >
>>>>>> > Do you carry your own tray? I always struggled with that; its
>>>>>> hard to balance and keep level. A mobility instructor showed me but
>>>>>> its
>>>>>> hard; always seems to wobble in my hand. I either place my hand across
>>>>>> the tray or under the tray and grasp it from underneath. I usually opt
>>>>>> for someone to carry it.
>>>>>> >
>>>>>> > Happy New year!
>>>>>> > Ashley
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>
>>>
>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>> before us;
>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>> past and future generations,
>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>> done, and
>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/hope.paulos%40maine.edu
>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>


-- 
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
before us;
if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
past and future generations,
then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
done, and
usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama


From astrochem119 at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 19:49:03 2010
From: astrochem119 at gmail.com (Chelsea Cook)
Date: Sun, 03 Jan 2010 14:49:03 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Trays
Message-ID: <4b40f36c.8802be0a.2a3a.0ee1@mx.google.com>

Hi,

  I agree with Darian on the tray points, and thank him for 
posting that Happy New Year sentiment! I liked it.
  As to the tray: I usually employ Dave's first method.  This is 
how I do it, particularly if there are multiple items (warning: 
physics major side peeking out):
Usually, I'll figure out what I have on the tray and try to 
conceptually determine its center of gravity (where everything is 
balanced), and try to achieve that as I move, making sure that 
not too many heavy things lean to one side.  Once I find that 
position, I usually hold my tray between non-cane arm and my 
body.  If I'm carrying a drink and it's not too difficult, I'll 
usually put the drink near the outer edge of the tray so my thumb 
can keep track of where it is.  The higher you hold on the cup, 
the more control you have over it.  If getting fast-food, I'll 
often ask for a to-go bag, even if I'm eating in.  That way, I 
can carry the drink securely and hold the bag between arm and 
body.  It makes life much easier.
Question: When in a college cafeteria setting with a fountain 
drink machine, do you usually find a table, set stuff down, and 
then go get a drink? Not sure how effective this would be when 
eating alone.
Chelsea
"I ask you to look both ways.  For the road to a knowledge of the 
stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom 
has been reached through the stars."
Sir Arthur Eddington, British astrophysicist (1882-1944), Stars 
and Atoms (1928), Lecture 1


From daydreamingncolor at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 20:16:38 2010
From: daydreamingncolor at gmail.com (Aziza C)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 12:16:38 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] College Math / Algebra with a reader
In-Reply-To: <3fea3c411001031111w5df04672kda52aeacec45632a@mail.gmail.com>
References: <fc8eb2b1001030945o15478aa9s9405625ad88317e9@mail.gmail.com>
	<3fea3c411001031111w5df04672kda52aeacec45632a@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <632092011001031216p5a7dee08u8d4987983b496423@mail.gmail.com>

I would also be interested in information on this topic. Although, I'd
be interested in finding out if it is truly hard to receive brailled
materials in college for math classes. Nathan, I haven't taken a
college level math class yet, I have finished one semester in college,
however I postponed my math class. I will be taking it in the spring.
I spoke to my DSPS office, and the agreement was that I could do
pretty well without brailled materials in all classes except math.
They agreed that they could get me the necessary material in Braille
for the class. Am I just lucky?
Aziza

On 1/3/10, Cindy Bennett <clb5590 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have used a reader for college algebra and statistics and found it
> very helpful. You can email me off list if you would like.
> clb5590 at gmail.com
>
> Cindy
>
> On 1/3/10, Nathan Clark <troubleclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Dear Nabsters,
>>
>> I will be starting college in the fall and would like to correspond
>> with someone who had to primarily rely on a reader for math related
>> courses. I have been told it is very difficult to get Math college
>> textbooks in Braille so I believe my option is limited to a reader.
>>
>> I would appreciate any advice and would like to ask you some
>> questions, maybe off list.
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Nathan
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/daydreamingncolor%40gmail.com
>


From haltaf at carrollu.edu  Sun Jan  3 20:23:08 2010
From: haltaf at carrollu.edu (Hina)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 14:23:08 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] College Math / Algebra with a reader
References: <fc8eb2b1001030945o15478aa9s9405625ad88317e9@mail.gmail.com><3fea3c411001031111w5df04672kda52aeacec45632a@mail.gmail.com>
	<632092011001031216p5a7dee08u8d4987983b496423@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4B95E6921BFD4F7697DE75D6F162EFB8@DB8D43F1>

hi,
i did college math with the help of math help centre/tuitors on campus. the 
college also provided me braille books for math.
hina.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Aziza C" <daydreamingncolor at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 2:16 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] College Math / Algebra with a reader


I would also be interested in information on this topic. Although, I'd
be interested in finding out if it is truly hard to receive brailled
materials in college for math classes. Nathan, I haven't taken a
college level math class yet, I have finished one semester in college,
however I postponed my math class. I will be taking it in the spring.
I spoke to my DSPS office, and the agreement was that I could do
pretty well without brailled materials in all classes except math.
They agreed that they could get me the necessary material in Braille
for the class. Am I just lucky?
Aziza

On 1/3/10, Cindy Bennett <clb5590 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have used a reader for college algebra and statistics and found it
> very helpful. You can email me off list if you would like.
> clb5590 at gmail.com
>
> Cindy
>
> On 1/3/10, Nathan Clark <troubleclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Dear Nabsters,
>>
>> I will be starting college in the fall and would like to correspond
>> with someone who had to primarily rely on a reader for math related
>> courses. I have been told it is very difficult to get Math college
>> textbooks in Braille so I believe my option is limited to a reader.
>>
>> I would appreciate any advice and would like to ask you some
>> questions, maybe off list.
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Nathan
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/daydreamingncolor%40gmail.com
>

_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/haltaf%40carrollu.edu 



From ginisd at sbcglobal.net  Sun Jan  3 20:37:16 2010
From: ginisd at sbcglobal.net (V Nork)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 12:37:16 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] On Study Groups
Message-ID: <061EDF6B834D4AAD9C7906CE6125BDBA@windows4c0ed96>

Open question, what advice do any of you have for starting a study group in a class?  I have never been a   part of a study group, but I think it could really be   a help in  managing the work load and  doing well in a class.  Or would it?  If any of you have been in a study group, what did you like and dislike about it?  Did it benefit you?  Are there strategies you used to start one in a class?  Where did you meet, etcetera, Thanks for  sharing your thoughts, Ginny

From dianefilipe at peoplepc.com  Sun Jan  3 20:47:38 2010
From: dianefilipe at peoplepc.com (Diane)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 13:47:38 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] It's not too early!
Message-ID: <9FD05A5C29864658B2AAE53172714641@DianePC>

Just wanted y'all to know I just made my reservation for National in Dallas, July 3 to 8.
The phone number for the Hilton Anatole is 214-748-1200, and be sure to tell them you are with the NFB to get the $62/night rate!
Diane

From minesm at me.com  Sun Jan  3 20:47:45 2010
From: minesm at me.com (Maurice Mines)
Date: Sun, 03 Jan 2010 12:47:45 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Trays
In-Reply-To: <4b40f36c.8802be0a.2a3a.0ee1@mx.google.com>
References: <4b40f36c.8802be0a.2a3a.0ee1@mx.google.com>
Message-ID: <11BD2F6A-3D24-4473-9A8A-F1FE79F53BE3@me.com>

what I due with a drink is if getting fast food I rap the top of the bag around the cup so I don't speil it. jest my two bites worth. maurice call kd0iko. 
On Jan 3, 2010, at 11:49 AM, Chelsea Cook wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I agree with Darian on the tray points, and thank him for posting that Happy New Year sentiment! I liked it.
> As to the tray: I usually employ Dave's first method.  This is how I do it, particularly if there are multiple items (warning: physics major side peeking out):
> Usually, I'll figure out what I have on the tray and try to conceptually determine its center of gravity (where everything is balanced), and try to achieve that as I move, making sure that not too many heavy things lean to one side.  Once I find that position, I usually hold my tray between non-cane arm and my body.  If I'm carrying a drink and it's not too difficult, I'll usually put the drink near the outer edge of the tray so my thumb can keep track of where it is.  The higher you hold on the cup, the more control you have over it.  If getting fast-food, I'll often ask for a to-go bag, even if I'm eating in.  That way, I can carry the drink securely and hold the bag between arm and body.  It makes life much easier.
> Question: When in a college cafeteria setting with a fountain drink machine, do you usually find a table, set stuff down, and then go get a drink? Not sure how effective this would be when eating alone.
> Chelsea
> "I ask you to look both ways.  For the road to a knowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars."
> Sir Arthur Eddington, British astrophysicist (1882-1944), Stars and Atoms (1928), Lecture 1
> 
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/minesm%40me.com



From bookwormahb at earthlink.net  Sun Jan  3 20:53:15 2010
From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net (Ashley  Bramlett)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 15:53:15 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Trays
References: <4b40f36c.8802be0a.2a3a.0ee1@mx.google.com>
Message-ID: <6E2D59251D2F407AB9F041C625BBF754@Ashley>

In college, I chose to have assistance and they carried my tray and drink. 
However, if I wanted seconds on drinks, I got it on my own.  I just carried 
the drink in my hand and asked a student or someone what the drink selection 
was.

Ashley
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chelsea Cook" <astrochem119 at gmail.com>
To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 2:49 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] Trays


> Hi,
>
>  I agree with Darian on the tray points, and thank him for posting that 
> Happy New Year sentiment! I liked it.
>  As to the tray: I usually employ Dave's first method.  This is how I do 
> it, particularly if there are multiple items (warning: physics major side 
> peeking out):
> Usually, I'll figure out what I have on the tray and try to conceptually 
> determine its center of gravity (where everything is balanced), and try to 
> achieve that as I move, making sure that not too many heavy things lean to 
> one side.  Once I find that position, I usually hold my tray between 
> non-cane arm and my body.  If I'm carrying a drink and it's not too 
> difficult, I'll usually put the drink near the outer edge of the tray so 
> my thumb can keep track of where it is.  The higher you hold on the cup, 
> the more control you have over it.  If getting fast-food, I'll often ask 
> for a to-go bag, even if I'm eating in.  That way, I can carry the drink 
> securely and hold the bag between arm and body.  It makes life much 
> easier.
> Question: When in a college cafeteria setting with a fountain drink 
> machine, do you usually find a table, set stuff down, and then go get a 
> drink? Not sure how effective this would be when eating alone.
> Chelsea
> "I ask you to look both ways.  For the road to a knowledge of the stars 
> leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been 
> reached through the stars."
> Sir Arthur Eddington, British astrophysicist (1882-1944), Stars and Atoms 
> (1928), Lecture 1
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
> 



From l.sterling0 at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 20:59:43 2010
From: l.sterling0 at gmail.com (lsterling0)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 14:59:43 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] College Math / Algebra with a reader
In-Reply-To: <fc8eb2b1001030945o15478aa9s9405625ad88317e9@mail.gmail.com>
References: <fc8eb2b1001030945o15478aa9s9405625ad88317e9@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <006301ca8cb7$acd36780$067a3680$@com>

Hi Nathan, I took my math classes using only a reader and much help and
understanding from my profss.
I postponed all my math classes as long as I could but finally had to tackle
them.
I found a great reader thanks to God but that is a story for another time.
If I can give you some advice, talk to other students to get their ideas on
the best profs. After that talk to the ones that seem the best to get a feel
for how they will work with you.
I took most of my test in the profs offices.
Also, take extra time for these classes.
I hope this will help you as well as others.
You can email me off list.
Lou

Owner of vipspouses a list for visually impaired and blind individuals to
discuss frustrations in their lives.
for an invertation To join contact 
lsterling0 at gmail.com



-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Nathan Clark
Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 11:46 AM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: [nabs-l] College Math / Algebra with a reader

Dear Nabsters,

I will be starting college in the fall and would like to correspond
with someone who had to primarily rely on a reader for math related
courses. I have been told it is very difficult to get Math college
textbooks in Braille so I believe my option is limited to a reader.

I would appreciate any advice and would like to ask you some
questions, maybe off list.

Thanks

Nathan

_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/l.sterling0%40gmail.
com



From bookwormahb at earthlink.net  Sun Jan  3 21:03:08 2010
From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net (Ashley  Bramlett)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 16:03:08 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] College Math / Algebra with a reader
References: <fc8eb2b1001030945o15478aa9s9405625ad88317e9@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <696D962A300045A185FB35F23A9E470D@Ashley>

Nathan, if you use a reader for math, make sure that reader is familiar with 
math symbols.  Get a math major or someone who took the class.  Also have a 
way to write down important stuff like formulas and have a way to draw 
diagrams so you'll remember it such as wiki sticks.  If you can see a little 
use a marker.

Ashley
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Nathan Clark" <troubleclark at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 12:45 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] College Math / Algebra with a reader


> Dear Nabsters,
>
> I will be starting college in the fall and would like to correspond
> with someone who had to primarily rely on a reader for math related
> courses. I have been told it is very difficult to get Math college
> textbooks in Braille so I believe my option is limited to a reader.
>
> I would appreciate any advice and would like to ask you some
> questions, maybe off list.
>
> Thanks
>
> Nathan
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
> 



From dsmithnfb at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 21:11:43 2010
From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 13:11:43 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Trays
In-Reply-To: <4b40f36c.8802be0a.2a3a.0ee1@mx.google.com>
References: <4b40f36c.8802be0a.2a3a.0ee1@mx.google.com>
Message-ID: <409c235c1001031311n2618d0f9w65e7d3e71f54312a@mail.gmail.com>

Hi  Chelsea - Thanks,

 I normally get  my drink and then  just  find my seat after this.  I
have also put the  trey down at a seat and  simply remember where I
put  the  trey. I'll either orientate by how many tables I have to
travel to get to the drinks or  noise in the area.     An example of
this would be  if  you  hear people going into a refridgorator  and
then can pick up the  humming from  it and know it's  relation to you
as you  are sitting at your seat, you can  use this  to  find your way
back to your seat.
  hope that makes sense  and halps.
  Darian

On 1/3/10, Chelsea Cook <astrochem119 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>   I agree with Darian on the tray points, and thank him for
> posting that Happy New Year sentiment! I liked it.
>   As to the tray: I usually employ Dave's first method.  This is
> how I do it, particularly if there are multiple items (warning:
> physics major side peeking out):
> Usually, I'll figure out what I have on the tray and try to
> conceptually determine its center of gravity (where everything is
> balanced), and try to achieve that as I move, making sure that
> not too many heavy things lean to one side.  Once I find that
> position, I usually hold my tray between non-cane arm and my
> body.  If I'm carrying a drink and it's not too difficult, I'll
> usually put the drink near the outer edge of the tray so my thumb
> can keep track of where it is.  The higher you hold on the cup,
> the more control you have over it.  If getting fast-food, I'll
> often ask for a to-go bag, even if I'm eating in.  That way, I
> can carry the drink securely and hold the bag between arm and
> body.  It makes life much easier.
> Question: When in a college cafeteria setting with a fountain
> drink machine, do you usually find a table, set stuff down, and
> then go get a drink? Not sure how effective this would be when
> eating alone.
> Chelsea
> "I ask you to look both ways.  For the road to a knowledge of the
> stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom
> has been reached through the stars."
> Sir Arthur Eddington, British astrophysicist (1882-1944), Stars
> and Atoms (1928), Lecture 1
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>


-- 
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
before us;
if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
past and future generations,
then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
done, and
usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama


From serenacucco at verizon.net  Sun Jan  3 20:59:19 2010
From: serenacucco at verizon.net (Serena)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 15:59:19 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
References: <FEEA069F9B104DB9BB28822D9BF9C3BB@kevin9ee0841f6><auto-000133323289@mailfront2.g2host.com><632092011001011441u3295eed5h5144b06e498f156d@mail.gmail.com>
	<5F0A86A3D6CA4F51BBFCE95DEEEEA927@Ashley>
Message-ID: <011c01ca8cb7$9eaa38a0$0201a8c0@Serene>

Hi list,

I don't go to clubs, so I'm not the expert, but the only issue I'd have 
about letting the person who's number you want put the number in your phone 
is How well do you guys really know one another if you just met at a club? 
How do you know if the person isn't drunk/high when he/she says he/she's 
gonna give you his/her number or asks you for yours?  Sighted folks may or 
may not know this answer, either, but can see the look on the person's face 
to judge the situation.

Serena


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ashley Bramlett" <bookwormahb at earthlink.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 11:33 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


> Aziza,
> Yes sighted people trade phones for that.  My brother did that.  At a 
> club I want as less as I can manage so having someone put a number in my 
> phone wouldn't bother me.  Another option is for them to write it down and 
> you have someone read it to you later.  I don't go to clubs much so this 
> hasn't been an issue but that's what I'd do.
>
> Ashley
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Aziza C" <daydreamingncolor at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:41 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>>I agree with Dave, but isn't letting someone put their number in your
>> phone what sighted people do too? I've seen my sister trade phones
>> with her new friends and they input their numbers in each others
>> phones. Or, one person will input the number in the other's phone,
>> then the person will call them and the first person will save the
>> number when it shows up on the missed call list.
>> Aziza
>>
>> On 1/1/10, David Andrews <dandrews at visi.com> wrote:
>>> I would take a slate and stylus.  There are small ones that Braille
>>> on cards.  Using one makes you independent -- having someone put a
>>> number in your cell phone seems more dependent to me.
>>>
>>> Dave
>>>
>>> At 10:11 AM 1/1/2010, you wrote:
>>>>Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a
>>>>discussion on here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have
>>>>a job at Verizon Wireless working at a call center. It is
>>>>challenging. How it is rewarding. I am glad to finely get off of
>>>>social security soon. Or as I call it socialist insecurity. But
>>>>that's another story.
>>>>
>>>>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night
>>>> clubs back in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with
>>>> me because the thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded
>>>> strange. But I would always have a problem if I met someone and
>>>> wanted to get their number. This was because the music was so loud
>>>> that it was hard to communicate. I use to have people program
>>>> numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like that. My question
>>>> to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your note
>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I
>>>> believe a Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some
>>>> like the night club sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/daydreamingncolor%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net 



From brileyp at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 22:03:48 2010
From: brileyp at gmail.com (Briley Pollard)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 16:03:48 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
In-Reply-To: <409c235c1001031137m7ea8975fpbe192e456230c21c@mail.gmail.com>
References: <F431BF0F5666406EA29732BC870B6651@Ashley>
	<BAY139-W2879DFA03A79856BB852568B760@phx.gbl>
	<auto-000133630047@mailfront1.g2host.com>
	<E9A0F11F1598440F8F043CFF2020611E@Ashley>
	<409c235c1001030625j7c92a234wa1dab122d8d2b2b8@mail.gmail.com>
	<13466A2F09A64B24955AF0AE6484E94B@Hope>
	<AE58DD5B-6E19-4E2B-948A-735E435C4D8E@gmail.com>
	<409c235c1001031137m7ea8975fpbe192e456230c21c@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <7C516744-9CFE-4838-906D-2AA715922FFB@gmail.com>

Verbal is usually effective for Wrangler. I suppose I've never been in a situation where I needed to give a leash correction while carrying a tray. I try to avoid leash corrections whenever possible, so my dog is very responsibe to verbal ones.
On Jan 3, 2010, at 1:37 PM, Darian Smith wrote:

> This technique seemed to make sense to me for dog handlers at first
> thought, but my question is  What if you need to   give a correction?
> 
> On 1/3/10, Briley Pollard <brileyp at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I usually use the same technique  of holding the tray against my hip or
>> side, even when I'm using my dog.  As long as I have a firm grasp on the
>> drink, and steady down the dog, I have no problems. Good luck.
>> On Jan 3, 2010, at 11:04 AM, Hope Paulos wrote:
>> 
>>> This technique makes sense for a cane user. Can those students with dogs
>>> explain how they carry a tray, please? I'm also interested. I usually
>>> carry my drink in my right hand and ask someone to carry my tray. My dog
>>> is trained with both hand signals and verbal  commands. Any assistance
>>> would be appreciated.
>>> Hope and Beignet
>>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Darian Smith" <dsmithnfb at gmail.com>
>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 9:25 AM
>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> hey,
>>>> I  have done a few things in this situation; I've  asked someone for
>>>> the general layout of the area  and have gone about it from there,  I
>>>> have also listened to the sound of people congragating in lines and
>>>> have  used those sound cues   to find out where I should be going.
>>>> I think the easiest thing is just to  go with a student who might be
>>>> headed in that direction to get to  the line  you  need to get to and
>>>> then  ask someone around  as you need about  the lay out of the foods
>>>> in relation  to you (bread is in front of you, salid to  the left of
>>>> it, salid dressing to  it's left and so-on).   As for holding a trey;
>>>> I usually hold the trey on my left side (non-cane using side) with my
>>>> arm securing the trey aginst my side and  looping my index finger and
>>>> thumb around the cup if I have one.  I can still use my cane in this
>>>> way and  I just make sure to clear  the path of travel with my cane as
>>>> always.
>>>> Best,
>>>> Darian
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> On 1/2/10, Ashley  Bramlett <bookwormahb at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>> Dave,
>>>>> Yes there are techniques and thanks for sharing.  As you see though some
>>>>> of
>>>>> us have trouble with it.  Someone said the tray wobbles and if the tray
>>>>> is
>>>>> heavy this is a problem.
>>>>> I tried the second way of sliding your arm under the tray and placing
>>>>> the
>>>>> tray on top  of your arm.  This didn't work for me because one side did
>>>>> not
>>>>> have stability.  The tray fell down.  Fortunately, I was practicing and
>>>>> the
>>>>> tray was empty.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I have tried the first way and it works a little better for me.  Its
>>>>> hard to
>>>>> describe what to do, but there are probably several ways.  So if you all
>>>>> have ideas share them.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Ashley
>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>> From: "David Andrews" <dandrews at visi.com>
>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>> Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 9:06 PM
>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>>> Actually, there are techniques a blind person can use to safely carry a
>>>>>> tray, and still use a cane.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> One method involves kind of wrapping your arm around the tray along its
>>>>>> edge, and pressing the other side against your body, and holding it
>>>>>> that
>>>>>> way.  Your hand can also extend past the edge of the tray, into they
>>>>>> tray
>>>>>> where it can hold your drink for stability.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Another method involves making your arm into an angle and setting the
>>>>>> tray
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> on top of your arm.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I probably aren't explaining very well, but it can be done with
>>>>>> practice.
>>>>>> It is something most of us as blind people are nervous about in one way
>>>>>> or
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> another.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Dave
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> At 09:24 AM 1/2/2010, you wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> It is okay to ask some one to help you carry the tray in my opinion
>>>>>>> because it wobbles and it can tip over very easily. You can not carry
>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>> cane and control the try safely. It is very hard to do this with out
>>>>>>> spilling. Stay warm from all the wind.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net
>>>>>>>> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 22:55:28 -0500
>>>>>>>> Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> Hi all,
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> How do you handle cafeterias? If your university is like mine,
>>>>>>> and most are standard setups, you have various stations. For instance
>>>>>>> mine had an entree line, grill, sandwich area, salad bar and more. Did
>>>>>>> you have an employee help you? I chose to do that since it was most
>>>>>>> efficient. We walked to the various places and they told me the food
>>>>>>> and
>>>>>>> I selected what I wanted.
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> Do you carry your own tray? I always struggled with that; its
>>>>>>> hard to balance and keep level. A mobility instructor showed me but
>>>>>>> its
>>>>>>> hard; always seems to wobble in my hand. I either place my hand across
>>>>>>> the tray or under the tray and grasp it from underneath. I usually opt
>>>>>>> for someone to carry it.
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> Happy New year!
>>>>>>>> Ashley
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
>>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> --
>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>> before us;
>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>> past and future generations,
>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>> done, and
>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>> 
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/hope.paulos%40maine.edu
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
> 
> 
> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
> before us;
> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
> past and future generations,
> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
> done, and
> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
> 
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com



From brileyp at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 22:13:53 2010
From: brileyp at gmail.com (Briley Pollard)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 16:13:53 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Trays
In-Reply-To: <4b40f36c.8802be0a.2a3a.0ee1@mx.google.com>
References: <4b40f36c.8802be0a.2a3a.0ee1@mx.google.com>
Message-ID: <7C6EF458-2A00-4227-A163-A874A78F3CBA@gmail.com>

I do usually sit things down then get a drink. I suppose it depends on the cafeteria size etc, but it has never been an issue for me to do things this way. Also, suggestion about getting food in a to go bag is a good one.
On Jan 3, 2010, at 1:49 PM, Chelsea Cook wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I agree with Darian on the tray points, and thank him for posting that Happy New Year sentiment! I liked it.
> As to the tray: I usually employ Dave's first method.  This is how I do it, particularly if there are multiple items (warning: physics major side peeking out):
> Usually, I'll figure out what I have on the tray and try to conceptually determine its center of gravity (where everything is balanced), and try to achieve that as I move, making sure that not too many heavy things lean to one side.  Once I find that position, I usually hold my tray between non-cane arm and my body.  If I'm carrying a drink and it's not too difficult, I'll usually put the drink near the outer edge of the tray so my thumb can keep track of where it is.  The higher you hold on the cup, the more control you have over it.  If getting fast-food, I'll often ask for a to-go bag, even if I'm eating in.  That way, I can carry the drink securely and hold the bag between arm and body.  It makes life much easier.
> Question: When in a college cafeteria setting with a fountain drink machine, do you usually find a table, set stuff down, and then go get a drink? Not sure how effective this would be when eating alone.
> Chelsea
> "I ask you to look both ways.  For the road to a knowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars."
> Sir Arthur Eddington, British astrophysicist (1882-1944), Stars and Atoms (1928), Lecture 1
> 
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com



From jsorozco at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 22:14:27 2010
From: jsorozco at gmail.com (Joe Orozco)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 17:14:27 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Listening to Braille from the NY Times
Message-ID: <C6895950774445B2A414762D99EE35D7@Rufus>

Listening to Braille
By RACHEL AVIV
Published: December 30, 2009 

AT 4 O'CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading. She
calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic voice, and
she listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
Financial Times to her while she uses her computer's text-to-speech system
to play The Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other
to the magazine. The managing director of a Wall Street investment
management firm, Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads
constantly, poring over the news and the economic reports for several hours
every morning, she does not use Braille. "Knowledge goes from my ears to my
brain, not from my finger to my brain," she says. As a child she learned how
the letters of the alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the
page. She doesn't think of a comma in terms of its written form but rather
as "a stop on the way before continuing." This, she says, is the future of
reading for the blind. "Literacy evolves," she told me. "When Braille was
invented, in the 19th century, we had nothing else. We didn't even have
radio. At that time, blindness
<http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/symptoms/blindness/overview.html?in
line=nyt-classifier>  was a disability. Now it's just a minor, minor
impairment."

A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age would
create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed the written
word. Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
"tribal and oral pattern." But the decline of written language has become a
reality for only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more
time learning to spell in her youth - she writes by dictation - she says she
thinks that using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted
peers. "It's an arcane means of communication, which for the most part
should be abolished," she told me. "It's just not needed today."

Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing house
in Boston, printed the Harry Potter
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/complete_coverage/harry
_potter/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>  series on its Heidelberg
cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes, each nearly a foot tall. Because
a single textbook can cost more than $1,000 and there's a shortage of
Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired students often read
using MP3 players, audiobooks and computer-screen-reading software.

A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind, an
advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent of the
1.3 million legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of
all blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as low
as 1 in 10, according to the report. The figures are controversial because
there is debate about when a child with residual vision has "too much sight"
for Braille and because the causes of blindness have changed over the
decades - in recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities,
because of premature births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has
been waning for some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and
the report has inspired a fervent movement to change the way blind people
read. "What we're finding are students who are very smart, very verbally
able - and illiterate," Jim Marks, a board member for the past five years of
the Association on Higher Education and Disability, told me. "We stopped
teaching our nation's blind children how to read and write. We put a tape
player, then a computer, on their desks. Now their writing is phonetic and
butchered. They never got to learn the beauty and shape and structure of
language."

For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
visually impaired children can be well versed in literature without knowing
how to read; computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word
and read the individual letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to
define, even for educators.

"If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your mind is
limited," Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind Access Journal,
told me. "You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can't feel
or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone." Like many
Braille readers, Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line
of Braille cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices
are still extremely costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the
decline in Braille literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: "This is
like going back to the 1400s, before Gutenberg's printing press came on the
scene," he said. "Only the scholars and monks knew how to read and write.
And then there were the illiterate masses, the peasants."

UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture. Some
tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or outlined in
felt with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began studying a
cipher language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified the
code so that it could be read more efficiently - each letter or punctuation
symbol is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
rows and two columns - and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
"knowledge," "people" and "Lord." Endowed with a reliable method of written
communication for the first time in history, blind people had a significant
rise in social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
and spiritual savior. With his "godlike courage," Helen Keller wrote,
Braille built a "firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings
to climb from hopeless darkness to the Mind Eternal."

At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but also
as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more innocent and
malleable, not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In his 1933
book, "The Blind in School and Society," the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth,
who lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
assimilated into the sighted world would become lost in "verbal unreality."
At some residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
light because, they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense.
These theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
blind children as young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between
words like "look," "touch" and "see." And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
misguided in his argument that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In
the 1990s, a series of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual
cortices of the blind are not rendered useless, as previously assumed. When
test subjects swept their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed
intense activation in the parts of the brain that typically process visual
input. 

These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
Braille is essential for blind children's cognitive development, as the
visual cortex takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain's
plasticity, it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading -
whether the information is absorbed by ear, finger or retina - is inherently
better than another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The
architecture of the brain is not fixed, and without images to process, the
visual cortex can reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature
Neuroscience found that blind subjects consistently surpassed sighted ones
on tests of verbal memory
<http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/test/mental-status-tests/overview.h
tml?inline=nyt-classifier> , and their superior performance was caused, the
authors suggested, by the extra processing that took place in the visual
regions of their brains. 

Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child development
that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally wired for print
literacy. But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and
literacy has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
activity of reading itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report
released in 2009 in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras
studies illiterate former guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat,
had abandoned their weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization.
Carreiras compares 20 adults who had recently completed a literacy program
with 22 people who had not yet begun it. In M.R.I.
<http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/test/mri/overview.html?inline=nyt-c
lassifier>  scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more
gray matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
and more white matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in
dyslexics, and the study suggests that those brain patterns weren't the
cause of their illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.

There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
debate. In moving from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences
for blind people may not be cognitive but cultural - a loss much harder to
avoid. In one of the few studies of blind people's prose, Doug Brent, a
professor of communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana
Brent, a teacher of visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students
who didn't use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited
by listening to their words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional
story about a character named Mark who had "sleep bombs":

He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on his bed
sleeping mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad
lept up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.

In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the literary
scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate societies think
differently than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said -
the ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them -
transformed the shape of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of
many audio-only readers as disorganized, "as if all of their ideas are
crammed into a container, shaken and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper
like dice onto a table." The beginnings and endings of sentences seem
arbitrary, one thought emerging in the midst of another with a kind of
breathless energy. The authors concluded, "It just doesn't seem to reflect
the qualities of organized sequence and complex thought that we value in a
literate society."

OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools for
reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for blind
people makes the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s,
when Louis Braille invented his writing system - so that blind people would
no longer be "despised or patronized by condescending sighted people," as he
put it - there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
moral dimension to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral culture
seen as primitive and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative
has been complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S.
and Britain, are now thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in
developing ones, like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few
alternatives to Braille. Tim Connell, the managing director of an
assistive-technology company in Australia, told me that he has heard this
described as "one of the advantages of being poor." 

Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of blindness
that it has assumed a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual
vision and still try to read print - very slowly or by holding the page an
inch or two from their faces - are generally frowned upon by the National
Federation of the Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil
rights movement for the blind. Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious
reader, compares Louis Braille to Abraham Lincoln
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/abraham_lincol
n/index.html?inline=nyt-per> . At the annual convention for the federation,
held at a Detroit Marriott last July, I heard the mantra "listening is not
literacy" repeated everywhere, from panels on the Braille crisis to
conversations among middle-school girls. Horror stories circulating around
the convention featured children who don't know what a paragraph is or why
we capitalize letters or that "happily ever after" is made up of three
separate words. 

Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner of
the Rehabilitation Services Administration under President Clinton and
relies primarily on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his
lack of reading skills. "I am now over 50 years old, and it wasn't until two
months ago that I realized that 'dissent,' to disagree, is different than
'descent,' to lower something," he told me. "I'm functionally illiterate.
People say, 'Oh, no, you're not.' Yes, I am. I'm sorry about it, but I'm not
embarrassed to admit it."

While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York, David A.
Paterson
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/david_a_paters
on/index.html?inline=nyt-per> , who also reads by listening, may be able to
achieve without the help of Braille, their success requires accommodations
that many cannot afford. Like Sloate, Paterson dictates his memos, and his
staff members select pertinent newspaper articles for him and read them
aloud on his voice mail every morning. (He calls himself "overassimilated"
and told me that as a child he was "mainstreamed so much that I
psychologically got the message that I'm not really supposed to be blind.")
Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend to form the blind
elite, in part because it is more plausible for a blind person to find work
doing intellectual rather than manual labor. 

A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults, those who
learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely to be employed as
those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently cited
with pride, so much so that those who didn't know Braille were sometimes
made to feel like outsiders. "There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
from the older guard," James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
text-to-speech software, told me. "If we could live in our own little
Braille world, then that'd be perfect," he added. "But we live in a visual
world."

When deaf people began getting cochlear implants
<http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/specialtopic/cochlear-implant/overv
iew.html?inline=nyt-classifier>  in the late 1980s, many in the deaf
community felt betrayed. The new technology pushed people to think of the
disability in a new way - as an identity and a culture. Technology has
changed the nature of many disabilities, lifting the burdens but also
complicating people's sense of what is physically natural, because bodies
can so often be tweaked until "fixed." Arielle Silverman, a graduate student
at the convention who has been blind since birth, told me that if she had
the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take it. Recently she
purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes photographs of text and
then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of vision like that, as
"just another piece of technology."

The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of reading,
with the scope of the disability - the extent to which you are viewed as
ignorant or civilized, helpless or independent - determined largely by your
ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
designed to function as much as possible like print books. But now the
computer has essentially done away with the limits of form, because
information, once it has been digitized, can be conveyed through sound or
touch. For sighted people, the transition from print to digital text has
been relatively subtle, but for many blind people the shift to computerized
speech is an unwelcome and uncharted experiment. In grappling with what has
been lost, several federation members recited to me various takes on the
classic expression Scripta manent, verba volant: What is written remains,
what is spoken vanishes into air. 

Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism with
the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The Times.



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database 4738 (20100102) __________

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From bunnykatie6 at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 22:40:36 2010
From: bunnykatie6 at gmail.com (Katie Wang)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 17:40:36 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] College Math / Algebra with a reader
In-Reply-To: <3fea3c411001031111w5df04672kda52aeacec45632a@mail.gmail.com>
References: <fc8eb2b1001030945o15478aa9s9405625ad88317e9@mail.gmail.com>
	<3fea3c411001031111w5df04672kda52aeacec45632a@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <5096b4731001031440o3fc9619aua8ca9b75a99ba808@mail.gmail.com>

Hi, Nathan,
  I think it is generally pretty difficult to get math textbooks in
braille for college, as they are extremely expensive. However, I was a
statistics major in undergrad and my school was able to provide me
braille materials for my math classes, so it is definitely worth
checking with your disability support office as well as the state
rehab agency to see if either of them would be willing to pay and get
the books transcribed. I would also suggest searching for the books
you need on RFB&D, as negotiating your schedule with a reader can be
annoying. They don't record too many math books, but I have seen a few
calculus books on their catalog. You may also want to think about how
to complete and turn in your work; I did my assignments in braille and
dictate it to a student scribe to write it in print, but maybe there
is a more efficient way to do this. You are welcome to email me
off-list if you have more questions. Hope this helps!
   Katie

On 1/3/10, Cindy Bennett <clb5590 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have used a reader for college algebra and statistics and found it
> very helpful. You can email me off list if you would like.
> clb5590 at gmail.com
>
> Cindy
>
> On 1/3/10, Nathan Clark <troubleclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Dear Nabsters,
>>
>> I will be starting college in the fall and would like to correspond
>> with someone who had to primarily rely on a reader for math related
>> courses. I have been told it is very difficult to get Math college
>> textbooks in Braille so I believe my option is limited to a reader.
>>
>> I would appreciate any advice and would like to ask you some
>> questions, maybe off list.
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Nathan
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
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>


From adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 22:43:31 2010
From: adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com (Adrianne Dempsey)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 17:43:31 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
References: <FEEA069F9B104DB9BB28822D9BF9C3BB@kevin9ee0841f6><auto-000133323289@mailfront2.g2host.com><632092011001011441u3295eed5h5144b06e498f156d@mail.gmail.com><5F0A86A3D6CA4F51BBFCE95DEEEEA927@Ashley>
	<011c01ca8cb7$9eaa38a0$0201a8c0@Serene>
Message-ID: <9C3ACA51597446BF91C8BDF7C43DC0BE@YOUR314E04A90B>

Serena, in answer to your question, blind people can usually tell the same 
about a person at a club as a sighted person based on how they talk and act. 
It is true you don't know that person very well or at all, but are 
exchanging numbers for the perpous of getting to know that person  better. 
Their is always a risk, but that is true at a conference or club, or 
anywhere for that matter.  If you later have a problem with that person, 
block their number.  It is easy to do their is two ways of doing it.  You 
can hit a code I don't remember what it is but it is easy to Google.  Then 
call and you hit star what ever the code number is.  The other way is to 
call your phone company and have them block it.  But you shouldn't hold back 
on meeting new people no matter where you are their are some really grate 
people and usually you can tell if their a creep or not when you first meet 
them.  And on the plus side, if they are a creep, and you don't want to 
exchange numbers with them, either tell them you are not interested, or they 
might give you their number and you have a ready excuse why not to give 
yours away and trash the number later.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Serena" <serenacucco at verizon.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 3:59 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


> Hi list,
>
> I don't go to clubs, so I'm not the expert, but the only issue I'd have 
> about letting the person who's number you want put the number in your 
> phone is How well do you guys really know one another if you just met at a 
> club? How do you know if the person isn't drunk/high when he/she says 
> he/she's gonna give you his/her number or asks you for yours?  Sighted 
> folks may or may not know this answer, either, but can see the look on the 
> person's face to judge the situation.
>
> Serena
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Ashley Bramlett" <bookwormahb at earthlink.net>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 11:33 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>> Aziza,
>> Yes sighted people trade phones for that.  My brother did that.  At a 
>> club I want as less as I can manage so having someone put a number in my 
>> phone wouldn't bother me.  Another option is for them to write it down 
>> and you have someone read it to you later.  I don't go to clubs much so 
>> this hasn't been an issue but that's what I'd do.
>>
>> Ashley
>> ----- Original Message ----- 
>> From: "Aziza C" <daydreamingncolor at gmail.com>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:41 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>
>>
>>>I agree with Dave, but isn't letting someone put their number in your
>>> phone what sighted people do too? I've seen my sister trade phones
>>> with her new friends and they input their numbers in each others
>>> phones. Or, one person will input the number in the other's phone,
>>> then the person will call them and the first person will save the
>>> number when it shows up on the missed call list.
>>> Aziza
>>>
>>> On 1/1/10, David Andrews <dandrews at visi.com> wrote:
>>>> I would take a slate and stylus.  There are small ones that Braille
>>>> on cards.  Using one makes you independent -- having someone put a
>>>> number in your cell phone seems more dependent to me.
>>>>
>>>> Dave
>>>>
>>>> At 10:11 AM 1/1/2010, you wrote:
>>>>>Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a
>>>>>discussion on here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have
>>>>>a job at Verizon Wireless working at a call center. It is
>>>>>challenging. How it is rewarding. I am glad to finely get off of
>>>>>social security soon. Or as I call it socialist insecurity. But
>>>>>that's another story.
>>>>>
>>>>>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night
>>>>> clubs back in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with
>>>>> me because the thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded
>>>>> strange. But I would always have a problem if I met someone and
>>>>> wanted to get their number. This was because the music was so loud
>>>>> that it was hard to communicate. I use to have people program
>>>>> numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like that. My question
>>>>> to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your note
>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I
>>>>> believe a Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some
>>>>> like the night club sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/daydreamingncolor%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
> 



From spangler.robert at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 23:00:50 2010
From: spangler.robert at gmail.com (Robert Spangler)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 18:00:50 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
In-Reply-To: <9C3ACA51597446BF91C8BDF7C43DC0BE@YOUR314E04A90B>
References: <FEEA069F9B104DB9BB28822D9BF9C3BB@kevin9ee0841f6>
	<auto-000133323289@mailfront2.g2host.com>
	<632092011001011441u3295eed5h5144b06e498f156d@mail.gmail.com>
	<5F0A86A3D6CA4F51BBFCE95DEEEEA927@Ashley>
	<011c01ca8cb7$9eaa38a0$0201a8c0@Serene>
	<9C3ACA51597446BF91C8BDF7C43DC0BE@YOUR314E04A90B>
Message-ID: <19ccaa051001031500s5f05cd52pea899817de110511@mail.gmail.com>

I would never let anyone I didn't know touch my phone.  I would either
ask them for their number and put it in myself or have them call me
and add it from the missed calls list later.  My phone was way too
expensive to risk letting someone I don't know handle it.

On 1/3/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
> Serena, in answer to your question, blind people can usually tell the same
> about a person at a club as a sighted person based on how they talk and act.
> It is true you don't know that person very well or at all, but are
> exchanging numbers for the perpous of getting to know that person  better.
> Their is always a risk, but that is true at a conference or club, or
> anywhere for that matter.  If you later have a problem with that person,
> block their number.  It is easy to do their is two ways of doing it.  You
> can hit a code I don't remember what it is but it is easy to Google.  Then
> call and you hit star what ever the code number is.  The other way is to
> call your phone company and have them block it.  But you shouldn't hold back
> on meeting new people no matter where you are their are some really grate
> people and usually you can tell if their a creep or not when you first meet
> them.  And on the plus side, if they are a creep, and you don't want to
> exchange numbers with them, either tell them you are not interested, or they
> might give you their number and you have a ready excuse why not to give
> yours away and trash the number later.
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Serena" <serenacucco at verizon.net>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 3:59 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>> Hi list,
>>
>> I don't go to clubs, so I'm not the expert, but the only issue I'd have
>> about letting the person who's number you want put the number in your
>> phone is How well do you guys really know one another if you just met at a
>>
>> club? How do you know if the person isn't drunk/high when he/she says
>> he/she's gonna give you his/her number or asks you for yours?  Sighted
>> folks may or may not know this answer, either, but can see the look on the
>>
>> person's face to judge the situation.
>>
>> Serena
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Ashley Bramlett" <bookwormahb at earthlink.net>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 11:33 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>
>>
>>> Aziza,
>>> Yes sighted people trade phones for that.  My brother did that.  At a
>>> club I want as less as I can manage so having someone put a number in my
>>> phone wouldn't bother me.  Another option is for them to write it down
>>> and you have someone read it to you later.  I don't go to clubs much so
>>> this hasn't been an issue but that's what I'd do.
>>>
>>> Ashley
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Aziza C" <daydreamingncolor at gmail.com>
>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:41 PM
>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>
>>>
>>>>I agree with Dave, but isn't letting someone put their number in your
>>>> phone what sighted people do too? I've seen my sister trade phones
>>>> with her new friends and they input their numbers in each others
>>>> phones. Or, one person will input the number in the other's phone,
>>>> then the person will call them and the first person will save the
>>>> number when it shows up on the missed call list.
>>>> Aziza
>>>>
>>>> On 1/1/10, David Andrews <dandrews at visi.com> wrote:
>>>>> I would take a slate and stylus.  There are small ones that Braille
>>>>> on cards.  Using one makes you independent -- having someone put a
>>>>> number in your cell phone seems more dependent to me.
>>>>>
>>>>> Dave
>>>>>
>>>>> At 10:11 AM 1/1/2010, you wrote:
>>>>>>Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a
>>>>>>discussion on here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have
>>>>>>a job at Verizon Wireless working at a call center. It is
>>>>>>challenging. How it is rewarding. I am glad to finely get off of
>>>>>>social security soon. Or as I call it socialist insecurity. But
>>>>>>that's another story.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night
>>>>>> clubs back in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with
>>>>>> me because the thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded
>>>>>> strange. But I would always have a problem if I met someone and
>>>>>> wanted to get their number. This was because the music was so loud
>>>>>> that it was hard to communicate. I use to have people program
>>>>>> numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like that. My question
>>>>>> to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your note
>>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I
>>>>>> believe a Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some
>>>>>> like the night club sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/daydreamingncolor%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
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>


-- 
Robert Spangler
The University of Toledo
Student Senator - Administrative Affairs Committee Chair, College of
Arts and Sciences


From dsmithnfb at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 23:24:13 2010
From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 15:24:13 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Trays
In-Reply-To: <7C6EF458-2A00-4227-A163-A874A78F3CBA@gmail.com>
References: <4b40f36c.8802be0a.2a3a.0ee1@mx.google.com>
	<7C6EF458-2A00-4227-A163-A874A78F3CBA@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <409c235c1001031524i7cd45b67g3f05409f172de129@mail.gmail.com>

using a bag  is not a bad idea; I  just try not to because  if I can
help to not kill a tree;I'l all about it. Then again, it's probably
the  californian in me :)
 Darian

On 1/3/10, Briley Pollard <brileyp at gmail.com> wrote:
> I do usually sit things down then get a drink. I suppose it depends on the
> cafeteria size etc, but it has never been an issue for me to do things this
> way. Also, suggestion about getting food in a to go bag is a good one.
> On Jan 3, 2010, at 1:49 PM, Chelsea Cook wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I agree with Darian on the tray points, and thank him for posting that
>> Happy New Year sentiment! I liked it.
>> As to the tray: I usually employ Dave's first method.  This is how I do
>> it, particularly if there are multiple items (warning: physics major side
>> peeking out):
>> Usually, I'll figure out what I have on the tray and try to conceptually
>> determine its center of gravity (where everything is balanced), and try to
>> achieve that as I move, making sure that not too many heavy things lean to
>> one side.  Once I find that position, I usually hold my tray between
>> non-cane arm and my body.  If I'm carrying a drink and it's not too
>> difficult, I'll usually put the drink near the outer edge of the tray so
>> my thumb can keep track of where it is.  The higher you hold on the cup,
>> the more control you have over it.  If getting fast-food, I'll often ask
>> for a to-go bag, even if I'm eating in.  That way, I can carry the drink
>> securely and hold the bag between arm and body.  It makes life much
>> easier.
>> Question: When in a college cafeteria setting with a fountain drink
>> machine, do you usually find a table, set stuff down, and then go get a
>> drink? Not sure how effective this would be when eating alone.
>> Chelsea
>> "I ask you to look both ways.  For the road to a knowledge of the stars
>> leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been
>> reached through the stars."
>> Sir Arthur Eddington, British astrophysicist (1882-1944), Stars and Atoms
>> (1928), Lecture 1
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
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>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>


-- 
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
before us;
if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
past and future generations,
then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
done, and
usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama


From carter.tjoseph at gmail.com  Sun Jan  3 23:52:22 2010
From: carter.tjoseph at gmail.com (T. Joseph Carter)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 15:52:22 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
In-Reply-To: <auto-000133630047@mailfront1.g2host.com>
References: <F431BF0F5666406EA29732BC870B6651@Ashley>
	<BAY139-W2879DFA03A79856BB852568B760@phx.gbl>
	<auto-000133630047@mailfront1.g2host.com>
Message-ID: <20100103235221.GG15800@yumi.bluecherry.net>

I do as Dave suggests here, but only if there's a single drink on the 
tray.  When I am with Katie, I either make two trips or ask for the 
assistance I need if that's not practical.

I have no problem seeking help when it is sensible.  I know that I 
can manage myself, but when doing so becomes more of a bother than 
asking for a hand, I will ask.

Joseph


On Sat, Jan 02, 2010 at 08:06:07PM -0600, David Andrews wrote:
>Actually, there are techniques a blind person can use to safely carry 
>a tray, and still use a cane.
>
>One method involves kind of wrapping your arm around the tray along 
>its edge, and pressing the other side against your body, and holding 
>it that way.  Your hand can also extend past the edge of the tray, 
>into they tray where it can hold your drink for stability.
>
>Another method involves making your arm into an angle and setting the 
>tray on top of your arm.
>
>I probably aren't explaining very well, but it can be done with 
>practice.  It is something most of us as blind people are nervous 
>about in one way or another.
>
>Dave
>
>At 09:24 AM 1/2/2010, you wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>It is okay to ask some one to help you carry the tray in my opinion 
>>because it wobbles and it can tip over very easily. You can not 
>>carry the cane and control the try safely. It is very hard to do 
>>this with out spilling. Stay warm from all the wind.


From loneblindjedi at samobile.net  Mon Jan  4 00:35:03 2010
From: loneblindjedi at samobile.net (Jedi)
Date: Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:35:03 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
Message-ID: <20100104003503.20893.53235@web2.serotek.com>

Actually, one can carry a tray safely while using a cane or guide dog.

The most commonly used method I've seen in the NFB is to hold the tray 
close to one's body using one hand and holding the cane in the other. 
The tray arm holds the tray in an overhand fashion with the thumb and 
index finger securing the drink and the other fingers curled under the 
tray. The best way to overcome balance issues is to be sure that the 
plates and bowls of food are equally distributed so that the weight on 
the tray is equally distributed. For example, if you have a heavy bowl, 
don't put it on the same side as your drink and a light plate on the 
other side of the tray. Instead, put the bowl on one side so that it 
counterbalances the light plate and the drink. Does that make sense?

Respectfully,
Jedi


Original message:



> It is okay to ask some one to help you carry the tray in my opinion 
> because it wobbles and it can tip over very easily. You can not carry 
> the cane and control the try safely. It is very hard to do this with 
> out spilling. Stay warm from all the wind.

>> From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net
>> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 22:55:28 -0500
>> Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays

>> Hi all,

>> How do you handle cafeterias? If your university is like mine, and most 
>> are standard setups, you have various stations. For instance mine had 
>> an entree line, grill, sandwich area, salad bar and more. Did you have 
>> an employee help you? I chose to do that since it was most efficient. 
>> We walked to the various places and they told me the food and I 
>> selected what I wanted.

>> Do you carry your own tray? I always struggled with that; its hard to 
>> balance and keep level. A mobility instructor showed me but its hard; 
>> always seems to wobble in my hand. I either place my hand across the 
>> tray or under the tray and grasp it from underneath. I usually opt for 
>> someone to carry it.

>> Happy New year!
>> Ashley
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/albertyoo1%40hotmail.com

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From loneblindjedi at samobile.net  Mon Jan  4 00:37:35 2010
From: loneblindjedi at samobile.net (Jedi)
Date: Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:37:35 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
Message-ID: <20100104003735.20899.34863@web2.serotek.com>

And that's why one should avoid depending  on a sighted guide if at all 
possible so that their decisions don't have to affect yours.

Respectfully,
Jedi


Original message:
> hmm no i wouldnt take my guide dog since music would be loud and there would
> just be too  much activity but i never really take a cane either. I think
> the first time i went to a bar since my vision loss or a  club yes i had my
> cell and my cane but after the first time i left it and went with friends
> sighted guide.

> here is another question alittle off topic. What if you went sighted guide
> and your guide ended up drinking. do you drink too? what if you wanted to
> drink, would you do it in a nightblub or bar or even alittle further in
> public?

>             -Teal
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:16 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


>> I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
>> others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is the
>> last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
>> whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
>> friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell phone,
>> and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
>> this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
>> ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
>> keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
>> happens.

>> To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything extra
>> that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
>> anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
>> trouble.

>> Brice
>> On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even
>>> bring
>>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want to
>>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it.  In
>>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with it
>>> on
>>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted guide.
>>> I
>>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go
>>> with
>>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel silly
>>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having someone
>>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it yourself.
>>> But
>>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and it
>>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit O.K.
>>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in
>>> the
>>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have a
>>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your number.
>>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell
>>> phones
>>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if you
>>> can
>>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful with
>>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you move
>>> funny or if your pants are tight.


>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


>>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers are
>>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>>>> is a good option.
>>>> Beth

>>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a discussion
>>>>> on
>>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at Verizon
>>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>>> rewarding. I
>>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>>> socialist
>>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.

>>>>>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs
>>>>> back
>>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because the
>>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I
>>>>> would
>>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their number.
>>>>> This
>>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I
>>>>> use
>>>>> to
>>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like
>>>>> that.

>>>>> My
>>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your
>>>>> note
>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I believe
>>>>> a
>>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the night
>>>>> club
>>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com


>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
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>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
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From loneblindjedi at samobile.net  Mon Jan  4 00:46:06 2010
From: loneblindjedi at samobile.net (Jedi)
Date: Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:46:06 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
Message-ID: <20100104004606.20906.26630@web2.serotek.com>

Actually, I use my cane when I dance. I can use it like a baton if the 
room isn't crowded. i pretend it's a dance partner if I want to amuse 
my friends. I use it when fast dancing so I can avoid stepping on other 
people. If I'm slow dancing, I'll dance near a wall so that my cane can 
hang out while I dance. Or, if my partner's sighted, I put my cane in 
his line of sight so he can see it and know it isn't going anywhere. I 
have, on occasion, actually slow danced with my cane, too. there's a 
photo of someone doing just that at the National Center in Baltimore. 
She holds her cane in the hand that's also gripping her partner's hand.

Personally, if I'm counting on dancing, I take a telescoping cane. I 
don't usually wear dresses because it's not usually warm enough to do 
so here. So, that means I can use one of those hooks that they use for 
mountain climbing and often keys to secure my collapsed telescoper to 
my belt or jean loop. If I do wear a dress, I generally wear dresses 
that have sashes that tie around the middle. So i can hook my cane 
around that, too. That usually does the trick.

Respectfully,
Jedi

Original message:
> If you bring your cane to a bar or night club, what do you do with it on the
> dance floor?  Even the telescoping and folding canes are to big to just tuck
> away somewhere.  You can't just hold it when your dancing because that looks
> ridiculous even if it is compacted.  You can't put it on the table and leave
> it because you can't keep a table at a club unless one friend sits and
> watches the table and stuff at it, and that leaves them out of the fun.  An
> identification cane would be easier to deal with but it still leaves you
> with the same problem of what do you do with it.  If you brot your purse it
> might fit in it but I don't bring a purse for the same reason, what do you
> do with it?  Also I don't want it to get stolen.


> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jedi" <loneblindjedi at samobile.net>
> To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 6:17 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


>> you should always carry a cane with you even if you use a dog. You never
>> know when you will want or need to get somewhere independently.

>> If you have a dog or want to avoid the inconvenience of a straight cane
>> (when dancing for example), use a telescoping cane or folding cane. A
>> night club is the last place a young lady or gentleman should be without a
>> traveling tool of some kind.

>> Respectfully,
>> Jedi)

>> PS. I would not take a notetaker to a club nor would I just hand over my
>> phone. If your phone is hnaccessible, just call yourself and leave a
>> message with your rontact's info for later filing.


>> Original message:
>>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even
>>> bring
>>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want to
>>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it.  In
>>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with it
>>> on
>>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted guide.
>>> I
>>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go
>>> with
>>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel silly
>>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having someone
>>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it yourself.
>>> But
>>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and it
>>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit O.K.
>>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in
>>> the
>>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have a
>>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your number.
>>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell
>>> phones
>>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if you
>>> can
>>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful with
>>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you move
>>> funny or if your pants are tight.


>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


>>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers are
>>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>>>> is a good option.
>>>> Beth

>>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a discussion
>>>>> on
>>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at Verizon
>>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>>> rewarding. I
>>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>>> socialist
>>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.

>>>>>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs
>>>>> back
>>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because the
>>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I
>>>>> would
>>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their number.
>>>>> This
>>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I
>>>>> use
>>>>> to
>>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like
>>>>> that.
>>>>> My
>>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your
>>>>> note
>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I believe
>>>>> a
>>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the night
>>>>> club
>>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com


>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com


>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
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>> www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.

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www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.


From daydreamingncolor at gmail.com  Mon Jan  4 01:33:36 2010
From: daydreamingncolor at gmail.com (Aziza C)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 17:33:36 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
In-Reply-To: <20100104003735.20899.34863@web2.serotek.com>
References: <20100104003735.20899.34863@web2.serotek.com>
Message-ID: <632092011001031733w4d225d2x332a890b3e3dae2c@mail.gmail.com>

I agree. Their is always a possibility of being separated from a
sighted guide, or having something happen to the sighted guide,
whether it be to much to drink, or them getting hurt in some way. I
have no problem going sighted guide with friends, many times I enjoy
it, however, having my cane with me when needed makes me feel a lot
more secure, and you never know when you'll need it. If you have your
cane with you you have the choice of going sighted guide, or being
independent, and I for one love having the choice to make. And, if the
choice is made for you, i.e. the sighted guide is unavailable, its in
your best interest to be prepared.
Aziza

On 1/3/10, Jedi <loneblindjedi at samobile.net> wrote:
> And that's why one should avoid depending  on a sighted guide if at all
> possible so that their decisions don't have to affect yours.
>
> Respectfully,
> Jedi
>
>
> Original message:
>> hmm no i wouldnt take my guide dog since music would be loud and there
>> would
>> just be too  much activity but i never really take a cane either. I think
>> the first time i went to a bar since my vision loss or a  club yes i had
>> my
>> cell and my cane but after the first time i left it and went with friends
>> sighted guide.
>
>> here is another question alittle off topic. What if you went sighted guide
>> and your guide ended up drinking. do you drink too? what if you wanted to
>> drink, would you do it in a nightblub or bar or even alittle further in
>> public?
>
>>             -Teal
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:16 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>>> I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
>>> others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is the
>>> last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
>>> whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
>>> friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell phone,
>>> and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
>>> this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
>>> ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
>>> keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
>>> happens.
>
>>> To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything extra
>>> that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
>>> anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
>>> trouble.
>
>>> Brice
>>> On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even
>>>> bring
>>>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want
>>>> to
>>>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it.
>>>> In
>>>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with it
>>>> on
>>>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted guide.
>>>> I
>>>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go
>>>> with
>>>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel silly
>>>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having someone
>>>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it yourself.
>>>> But
>>>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and
>>>> it
>>>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit O.K.
>>>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in
>>>> the
>>>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have a
>>>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your number.
>>>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell
>>>> phones
>>>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if you
>>>> can
>>>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful
>>>> with
>>>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you move
>>>> funny or if your pants are tight.
>
>
>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>>>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers are
>>>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>>>>> is a good option.
>>>>> Beth
>
>>>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a discussion
>>>>>> on
>>>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at
>>>>>> Verizon
>>>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>>>> rewarding. I
>>>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>>>> socialist
>>>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>
>>>>>>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs
>>>>>> back
>>>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I
>>>>>> would
>>>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their number.
>>>>>> This
>>>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I
>>>>>> use
>>>>>> to
>>>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like
>>>>>> that.
>
>>>>>> My
>>>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your
>>>>>> note
>>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I believe
>>>>>> a
>>>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the
>>>>>> night
>>>>>> club
>>>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>
>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>
>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com
>
>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com
>
>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net
>
> --
> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit
> www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.
>
> _______________________________________________
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>


From rmlambert1987 at yahoo.com  Mon Jan  4 03:14:57 2010
From: rmlambert1987 at yahoo.com (Rob Lambert)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 19:14:57 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities
Message-ID: <196049.24199.qm@web56101.mail.re3.yahoo.com>

Firefox works on Windows & Linux. Safari works on Macs only. 

Sent from my iPod

On Dec 30, 2009, at 3:51 PM, "Denna Lambert" <dlambert at aristotle.net> wrote:

Got a quick question for everyone (geeks and non-geeks alike).  Do your
universities or professors require the use of any of these products?

FireFox 3.0 or greater; 
Safari 4.0 or greater; 
Chrome 3 or greater, 

Are these web browsers accessible?  What has been your experience with them?


Any help you can be would be great.  

Denna



_______________________________________________
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nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
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From brileyp at gmail.com  Mon Jan  4 03:28:27 2010
From: brileyp at gmail.com (Briley Pollard)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 21:28:27 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
In-Reply-To: <20100104003735.20899.34863@web2.serotek.com>
References: <20100104003735.20899.34863@web2.serotek.com>
Message-ID: <56359C7E-1A7E-4751-98A9-E3C5F78C3F13@gmail.com>

Depending exclusively on a sighted guide is of course not wise. Having no other mobility aid available is  foolish. However, using sighted guide in addition to another mobility aid is useful at times such as in loud and crowded environments such as night clubs. I'm not saying hang on to your friends all night, (that is obviously awkward and defeats the purpose of going tout to have fun), but it still can be helpful. Even when I'm with blind friends, often someone might hold my arm while using their cane just to insure we stay together in crowded environments. My point is it shouldn't be disregarded as a viable tool in addition to others.

BrileyOn Jan 3, 2010, at 6:37 PM, Jedi wrote:

> And that's why one should avoid depending  on a sighted guide if at all possible so that their decisions don't have to affect yours.
> 
> Respectfully,
> Jedi
> 
> 
> Original message:
>> hmm no i wouldnt take my guide dog since music would be loud and there would
>> just be too  much activity but i never really take a cane either. I think
>> the first time i went to a bar since my vision loss or a  club yes i had my
>> cell and my cane but after the first time i left it and went with friends
>> sighted guide.
> 
>> here is another question alittle off topic. What if you went sighted guide
>> and your guide ended up drinking. do you drink too? what if you wanted to
>> drink, would you do it in a nightblub or bar or even alittle further in
>> public?
> 
>>            -Teal
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:16 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
> 
> 
>>> I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
>>> others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is the
>>> last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
>>> whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
>>> friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell phone,
>>> and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
>>> this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
>>> ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
>>> keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
>>> happens.
> 
>>> To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything extra
>>> that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
>>> anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
>>> trouble.
> 
>>> Brice
>>> On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even
>>>> bring
>>>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want to
>>>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it.  In
>>>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with it
>>>> on
>>>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted guide.
>>>> I
>>>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go
>>>> with
>>>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel silly
>>>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having someone
>>>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it yourself.
>>>> But
>>>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and it
>>>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit O.K.
>>>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in
>>>> the
>>>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have a
>>>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your number.
>>>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell
>>>> phones
>>>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if you
>>>> can
>>>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful with
>>>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you move
>>>> funny or if your pants are tight.
> 
> 
>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
> 
> 
>>>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers are
>>>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>>>>> is a good option.
>>>>> Beth
> 
>>>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a discussion
>>>>>> on
>>>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at Verizon
>>>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>>>> rewarding. I
>>>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>>>> socialist
>>>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
> 
>>>>>>                I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs
>>>>>> back
>>>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because the
>>>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I
>>>>>> would
>>>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their number.
>>>>>> This
>>>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I
>>>>>> use
>>>>>> to
>>>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like
>>>>>> that.
> 
>>>>>> My
>>>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your
>>>>>> note
>>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I believe
>>>>>> a
>>>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the night
>>>>>> club
>>>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
> 
> 
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
> 
> 
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com
> 
> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com
> 
> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net
> 
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> _______________________________________________
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From daydreamingncolor at gmail.com  Mon Jan  4 04:10:17 2010
From: daydreamingncolor at gmail.com (Aziza C)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 20:10:17 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
In-Reply-To: <56359C7E-1A7E-4751-98A9-E3C5F78C3F13@gmail.com>
References: <20100104003735.20899.34863@web2.serotek.com>
	<56359C7E-1A7E-4751-98A9-E3C5F78C3F13@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <632092011001032010q385f2933pf5f381b529eda40b@mail.gmail.com>

Nicely stated Briley.

On 1/3/10, Briley Pollard <brileyp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Depending exclusively on a sighted guide is of course not wise. Having no
> other mobility aid available is  foolish. However, using sighted guide in
> addition to another mobility aid is useful at times such as in loud and
> crowded environments such as night clubs. I'm not saying hang on to your
> friends all night, (that is obviously awkward and defeats the purpose of
> going tout to have fun), but it still can be helpful. Even when I'm with
> blind friends, often someone might hold my arm while using their cane just
> to insure we stay together in crowded environments. My point is it shouldn't
> be disregarded as a viable tool in addition to others.
>
> BrileyOn Jan 3, 2010, at 6:37 PM, Jedi wrote:
>
>> And that's why one should avoid depending  on a sighted guide if at all
>> possible so that their decisions don't have to affect yours.
>>
>> Respectfully,
>> Jedi
>>
>>
>> Original message:
>>> hmm no i wouldnt take my guide dog since music would be loud and there
>>> would
>>> just be too  much activity but i never really take a cane either. I think
>>> the first time i went to a bar since my vision loss or a  club yes i had
>>> my
>>> cell and my cane but after the first time i left it and went with friends
>>> sighted guide.
>>
>>> here is another question alittle off topic. What if you went sighted
>>> guide
>>> and your guide ended up drinking. do you drink too? what if you wanted to
>>> drink, would you do it in a nightblub or bar or even alittle further in
>>> public?
>>
>>>            -Teal
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:16 PM
>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>
>>
>>>> I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
>>>> others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is the
>>>> last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
>>>> whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
>>>> friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell phone,
>>>> and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
>>>> this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
>>>> ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
>>>> keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
>>>> happens.
>>
>>>> To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything extra
>>>> that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
>>>> anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
>>>> trouble.
>>
>>>> Brice
>>>> On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even
>>>>> bring
>>>>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want
>>>>> to
>>>>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it.
>>>>> In
>>>>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with it
>>>>> on
>>>>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted guide.
>>>>> I
>>>>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go
>>>>> with
>>>>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel
>>>>> silly
>>>>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having
>>>>> someone
>>>>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it yourself.
>>>>> But
>>>>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and
>>>>> it
>>>>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit
>>>>> O.K.
>>>>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in
>>>>> the
>>>>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have a
>>>>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your
>>>>> number.
>>>>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell
>>>>> phones
>>>>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if
>>>>> you
>>>>> can
>>>>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful
>>>>> with
>>>>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you move
>>>>> funny or if your pants are tight.
>>
>>
>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>
>>
>>>>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>>>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers are
>>>>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>>>>>> is a good option.
>>>>>> Beth
>>
>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a
>>>>>>> discussion
>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at
>>>>>>> Verizon
>>>>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>>>>> rewarding. I
>>>>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>>>>> socialist
>>>>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>>
>>>>>>>                I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs
>>>>>>> back
>>>>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because
>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I
>>>>>>> would
>>>>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their
>>>>>>> number.
>>>>>>> This
>>>>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I
>>>>>>> use
>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like
>>>>>>> that.
>>
>>>>>>> My
>>>>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your
>>>>>>> note
>>>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I
>>>>>>> believe
>>>>>>> a
>>>>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the
>>>>>>> night
>>>>>>> club
>>>>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>
>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>>
>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com
>>
>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com
>>
>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net
>>
>> --
>> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit
>> www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/daydreamingncolor%40gmail.com
>


From ginisd at sbcglobal.net  Mon Jan  4 04:28:12 2010
From: ginisd at sbcglobal.net (V Nork)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 20:28:12 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
References: <20100104003735.20899.34863@web2.serotek.com>
	<56359C7E-1A7E-4751-98A9-E3C5F78C3F13@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <9CE30F106C984D2FA4E7CB250FC6EA5A@windows4c0ed96>

Hello list, As I read this great thread, I wonder, as a woman, what the 
thinking is about going out to clubs and bars alone, with just a cane and 
cell phone?  I have never tried this, but I would like to venture out alone, 
maybe you could share your experiences and ideas?  Most of my friends I do 
hang out with are not into clubs, so this would be a solo outing for me. 
Thanks , Ginny
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Briley Pollard" <brileyp at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 7:28 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


> Depending exclusively on a sighted guide is of course not wise. Having no 
> other mobility aid available is  foolish. However, using sighted guide in 
> addition to another mobility aid is useful at times such as in loud and 
> crowded environments such as night clubs. I'm not saying hang on to your 
> friends all night, (that is obviously awkward and defeats the purpose of 
> going tout to have fun), but it still can be helpful. Even when I'm with 
> blind friends, often someone might hold my arm while using their cane just 
> to insure we stay together in crowded environments. My point is it 
> shouldn't be disregarded as a viable tool in addition to others.
>
> BrileyOn Jan 3, 2010, at 6:37 PM, Jedi wrote:
>
>> And that's why one should avoid depending  on a sighted guide if at all 
>> possible so that their decisions don't have to affect yours.
>>
>> Respectfully,
>> Jedi
>>
>>
>> Original message:
>>> hmm no i wouldnt take my guide dog since music would be loud and there 
>>> would
>>> just be too  much activity but i never really take a cane either. I 
>>> think
>>> the first time i went to a bar since my vision loss or a  club yes i had 
>>> my
>>> cell and my cane but after the first time i left it and went with 
>>> friends
>>> sighted guide.
>>
>>> here is another question alittle off topic. What if you went sighted 
>>> guide
>>> and your guide ended up drinking. do you drink too? what if you wanted 
>>> to
>>> drink, would you do it in a nightblub or bar or even alittle further in
>>> public?
>>
>>>            -Teal
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:16 PM
>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>
>>
>>>> I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
>>>> others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is the
>>>> last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
>>>> whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
>>>> friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell phone,
>>>> and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
>>>> this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
>>>> ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
>>>> keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
>>>> happens.
>>
>>>> To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything extra
>>>> that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
>>>> anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
>>>> trouble.
>>
>>>> Brice
>>>> On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even
>>>>> bring
>>>>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want 
>>>>> to
>>>>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it. 
>>>>> In
>>>>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with 
>>>>> it
>>>>> on
>>>>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted 
>>>>> guide.
>>>>> I
>>>>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go
>>>>> with
>>>>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel 
>>>>> silly
>>>>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having 
>>>>> someone
>>>>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it 
>>>>> yourself.
>>>>> But
>>>>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and 
>>>>> it
>>>>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit 
>>>>> O.K.
>>>>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in
>>>>> the
>>>>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have 
>>>>> a
>>>>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your 
>>>>> number.
>>>>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell
>>>>> phones
>>>>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if 
>>>>> you
>>>>> can
>>>>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful 
>>>>> with
>>>>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you 
>>>>> move
>>>>> funny or if your pants are tight.
>>
>>
>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>
>>
>>>>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>>>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers 
>>>>>> are
>>>>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>>>>>> is a good option.
>>>>>> Beth
>>
>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a 
>>>>>>> discussion
>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at 
>>>>>>> Verizon
>>>>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>>>>> rewarding. I
>>>>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>>>>> socialist
>>>>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>>
>>>>>>>                I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night 
>>>>>>> clubs
>>>>>>> back
>>>>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because 
>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I
>>>>>>> would
>>>>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their 
>>>>>>> number.
>>>>>>> This
>>>>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I
>>>>>>> use
>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like
>>>>>>> that.
>>
>>>>>>> My
>>>>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your
>>>>>>> note
>>>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I 
>>>>>>> believe
>>>>>>> a
>>>>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the 
>>>>>>> night
>>>>>>> club
>>>>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info 
>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>
>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>>
>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com
>>
>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com
>>
>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net
>>
>> -- 
>> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit 
>> www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/ginisd%40sbcglobal.net 



From daydreamingncolor at gmail.com  Mon Jan  4 04:47:28 2010
From: daydreamingncolor at gmail.com (Aziza C)
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 20:47:28 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
In-Reply-To: <9CE30F106C984D2FA4E7CB250FC6EA5A@windows4c0ed96>
References: <20100104003735.20899.34863@web2.serotek.com>
	<56359C7E-1A7E-4751-98A9-E3C5F78C3F13@gmail.com>
	<9CE30F106C984D2FA4E7CB250FC6EA5A@windows4c0ed96>
Message-ID: <632092011001032047q6de3ba91h70482f18c341f268@mail.gmail.com>

I am to young to attend clubs, and personally do not think I'd be
interested, however, I would not reccomend attending one alone. I
would say this for sighted females too. I do not think females should
be in that type of environment on their own if they can help it, so
going with friends would be my suggestion, although I am deffinetly
open to hearing other's oppinions.
Aziza

On 1/3/10, V Nork <ginisd at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Hello list, As I read this great thread, I wonder, as a woman, what the
> thinking is about going out to clubs and bars alone, with just a cane and
> cell phone?  I have never tried this, but I would like to venture out alone,
> maybe you could share your experiences and ideas?  Most of my friends I do
> hang out with are not into clubs, so this would be a solo outing for me.
> Thanks , Ginny
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Briley Pollard" <brileyp at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 7:28 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>> Depending exclusively on a sighted guide is of course not wise. Having no
>> other mobility aid available is  foolish. However, using sighted guide in
>> addition to another mobility aid is useful at times such as in loud and
>> crowded environments such as night clubs. I'm not saying hang on to your
>> friends all night, (that is obviously awkward and defeats the purpose of
>> going tout to have fun), but it still can be helpful. Even when I'm with
>> blind friends, often someone might hold my arm while using their cane just
>>
>> to insure we stay together in crowded environments. My point is it
>> shouldn't be disregarded as a viable tool in addition to others.
>>
>> BrileyOn Jan 3, 2010, at 6:37 PM, Jedi wrote:
>>
>>> And that's why one should avoid depending  on a sighted guide if at all
>>> possible so that their decisions don't have to affect yours.
>>>
>>> Respectfully,
>>> Jedi
>>>
>>>
>>> Original message:
>>>> hmm no i wouldnt take my guide dog since music would be loud and there
>>>> would
>>>> just be too  much activity but i never really take a cane either. I
>>>> think
>>>> the first time i went to a bar since my vision loss or a  club yes i had
>>>>
>>>> my
>>>> cell and my cane but after the first time i left it and went with
>>>> friends
>>>> sighted guide.
>>>
>>>> here is another question alittle off topic. What if you went sighted
>>>> guide
>>>> and your guide ended up drinking. do you drink too? what if you wanted
>>>> to
>>>> drink, would you do it in a nightblub or bar or even alittle further in
>>>> public?
>>>
>>>>            -Teal
>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>> From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:16 PM
>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>
>>>
>>>>> I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
>>>>> others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is the
>>>>> last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
>>>>> whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
>>>>> friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell phone,
>>>>> and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
>>>>> this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
>>>>> ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
>>>>> keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
>>>>> happens.
>>>
>>>>> To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything extra
>>>>> that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
>>>>> anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
>>>>> trouble.
>>>
>>>>> Brice
>>>>> On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even
>>>>>> bring
>>>>>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want
>>>>>>
>>>>>> to
>>>>>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it.
>>>>>> In
>>>>>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with
>>>>>> it
>>>>>> on
>>>>>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted
>>>>>> guide.
>>>>>> I
>>>>>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go
>>>>>> with
>>>>>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel
>>>>>> silly
>>>>>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having
>>>>>> someone
>>>>>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it
>>>>>> yourself.
>>>>>> But
>>>>>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and
>>>>>>
>>>>>> it
>>>>>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit
>>>>>> O.K.
>>>>>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have
>>>>>> a
>>>>>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your
>>>>>> number.
>>>>>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell
>>>>>> phones
>>>>>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if
>>>>>> you
>>>>>> can
>>>>>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful
>>>>>> with
>>>>>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you
>>>>>> move
>>>>>> funny or if your pants are tight.
>>>
>>>
>>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>
>>>
>>>>>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>>>>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers
>>>>>>> are
>>>>>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>>>>>>> is a good option.
>>>>>>> Beth
>>>
>>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a
>>>>>>>> discussion
>>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at
>>>>>>>> Verizon
>>>>>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>>>>>> rewarding. I
>>>>>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>>>>>> socialist
>>>>>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>>>
>>>>>>>>                I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night
>>>>>>>> clubs
>>>>>>>> back
>>>>>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because
>>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I
>>>>>>>> would
>>>>>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their
>>>>>>>> number.
>>>>>>>> This
>>>>>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I
>>>>>>>> use
>>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like
>>>>>>>> that.
>>>
>>>>>>>> My
>>>>>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your
>>>>>>>> note
>>>>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I
>>>>>>>> believe
>>>>>>>> a
>>>>>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the
>>>>>>>> night
>>>>>>>> club
>>>>>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
>>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>
>>>
>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>>>
>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com
>>>
>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
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>>>
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From loneblindjedi at samobile.net  Mon Jan  4 06:16:00 2010
From: loneblindjedi at samobile.net (Jedi)
Date: Mon, 04 Jan 2010 01:16:00 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
Message-ID: <20100104061600.25517.29627@web3.serotek.com>

Absolutely not. Any tool is useful. What one wants to avoid is dependence.

Respectfully,
Jedi


Original message:
> Depending exclusively on a sighted guide is of course not wise. Having 
> no other mobility aid available is  foolish. However, using sighted 
> guide in addition to another mobility aid is useful at times such as in 
> loud and crowded environments such as night clubs. I'm not saying hang 
> on to your friends all night, (that is obviously awkward and defeats 
> the purpose of going tout to have fun), but it still can be helpful. 
> Even when I'm with blind friends, often someone might hold my arm while 
> using their cane just to insure we stay together in crowded 
> environments. My point is it shouldn't be disregarded as a viable tool 
> in addition to others.

> BrileyOn Jan 3, 2010, at 6:37 PM, Jedi wrote:

>> And that's why one should avoid depending  on a sighted guide if at all 
>> possible so that their decisions don't have to affect yours.

>> Respectfully,
>> Jedi


>> Original message:
>>> hmm no i wouldnt take my guide dog since music would be loud and there would
>>> just be too  much activity but i never really take a cane either. I think
>>> the first time i went to a bar since my vision loss or a  club yes i had my
>>> cell and my cane but after the first time i left it and went with friends
>>> sighted guide.

>>> here is another question alittle off topic. What if you went sighted guide
>>> and your guide ended up drinking. do you drink too? what if you wanted to
>>> drink, would you do it in a nightblub or bar or even alittle further in
>>> public?

>>>            -Teal
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:16 PM
>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


>>>> I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
>>>> others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is the
>>>> last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
>>>> whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
>>>> friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell phone,
>>>> and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
>>>> this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
>>>> ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
>>>> keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
>>>> happens.

>>>> To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything extra
>>>> that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
>>>> anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
>>>> trouble.

>>>> Brice
>>>> On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even
>>>>> bring
>>>>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want to
>>>>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it.  In
>>>>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with it
>>>>> on
>>>>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted guide.
>>>>> I
>>>>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go
>>>>> with
>>>>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel silly
>>>>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having someone
>>>>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it yourself.
>>>>> But
>>>>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and it
>>>>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit O.K.
>>>>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in
>>>>> the
>>>>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have a
>>>>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your number.
>>>>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell
>>>>> phones
>>>>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if you
>>>>> can
>>>>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful with
>>>>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you move
>>>>> funny or if your pants are tight.


>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


>>>>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>>>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers are
>>>>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>>>>>> is a good option.
>>>>>> Beth

>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a discussion
>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at Verizon
>>>>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>>>>> rewarding. I
>>>>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>>>>> socialist
>>>>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.

>>>>>>>                I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs
>>>>>>> back
>>>>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because the
>>>>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I
>>>>>>> would
>>>>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their number.
>>>>>>> This
>>>>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I
>>>>>>> use
>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like
>>>>>>> that.

>>>>>>> My
>>>>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your
>>>>>>> note
>>>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I believe
>>>>>>> a
>>>>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the night
>>>>>>> club
>>>>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com


>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com


>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com


>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com


>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net

>> --
>> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit 
>> www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.

>> _______________________________________________
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>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com


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From loneblindjedi at samobile.net  Mon Jan  4 06:28:20 2010
From: loneblindjedi at samobile.net (Jedi)
Date: Mon, 04 Jan 2010 01:28:20 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
Message-ID: <20100104062820.27506.20125@web3.serotek.com>

I personally don't feel any more or less vulnerable than anyone else 
either because I'm blind or because I'm a woman. I think a little 
common sense goes a long way when you're out. For example, keep a cell 
phone on you so you can call for help if you need it, a ride home via a 
friend or a taxi service, or if you need to locate someone or be 
located. A cane is a must have if you don't have a dog and if you are blind.

As to common sense, it goes without saying that one shouldn't get into 
a car with someone you don't know unless you're positive you can trust 
them. And in that case, go with whatever your gut's telling you. 
Generally, your intuition in these matters is pretty accurate. This 
also goes with accepting invites to private parties, or receiving 
offers from strangers to escort you some place. Also, when I go walking 
at night, I make damn sure it appears I know where I'm going even if I 
don't. That means walking confidently and briskly. Confidence helps a 
great deal. And if I am not sure where I'm going, I'd prefer to ask a 
taxi driver, a police officer, or a business owner/someone who works at 
an establishment for directions. I have found a GPS to be a useful 
device in avoiding getting lost. If you do use a GPS, it's better to 
use a portable one that isn't so obvious such as those you can get in a 
cell phone. And finally, it's always a good rule to play it safe rather 
than to be sorry. If you're not sure about a person or place, don't go 
there. When you do communicate with strangers, be assertive and be 
ready to tell them what you want and don't want in your communication 
with them. That doesn't mean being a jerk, but clear communication can 
resolve conflicts ranging from how much help someone ought to give you 
to whether or not you're interested in getting to know someone better. 
I hope these ideas help. Oh, and by the way, it's never a bad idea to 
learn a couple of self defense moves for just in case. Whatever you do 
though, don't carry a weapon of any kind because it's likely to be used 
against you if your attacker gets their hands on it.

Respectfully,
Jedi


Original message:
> Hello list, As I read this great thread, I wonder, as a woman, what the
> thinking is about going out to clubs and bars alone, with just a cane and
> cell phone?  I have never tried this, but I would like to venture out alone,
> maybe you could share your experiences and ideas?  Most of my friends I do
> hang out with are not into clubs, so this would be a solo outing for me.
> Thanks , Ginny
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Briley Pollard" <brileyp at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 7:28 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


>> Depending exclusively on a sighted guide is of course not wise. Having no
>> other mobility aid available is  foolish. However, using sighted guide in
>> addition to another mobility aid is useful at times such as in loud and
>> crowded environments such as night clubs. I'm not saying hang on to your
>> friends all night, (that is obviously awkward and defeats the purpose of
>> going tout to have fun), but it still can be helpful. Even when I'm with
>> blind friends, often someone might hold my arm while using their cane just
>> to insure we stay together in crowded environments. My point is it
>> shouldn't be disregarded as a viable tool in addition to others.

>> BrileyOn Jan 3, 2010, at 6:37 PM, Jedi wrote:

>>> And that's why one should avoid depending  on a sighted guide if at all
>>> possible so that their decisions don't have to affect yours.

>>> Respectfully,
>>> Jedi


>>> Original message:
>>>> hmm no i wouldnt take my guide dog since music would be loud and there
>>>> would
>>>> just be too  much activity but i never really take a cane either. I
>>>> think
>>>> the first time i went to a bar since my vision loss or a  club yes i had
>>>> my
>>>> cell and my cane but after the first time i left it and went with
>>>> friends
>>>> sighted guide.

>>>> here is another question alittle off topic. What if you went sighted
>>>> guide
>>>> and your guide ended up drinking. do you drink too? what if you wanted
>>>> to
>>>> drink, would you do it in a nightblub or bar or even alittle further in
>>>> public?

>>>>            -Teal
>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>> From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:16 PM
>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


>>>>> I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
>>>>> others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is the
>>>>> last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
>>>>> whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
>>>>> friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell phone,
>>>>> and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
>>>>> this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
>>>>> ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
>>>>> keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
>>>>> happens.

>>>>> To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything extra
>>>>> that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
>>>>> anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
>>>>> trouble.

>>>>> Brice
>>>>> On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even
>>>>>> bring
>>>>>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want
>>>>>> to
>>>>>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it.
>>>>>> In
>>>>>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with
>>>>>> it
>>>>>> on
>>>>>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted
>>>>>> guide.
>>>>>> I
>>>>>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go
>>>>>> with
>>>>>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel
>>>>>> silly
>>>>>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having
>>>>>> someone
>>>>>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it
>>>>>> yourself.
>>>>>> But
>>>>>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and
>>>>>> it
>>>>>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit
>>>>>> O.K.
>>>>>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have
>>>>>> a
>>>>>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your
>>>>>> number.
>>>>>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell
>>>>>> phones
>>>>>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if
>>>>>> you
>>>>>> can
>>>>>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful
>>>>>> with
>>>>>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you
>>>>>> move
>>>>>> funny or if your pants are tight.


>>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


>>>>>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>>>>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers
>>>>>>> are
>>>>>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>>>>>>> is a good option.
>>>>>>> Beth

>>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a
>>>>>>>> discussion
>>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at
>>>>>>>> Verizon
>>>>>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>>>>>> rewarding. I
>>>>>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>>>>>> socialist
>>>>>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.

>>>>>>>>                I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night
>>>>>>>> clubs
>>>>>>>> back
>>>>>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because
>>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I
>>>>>>>> would
>>>>>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their
>>>>>>>> number.
>>>>>>>> This
>>>>>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I
>>>>>>>> use
>>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like
>>>>>>>> that.

>>>>>>>> My
>>>>>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your
>>>>>>>> note
>>>>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I
>>>>>>>> believe
>>>>>>>> a
>>>>>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the
>>>>>>>> night
>>>>>>>> club
>>>>>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
>>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com


>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com


>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com


>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com


>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net

>>> --
>>> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit
>>> www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.

>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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>> _______________________________________________
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>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
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> _______________________________________________
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From ginisd at sbcglobal.net  Mon Jan  4 08:07:30 2010
From: ginisd at sbcglobal.net (V Nork)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 00:07:30 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
References: <20100104062820.27506.20125@web3.serotek.com>
Message-ID: <5786C22139F34EA381A5DCA6667ABEE5@windows4c0ed96>

Dear Jedi, Thanks  so much for  your very thoughtful comments.  It is an 
issue that needs to be looked at and discussed  from different perspectives, 
I think, I have been told by some law enforcement personnel flatly that "no 
woman should go out alone at night."  This is an extreme, of course, and not 
really practical for a blind person who travels by bus to  work or school 
and back after dark sometimes.  Anyway, I have a friend who is a taxi 
driver, and I think I will pick a familiar place near home and try going out 
alone.  By the way, if you don't mind, what kind of gps do you have?  Thanks 
again, Ginny
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jedi" <loneblindjedi at samobile.net>
To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 10:28 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


>I personally don't feel any more or less vulnerable than anyone else either 
>because I'm blind or because I'm a woman. I think a little common sense 
>goes a long way when you're out. For example, keep a cell phone on you so 
>you can call for help if you need it, a ride home via a friend or a taxi 
>service, or if you need to locate someone or be located. A cane is a must 
>have if you don't have a dog and if you are blind.
>
> As to common sense, it goes without saying that one shouldn't get into a 
> car with someone you don't know unless you're positive you can trust them. 
> And in that case, go with whatever your gut's telling you. Generally, your 
> intuition in these matters is pretty accurate. This also goes with 
> accepting invites to private parties, or receiving offers from strangers 
> to escort you some place. Also, when I go walking at night, I make damn 
> sure it appears I know where I'm going even if I don't. That means walking 
> confidently and briskly. Confidence helps a great deal. And if I am not 
> sure where I'm going, I'd prefer to ask a taxi driver, a police officer, 
> or a business owner/someone who works at an establishment for directions. 
> I have found a GPS to be a useful device in avoiding getting lost. If you 
> do use a GPS, it's better to use a portable one that isn't so obvious such 
> as those you can get in a cell phone. And finally, it's always a good rule 
> to play it safe rather than to be sorry. If you're not sure about a person 
> or place, don't go there. When you do communicate with strangers, be 
> assertive and be ready to tell them what you want and don't want in your 
> communication with them. That doesn't mean being a jerk, but clear 
> communication can resolve conflicts ranging from how much help someone 
> ought to give you to whether or not you're interested in getting to know 
> someone better. I hope these ideas help. Oh, and by the way, it's never a 
> bad idea to learn a couple of self defense moves for just in case. 
> Whatever you do though, don't carry a weapon of any kind because it's 
> likely to be used against you if your attacker gets their hands on it.
>
> Respectfully,
> Jedi
>
>
> Original message:
>> Hello list, As I read this great thread, I wonder, as a woman, what the
>> thinking is about going out to clubs and bars alone, with just a cane and
>> cell phone?  I have never tried this, but I would like to venture out 
>> alone,
>> maybe you could share your experiences and ideas?  Most of my friends I 
>> do
>> hang out with are not into clubs, so this would be a solo outing for me.
>> Thanks , Ginny
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Briley Pollard" <brileyp at gmail.com>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 7:28 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>>> Depending exclusively on a sighted guide is of course not wise. Having 
>>> no
>>> other mobility aid available is  foolish. However, using sighted guide 
>>> in
>>> addition to another mobility aid is useful at times such as in loud and
>>> crowded environments such as night clubs. I'm not saying hang on to your
>>> friends all night, (that is obviously awkward and defeats the purpose of
>>> going tout to have fun), but it still can be helpful. Even when I'm with
>>> blind friends, often someone might hold my arm while using their cane 
>>> just
>>> to insure we stay together in crowded environments. My point is it
>>> shouldn't be disregarded as a viable tool in addition to others.
>
>>> BrileyOn Jan 3, 2010, at 6:37 PM, Jedi wrote:
>
>>>> And that's why one should avoid depending  on a sighted guide if at all
>>>> possible so that their decisions don't have to affect yours.
>
>>>> Respectfully,
>>>> Jedi
>
>
>>>> Original message:
>>>>> hmm no i wouldnt take my guide dog since music would be loud and there
>>>>> would
>>>>> just be too  much activity but i never really take a cane either. I
>>>>> think
>>>>> the first time i went to a bar since my vision loss or a  club yes i 
>>>>> had
>>>>> my
>>>>> cell and my cane but after the first time i left it and went with
>>>>> friends
>>>>> sighted guide.
>
>>>>> here is another question alittle off topic. What if you went sighted
>>>>> guide
>>>>> and your guide ended up drinking. do you drink too? what if you wanted
>>>>> to
>>>>> drink, would you do it in a nightblub or bar or even alittle further 
>>>>> in
>>>>> public?
>
>>>>>            -Teal
>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>> From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:16 PM
>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>>>>>> I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
>>>>>> others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is 
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
>>>>>> whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
>>>>>> friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell 
>>>>>> phone,
>>>>>> and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
>>>>>> this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
>>>>>> ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
>>>>>> keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
>>>>>> happens.
>
>>>>>> To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything 
>>>>>> extra
>>>>>> that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
>>>>>> anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
>>>>>> trouble.
>
>>>>>> Brice
>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even
>>>>>>> bring
>>>>>>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't 
>>>>>>> want
>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with 
>>>>>>> it.
>>>>>>> In
>>>>>>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with
>>>>>>> it
>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted
>>>>>>> guide.
>>>>>>> I
>>>>>>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I 
>>>>>>> go
>>>>>>> with
>>>>>>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel
>>>>>>> silly
>>>>>>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having
>>>>>>> someone
>>>>>>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it
>>>>>>> yourself.
>>>>>>> But
>>>>>>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. 
>>>>>>> and
>>>>>>> it
>>>>>>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit
>>>>>>> O.K.
>>>>>>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type 
>>>>>>> in
>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to 
>>>>>>> have
>>>>>>> a
>>>>>>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your
>>>>>>> number.
>>>>>>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell
>>>>>>> phones
>>>>>>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if
>>>>>>> you
>>>>>>> can
>>>>>>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful
>>>>>>> with
>>>>>>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you
>>>>>>> move
>>>>>>> funny or if your pants are tight.
>
>
>>>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>>>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>>>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>>>>>>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>>>>>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers
>>>>>>>> are
>>>>>>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note 
>>>>>>>> taker
>>>>>>>> is a good option.
>>>>>>>> Beth
>
>>>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>>>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a
>>>>>>>>> discussion
>>>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at
>>>>>>>>> Verizon
>>>>>>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>>>>>>> rewarding. I
>>>>>>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>>>>>>> socialist
>>>>>>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>
>>>>>>>>>                I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night
>>>>>>>>> clubs
>>>>>>>>> back
>>>>>>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me 
>>>>>>>>> because
>>>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I
>>>>>>>>> would
>>>>>>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their
>>>>>>>>> number.
>>>>>>>>> This
>>>>>>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. 
>>>>>>>>> I
>>>>>>>>> use
>>>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places 
>>>>>>>>> like
>>>>>>>>> that.
>
>>>>>>>>> My
>>>>>>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken 
>>>>>>>>> your
>>>>>>>>> note
>>>>>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I
>>>>>>>>> believe
>>>>>>>>> a
>>>>>>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the
>>>>>>>>> night
>>>>>>>>> club
>>>>>>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
>>>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>
>
>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info 
>>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>
>
>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info 
>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com
>
>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com
>
>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net
>
>>>> --
>>>> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit
>>>> www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.
>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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>
>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
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>
>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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>
> -- 
> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit 
> www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.
>
> _______________________________________________
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> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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From loneblindjedi at samobile.net  Mon Jan  4 09:05:19 2010
From: loneblindjedi at samobile.net (Jedi)
Date: Mon, 04 Jan 2010 04:05:19 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
Message-ID: <20100104090519.31336.47963@web3.serotek.com>

I use WayFinder Access on a Nokia N82.

As to what law enforcement officers have said to you about women not 
going out alone, their concern is praiseworthy. However, no change has 
ever come by hiding in fear. No minority ever gained first-class 
citizenship or safety by hiding behind members of the majority. Does 
that mean that men should not be involved in issues related to women's 
safety? No. In fact, many college campuses and other community centers 
are hosting educational efforts to empower men against the sexism and 
violence that make law enforcement officers concerned in the first 
place. I think that men and women can work together as partners to 
combat violence against all persons regardless of sex, gender, sexual 
orientation, race, creed, disability status, etc.

I think it's a great idea to try a night club or pub near home. In 
fact, the advantage of doing so means that you can walk home and not 
need a ride unless the weather's bad or you've had a sufficient amount 
to drink such that you'd be at risk of danger when traveling. I like to 
visit a pub just a half block from home. I walk there any time I like, 
have some food and drink, then walk home. This arrangement has worked 
out really well. And if I have had too much, I call a cab and pay them 
extra just because they drove me a whole half block home.

Respectfully,
Jedi


Original message:
> Dear Jedi, Thanks  so much for  your very thoughtful comments.  It is an
> issue that needs to be looked at and discussed  from different perspectives,
> I think, I have been told by some law enforcement personnel flatly that "no
> woman should go out alone at night."  This is an extreme, of course, and not
> really practical for a blind person who travels by bus to  work or school
> and back after dark sometimes.  Anyway, I have a friend who is a taxi
> driver, and I think I will pick a familiar place near home and try going out
> alone.  By the way, if you don't mind, what kind of gps do you have?  Thanks
> again, Ginny
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jedi" <loneblindjedi at samobile.net>
> To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 10:28 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


>> I personally don't feel any more or less vulnerable than anyone else either
>> because I'm blind or because I'm a woman. I think a little common sense
>> goes a long way when you're out. For example, keep a cell phone on you so
>> you can call for help if you need it, a ride home via a friend or a taxi
>> service, or if you need to locate someone or be located. A cane is a must
>> have if you don't have a dog and if you are blind.

>> As to common sense, it goes without saying that one shouldn't get into a
>> car with someone you don't know unless you're positive you can trust them.
>> And in that case, go with whatever your gut's telling you. Generally, your
>> intuition in these matters is pretty accurate. This also goes with
>> accepting invites to private parties, or receiving offers from strangers
>> to escort you some place. Also, when I go walking at night, I make damn
>> sure it appears I know where I'm going even if I don't. That means walking
>> confidently and briskly. Confidence helps a great deal. And if I am not
>> sure where I'm going, I'd prefer to ask a taxi driver, a police officer,
>> or a business owner/someone who works at an establishment for directions.
>> I have found a GPS to be a useful device in avoiding getting lost. If you
>> do use a GPS, it's better to use a portable one that isn't so obvious such
>> as those you can get in a cell phone. And finally, it's always a good rule
>> to play it safe rather than to be sorry. If you're not sure about a person
>> or place, don't go there. When you do communicate with strangers, be
>> assertive and be ready to tell them what you want and don't want in your
>> communication with them. That doesn't mean being a jerk, but clear
>> communication can resolve conflicts ranging from how much help someone
>> ought to give you to whether or not you're interested in getting to know
>> someone better. I hope these ideas help. Oh, and by the way, it's never a
>> bad idea to learn a couple of self defense moves for just in case.
>> Whatever you do though, don't carry a weapon of any kind because it's
>> likely to be used against you if your attacker gets their hands on it.

>> Respectfully,
>> Jedi


>> Original message:
>>> Hello list, As I read this great thread, I wonder, as a woman, what the
>>> thinking is about going out to clubs and bars alone, with just a cane and
>>> cell phone?  I have never tried this, but I would like to venture out
>>> alone,
>>> maybe you could share your experiences and ideas?  Most of my friends I
>>> do
>>> hang out with are not into clubs, so this would be a solo outing for me.
>>> Thanks , Ginny
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Briley Pollard" <brileyp at gmail.com>
>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 7:28 PM
>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


>>>> Depending exclusively on a sighted guide is of course not wise. Having
>>>> no
>>>> other mobility aid available is  foolish. However, using sighted guide
>>>> in
>>>> addition to another mobility aid is useful at times such as in loud and
>>>> crowded environments such as night clubs. I'm not saying hang on to your
>>>> friends all night, (that is obviously awkward and defeats the purpose of
>>>> going tout to have fun), but it still can be helpful. Even when I'm with
>>>> blind friends, often someone might hold my arm while using their cane
>>>> just
>>>> to insure we stay together in crowded environments. My point is it
>>>> shouldn't be disregarded as a viable tool in addition to others.

>>>> BrileyOn Jan 3, 2010, at 6:37 PM, Jedi wrote:

>>>>> And that's why one should avoid depending  on a sighted guide if at all
>>>>> possible so that their decisions don't have to affect yours.

>>>>> Respectfully,
>>>>> Jedi


>>>>> Original message:
>>>>>> hmm no i wouldnt take my guide dog since music would be loud and there
>>>>>> would
>>>>>> just be too  much activity but i never really take a cane either. I
>>>>>> think
>>>>>> the first time i went to a bar since my vision loss or a  club yes i
>>>>>> had
>>>>>> my
>>>>>> cell and my cane but after the first time i left it and went with
>>>>>> friends
>>>>>> sighted guide.

>>>>>> here is another question alittle off topic. What if you went sighted
>>>>>> guide
>>>>>> and your guide ended up drinking. do you drink too? what if you wanted
>>>>>> to
>>>>>> drink, would you do it in a nightblub or bar or even alittle further
>>>>>> in
>>>>>> public?

>>>>>>            -Teal
>>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>>> From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
>>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:16 PM
>>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


>>>>>>> I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
>>>>>>> others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is
>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>> last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
>>>>>>> whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
>>>>>>> friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell
>>>>>>> phone,
>>>>>>> and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
>>>>>>> this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
>>>>>>> ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
>>>>>>> keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
>>>>>>> happens.

>>>>>>> To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything
>>>>>>> extra
>>>>>>> that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
>>>>>>> anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
>>>>>>> trouble.

>>>>>>> Brice
>>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even
>>>>>>>> bring
>>>>>>>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't
>>>>>>>> want
>>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with
>>>>>>>> it.
>>>>>>>> In
>>>>>>>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with
>>>>>>>> it
>>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted
>>>>>>>> guide.
>>>>>>>> I
>>>>>>>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I
>>>>>>>> go
>>>>>>>> with
>>>>>>>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel
>>>>>>>> silly
>>>>>>>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having
>>>>>>>> someone
>>>>>>>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it
>>>>>>>> yourself.
>>>>>>>> But
>>>>>>>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k.
>>>>>>>> and
>>>>>>>> it
>>>>>>>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit
>>>>>>>> O.K.
>>>>>>>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type
>>>>>>>> in
>>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to
>>>>>>>> have
>>>>>>>> a
>>>>>>>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your
>>>>>>>> number.
>>>>>>>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell
>>>>>>>> phones
>>>>>>>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if
>>>>>>>> you
>>>>>>>> can
>>>>>>>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful
>>>>>>>> with
>>>>>>>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you
>>>>>>>> move
>>>>>>>> funny or if your pants are tight.


>>>>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>>>>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>>>>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


>>>>>>>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>>>>>>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers
>>>>>>>>> are
>>>>>>>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note
>>>>>>>>> taker
>>>>>>>>> is a good option.
>>>>>>>>> Beth

>>>>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a
>>>>>>>>>> discussion
>>>>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at
>>>>>>>>>> Verizon
>>>>>>>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>>>>>>>> rewarding. I
>>>>>>>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>>>>>>>> socialist
>>>>>>>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.

>>>>>>>>>>                I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night
>>>>>>>>>> clubs
>>>>>>>>>> back
>>>>>>>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me
>>>>>>>>>> because
>>>>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I
>>>>>>>>>> would
>>>>>>>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their
>>>>>>>>>> number.
>>>>>>>>>> This
>>>>>>>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate.
>>>>>>>>>> I
>>>>>>>>>> use
>>>>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places
>>>>>>>>>> like
>>>>>>>>>> that.

>>>>>>>>>> My
>>>>>>>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken
>>>>>>>>>> your
>>>>>>>>>> note
>>>>>>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I
>>>>>>>>>> believe
>>>>>>>>>> a
>>>>>>>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the
>>>>>>>>>> night
>>>>>>>>>> club
>>>>>>>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
>>>>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com


>>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
>>>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com


>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
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>>>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>>> --
>>>>> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit
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From hope.paulos at maine.edu  Mon Jan  4 13:22:00 2010
From: hope.paulos at maine.edu (Hope Paulos)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 08:22:00 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
References: <20100104003503.20893.53235@web2.serotek.com>
Message-ID: <53E7D47C01874AACA65B92BDC8E96539@Hope>

Thank you, Jedi, for your explanation!!!
Hope and Beignet
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jedi" <loneblindjedi at samobile.net>
To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 7:35 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays


> Actually, one can carry a tray safely while using a cane or guide dog.
>
> The most commonly used method I've seen in the NFB is to hold the tray 
> close to one's body using one hand and holding the cane in the other. The 
> tray arm holds the tray in an overhand fashion with the thumb and index 
> finger securing the drink and the other fingers curled under the tray. The 
> best way to overcome balance issues is to be sure that the plates and 
> bowls of food are equally distributed so that the weight on the tray is 
> equally distributed. For example, if you have a heavy bowl, don't put it 
> on the same side as your drink and a light plate on the other side of the 
> tray. Instead, put the bowl on one side so that it counterbalances the 
> light plate and the drink. Does that make sense?
>
> Respectfully,
> Jedi
>
>
> Original message:
>
>
>
>> It is okay to ask some one to help you carry the tray in my opinion 
>> because it wobbles and it can tip over very easily. You can not carry the 
>> cane and control the try safely. It is very hard to do this with out 
>> spilling. Stay warm from all the wind.
>
>>> From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net
>>> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 22:55:28 -0500
>>> Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
>
>>> Hi all,
>
>>> How do you handle cafeterias? If your university is like mine, and most 
>>> are standard setups, you have various stations. For instance mine had an 
>>> entree line, grill, sandwich area, salad bar and more. Did you have an 
>>> employee help you? I chose to do that since it was most efficient. We 
>>> walked to the various places and they told me the food and I selected 
>>> what I wanted.
>
>>> Do you carry your own tray? I always struggled with that; its hard to 
>>> balance and keep level. A mobility instructor showed me but its hard; 
>>> always seems to wobble in my hand. I either place my hand across the 
>>> tray or under the tray and grasp it from underneath. I usually opt for 
>>> someone to carry it.
>
>>> Happy New year!
>>> Ashley
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/albertyoo1%40hotmail.com
>
>> _________________________________________________________________
>> Hotmail: Powerful Free email with security by Microsoft.
>> http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/171222986/direct/01/
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>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net
>
> -- 
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> www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.
>
> _______________________________________________
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From hope.paulos at maine.edu  Mon Jan  4 13:35:30 2010
From: hope.paulos at maine.edu (Hope Paulos)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 08:35:30 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] well-described workout routines?
Message-ID: <D757C6D2DCCC495B99A3054570AFC730@Hope>

Hello all. This year, one of my New Year's resolutions is to get in better shape than I have in the past. The closest gym to me is approximately 20 miles away (I live on an island, in Maine). I'm wondering if any well-described workout routines exist? I've tried listening and following the exercise programs on tv, but they are not well-described. 
The only way I can make this student-related is that exercise relieves stress.  Can someone give me some suggestions, either on or off list?
Thanks.
Hope and Beignet

From thebluesisloose at gmail.com  Mon Jan  4 18:55:51 2010
From: thebluesisloose at gmail.com (Beth)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 13:55:51 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] well-described workout routines?
In-Reply-To: <D757C6D2DCCC495B99A3054570AFC730@Hope>
References: <D757C6D2DCCC495B99A3054570AFC730@Hope>
Message-ID: <4383d01d1001041055n19570653uc63cb85a9116f381@mail.gmail.com>

Try spinning.  Spinning works wonders on your body, and it's really
cool and stationary.  YOu don't have to run around or anything, and
the teachers are usually good about describing stuff.
Beth

On 1/4/10, Hope Paulos <hope.paulos at maine.edu> wrote:
> Hello all. This year, one of my New Year's resolutions is to get in better
> shape than I have in the past. The closest gym to me is approximately 20
> miles away (I live on an island, in Maine). I'm wondering if any
> well-described workout routines exist? I've tried listening and following
> the exercise programs on tv, but they are not well-described.
> The only way I can make this student-related is that exercise relieves
> stress.  Can someone give me some suggestions, either on or off list?
> Thanks.
> Hope and Beignet
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>


From dsmithnfb at gmail.com  Mon Jan  4 19:51:53 2010
From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 11:51:53 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Web Browsers used by Universities
In-Reply-To: <196049.24199.qm@web56101.mail.re3.yahoo.com>
References: <196049.24199.qm@web56101.mail.re3.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <409c235c1001041151y8acf7aax484942514c66075b@mail.gmail.com>

hey Denna (and list)

 I've had no issues with Firefox but I've just kind of been teaching
myself because the tech lab at my school maily uses this.
 don't know about  much else other than I E and obviously that works
rather well for most.
  Darian

On 1/3/10, Rob Lambert <rmlambert1987 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Firefox works on Windows & Linux. Safari works on Macs only.
>
> Sent from my iPod
>
> On Dec 30, 2009, at 3:51 PM, "Denna Lambert" <dlambert at aristotle.net> wrote:
>
> Got a quick question for everyone (geeks and non-geeks alike).  Do your
> universities or professors require the use of any of these products?
>
> FireFox 3.0 or greater;
> Safari 4.0 or greater;
> Chrome 3 or greater,
>
> Are these web browsers accessible?  What has been your experience with them?
>
>
> Any help you can be would be great.
>
> Denna
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/rmlambert1987%40yahoo.com
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>


-- 
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
before us;
if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
past and future generations,
then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
done, and
usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama


From dsmithnfb at gmail.com  Mon Jan  4 20:15:06 2010
From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 12:15:06 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Happy new year
In-Reply-To: <0678C4E024FC4D46A5632CABF1EF4AD0@Ashley>
References: <39DF86EABD824D30844906FF15A180B0@kevin9ee0841f6>
	<0678C4E024FC4D46A5632CABF1EF4AD0@Ashley>
Message-ID: <409c235c1001041215g1214eb53ldd4cdfe95d26b0fa@mail.gmail.com>

Hi Ashley  and list,

 I think I have quite a bit of goals when I think about it, but  I
think I'll share   a few of them:

1. work out  more:  During my service year in  AmeriCorps we had to
work out three times a week for  an hour or so and my first team
loved the gym. So, I think my goal there is to be  more of a gym
rat(not like I was in horrible shape, but I was obviously in better
shape than I've been in a while and I  liked it) lol.
2. be more  involved  in  the sports I have  the most interest in. So,
goalball and judo are some sports I'm going to attempt to focus on. 3.
finish some of my un-finished goals from pre-americorps (I don't too
much like unfinished business)
 Happy New year   List serve   Peeps

On 1/1/10, Ashley  Bramlett <bookwormahb at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Hi All,
> Years fly by.  I can't believe we are starting another new year.  To make
> some substance to this how about sharing a goal or resolution you have for
> the upcoming year.
> I graduated last year with a BA in liberal studies which meant I studied
> psychology and communication.
> My goals include making healthy eating choices, exercise, some weight loss,
> making time to relax so I'm not too stressed, and finding a fulfilling job
> or volunteer experience.
>
> Happy new year!
> Ashley
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Kevin Wassmer" <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 11:12 AM
> Subject: [nabs-l] Happy new year
>
>
>>I want to wish you all a happy new year. This year is going to be very
>>interesting.
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>


-- 
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
before us;
if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
past and future generations,
then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
done, and
usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama


From kramc11 at gmail.com  Mon Jan  4 20:21:47 2010
From: kramc11 at gmail.com (Mark J. Cadigan)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 15:21:47 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] well-described workout routines?
In-Reply-To: <4383d01d1001041055n19570653uc63cb85a9116f381@mail.gmail.com>
References: <D757C6D2DCCC495B99A3054570AFC730@Hope>
	<4383d01d1001041055n19570653uc63cb85a9116f381@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <368D0DDB16FA4CB9B3719BEE09AABB6E@SonyPC>

If you design a workout plan consisting of exercises you can do at your 
house you don't even need a work out tape or something like it.

Personally, I like swimming and biking. But I have to ride a tandem bike 
witch requires another person. Stationary bikes are good, but I think I get 
a much better workout riding up and down the hills near my house.

If you want a good workout without leaving your house, try doing 
calisthenics, including pushups, sit-ups, and jumping jacks just to name a 
few. You don't have to spend any money, and these simple exercises will go a 
long way towards increasing your physical fitness.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Monday, January 04, 2010 1:55 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] well-described workout routines?


> Try spinning.  Spinning works wonders on your body, and it's really
> cool and stationary.  YOu don't have to run around or anything, and
> the teachers are usually good about describing stuff.
> Beth
>
> On 1/4/10, Hope Paulos <hope.paulos at maine.edu> wrote:
>> Hello all. This year, one of my New Year's resolutions is to get in 
>> better
>> shape than I have in the past. The closest gym to me is approximately 20
>> miles away (I live on an island, in Maine). I'm wondering if any
>> well-described workout routines exist? I've tried listening and following
>> the exercise programs on tv, but they are not well-described.
>> The only way I can make this student-related is that exercise relieves
>> stress.  Can someone give me some suggestions, either on or off list?
>> Thanks.
>> Hope and Beignet
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kramc11%40gmail.com 



From thebluesisloose at gmail.com  Mon Jan  4 21:03:16 2010
From: thebluesisloose at gmail.com (Beth)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 16:03:16 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] well-described workout routines?
In-Reply-To: <368D0DDB16FA4CB9B3719BEE09AABB6E@SonyPC>
References: <D757C6D2DCCC495B99A3054570AFC730@Hope>
	<4383d01d1001041055n19570653uc63cb85a9116f381@mail.gmail.com>
	<368D0DDB16FA4CB9B3719BEE09AABB6E@SonyPC>
Message-ID: <4383d01d1001041303ybea1ec6xa2100aa6a638d97b@mail.gmail.com>

You've got a good point, though I do get sick of calisthenics.  Good
point though.
Beth

On 1/4/10, Mark J. Cadigan <kramc11 at gmail.com> wrote:
> If you design a workout plan consisting of exercises you can do at your
> house you don't even need a work out tape or something like it.
>
> Personally, I like swimming and biking. But I have to ride a tandem bike
> witch requires another person. Stationary bikes are good, but I think I get
> a much better workout riding up and down the hills near my house.
>
> If you want a good workout without leaving your house, try doing
> calisthenics, including pushups, sit-ups, and jumping jacks just to name a
> few. You don't have to spend any money, and these simple exercises will go a
> long way towards increasing your physical fitness.
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Monday, January 04, 2010 1:55 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] well-described workout routines?
>
>
>> Try spinning.  Spinning works wonders on your body, and it's really
>> cool and stationary.  YOu don't have to run around or anything, and
>> the teachers are usually good about describing stuff.
>> Beth
>>
>> On 1/4/10, Hope Paulos <hope.paulos at maine.edu> wrote:
>>> Hello all. This year, one of my New Year's resolutions is to get in
>>> better
>>> shape than I have in the past. The closest gym to me is approximately 20
>>> miles away (I live on an island, in Maine). I'm wondering if any
>>> well-described workout routines exist? I've tried listening and following
>>> the exercise programs on tv, but they are not well-described.
>>> The only way I can make this student-related is that exercise relieves
>>> stress.  Can someone give me some suggestions, either on or off list?
>>> Thanks.
>>> Hope and Beignet
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kramc11%40gmail.com
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>


From tealbloodworth at gmail.com  Mon Jan  4 22:07:28 2010
From: tealbloodworth at gmail.com (Teal Bloodworth)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 16:07:28 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
References: <20100104003735.20899.34863@web2.serotek.com><56359C7E-1A7E-4751-98A9-E3C5F78C3F13@gmail.com>
	<9CE30F106C984D2FA4E7CB250FC6EA5A@windows4c0ed96>
Message-ID: <43ED0879583C45ADBA9115E5F371C37B@teal6e6857f643>

yeah i dont trust myself to go out in that environment without a group of 
friends. Taking my side kick guide dog is not realistic because of the 
crowded and loud room and i would misplace a white cane so i would latch on 
to some friends and go out. I wasnt looked at as depending on them and being 
socially awkward. Living in a smaller college campus with all the other 
colleges being small too you see  alot of the same people and most of them 
have had a class with me which allowed for small talk or even them 
approaching me to begin with.

If i were getting someones phone number either as a friend or an intimate 
interest i would either have them call me and leave a message  then i would 
hand them the phone and have them put it in there and tell me the speed dial 
number. Or just hand it to them and have them do that. I am not braille 
literate because i dont like braille and it doesnt like me. I wouldnt want 
to take an expensive device with me in case i sat it down and forgetfully 
leave it. Yes my pose may seem foolish to you all and maybe this undignifys 
me by making it seem like i depend on people who are sighted but i used to 
be one of them. I treat them like they treat me and i have more sighted 
friends than blind or visually impaired because where i live i am the only 
blind person. This is in my home town and at my small private college. Maybe 
i just have really good friends who packed me home on a night where i had 
too much and had to learn the hard way. who always returned my personal 
posessions and wouldnt pity me for being blind but rather expected for me to 
act no different.

        -Teal
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "V Nork" <ginisd at sbcglobal.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 10:28 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


> Hello list, As I read this great thread, I wonder, as a woman, what the 
> thinking is about going out to clubs and bars alone, with just a cane and 
> cell phone?  I have never tried this, but I would like to venture out 
> alone, maybe you could share your experiences and ideas?  Most of my 
> friends I do hang out with are not into clubs, so this would be a solo 
> outing for me. Thanks , Ginny
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Briley Pollard" <brileyp at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 7:28 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>> Depending exclusively on a sighted guide is of course not wise. Having no 
>> other mobility aid available is  foolish. However, using sighted guide in 
>> addition to another mobility aid is useful at times such as in loud and 
>> crowded environments such as night clubs. I'm not saying hang on to your 
>> friends all night, (that is obviously awkward and defeats the purpose of 
>> going tout to have fun), but it still can be helpful. Even when I'm with 
>> blind friends, often someone might hold my arm while using their cane 
>> just to insure we stay together in crowded environments. My point is it 
>> shouldn't be disregarded as a viable tool in addition to others.
>>
>> BrileyOn Jan 3, 2010, at 6:37 PM, Jedi wrote:
>>
>>> And that's why one should avoid depending  on a sighted guide if at all 
>>> possible so that their decisions don't have to affect yours.
>>>
>>> Respectfully,
>>> Jedi
>>>
>>>
>>> Original message:
>>>> hmm no i wouldnt take my guide dog since music would be loud and there 
>>>> would
>>>> just be too  much activity but i never really take a cane either. I 
>>>> think
>>>> the first time i went to a bar since my vision loss or a  club yes i 
>>>> had my
>>>> cell and my cane but after the first time i left it and went with 
>>>> friends
>>>> sighted guide.
>>>
>>>> here is another question alittle off topic. What if you went sighted 
>>>> guide
>>>> and your guide ended up drinking. do you drink too? what if you wanted 
>>>> to
>>>> drink, would you do it in a nightblub or bar or even alittle further in
>>>> public?
>>>
>>>>            -Teal
>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>> From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:16 PM
>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>
>>>
>>>>> I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
>>>>> others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is the
>>>>> last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
>>>>> whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
>>>>> friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell phone,
>>>>> and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
>>>>> this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
>>>>> ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
>>>>> keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
>>>>> happens.
>>>
>>>>> To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything extra
>>>>> that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
>>>>> anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
>>>>> trouble.
>>>
>>>>> Brice
>>>>> On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even
>>>>>> bring
>>>>>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't 
>>>>>> want to
>>>>>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it. 
>>>>>> In
>>>>>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with 
>>>>>> it
>>>>>> on
>>>>>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted 
>>>>>> guide.
>>>>>> I
>>>>>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go
>>>>>> with
>>>>>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel 
>>>>>> silly
>>>>>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having 
>>>>>> someone
>>>>>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it 
>>>>>> yourself.
>>>>>> But
>>>>>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. 
>>>>>> and it
>>>>>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit 
>>>>>> O.K.
>>>>>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type 
>>>>>> in
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have 
>>>>>> a
>>>>>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your 
>>>>>> number.
>>>>>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell
>>>>>> phones
>>>>>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if 
>>>>>> you
>>>>>> can
>>>>>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful 
>>>>>> with
>>>>>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you 
>>>>>> move
>>>>>> funny or if your pants are tight.
>>>
>>>
>>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>
>>>
>>>>>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>>>>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers 
>>>>>>> are
>>>>>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>>>>>>> is a good option.
>>>>>>> Beth
>>>
>>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a 
>>>>>>>> discussion
>>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at 
>>>>>>>> Verizon
>>>>>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>>>>>> rewarding. I
>>>>>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>>>>>> socialist
>>>>>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>>>
>>>>>>>>                I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night 
>>>>>>>> clubs
>>>>>>>> back
>>>>>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because 
>>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I
>>>>>>>> would
>>>>>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their 
>>>>>>>> number.
>>>>>>>> This
>>>>>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. 
>>>>>>>> I
>>>>>>>> use
>>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like
>>>>>>>> that.
>>>
>>>>>>>> My
>>>>>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your
>>>>>>>> note
>>>>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I 
>>>>>>>> believe
>>>>>>>> a
>>>>>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the 
>>>>>>>> night
>>>>>>>> club
>>>>>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info 
>>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>
>>>
>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info 
>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>>>
>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com
>>>
>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com
>>>
>>>
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>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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>>>
>>> -- 
>>> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit 
>>> www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>
>>
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From dsmithnfb at gmail.com  Mon Jan  4 22:59:27 2010
From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 14:59:27 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in town?
Message-ID: <409c235c1001041459k20d160aeo96faa1d05e2241a1@mail.gmail.com>

This
Listening to Braille

By RACHEL AVIV

Published: December 30, 2009

AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
voice, and she
listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
Financial Times
to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The
Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the
magazine.
The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
poring over the
news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
from my finger to
my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
doesn’t think of a
comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way
before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the
blind. “Literacy
evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th
century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time,
blindness
 was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”

A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
the written word.
Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
“tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has
become a reality for
only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says
she thinks that
using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
“It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should
be abolished,”
she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”

Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
house in Boston,
printed the
Harry Potter
 series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
$1,000 and there’s
a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
computer-screen-reading software.

A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
of the 1.3 million
legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
low as 1 in 10,
according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight”
for Braille
and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in
recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
of premature
births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for
some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
has inspired
a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re
finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and
illiterate,” Jim
Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our
nation’s blind children
how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their
desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
learn the
beauty and shape and structure of language.”

For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
visually impaired
children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read;
computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
read the individual
letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for educators.

“If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
Access Journal, told
me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel
or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many
Braille readers,
Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
still extremely
costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going
back to the 1400s,
before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only
the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were
the illiterate
masses, the peasants.”

UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture.
Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
outlined in felt
with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
studying a cipher
language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
the code so that
it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol
is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
rows and two
columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
“knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of
written communication
for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
and spiritual
savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
from hopeless
darkness to the Mind Eternal.”

At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but
also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
innocent and malleable,
not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
his 1933 book, “The
Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
assimilated into
the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some
residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
light because,
they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
blind children as
young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
“look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
misguided in his argument
that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series
of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
blind are not
rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
in the parts of
the brain that typically process visual input.

These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as
the visual cortex
takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity,
it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading —
whether the information
is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than
another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
of the brain is
not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
found that blind subjects
consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
memory
, and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by
the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
brains.

Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
wired for print literacy.
But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
activity of reading
itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
illiterate former
guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their
weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares
20 adults
who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
not yet begun it. In
M.R.I.
 scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
and more white
matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in
dyslexics, and the study
suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their
illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.

There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
debate. In moving
from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to
avoid. In one of
the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent,
a teacher of
visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t
use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
listening to their
words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:

He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
his bed sleeping
mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.

In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
societies think differently
than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the
ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them —
transformed the shape
of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
container, shaken
and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The
beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
emerging in the
midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized
sequence and complex
thought that we value in a literate society.”

OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
blind people makes
the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people would
no longer be
“despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put it
— there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
moral dimension
to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
culture seen as primitive
and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
Britain, are now
thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
Braille. Tim Connell,
the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia,
told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of
being poor.”


Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
blindness that it has assumed
a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
from their
faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
for the blind.
Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille to
Abraham Lincoln
. At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy”
repeated everywhere,
from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school
girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
children who don’t
know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily
ever after” is made up of three separate words.

Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner
of the Rehabilitation
Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
reading skills. “I
am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I
realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to
lower something,”
he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re
not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit
it.”

While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
David A. Paterson
, who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help
of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
afford. Like Sloate,
Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every
morning. (He
calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was
“mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m
not really supposed
to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend
to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
blind person
to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.

A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
to be employed as
those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were
sometimes made
to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
text-to-speech
software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world,
then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”

When deaf people began getting
cochlear implants
 in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as
an identity
and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities,
lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is
physically natural,
because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle
Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
since birth, told me that
if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
photographs of
text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”

The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you
are viewed as ignorant
or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your
ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
designed to function
as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
once it has been digitized,
can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
for many blind people
the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
members recited to
me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.

Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
Times.

-- 
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
before us;
if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
past and future generations,
then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
done, and
usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama


From daydreamingncolor at gmail.com  Mon Jan  4 23:04:51 2010
From: daydreamingncolor at gmail.com (Aziza C)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 15:04:51 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
In-Reply-To: <43ED0879583C45ADBA9115E5F371C37B@teal6e6857f643>
References: <20100104003735.20899.34863@web2.serotek.com>
	<56359C7E-1A7E-4751-98A9-E3C5F78C3F13@gmail.com>
	<9CE30F106C984D2FA4E7CB250FC6EA5A@windows4c0ed96>
	<43ED0879583C45ADBA9115E5F371C37B@teal6e6857f643>
Message-ID: <632092011001041504w792477b2gc00fb9c10e009b88@mail.gmail.com>

Teal,

I don't think any of us think you are foolish for what you do. The
point of the list is to discuss what we do and think. I personally
respect your decisions to do things your way, that is part of being
independent.

Aziza

On 1/4/10, Teal Bloodworth <tealbloodworth at gmail.com> wrote:
> yeah i dont trust myself to go out in that environment without a group of
> friends. Taking my side kick guide dog is not realistic because of the
> crowded and loud room and i would misplace a white cane so i would latch on
> to some friends and go out. I wasnt looked at as depending on them and being
> socially awkward. Living in a smaller college campus with all the other
> colleges being small too you see  alot of the same people and most of them
> have had a class with me which allowed for small talk or even them
> approaching me to begin with.
>
> If i were getting someones phone number either as a friend or an intimate
> interest i would either have them call me and leave a message  then i would
> hand them the phone and have them put it in there and tell me the speed dial
> number. Or just hand it to them and have them do that. I am not braille
> literate because i dont like braille and it doesnt like me. I wouldnt want
> to take an expensive device with me in case i sat it down and forgetfully
> leave it. Yes my pose may seem foolish to you all and maybe this undignifys
> me by making it seem like i depend on people who are sighted but i used to
> be one of them. I treat them like they treat me and i have more sighted
> friends than blind or visually impaired because where i live i am the only
> blind person. This is in my home town and at my small private college. Maybe
> i just have really good friends who packed me home on a night where i had
> too much and had to learn the hard way. who always returned my personal
> posessions and wouldnt pity me for being blind but rather expected for me to
> act no different.
>
>         -Teal
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "V Nork" <ginisd at sbcglobal.net>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 10:28 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>> Hello list, As I read this great thread, I wonder, as a woman, what the
>> thinking is about going out to clubs and bars alone, with just a cane and
>> cell phone?  I have never tried this, but I would like to venture out
>> alone, maybe you could share your experiences and ideas?  Most of my
>> friends I do hang out with are not into clubs, so this would be a solo
>> outing for me. Thanks , Ginny
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Briley Pollard" <brileyp at gmail.com>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 7:28 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>
>>
>>> Depending exclusively on a sighted guide is of course not wise. Having no
>>>
>>> other mobility aid available is  foolish. However, using sighted guide in
>>>
>>> addition to another mobility aid is useful at times such as in loud and
>>> crowded environments such as night clubs. I'm not saying hang on to your
>>> friends all night, (that is obviously awkward and defeats the purpose of
>>> going tout to have fun), but it still can be helpful. Even when I'm with
>>> blind friends, often someone might hold my arm while using their cane
>>> just to insure we stay together in crowded environments. My point is it
>>> shouldn't be disregarded as a viable tool in addition to others.
>>>
>>> BrileyOn Jan 3, 2010, at 6:37 PM, Jedi wrote:
>>>
>>>> And that's why one should avoid depending  on a sighted guide if at all
>>>> possible so that their decisions don't have to affect yours.
>>>>
>>>> Respectfully,
>>>> Jedi
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Original message:
>>>>> hmm no i wouldnt take my guide dog since music would be loud and there
>>>>> would
>>>>> just be too  much activity but i never really take a cane either. I
>>>>> think
>>>>> the first time i went to a bar since my vision loss or a  club yes i
>>>>> had my
>>>>> cell and my cane but after the first time i left it and went with
>>>>> friends
>>>>> sighted guide.
>>>>
>>>>> here is another question alittle off topic. What if you went sighted
>>>>> guide
>>>>> and your guide ended up drinking. do you drink too? what if you wanted
>>>>> to
>>>>> drink, would you do it in a nightblub or bar or even alittle further in
>>>>> public?
>>>>
>>>>>            -Teal
>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>> From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:16 PM
>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>> I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
>>>>>> others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is the
>>>>>> last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
>>>>>> whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
>>>>>> friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell phone,
>>>>>> and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
>>>>>> this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
>>>>>> ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
>>>>>> keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
>>>>>> happens.
>>>>
>>>>>> To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything extra
>>>>>> that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
>>>>>> anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
>>>>>> trouble.
>>>>
>>>>>> Brice
>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even
>>>>>>> bring
>>>>>>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't
>>>>>>> want to
>>>>>>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> In
>>>>>>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with
>>>>>>> it
>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted
>>>>>>> guide.
>>>>>>> I
>>>>>>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go
>>>>>>> with
>>>>>>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel
>>>>>>> silly
>>>>>>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having
>>>>>>> someone
>>>>>>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it
>>>>>>> yourself.
>>>>>>> But
>>>>>>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k.
>>>>>>> and it
>>>>>>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit
>>>>>>> O.K.
>>>>>>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type
>>>>>>> in
>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> a
>>>>>>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your
>>>>>>> number.
>>>>>>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell
>>>>>>> phones
>>>>>>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if
>>>>>>> you
>>>>>>> can
>>>>>>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful
>>>>>>> with
>>>>>>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you
>>>>>>> move
>>>>>>> funny or if your pants are tight.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>>>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>>>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>>>>>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers
>>>>>>>> are
>>>>>>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>>>>>>>> is a good option.
>>>>>>>> Beth
>>>>
>>>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>>>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a
>>>>>>>>> discussion
>>>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at
>>>>>>>>> Verizon
>>>>>>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>>>>>>> rewarding. I
>>>>>>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>>>>>>> socialist
>>>>>>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>>>>
>>>>>>>>>                I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night
>>>>>>>>> clubs
>>>>>>>>> back
>>>>>>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I
>>>>>>>>> would
>>>>>>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their
>>>>>>>>> number.
>>>>>>>>> This
>>>>>>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate.
>>>>>>>>> I
>>>>>>>>> use
>>>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like
>>>>>>>>> that.
>>>>
>>>>>>>>> My
>>>>>>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your
>>>>>>>>> note
>>>>>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I
>>>>>>>>> believe
>>>>>>>>> a
>>>>>>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the
>>>>>>>>> night
>>>>>>>>> club
>>>>>>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
>>>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
>>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit
>>>> www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/ginisd%40sbcglobal.net
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
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>


From jessica.trask.reagan at gmail.com  Mon Jan  4 23:31:22 2010
From: jessica.trask.reagan at gmail.com (Jess)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 18:31:22 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
In-Reply-To: <43ED0879583C45ADBA9115E5F371C37B@teal6e6857f643>
References: <20100104003735.20899.34863@web2.serotek.com><56359C7E-1A7E-4751-98A9-E3C5F78C3F13@gmail.com><9CE30F106C984D2FA4E7CB250FC6EA5A@windows4c0ed96>
	<43ED0879583C45ADBA9115E5F371C37B@teal6e6857f643>
Message-ID: <9E8366641367460A9113678273401249@Jessica>

Teal,
The major difference with you is that you I'm assuming either were fully 
sighted or were  severely visually impaired when you were younger. So you 
would also have the benefit of if you were 21 and still sighted  then you 
would have been to  a bar or night club in that  situation. Keep in mind 
most of the people on the list have been totally blind or severely visually 
impaired since birth.
Jessica
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Teal Bloodworth" <tealbloodworth at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Monday, January 04, 2010 5:07 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


> yeah i dont trust myself to go out in that environment without a group of 
> friends. Taking my side kick guide dog is not realistic because of the 
> crowded and loud room and i would misplace a white cane so i would latch 
> on to some friends and go out. I wasnt looked at as depending on them and 
> being socially awkward. Living in a smaller college campus with all the 
> other colleges being small too you see  alot of the same people and most 
> of them have had a class with me which allowed for small talk or even them 
> approaching me to begin with.
>
> If i were getting someones phone number either as a friend or an intimate 
> interest i would either have them call me and leave a message  then i 
> would hand them the phone and have them put it in there and tell me the 
> speed dial number. Or just hand it to them and have them do that. I am not 
> braille literate because i dont like braille and it doesnt like me. I 
> wouldnt want to take an expensive device with me in case i sat it down and 
> forgetfully leave it. Yes my pose may seem foolish to you all and maybe 
> this undignifys me by making it seem like i depend on people who are 
> sighted but i used to be one of them. I treat them like they treat me and 
> i have more sighted friends than blind or visually impaired because where 
> i live i am the only blind person. This is in my home town and at my small 
> private college. Maybe i just have really good friends who packed me home 
> on a night where i had too much and had to learn the hard way. who always 
> returned my personal posessions and wouldnt pity me for being blind but 
> rather expected for me to act no different.
>
>        -Teal
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "V Nork" <ginisd at sbcglobal.net>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 10:28 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>> Hello list, As I read this great thread, I wonder, as a woman, what the 
>> thinking is about going out to clubs and bars alone, with just a cane and 
>> cell phone?  I have never tried this, but I would like to venture out 
>> alone, maybe you could share your experiences and ideas?  Most of my 
>> friends I do hang out with are not into clubs, so this would be a solo 
>> outing for me. Thanks , Ginny
>> ----- Original Message ----- 
>> From: "Briley Pollard" <brileyp at gmail.com>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 7:28 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>
>>
>>> Depending exclusively on a sighted guide is of course not wise. Having 
>>> no other mobility aid available is  foolish. However, using sighted 
>>> guide in addition to another mobility aid is useful at times such as in 
>>> loud and crowded environments such as night clubs. I'm not saying hang 
>>> on to your friends all night, (that is obviously awkward and defeats the 
>>> purpose of going tout to have fun), but it still can be helpful. Even 
>>> when I'm with blind friends, often someone might hold my arm while using 
>>> their cane just to insure we stay together in crowded environments. My 
>>> point is it shouldn't be disregarded as a viable tool in addition to 
>>> others.
>>>
>>> BrileyOn Jan 3, 2010, at 6:37 PM, Jedi wrote:
>>>
>>>> And that's why one should avoid depending  on a sighted guide if at all 
>>>> possible so that their decisions don't have to affect yours.
>>>>
>>>> Respectfully,
>>>> Jedi
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Original message:
>>>>> hmm no i wouldnt take my guide dog since music would be loud and there 
>>>>> would
>>>>> just be too  much activity but i never really take a cane either. I 
>>>>> think
>>>>> the first time i went to a bar since my vision loss or a  club yes i 
>>>>> had my
>>>>> cell and my cane but after the first time i left it and went with 
>>>>> friends
>>>>> sighted guide.
>>>>
>>>>> here is another question alittle off topic. What if you went sighted 
>>>>> guide
>>>>> and your guide ended up drinking. do you drink too? what if you wanted 
>>>>> to
>>>>> drink, would you do it in a nightblub or bar or even alittle further 
>>>>> in
>>>>> public?
>>>>
>>>>>            -Teal
>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>> From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:16 PM
>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>> I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
>>>>>> others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is 
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
>>>>>> whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
>>>>>> friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell 
>>>>>> phone,
>>>>>> and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
>>>>>> this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
>>>>>> ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
>>>>>> keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
>>>>>> happens.
>>>>
>>>>>> To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything 
>>>>>> extra
>>>>>> that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
>>>>>> anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
>>>>>> trouble.
>>>>
>>>>>> Brice
>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even
>>>>>>> bring
>>>>>>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't 
>>>>>>> want to
>>>>>>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with 
>>>>>>> it. In
>>>>>>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with 
>>>>>>> it
>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted 
>>>>>>> guide.
>>>>>>> I
>>>>>>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I 
>>>>>>> go
>>>>>>> with
>>>>>>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel 
>>>>>>> silly
>>>>>>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having 
>>>>>>> someone
>>>>>>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it 
>>>>>>> yourself.
>>>>>>> But
>>>>>>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. 
>>>>>>> and it
>>>>>>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit 
>>>>>>> O.K.
>>>>>>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type 
>>>>>>> in
>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to 
>>>>>>> have a
>>>>>>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your 
>>>>>>> number.
>>>>>>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell
>>>>>>> phones
>>>>>>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if 
>>>>>>> you
>>>>>>> can
>>>>>>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful 
>>>>>>> with
>>>>>>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you 
>>>>>>> move
>>>>>>> funny or if your pants are tight.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>>>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>>>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>>>>>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers 
>>>>>>>> are
>>>>>>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note 
>>>>>>>> taker
>>>>>>>> is a good option.
>>>>>>>> Beth
>>>>
>>>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>>>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a 
>>>>>>>>> discussion
>>>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at 
>>>>>>>>> Verizon
>>>>>>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>>>>>>> rewarding. I
>>>>>>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>>>>>>> socialist
>>>>>>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>>>>
>>>>>>>>>                I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night 
>>>>>>>>> clubs
>>>>>>>>> back
>>>>>>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me 
>>>>>>>>> because the
>>>>>>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I
>>>>>>>>> would
>>>>>>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their 
>>>>>>>>> number.
>>>>>>>>> This
>>>>>>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. 
>>>>>>>>> I
>>>>>>>>> use
>>>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places 
>>>>>>>>> like
>>>>>>>>> that.
>>>>
>>>>>>>>> My
>>>>>>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken 
>>>>>>>>> your
>>>>>>>>> note
>>>>>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I 
>>>>>>>>> believe
>>>>>>>>> a
>>>>>>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the 
>>>>>>>>> night
>>>>>>>>> club
>>>>>>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info 
>>>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info 
>>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info 
>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net
>>>>
>>>> -- 
>>>> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit 
>>>> www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/ginisd%40sbcglobal.net
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com
>
>
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From bookwormahb at earthlink.net  Mon Jan  4 23:34:17 2010
From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net (bookwormahb at earthlink.net)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 18:34:17 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [nabs-l] well-described workout routines?
Message-ID: <9745945.1262648057435.JavaMail.root@wamui-junio.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

Hope,
Unfortunately, exercise videos are not very accessible since the audio feedback depends on you seeing the routine.  I'd suggest just moving to music such as jumping jacks, jogging or running in place or maybe jump roping.  An aerobic routine won't be accessible.  If you had someone describe it and you remembered the sequence that would work.  
I either walk outside, go to my gym and use a treadmill or bike or move to music to get exercise.
I also think the best way to get a workout routine is to work with a personal trainer and they give you cardio and strength exercises.  You may not be able to afford that.  But if possible, do it for five sessions.  Its so helpful.


Ashley

-----Original Message-----
>From: Hope Paulos <hope.paulos at maine.edu>
>Sent: Jan 4, 2010 8:35 AM
>To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>Subject: [nabs-l] well-described workout routines?
>
>Hello all. This year, one of my New Year's resolutions is to get in better shape than I have in the past. The closest gym to me is approximately 20 miles away (I live on an island, in Maine). I'm wondering if any well-described workout routines exist? I've tried listening and following the exercise programs on tv, but they are not well-described. 
>The only way I can make this student-related is that exercise relieves stress.  Can someone give me some suggestions, either on or off list?
>Thanks.
>Hope and Beignet
>_______________________________________________
>nabs-l mailing list
>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net


Merry Christmas and Happy New Year


From brileyp at gmail.com  Mon Jan  4 23:45:10 2010
From: brileyp at gmail.com (Briley Pollard)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 17:45:10 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
In-Reply-To: <43ED0879583C45ADBA9115E5F371C37B@teal6e6857f643>
References: <20100104003735.20899.34863@web2.serotek.com><56359C7E-1A7E-4751-98A9-E3C5F78C3F13@gmail.com>
	<9CE30F106C984D2FA4E7CB250FC6EA5A@windows4c0ed96>
	<43ED0879583C45ADBA9115E5F371C37B@teal6e6857f643>
Message-ID: <A957A6A6-0DD1-4E35-9C99-0C6693EC0D37@gmail.com>

I have usually had more sighted friends than blind ones as well, but  using a cane or using braille doesn't make you different or awkward. I'm not saying dance with your cane or anything like that, or that letting people help you sometimes is wrong, because it isn't. But having a set of alternative skills is what makes you independent, (please don't take this as me saying you aren't, I'm just speaking in general terms). Being able to do things on  your own without help though is what integrates us as blind people into a sighted world. On Jan 4, 2010, at 4:07 PM, Teal Bloodworth wrote:

> yeah i dont trust myself to go out in that environment without a group of friends. Taking my side kick guide dog is not realistic because of the crowded and loud room and i would misplace a white cane so i would latch on to some friends and go out. I wasnt looked at as depending on them and being socially awkward. Living in a smaller college campus with all the other colleges being small too you see  alot of the same people and most of them have had a class with me which allowed for small talk or even them approaching me to begin with.
> 
> If i were getting someones phone number either as a friend or an intimate interest i would either have them call me and leave a message  then i would hand them the phone and have them put it in there and tell me the speed dial number. Or just hand it to them and have them do that. I am not braille literate because i dont like braille and it doesnt like me. I wouldnt want to take an expensive device with me in case i sat it down and forgetfully leave it. Yes my pose may seem foolish to you all and maybe this undignifys me by making it seem like i depend on people who are sighted but i used to be one of them. I treat them like they treat me and i have more sighted friends than blind or visually impaired because where i live i am the only blind person. This is in my home town and at my small private college. Maybe i just have really good friends who packed me home on a night where i had too much and had to learn the hard way. who always returned my personal posessions and wouldnt pity me for being blind but rather expected for me to act no different.
> 
>       -Teal
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "V Nork" <ginisd at sbcglobal.net>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 10:28 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
> 
> 
>> Hello list, As I read this great thread, I wonder, as a woman, what the thinking is about going out to clubs and bars alone, with just a cane and cell phone?  I have never tried this, but I would like to venture out alone, maybe you could share your experiences and ideas?  Most of my friends I do hang out with are not into clubs, so this would be a solo outing for me. Thanks , Ginny
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Briley Pollard" <brileyp at gmail.com>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 7:28 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>> 
>> 
>>> Depending exclusively on a sighted guide is of course not wise. Having no other mobility aid available is  foolish. However, using sighted guide in addition to another mobility aid is useful at times such as in loud and crowded environments such as night clubs. I'm not saying hang on to your friends all night, (that is obviously awkward and defeats the purpose of going tout to have fun), but it still can be helpful. Even when I'm with blind friends, often someone might hold my arm while using their cane just to insure we stay together in crowded environments. My point is it shouldn't be disregarded as a viable tool in addition to others.
>>> 
>>> BrileyOn Jan 3, 2010, at 6:37 PM, Jedi wrote:
>>> 
>>>> And that's why one should avoid depending  on a sighted guide if at all possible so that their decisions don't have to affect yours.
>>>> 
>>>> Respectfully,
>>>> Jedi
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Original message:
>>>>> hmm no i wouldnt take my guide dog since music would be loud and there would
>>>>> just be too  much activity but i never really take a cane either. I think
>>>>> the first time i went to a bar since my vision loss or a  club yes i had my
>>>>> cell and my cane but after the first time i left it and went with friends
>>>>> sighted guide.
>>>> 
>>>>> here is another question alittle off topic. What if you went sighted guide
>>>>> and your guide ended up drinking. do you drink too? what if you wanted to
>>>>> drink, would you do it in a nightblub or bar or even alittle further in
>>>>> public?
>>>> 
>>>>>           -Teal
>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>> From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:16 PM
>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>>> I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
>>>>>> others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is the
>>>>>> last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
>>>>>> whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
>>>>>> friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell phone,
>>>>>> and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
>>>>>> this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
>>>>>> ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
>>>>>> keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
>>>>>> happens.
>>>> 
>>>>>> To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything extra
>>>>>> that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
>>>>>> anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
>>>>>> trouble.
>>>> 
>>>>>> Brice
>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even
>>>>>>> bring
>>>>>>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want to
>>>>>>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it. In
>>>>>>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with it
>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted guide.
>>>>>>> I
>>>>>>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go
>>>>>>> with
>>>>>>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel silly
>>>>>>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having someone
>>>>>>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it yourself.
>>>>>>> But
>>>>>>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and it
>>>>>>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit O.K.
>>>>>>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in
>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have a
>>>>>>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your number.
>>>>>>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell
>>>>>>> phones
>>>>>>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if you
>>>>>>> can
>>>>>>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful with
>>>>>>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you move
>>>>>>> funny or if your pants are tight.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>>>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>>>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>>>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>>>>>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers are
>>>>>>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>>>>>>>> is a good option.
>>>>>>>> Beth
>>>> 
>>>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>>>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a discussion
>>>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at Verizon
>>>>>>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>>>>>>> rewarding. I
>>>>>>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>>>>>>> socialist
>>>>>>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>>>> 
>>>>>>>>>               I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night clubs
>>>>>>>>> back
>>>>>>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because the
>>>>>>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I
>>>>>>>>> would
>>>>>>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their number.
>>>>>>>>> This
>>>>>>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I
>>>>>>>>> use
>>>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like
>>>>>>>>> that.
>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> My
>>>>>>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your
>>>>>>>>> note
>>>>>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I believe
>>>>>>>>> a
>>>>>>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the night
>>>>>>>>> club
>>>>>>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net
>>>> 
>>>> -- 
>>>> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.
>>>> 
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
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>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/ginisd%40sbcglobal.net
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
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From bookwormahb at earthlink.net  Mon Jan  4 23:49:18 2010
From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net (bookwormahb at earthlink.net)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 18:49:18 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
Message-ID: <9966643.1262648958458.JavaMail.root@wamui-junio.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

Hi all,
Gedi, good ideas and I agree.  Learn some self defense, carry your mobility aid, cell phone and cash.  
However i admit I do feel more vunerable at night being a lady.  
Jinny I would not recommend going to a night club   alone.  Its not as safe; in general there's safety in numbers.  Besides why would you want to go to such an outing alone and not socialize with anyone.  It doesn't make sense to me.  Yes maybe go to a restaurant or fast food alone at night or whenever but not a club.  I advise to tell someone where you're going if you go alone, again for safety especially at night.  So if something happens they know where to search for you.

Ashley

-----Original Message-----
>From: Jedi <loneblindjedi at samobile.net>
>Sent: Jan 4, 2010 1:28 AM
>To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>I personally don't feel any more or less vulnerable than anyone else 
>either because I'm blind or because I'm a woman. I think a little 
>common sense goes a long way when you're out. For example, keep a cell 
>phone on you so you can call for help if you need it, a ride home via a 
>friend or a taxi service, or if you need to locate someone or be 
>located. A cane is a must have if you don't have a dog and if you are blind.
>
>As to common sense, it goes without saying that one shouldn't get into 
>a car with someone you don't know unless you're positive you can trust 
>them. And in that case, go with whatever your gut's telling you. 
>Generally, your intuition in these matters is pretty accurate. This 
>also goes with accepting invites to private parties, or receiving 
>offers from strangers to escort you some place. Also, when I go walking 
>at night, I make damn sure it appears I know where I'm going even if I 
>don't. That means walking confidently and briskly. Confidence helps a 
>great deal. And if I am not sure where I'm going, I'd prefer to ask a 
>taxi driver, a police officer, or a business owner/someone who works at 
>an establishment for directions. I have found a GPS to be a useful 
>device in avoiding getting lost. If you do use a GPS, it's better to 
>use a portable one that isn't so obvious such as those you can get in a 
>cell phone. And finally, it's always a good rule to play it safe rather 
>than to be sorry. If you're not sure about a person or place, don't go 
>there. When you do communicate with strangers, be assertive and be 
>ready to tell them what you want and don't want in your communication 
>with them. That doesn't mean being a jerk, but clear communication can 
>resolve conflicts ranging from how much help someone ought to give you 
>to whether or not you're interested in getting to know someone better. 
>I hope these ideas help. Oh, and by the way, it's never a bad idea to 
>learn a couple of self defense moves for just in case. Whatever you do 
>though, don't carry a weapon of any kind because it's likely to be used 
>against you if your attacker gets their hands on it.
>
>Respectfully,
>Jedi
>
>
>Original message:
>> Hello list, As I read this great thread, I wonder, as a woman, what the
>> thinking is about going out to clubs and bars alone, with just a cane and
>> cell phone?  I have never tried this, but I would like to venture out alone,
>> maybe you could share your experiences and ideas?  Most of my friends I do
>> hang out with are not into clubs, so this would be a solo outing for me.
>> Thanks , Ginny
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Briley Pollard" <brileyp at gmail.com>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 7:28 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>>> Depending exclusively on a sighted guide is of course not wise. Having no
>>> other mobility aid available is  foolish. However, using sighted guide in
>>> addition to another mobility aid is useful at times such as in loud and
>>> crowded environments such as night clubs. I'm not saying hang on to your
>>> friends all night, (that is obviously awkward and defeats the purpose of
>>> going tout to have fun), but it still can be helpful. Even when I'm with
>>> blind friends, often someone might hold my arm while using their cane just
>>> to insure we stay together in crowded environments. My point is it
>>> shouldn't be disregarded as a viable tool in addition to others.
>
>>> BrileyOn Jan 3, 2010, at 6:37 PM, Jedi wrote:
>
>>>> And that's why one should avoid depending  on a sighted guide if at all
>>>> possible so that their decisions don't have to affect yours.
>
>>>> Respectfully,
>>>> Jedi
>
>
>>>> Original message:
>>>>> hmm no i wouldnt take my guide dog since music would be loud and there
>>>>> would
>>>>> just be too  much activity but i never really take a cane either. I
>>>>> think
>>>>> the first time i went to a bar since my vision loss or a  club yes i had
>>>>> my
>>>>> cell and my cane but after the first time i left it and went with
>>>>> friends
>>>>> sighted guide.
>
>>>>> here is another question alittle off topic. What if you went sighted
>>>>> guide
>>>>> and your guide ended up drinking. do you drink too? what if you wanted
>>>>> to
>>>>> drink, would you do it in a nightblub or bar or even alittle further in
>>>>> public?
>
>>>>>            -Teal
>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>> From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:16 PM
>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>>>>>> I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
>>>>>> others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is the
>>>>>> last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
>>>>>> whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
>>>>>> friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell phone,
>>>>>> and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
>>>>>> this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
>>>>>> ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
>>>>>> keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
>>>>>> happens.
>
>>>>>> To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything extra
>>>>>> that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
>>>>>> anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
>>>>>> trouble.
>
>>>>>> Brice
>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even
>>>>>>> bring
>>>>>>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't want
>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it.
>>>>>>> In
>>>>>>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with
>>>>>>> it
>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted
>>>>>>> guide.
>>>>>>> I
>>>>>>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go
>>>>>>> with
>>>>>>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel
>>>>>>> silly
>>>>>>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having
>>>>>>> someone
>>>>>>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it
>>>>>>> yourself.
>>>>>>> But
>>>>>>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. and
>>>>>>> it
>>>>>>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit
>>>>>>> O.K.
>>>>>>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type in
>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have
>>>>>>> a
>>>>>>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your
>>>>>>> number.
>>>>>>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell
>>>>>>> phones
>>>>>>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if
>>>>>>> you
>>>>>>> can
>>>>>>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful
>>>>>>> with
>>>>>>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you
>>>>>>> move
>>>>>>> funny or if your pants are tight.
>
>
>>>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>>>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>>>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>>>>>>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>>>>>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers
>>>>>>>> are
>>>>>>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>>>>>>>> is a good option.
>>>>>>>> Beth
>
>>>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>>>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a
>>>>>>>>> discussion
>>>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at
>>>>>>>>> Verizon
>>>>>>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>>>>>>> rewarding. I
>>>>>>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>>>>>>> socialist
>>>>>>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>
>>>>>>>>>                I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night
>>>>>>>>> clubs
>>>>>>>>> back
>>>>>>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because
>>>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I
>>>>>>>>> would
>>>>>>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their
>>>>>>>>> number.
>>>>>>>>> This
>>>>>>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. I
>>>>>>>>> use
>>>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like
>>>>>>>>> that.
>
>>>>>>>>> My
>>>>>>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your
>>>>>>>>> note
>>>>>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I
>>>>>>>>> believe
>>>>>>>>> a
>>>>>>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the
>>>>>>>>> night
>>>>>>>>> club
>>>>>>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
>>>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year


From thebluesisloose at gmail.com  Mon Jan  4 23:55:02 2010
From: thebluesisloose at gmail.com (Beth)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 18:55:02 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
	town?
In-Reply-To: <409c235c1001041459k20d160aeo96faa1d05e2241a1@mail.gmail.com>
References: <409c235c1001041459k20d160aeo96faa1d05e2241a1@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4383d01d1001041555w619b636en31f036e8b2380a4b@mail.gmail.com>

Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
leaders, they say.
Beth

On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
> This
> Listening to Braille
>
> By RACHEL AVIV
>
> Published: December 30, 2009
>
> AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
> voice, and she
> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
> Financial Times
> to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The
> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the
> magazine.
> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
> poring over the
> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
> does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
> from my finger to
> my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
> doesn’t think of a
> comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way
> before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the
> blind. “Literacy
> evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th
> century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time,
> blindness
>  was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”
>
> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
> the written word.
> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
> “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has
> become a reality for
> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
> learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says
> she thinks that
> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
> “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should
> be abolished,”
> she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”
>
> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
> house in Boston,
> printed the
> Harry Potter
>  series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
> $1,000 and there’s
> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
> computer-screen-reading software.
>
> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
> of the 1.3 million
> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
> low as 1 in 10,
> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
> is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight”
> for Braille
> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in
> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
> of premature
> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for
> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
> has inspired
> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re
> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and
> illiterate,” Jim
> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
> Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our
> nation’s blind children
> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their
> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
> learn the
> beauty and shape and structure of language.”
>
> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
> visually impaired
> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read;
> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
> read the individual
> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
> educators.
>
> “If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
> mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
> Access Journal, told
> me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel
> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many
> Braille readers,
> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
> still extremely
> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going
> back to the 1400s,
> before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only
> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were
> the illiterate
> masses, the peasants.”
>
> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture.
> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
> outlined in felt
> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
> studying a cipher
> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
> the code so that
> it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol
> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
> rows and two
> columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
> “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of
> written communication
> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
> and spiritual
> savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
> a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
> from hopeless
> darkness to the Mind Eternal.”
>
> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but
> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
> innocent and malleable,
> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
> his 1933 book, “The
> Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
> assimilated into
> the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some
> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
> light because,
> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
> blind children as
> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
> “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
> misguided in his argument
> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series
> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
> blind are not
> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
> in the parts of
> the brain that typically process visual input.
>
> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
> Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as
> the visual cortex
> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity,
> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading —
> whether the information
> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than
> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
> of the brain is
> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
> found that blind subjects
> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
> memory
> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by
> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
> brains.
>
> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
> wired for print literacy.
> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
> activity of reading
> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
> illiterate former
> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their
> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares
> 20 adults
> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
> not yet begun it. In
> M.R.I.
>  scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
> and more white
> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in
> dyslexics, and the study
> suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their
> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
>
> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
> debate. In moving
> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
> people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to
> avoid. In one of
> the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent,
> a teacher of
> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t
> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
> listening to their
> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
> character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:
>
> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
> his bed sleeping
> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
>
> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
> societies think differently
> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the
> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them —
> transformed the shape
> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
> readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
> container, shaken
> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The
> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
> emerging in the
> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
> concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized
> sequence and complex
> thought that we value in a literate society.”
>
> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
> blind people makes
> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
> Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people would
> no longer be
> “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put it
> — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
> moral dimension
> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
> culture seen as primitive
> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
> Britain, are now
> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
> Braille. Tim Connell,
> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia,
> told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of
> being poor.”
>
>
> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
> blindness that it has assumed
> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
> try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
> from their
> faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
> for the blind.
> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille to
> Abraham Lincoln
> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy”
> repeated everywhere,
> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school
> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
> children who don’t
> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily
> ever after” is made up of three separate words.
>
> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner
> of the Rehabilitation
> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
> reading skills. “I
> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I
> realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to
> lower something,”
> he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re
> not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit
> it.”
>
> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
> David A. Paterson
> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help
> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
> afford. Like Sloate,
> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every
> morning. (He
> calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was
> “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m
> not really supposed
> to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend
> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
> blind person
> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
>
> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
> to be employed as
> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were
> sometimes made
> to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
> from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
> text-to-speech
> software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world,
> then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”
>
> When deaf people began getting
> cochlear implants
>  in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as
> an identity
> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities,
> lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is
> physically natural,
> because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle
> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
> since birth, told me that
> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
> photographs of
> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
> vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”
>
> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
> reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you
> are viewed as ignorant
> or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your
> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
> designed to function
> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
> once it has been digitized,
> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
> for many blind people
> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
> members recited to
> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
>
> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
> Times.
>
> --
> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>
>
> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
> before us;
> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
> past and future generations,
> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
> done, and
> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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> nabs-l:
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>


From amylsabo at comcast.net  Tue Jan  5 00:35:45 2010
From: amylsabo at comcast.net (Amy Sabo)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 00:35:45 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays
In-Reply-To: <F431BF0F5666406EA29732BC870B6651@Ashley>
Message-ID: <795955039.5193531262651745338.JavaMail.root@sz0144a.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net>

hello ashely and all,

this is a good thread indeed to discuss and also use. at my college i don't use a tray at all since there''s no cafeteria at my school just snack bars, deli's, and a food court. as for the food court i always get myy food in a bag even though i'm going to just sit in there instead of going outside to eat. but, in the deli i use a tray byy holding the cane in my left hand and the tray with myy right hand for the most part.

i hope this is helpful to you all. take care all and i will talk to you all soon!


hugss,
from amy

----- Original Message -----
From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list 
Sent: Sat, 2 Jan 2010 03:55:28 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [nabs-l] techniques in cafeterias and trays

Hi all,

How do you handle cafeterias?  If your university is like mine, and most are standard setups, you have various stations.  For instance mine had an entree line, grill, sandwich area, salad bar and more.  Did you have an employee help you?  I chose to do that since it was most efficient.  We walked to the various places and they told me the food and I selected what I wanted.  

Do you carry your own tray?  I always struggled with that; its hard to balance and keep level.  A mobility instructor showed me but its hard; always seems to wobble in my hand.  I either place my hand across the tray or under the tray and grasp it from underneath.  I usually opt for someone to carry it.  

Happy New year!
Ashley 
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From amylsabo at comcast.net  Tue Jan  5 00:44:16 2010
From: amylsabo at comcast.net (Amy Sabo)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 00:44:16 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [nabs-l] Happy new year
In-Reply-To: <39DF86EABD824D30844906FF15A180B0@kevin9ee0841f6>
Message-ID: <1865335685.5197731262652256483.JavaMail.root@sz0144a.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net>

hello kevin and all,

i too want to wish yyou all a very happy new year as well too! sorry, this is late but, never late than never! take care all and i will talk to you all soon!


hugs,
from amy

----- Original Message -----
From: Kevin Wassmer 
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list 
Sent: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 16:12:17 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [nabs-l] Happy new year

I want to wish you all a happy new year. This year is going to be very interesting.
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From amylsabo at comcast.net  Tue Jan  5 00:47:48 2010
From: amylsabo at comcast.net (Amy Sabo)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 00:47:48 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons
In-Reply-To: <BD63F8D1339C4CFF990AF9B581E63D1B@Ashley>
Message-ID: <76856514.5199191262652468535.JavaMail.root@sz0144a.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net>

hello ashely,

that's awesome that you are going to be getting a victor stream. i got my 3 years ago and, i love it! i mainly use as my music player and yes, you can create folders on it by going to the artist, album, genre, and song. i have it go to the particular album or artist to listen to my music!

anyway, that's what i use mine for and love it! take care and i will talk to you soon!


hugs,
from amy

----- Original Message -----
From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list 
Sent: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 04:47:20 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [nabs-l] VR stream pros and cons

Hi All,

I'm getting a VR stream.  I'd like to hear from users of it about your experiences and what it does.  What do you use it for?  I know you can download digital talking books; now I use the traditional cassettes.  What's the site to download books?  

What navigation capabilities does it have?  Can you search by words?  I know on the VR Wave you can go to bookmarks as well as chapters and pages.  

If you record stuff can you transfer it to your computer?  What functions does the MP3 player portion have?  Can you create playlists?  Can you jump to certain songs by name or singer like with regular mp3 players?  

What are some of the cons of it?
I will likely use it for recording notes such as phone numbers and lists.  I will also use the books feature to download books from RFB and digital talking books.

Thanks.
Ashley
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From amylsabo at comcast.net  Tue Jan  5 00:53:35 2010
From: amylsabo at comcast.net (Amy Sabo)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 00:53:35 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [nabs-l] alarm clocks
In-Reply-To: <B3C0E9D55915488EAABED6519E305BD2@kevin9ee0841f6>
Message-ID: <675435887.5201481262652815663.JavaMail.root@sz0144a.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net>

hello kevin and all,

this is a very good topic indeed and one that we need information on. i too also got a new talking clock for my beddroom for christmas and my mom found it on believe it or not it was tarrget.com.

it's a mosahi and, i love it! so, just go to www.target.com and, do a search for talking clocks and it will be there. as for the price i don't know how much it was since i got it for christmas. i hope this information is helpful for you in finding a good alarm cloock for your needs.


hugs,
from amy

----- Original Message -----
From: Kevin Wassmer 
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list 
Sent: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 12:16:25 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [nabs-l] alarm clocks

Hello folks. I was wondering what alarm clocks you like. I need something that is nice and loud. This is because I am a heavy sleeper. I use my Braille Note as an Alarm Clock. However, that doesn't always work because it does crash sometimes. What would you recomend?
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From amylsabo at comcast.net  Tue Jan  5 00:59:37 2010
From: amylsabo at comcast.net (Amy Sabo)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 00:59:37 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [nabs-l] accessible phones with verizon -- or should we switch
 to AT&T?
In-Reply-To: <SNT128-W54B5E0D696C9F3EAA7C4C8A47D0@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <1256622173.5204451262653177799.JavaMail.root@sz0144a.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net>

hello mandy and all,

i too have the htc ozone phone and i love it! talks sucks imo! but, there is another screen reader that works on the phone. it's called mobile speak and you can find it and purchase it at www.atguyss.com for about $250.00.

i hope this is helpful for you and for your boyfriend too!


hugs,
from amy

----- Original Message -----
From: Mandi Marks 
To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
Sent: Sat, 26 Dec 2009 02:22:02 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [nabs-l] accessible phones with verizon -- or should we switch to AT&T?


Last week my boyfriend upgraded his phone at Verizon Wireless to the HTC Ozone with Talks, and it has turned out to be an utter disappointment. Though the HTC Ozone appears to be a good phone in itself, it seems completely incapable of handling the Talks program. The phone crashes almost daily and frequently freezes up if you tap the keys too quickly. Verizon also requires him to pay an
extra $30 a month for the data package (since it's a smart phone), and the program isn't capable
of running anything that the data package is needed for. The software uses so much of the phone's processor that the
internet times out before it can even get a web page loaded. We have yet to be able to try out the internet or any of the apps on this phone because we simply can't get them to work with TALKS running. 

He is about ready to give up on it to say the least, but we are having a hard time finding another phone with Verizon that will give him the accessibility he wants. Really all he wants to do is to be able to know who's calling, manage his contacts, customize the sounds and ringtones, and text. I have an EnV which will do all those things and read text messages but won't read who they're from. He is somewhat considering switching to AT&T and getting the iPhone but that is a last  resort. So I'm really just looking for input from other blind cell phone users who have Verizon. Or even if you own an iPhone I'd love to hear what you think of it. Also, I heard that in 2010 Verizon will be releasing an Android software upgrade for their Droid phones which could provide free text-to-speech software, but I'm not able to find much information about it on the internet. Does anyone know anything about this?

Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

                          
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From amylsabo at comcast.net  Tue Jan  5 01:03:50 2010
From: amylsabo at comcast.net (Amy Sabo)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 01:03:50 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [nabs-l] Textbooks
In-Reply-To: <E0E75C93F9EF4F33BD08B7900E822844@MIRANDA>
Message-ID: <1259656570.5206281262653430720.JavaMail.root@sz0144a.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net>

hello there,

yes, there is a way to read them in txt format and also in word format too! i do this myself and it works out fine. just open up the pdf document and do a copy and paste into ms word and, it should work! i hope this is helpful for you! take care and i will talk to you soon!


hugs,
from amy

----- Original Message -----
From: Miranda brown 
To: 'National Association of Blind Students mailing list' 
Sent: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 20:17:07 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [nabs-l] Textbooks


three of my books this upcoming semester are in PDF format is their any way
to convert them to word? I know you can change them to txt format,  but one
of mine is an accounting book and I feel it would work better in word. 
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From jackson.dezman at gmail.com  Mon Jan  4 14:38:55 2010
From: jackson.dezman at gmail.com (Dezman Jackson)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 08:38:55 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Textbooks
References: <E0E75C93F9EF4F33BD08B7900E822844@MIRANDA>
Message-ID: <1F11EF99E87F4FAE8AC96C79233F31D5@Dezman>

Miranda,

Sorry to respond so late, but www.pdftoword.com will let you convert pdf's 
to word as well as rtf I believe.

hth
Dezman
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Miranda brown" <brownbears at mchsi.com>
To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 23, 2009 2:17 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] Textbooks


>
> three of my books this upcoming semester are in PDF format is their any 
> way
> to convert them to word? I know you can change them to txt format,  but 
> one
> of mine is an accounting book and I feel it would work better in word.
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jackson.dezman%40gmail.com
> 



From jackson.dezman at gmail.com  Mon Jan  4 14:39:03 2010
From: jackson.dezman at gmail.com (Dezman Jackson)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 08:39:03 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Textbooks
References: <E0E75C93F9EF4F33BD08B7900E822844@MIRANDA>
Message-ID: <D4A78A7102134E00977FE9C7E83916A0@Dezman>

Miranda,

Sorry to respond so late, but www.pdftoword.com will let you convert pdf's 
to word as well as rtf I believe.

hth
Dezman
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Miranda brown" <brownbears at mchsi.com>
To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 23, 2009 2:17 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] Textbooks


>
> three of my books this upcoming semester are in PDF format is their any 
> way
> to convert them to word? I know you can change them to txt format,  but 
> one
> of mine is an accounting book and I feel it would work better in word.
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jackson.dezman%40gmail.com
> 



From KKuhnke at nfb.org  Tue Jan  5 01:46:47 2010
From: KKuhnke at nfb.org (Kuhnke, Kristian)
Date: Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:46:47 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Visit eBay and Support the National Federation of the
	Blind!
Message-ID: <auto-000133867628@mailfront1.g2host.com>

Dear Fellow Federationists:

This week the National Federation of the Blind 
(NFB) is one of three featured charities at 
eBay’s check-out counter.  On January 4–10, 
customers will have the option of adding a $1–$25 
donation to one of these featured charities at 
the time of their purchase.  It’s an easy way to 
make a difference when you spend.

You can also go to 
<http://donations.ebay.com/charity/charity.jsp?NP_ID=34601>the 
National Federation of the Blind’s eBay Giving 
Works page to donate to the NFB or to buy or sell 
items that support the NFB.  There is no better 
time to visit eBay if you support the National 
Federation of the Blind! Thank you for your 
generous support, and please forward this 
communication to any family, friends, or coworkers who use eBay.


From kerrik2006 at gmail.com  Tue Jan  5 02:44:29 2010
From: kerrik2006 at gmail.com (Kerri Kosten)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 21:44:29 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
	town?
In-Reply-To: <4383d01d1001041555w619b636en31f036e8b2380a4b@mail.gmail.com>
References: <409c235c1001041459k20d160aeo96faa1d05e2241a1@mail.gmail.com>
	<4383d01d1001041555w619b636en31f036e8b2380a4b@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <e5a820711001041844h1c6bf4faw24b826f1777df07e@mail.gmail.com>

Hi:

Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.

I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
display.
So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
as I should.

I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.

Braille readers are leaders!

Kerri+

On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
> leaders, they say.
> Beth
>
> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>> This
>> Listening to Braille
>>
>> By RACHEL AVIV
>>
>> Published: December 30, 2009
>>
>> AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
>> voice, and she
>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
>> Financial Times
>> to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The
>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the
>> magazine.
>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
>> poring over the
>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>> does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
>> from my finger to
>> my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>> doesn’t think of a
>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way
>> before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the
>> blind. “Literacy
>> evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>> century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time,
>> blindness
>>  was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”
>>
>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
>> the written word.
>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>> “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has
>> become a reality for
>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>> learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says
>> she thinks that
>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>> “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should
>> be abolished,”
>> she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”
>>
>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
>> house in Boston,
>> printed the
>> Harry Potter
>>  series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
>> $1,000 and there’s
>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>> computer-screen-reading software.
>>
>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
>> of the 1.3 million
>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>> low as 1 in 10,
>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight”
>> for Braille
>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in
>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
>> of premature
>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for
>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
>> has inspired
>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re
>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and
>> illiterate,” Jim
>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our
>> nation’s blind children
>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their
>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
>> learn the
>> beauty and shape and structure of language.”
>>
>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
>> visually impaired
>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read;
>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
>> read the individual
>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>> educators.
>>
>> “If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
>> mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>> Access Journal, told
>> me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel
>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many
>> Braille readers,
>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
>> still extremely
>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going
>> back to the 1400s,
>> before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only
>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were
>> the illiterate
>> masses, the peasants.”
>>
>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture.
>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
>> outlined in felt
>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>> studying a cipher
>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
>> the code so that
>> it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol
>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
>> rows and two
>> columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>> “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of
>> written communication
>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
>> and spiritual
>> savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
>> a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
>> from hopeless
>> darkness to the Mind Eternal.”
>>
>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but
>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>> innocent and malleable,
>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
>> his 1933 book, “The
>> Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
>> assimilated into
>> the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some
>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
>> light because,
>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>> blind children as
>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>> “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>> misguided in his argument
>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series
>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>> blind are not
>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>> in the parts of
>> the brain that typically process visual input.
>>
>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
>> Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as
>> the visual cortex
>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity,
>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading —
>> whether the information
>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than
>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
>> of the brain is
>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>> found that blind subjects
>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>> memory
>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by
>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
>> brains.
>>
>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
>> wired for print literacy.
>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>> activity of reading
>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>> illiterate former
>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their
>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares
>> 20 adults
>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
>> not yet begun it. In
>> M.R.I.
>>  scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
>> and more white
>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in
>> dyslexics, and the study
>> suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their
>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
>>
>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
>> debate. In moving
>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
>> people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to
>> avoid. In one of
>> the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent,
>> a teacher of
>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t
>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
>> listening to their
>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
>> character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:
>>
>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
>> his bed sleeping
>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
>>
>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>> societies think differently
>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the
>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them —
>> transformed the shape
>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
>> readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
>> container, shaken
>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The
>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>> emerging in the
>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>> concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized
>> sequence and complex
>> thought that we value in a literate society.”
>>
>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
>> blind people makes
>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>> Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people would
>> no longer be
>> “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put it
>> — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>> moral dimension
>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
>> culture seen as primitive
>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
>> Britain, are now
>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia,
>> told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of
>> being poor.”
>>
>>
>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>> blindness that it has assumed
>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
>> try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
>> from their
>> faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
>> for the blind.
>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille to
>> Abraham Lincoln
>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy”
>> repeated everywhere,
>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school
>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>> children who don’t
>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily
>> ever after” is made up of three separate words.
>>
>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner
>> of the Rehabilitation
>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>> reading skills. “I
>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I
>> realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to
>> lower something,”
>> he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re
>> not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit
>> it.”
>>
>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>> David A. Paterson
>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help
>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>> afford. Like Sloate,
>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every
>> morning. (He
>> calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was
>> “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m
>> not really supposed
>> to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend
>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
>> blind person
>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
>>
>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
>> to be employed as
>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were
>> sometimes made
>> to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
>> from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>> text-to-speech
>> software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world,
>> then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”
>>
>> When deaf people began getting
>> cochlear implants
>>  in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as
>> an identity
>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities,
>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is
>> physically natural,
>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle
>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>> since birth, told me that
>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
>> photographs of
>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>> vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”
>>
>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>> reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you
>> are viewed as ignorant
>> or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your
>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
>> designed to function
>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
>> once it has been digitized,
>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
>> for many blind people
>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
>> members recited to
>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
>>
>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>> Times.
>>
>> --
>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>
>>
>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>> before us;
>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>> past and future generations,
>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>> done, and
>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
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>


From corbbo at gmail.com  Tue Jan  5 02:52:22 2010
From: corbbo at gmail.com (Corbb O'Connor)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 21:52:22 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] On Study Groups
In-Reply-To: <061EDF6B834D4AAD9C7906CE6125BDBA@windows4c0ed96>
References: <061EDF6B834D4AAD9C7906CE6125BDBA@windows4c0ed96>
Message-ID: <744283E3-42DA-454D-A7DE-4E9FE6344E0E@gmail.com>

I've had very good luck sending out a mass e-mail to the class via  
Blackboard asking if anybody wants to start a study group. Beware,  
though, that you may get responses from people who aren't the best/ 
strongest group members. That said, there's no way to know that until  
a few weeks into the group anyway. But, overall, I've had great luck.  
The stronger members tend to band together anyway.

As for making the sessions productive? It depends on the class, but  
sometimes just discussions or review sessions before exams work. If  
there are assignments, coming together after everybody has done the  
assignment works great too.

Best of luck!
Corbb


On Jan 3, 2010, at 3:37 PM, V Nork wrote:

Open question, what advice do any of you have for starting a study  
group in a class?  I have never been a   part of a study group, but I  
think it could really be   a help in  managing the work load and   
doing well in a class.  Or would it?  If any of you have been in a  
study group, what did you like and dislike about it?  Did it benefit  
you?  Are there strategies you used to start one in a class?  Where  
did you meet, etcetera, Thanks for  sharing your thoughts, Ginny
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From sarah.jevnikar at utoronto.ca  Tue Jan  5 03:35:04 2010
From: sarah.jevnikar at utoronto.ca (Sarah Jevnikar)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 22:35:04 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] volunteering and missions
In-Reply-To: <0F7DBCC8120D48858E442B7D605968F4@Ashley>
References: <0F7DBCC8120D48858E442B7D605968F4@Ashley>
Message-ID: <00b601ca8db8$13301ea0$39905be0$@jevnikar@utoronto.ca>

I worked with Habitat for a couple days in 2006 as part of a program for
blind an d visually-impaired Canadian students. I painted, sanded, and
filled in the holes nails had left behind with mud. It probably has a better
name than that. There's lots than can be done because every project is at a
different stage so using power tools (it sounds like fun) may not even be
necessary.
I hope you end up volunteering with them; they're a great organization.

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of bookwormahb at earthlink.net
Sent: Saturday, December 19, 2009 9:02 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: [nabs-l] volunteering and missions

    Hi all,


This list is sure quiet.  I was thinking this is the time of giving around
the holidays.  Have you participated in an outreach project?  Anyone done
Habitat for Humanity and if so what did you do and what alternative
techniques did you use?  Can we hammer and drill safely?  

For those of you who are religious, have you been on mission trips?  I would
like to do that someday.  So far I have been to a shelter to serve lunch
with my church.  I have volunteered for the talking book library and
political campaigns.  So what are you all doing lately?  I hope to hear
someone has done Habitat because that is something I am interested in but I
don't know how I can contribute.  I think I could paint  and mix and lay
concrete outside.  Look forward to your responses.

Ashley
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ronto.ca



From dsmithnfb at gmail.com  Tue Jan  5 03:40:41 2010
From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 19:40:41 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
	town?
In-Reply-To: <e5a820711001041844h1c6bf4faw24b826f1777df07e@mail.gmail.com>
References: <409c235c1001041459k20d160aeo96faa1d05e2241a1@mail.gmail.com>
	<4383d01d1001041555w619b636en31f036e8b2380a4b@mail.gmail.com>
	<e5a820711001041844h1c6bf4faw24b826f1777df07e@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <409c235c1001041940q2102a13em21b90591f17093fb@mail.gmail.com>

I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate  focused
upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
   What does this  make those who arn't very good braille readers,
don't want to know, or  don't know braille?

 Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille readers?
  respectfullly,
  Darian

On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi:
>
> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.
>
> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
> display.
> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
> as I should.
>
> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.
>
> Braille readers are leaders!
>
> Kerri+
>
> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
>> leaders, they say.
>> Beth
>>
>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> This
>>> Listening to Braille
>>>
>>> By RACHEL AVIV
>>>
>>> Published: December 30, 2009
>>>
>>> AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
>>> voice, and she
>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
>>> Financial Times
>>> to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The
>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the
>>> magazine.
>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
>>> poring over the
>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>>> does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
>>> from my finger to
>>> my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>>> doesn’t think of a
>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way
>>> before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the
>>> blind. “Literacy
>>> evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time,
>>> blindness
>>>  was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”
>>>
>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
>>> the written word.
>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>>> “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has
>>> become a reality for
>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>>> learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says
>>> she thinks that
>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>>> “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should
>>> be abolished,”
>>> she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”
>>>
>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
>>> house in Boston,
>>> printed the
>>> Harry Potter
>>>  series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
>>> $1,000 and there’s
>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>>> computer-screen-reading software.
>>>
>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
>>> of the 1.3 million
>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>>> low as 1 in 10,
>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight”
>>> for Braille
>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in
>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
>>> of premature
>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for
>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
>>> has inspired
>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re
>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and
>>> illiterate,” Jim
>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our
>>> nation’s blind children
>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their
>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
>>> learn the
>>> beauty and shape and structure of language.”
>>>
>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
>>> visually impaired
>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read;
>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
>>> read the individual
>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>>> educators.
>>>
>>> “If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
>>> mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>>> Access Journal, told
>>> me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel
>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many
>>> Braille readers,
>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
>>> still extremely
>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going
>>> back to the 1400s,
>>> before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only
>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were
>>> the illiterate
>>> masses, the peasants.”
>>>
>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture.
>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
>>> outlined in felt
>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>>> studying a cipher
>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
>>> the code so that
>>> it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol
>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
>>> rows and two
>>> columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>>> “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of
>>> written communication
>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
>>> and spiritual
>>> savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
>>> a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
>>> from hopeless
>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal.”
>>>
>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but
>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>>> innocent and malleable,
>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
>>> his 1933 book, “The
>>> Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
>>> assimilated into
>>> the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some
>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
>>> light because,
>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>>> blind children as
>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>>> “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>>> misguided in his argument
>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series
>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>>> blind are not
>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>>> in the parts of
>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
>>>
>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
>>> Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as
>>> the visual cortex
>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity,
>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading —
>>> whether the information
>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than
>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
>>> of the brain is
>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>>> found that blind subjects
>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>>> memory
>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by
>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
>>> brains.
>>>
>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
>>> wired for print literacy.
>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>>> activity of reading
>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>>> illiterate former
>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their
>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares
>>> 20 adults
>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
>>> not yet begun it. In
>>> M.R.I.
>>>  scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
>>> and more white
>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in
>>> dyslexics, and the study
>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their
>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
>>>
>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
>>> debate. In moving
>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to
>>> avoid. In one of
>>> the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent,
>>> a teacher of
>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t
>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
>>> listening to their
>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
>>> character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:
>>>
>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
>>> his bed sleeping
>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
>>>
>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>>> societies think differently
>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the
>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them —
>>> transformed the shape
>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
>>> readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
>>> container, shaken
>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The
>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>>> emerging in the
>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>>> concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized
>>> sequence and complex
>>> thought that we value in a literate society.”
>>>
>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
>>> blind people makes
>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people would
>>> no longer be
>>> “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put it
>>> — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>>> moral dimension
>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
>>> culture seen as primitive
>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
>>> Britain, are now
>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia,
>>> told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of
>>> being poor.”
>>>
>>>
>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>>> blindness that it has assumed
>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
>>> try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
>>> from their
>>> faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
>>> for the blind.
>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille to
>>> Abraham Lincoln
>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy”
>>> repeated everywhere,
>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school
>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>>> children who don’t
>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily
>>> ever after” is made up of three separate words.
>>>
>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner
>>> of the Rehabilitation
>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>>> reading skills. “I
>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I
>>> realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to
>>> lower something,”
>>> he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re
>>> not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit
>>> it.”
>>>
>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>>> David A. Paterson
>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help
>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>>> afford. Like Sloate,
>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every
>>> morning. (He
>>> calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was
>>> “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m
>>> not really supposed
>>> to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend
>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
>>> blind person
>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
>>>
>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
>>> to be employed as
>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were
>>> sometimes made
>>> to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
>>> from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>>> text-to-speech
>>> software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world,
>>> then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”
>>>
>>> When deaf people began getting
>>> cochlear implants
>>>  in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as
>>> an identity
>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities,
>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is
>>> physically natural,
>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle
>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>>> since birth, told me that
>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
>>> photographs of
>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>>> vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”
>>>
>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>>> reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you
>>> are viewed as ignorant
>>> or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your
>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
>>> designed to function
>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
>>> once it has been digitized,
>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
>>> for many blind people
>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
>>> members recited to
>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
>>>
>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>>> Times.
>>>
>>> --
>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>
>>>
>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>> before us;
>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>> past and future generations,
>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>> done, and
>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>


-- 
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
before us;
if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
past and future generations,
then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
done, and
usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama


From sarah.jevnikar at utoronto.ca  Tue Jan  5 03:45:32 2010
From: sarah.jevnikar at utoronto.ca (Sarah Jevnikar)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 22:45:32 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] New THOUGHT PROVOKER #152- The Cursed
In-Reply-To: <20091221003642.22285.91573@web3.serotek.com>
References: <20091221003642.22285.91573@web3.serotek.com>
Message-ID: <00b701ca8db9$890a24d0$9b1e6e70$@jevnikar@utoronto.ca>

I hope that research was done before writing this. Especially with
islamophobia at a peak, it seems unfair to continue to act on people's fears
of what they don't understand. Is "God's cursed" an actual Islamic belief?
Lots could happen here. Parents get used to their children's partners. They
only talked and had tea over their visit. Perhaps the father would learn
that his hopeful son-in-law had a good job and was self-supporting. I don't
think it's fair to just say "it's a fact of life" and move on, or say "my
religion's not that way" because most people don't understand their own
religion let alone someone else's which has been so negatively portrayed.

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Jedi
Sent: Sunday, December 20, 2009 7:37 PM
To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] New THOUGHT PROVOKER #152- The Cursed

Is that what you'd say to yourself if you were in Robert's shoes? What 
if you really loved that woman? Would you be willing to simply stay 
seated and say "That's just a fact of life?" The Blacks didn't say that 
when they were forbidden to take the front seat in buses. What would 
have happened if Jews and Jewish sympathizers used the same logic to 
stand still during the Holocaust?

Respectfully,
Jedi


Original message:
> Just one of the facts of life.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf
> Of Teal Bloodworth
> Sent: Sunday, December 20, 2009 11:45 AM
> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] New THOUGHT PROVOKER #152- The Cursed

> Thats not fair...i understand that people dont do well with things they do
> not understand but we see everything and just have a different perception
> and a different way of aproaching the action of " seeing. "

>         Teal
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Robert Leslie Newman" <newmanrl at cox.net>
> To: "nfbnabs" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Sunday, December 20, 2009 9:38 AM
> Subject: [nabs-l] New THOUGHT PROVOKER #152- The Cursed


>> NABS
>> RE:  The Cursed

>> Here is my #152nd THOUGHT PROVOKER. It is a study in how various
religious
>> factions will view the blind; from near sainthood to being cursed. If you
>> have not read the PROVOKER, it follows.  Recall that I collect responses
>> and
>> post them upon my web site for all the WWW to read and learn from and
that
>> URL is- Http://thoughtprovoker.info <http://thoughtprovoker.info/>   If
>> you
>> wish to receive THOUGHT PROVOKERS sent directly to you, just write me and
>> ask, at-  newmanrl at cox.net



>> THOUGHT PROVOKER 152
>> The Cursed

>> "Hi, I'm Robert. Your accent, if I am reading it correctly, places you
>> from
>> somewhere in the Middle East?"

>> The attractive dusky-skinned, dark-haired woman looked quizzically at the
>> guy approaching. He was about her age, nice looking, using a long white
>> cane. She had first noticed him upon her arrival in the hotel lobby, and
>> later in the registration line and reception area for those attending the
>> two-day conference. He had impressed her with his poise as he maneuvered
>> about independently, responding charmingly as he dealt with the awkward
>> reception his presence sometimes elicited. Without hesitation, she spoke
>> up,
>> "Hello, and, yes. To put a finger or two on the map, Cairo originally,
but
>> most recently, right here in Philly. My name is Dara --- I'm the only one
>> sitting in this row." A realization was blossoming within her; this guy's
>> disability didn't make her feel uncomfortable.

>> Anticipation fueling his every stride, Robert moved into the row. He
>> hadn't
>> expected such a provocative seatmate at a conference where he knew there
>> wouldn't be anyone he'd know. Her voice is so beautiful, he thought.
>> Feeling at ease and maybe too much so, he couldn't believe his next
words,
>> "Well, guess I'll sit by you and fill up the row so it's just ours."

>> They didn't have the entire row to themselves. Yet throughout the
>> morning's
>> presentations, they indulged in periodic soft-spoken exchanges.  Some
>> concerning the information being presented, some purely personal, and
>> sometimes, sharing some stifled laughter.

>> At the end of the morning session, they decided to have lunch together.
>> Later, they had dinner, then the next morning, breakfast, and then lunch
>> again. The conference was over at 4:00 PM.

>> "I've got to see you again. How about tomorrow lunch or dinner
somewhere?"
>> Robert asked.

>> "Yes, me too. Ah --- how about you come over to my apartment and I make
>> dinner --- you bring a refreshment."

>> "Yes!"

>> The night of their date, dinner finished, with more wine, soft music, and
>> a
>> deep lingering kiss, Dara said, "I once heard that it was very
>> disconcerting
>> to look into a blind person's eyes. But ah --- being this close and
>> looking
>> --- I'm not sure I know what they are referring to."

>> "Well I'm told --- good art work on non-scratch plastic like I have, can
>> work miracles."

>> "Ha! Oh Robert my dear man," Dara snuggled closer, "you are so full of
>> surprises and delights. I must tell you that I feel that I am falling in
>> love with you. "Fingertips caressing his cheek,  "Before we get more
>> serious, we must go to my father. He must meet and pass his judgment on
my
>> choice."

>> "Woo, You mean we have to get your father's permission to fall in love?"

>> "No, it's not that way. I have my own heart and feelings. I respect you
>> for
>> who you are, my dear. Just that, my father is the --- head of the family.
>> It
>> is the way within my culture. The man oversees the affairs of the family.
>> You will like him. He is a generous, loving, and God fearing man. And his
>> being judgmental; well --- it goes along with the position "

>> The day came for their trip to Dara's family home and her introduction of
>> Robert to her father came. Her mother served them tea and sweets. They
>> talked, drank tea, talked some more, and though her family were very
>> polite,
>> they were nevertheless very curious about how this blind man lived.

>> After dinner, in her father's study, Dara and Robert spoke of their
>> feelings
>> for one another. And her father answered. "My dear daughter, I do not
give
>> my permission. Let me make this very clear, Robert, though you are a fine
>> fellow, I must oppose this marriage. I do not want my daughter to be
fated
>> to the life she would have to live if she is betrothed to you. You are
>> blind, a condition which greatly, how should I say it --- blindness
>> severely
>> impacts your life--you are stigmatized; you have reduced independence
and,
>> therefore, your prospects to financially care for my daughter are
>> handicapped. No. I forbid this union. You are one of God's cursed."


>> Robert Leslie Newman
>> Email- newmanrl at cox.net
>> THOUGHT PROVOKER Website-
>> Http://www.thoughtprovoker.info

>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:

>
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> il.com

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From bunnykatie6 at gmail.com  Tue Jan  5 03:48:49 2010
From: bunnykatie6 at gmail.com (Katie Wang)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 22:48:49 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Gmail Chat accessibility
Message-ID: <5096b4731001041948k1985c46bk715c803d4a08b620@mail.gmail.com>

Hi, all,
  Has anyone tried to use the Google instant messenger, either within
gmail or through the downlodable Google Talk software? I'm running
JAWS 10 and can't get either version to work properly. I have a
Braille Note with Keysoft version 8, which gives me access to the chat
application, but it is unstable and crashes often. I know AIM and
other traditional IM programs are more accessible, but many of my
friends have switched to gmail chat. Any experiences you may have
would be much appreciated. Thanks!
   Katie


From nabs.president at gmail.com  Tue Jan  5 04:50:46 2010
From: nabs.president at gmail.com (Arielle Silverman)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 15:50:46 +1100
Subject: [nabs-l] NABS Bulletin Additions
Message-ID: <85ff10071001042050n20534480o913792b9a8d38fe2@mail.gmail.com>

Hi all,

The time has come again to prepare the next NABS update. If you  have
news from your state NABS division, please send it to me before
Sunday.

Thanks and Happy New Year to all!
Arielle

-- 
Arielle Silverman
President, National Association of Blind Students
Phone:  602-502-2255
Email:
nabs.president at gmail.com
Website:
www.nabslink.org


From raniaismail04 at gmail.com  Tue Jan  5 05:13:33 2010
From: raniaismail04 at gmail.com (Rania)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 00:13:33 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
	intown?
References: <409c235c1001041459k20d160aeo96faa1d05e2241a1@mail.gmail.com><4383d01d1001041555w619b636en31f036e8b2380a4b@mail.gmail.com>
	<e5a820711001041844h1c6bf4faw24b826f1777df07e@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <004901ca8dc5$d50579a0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>

I don't use braille much my self but I will take my packmate braille display 
hook it to my labtop and use it to study and or when I have to present a 
paper in class.
Rania,
"For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
See you at the finish line."
~Christopher Reeve

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kerri Kosten" <kerrik2006 at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Monday, January 04, 2010 9:44 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one 
intown?


Hi:

Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.

I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
display.
So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
as I should.

I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.

Braille readers are leaders!

Kerri+

On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
> leaders, they say.
> Beth
>
> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>> This
>> Listening to Braille
>>
>> By RACHEL AVIV
>>
>> Published: December 30, 2009
>>
>> AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
>> voice, and she
>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
>> Financial Times
>> to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The
>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the
>> magazine.
>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
>> poring over the
>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>> does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
>> from my finger to
>> my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>> doesn’t think of a
>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way
>> before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the
>> blind. “Literacy
>> evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>> century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time,
>> blindness
>>  was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”
>>
>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
>> the written word.
>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>> “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has
>> become a reality for
>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>> learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says
>> she thinks that
>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>> “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should
>> be abolished,”
>> she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”
>>
>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
>> house in Boston,
>> printed the
>> Harry Potter
>>  series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
>> $1,000 and there’s
>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>> computer-screen-reading software.
>>
>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
>> of the 1.3 million
>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>> low as 1 in 10,
>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight”
>> for Braille
>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in
>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
>> of premature
>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for
>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
>> has inspired
>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re
>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and
>> illiterate,” Jim
>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our
>> nation’s blind children
>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their
>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
>> learn the
>> beauty and shape and structure of language.”
>>
>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
>> visually impaired
>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read;
>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
>> read the individual
>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>> educators.
>>
>> “If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
>> mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>> Access Journal, told
>> me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel
>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many
>> Braille readers,
>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
>> still extremely
>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going
>> back to the 1400s,
>> before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only
>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were
>> the illiterate
>> masses, the peasants.”
>>
>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture.
>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
>> outlined in felt
>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>> studying a cipher
>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
>> the code so that
>> it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol
>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
>> rows and two
>> columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>> “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of
>> written communication
>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
>> and spiritual
>> savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
>> a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
>> from hopeless
>> darkness to the Mind Eternal.”
>>
>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but
>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>> innocent and malleable,
>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
>> his 1933 book, “The
>> Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
>> assimilated into
>> the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some
>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
>> light because,
>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>> blind children as
>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>> “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>> misguided in his argument
>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series
>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>> blind are not
>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>> in the parts of
>> the brain that typically process visual input.
>>
>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
>> Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as
>> the visual cortex
>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity,
>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading —
>> whether the information
>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than
>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
>> of the brain is
>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>> found that blind subjects
>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>> memory
>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by
>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
>> brains.
>>
>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
>> wired for print literacy.
>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>> activity of reading
>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>> illiterate former
>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their
>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares
>> 20 adults
>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
>> not yet begun it. In
>> M.R.I.
>>  scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
>> and more white
>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in
>> dyslexics, and the study
>> suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their
>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
>>
>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
>> debate. In moving
>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
>> people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to
>> avoid. In one of
>> the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent,
>> a teacher of
>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t
>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
>> listening to their
>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
>> character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:
>>
>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
>> his bed sleeping
>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
>>
>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>> societies think differently
>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the
>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them —
>> transformed the shape
>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
>> readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
>> container, shaken
>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The
>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>> emerging in the
>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>> concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized
>> sequence and complex
>> thought that we value in a literate society.”
>>
>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
>> blind people makes
>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>> Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people would
>> no longer be
>> “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put it
>> — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>> moral dimension
>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
>> culture seen as primitive
>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
>> Britain, are now
>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia,
>> told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of
>> being poor.”
>>
>>
>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>> blindness that it has assumed
>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
>> try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
>> from their
>> faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
>> for the blind.
>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille to
>> Abraham Lincoln
>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy”
>> repeated everywhere,
>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school
>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>> children who don’t
>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily
>> ever after” is made up of three separate words.
>>
>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner
>> of the Rehabilitation
>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>> reading skills. “I
>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I
>> realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to
>> lower something,”
>> he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re
>> not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit
>> it.”
>>
>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>> David A. Paterson
>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help
>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>> afford. Like Sloate,
>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every
>> morning. (He
>> calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was
>> “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m
>> not really supposed
>> to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend
>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
>> blind person
>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
>>
>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
>> to be employed as
>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were
>> sometimes made
>> to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
>> from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>> text-to-speech
>> software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world,
>> then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”
>>
>> When deaf people began getting
>> cochlear implants
>>  in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as
>> an identity
>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities,
>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is
>> physically natural,
>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle
>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>> since birth, told me that
>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
>> photographs of
>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>> vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”
>>
>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>> reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you
>> are viewed as ignorant
>> or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your
>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
>> designed to function
>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
>> once it has been digitized,
>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
>> for many blind people
>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
>> members recited to
>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
>>
>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>> Times.
>>
>> --
>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>
>>
>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>> before us;
>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>> past and future generations,
>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>> done, and
>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>

_______________________________________________
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To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaismail04%40gmail.com 



From nefamphetamine at gmail.com  Tue Jan  5 13:00:27 2010
From: nefamphetamine at gmail.com (Nef)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 08:00:27 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Google Calendar
Message-ID: <3d644bc31001050500v71220983w6171cc58c2bf6661@mail.gmail.com>

-- 
Peace, love and empathy,

Nefertiti
Greetings:

The use of Google Calendar may be a requirement for a project I’m
embarking on. I’m finding that it isn’t terribly accessible. Have any
of you had any luck using it and might you possibly share a tip or 2?

Thanks in advance for your input.


From smwhalenpsp at gmail.com  Tue Jan  5 16:29:43 2010
From: smwhalenpsp at gmail.com (Sean Whalen)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 11:29:43 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] DC Summer Internship Opportunities
In-Reply-To: <409c235c1001041459k20d160aeo96faa1d05e2241a1@mail.gmail.com>
References: <409c235c1001041459k20d160aeo96faa1d05e2241a1@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <2D7D0DEA2CA7426FABC78092B91CD363@VALUED04C3B21F>

Good morning,

While I am sure that many of you are aware of the AAPD DC internship
program, I am pasting information on the program below. The deadline for
applications is this Friday. There are internships available in
policy/politics/law and in IT. I know a few people who have participated in
this program and they had positive experiences.

>From the AAPD JFA newsletter:

LAST CALL: AAPD Summer Internship Applications Due THIS FRIDAY
 

DEADLINE THIS FRIDAY, JANUARY 8, 2010!!!
 

(Please share with your networks.)
 

The American Association of People with Disabilities is searching for
college students with disabilities to apply for the:
 2010 AAPD Summer Internships in Washington, D.C.!
To apply, please visit http://www.aapd.com/AAPDInternship 
 

Each year, AAPD coordinates two summer internship programs for college
students with disabilities wanting to spend a summer working in Washington,
DC.  AAPD summer interns receive a living stipend, accessible housing, and
travel to and from Washington, DC.  Currently-enrolled undergraduate college
students with any type of disability pursuing any type of undergraduate
degree are encouraged to apply.  
 

Hosted by AAPD and sponsored by the Mitsubishi Electric America Foundation,
the AAPD-MEAF Congressional Internship Program provides students interested
in government, politics, law, or leadership the unique opportunity to intern
on Capital Hill for members of Congress.  Previous AAPD-MEAF Congressional
intern placements have included:
Senator Barack Obama (D-IL)
Senator Hillary Rodham-Clinton (D-NY)
Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS)
Congressman F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI)
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD)
Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA)
 

Hosted by AAPD and sponsored by Microsoft, the AAPD-Microsoft Federal IT
Internship Program provides students pursuing careers in Information
Technology the unique opportunity to intern in the IT divisions of federal
agencies.  Previous IT placements have included:
US Coast Guard
Department of Homeland Security
US Patent and Trade Office
National Science Foundation
US Department of Transportation
Transportation Security Administration
Federal Aviation Administration


To apply for the AAPD Summer Internship programs, please visit
http://www.aapd.com/AAPDInternship.  For additional information or for
questions, please contact the AAPD program staff at internship at aapd.com.  
 
MODERATOR, Sarah Peterson, JUSTICE FOR ALL -- A Service of the American
Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD).



From jsorozco at gmail.com  Tue Jan  5 17:21:32 2010
From: jsorozco at gmail.com (Joe Orozco)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 12:21:32 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Google Calendar
In-Reply-To: <3d644bc31001050500v71220983w6171cc58c2bf6661@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <54AA845F2B574B378DB9A42A2E59CF8F@Rufus>

There is a plug-in you can use for MS Outlook.  Basically, anything you
record on your Outlook calendar reflects on the Google Calendar for everyone
else's benefit, but you yourself only have to use Outlook to manipulate the
entries.  You'll have to Google it, but you'll find it right away.

Joe Orozco

"A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the
crowd."--Max Lucado 

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org 
[mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Nef
Sent: Tuesday, January 05, 2010 8:00 AM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: [nabs-l] Google Calendar

-- 
Peace, love and empathy,

Nefertiti
Greetings:

The use of Google Calendar may be a requirement for a project I'm
embarking on. I'm finding that it isn't terribly accessible. Have any
of you had any luck using it and might you possibly share a tip or 2?

Thanks in advance for your input.

_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account 
info for nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jsorozco
%40gmail.com
 

__________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of 
virus signature database 4743 (20100104) __________

The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.

http://www.eset.com
 
 

__________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature
database 4745 (20100105) __________

The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.

http://www.eset.com
 



From mrsmigs at migliorelli.org  Tue Jan  5 16:58:03 2010
From: mrsmigs at migliorelli.org (Maryann Migliorelli)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 09:58:03 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] well-described workout routines?
References: <D757C6D2DCCC495B99A3054570AFC730@Hope>
Message-ID: <CCFEB5CA2C45415B8CB30E45584D766B@PAULLAPTOP>

    Hi,  Working out is a great thing for us students to be doing no matter 
what.  I use an aerobic workout that is sold by Independent Living Aids. 
One side of the tape is the directions and descriptions of the exercises. 
The other side is the workout fully described and directed by voice.  It was 
created by a mobility teacher many years ago.  It's not perfect, but it's an 
excellent tool for getting started on your goal.
Good luck.
Maryann Migliorelli




From mrsmigs at migliorelli.org  Tue Jan  5 17:34:19 2010
From: mrsmigs at migliorelli.org (Maryann Migliorelli)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 10:34:19 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] University of Phoenix question
Message-ID: <FED903FB37EB466A9C505665EFF50F22@PAULLAPTOP>

Hi all,  Is anyone on the list attending University of Phoenix?  I'm looking at it for some online classes and am wondering about accessibility.
Please share your thoughts and experiences either on or of list.
Thanks.
Maryann Migliorelli

From spangler.robert at gmail.com  Tue Jan  5 17:41:29 2010
From: spangler.robert at gmail.com (Robert Spangler)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 12:41:29 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
In-Reply-To: <A957A6A6-0DD1-4E35-9C99-0C6693EC0D37@gmail.com>
References: <20100104003735.20899.34863@web2.serotek.com>
	<56359C7E-1A7E-4751-98A9-E3C5F78C3F13@gmail.com>
	<9CE30F106C984D2FA4E7CB250FC6EA5A@windows4c0ed96>
	<43ED0879583C45ADBA9115E5F371C37B@teal6e6857f643>
	<A957A6A6-0DD1-4E35-9C99-0C6693EC0D37@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <19ccaa051001050941u76a9955bx7baf25ee78ad2782@mail.gmail.com>

You have the right to take any pose that you wish and, of course, to
face the consequences that come with that pose.  However, I would
recommend you to change it for your own good.  Your first step should
be to place a higher value on your cane.  You just never know when you
will be left alone (it could happen) and without a cane will make it
pure hell.  but take it one thing at a time.

On 1/4/10, Briley Pollard <brileyp at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have usually had more sighted friends than blind ones as well, but  using
> a cane or using braille doesn't make you different or awkward. I'm not
> saying dance with your cane or anything like that, or that letting people
> help you sometimes is wrong, because it isn't. But having a set of
> alternative skills is what makes you independent, (please don't take this as
> me saying you aren't, I'm just speaking in general terms). Being able to do
> things on  your own without help though is what integrates us as blind
> people into a sighted world. On Jan 4, 2010, at 4:07 PM, Teal Bloodworth
> wrote:
>
>> yeah i dont trust myself to go out in that environment without a group of
>> friends. Taking my side kick guide dog is not realistic because of the
>> crowded and loud room and i would misplace a white cane so i would latch
>> on to some friends and go out. I wasnt looked at as depending on them and
>> being socially awkward. Living in a smaller college campus with all the
>> other colleges being small too you see  alot of the same people and most
>> of them have had a class with me which allowed for small talk or even them
>> approaching me to begin with.
>>
>> If i were getting someones phone number either as a friend or an intimate
>> interest i would either have them call me and leave a message  then i
>> would hand them the phone and have them put it in there and tell me the
>> speed dial number. Or just hand it to them and have them do that. I am not
>> braille literate because i dont like braille and it doesnt like me. I
>> wouldnt want to take an expensive device with me in case i sat it down and
>> forgetfully leave it. Yes my pose may seem foolish to you all and maybe
>> this undignifys me by making it seem like i depend on people who are
>> sighted but i used to be one of them. I treat them like they treat me and
>> i have more sighted friends than blind or visually impaired because where
>> i live i am the only blind person. This is in my home town and at my small
>> private college. Maybe i just have really good friends who packed me home
>> on a night where i had too much and had to learn the hard way. who always
>> returned my personal posessions and wouldnt pity me for being blind but
>> rather expected for me to act no different.
>>
>>       -Teal
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "V Nork" <ginisd at sbcglobal.net>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 10:28 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>
>>
>>> Hello list, As I read this great thread, I wonder, as a woman, what the
>>> thinking is about going out to clubs and bars alone, with just a cane and
>>> cell phone?  I have never tried this, but I would like to venture out
>>> alone, maybe you could share your experiences and ideas?  Most of my
>>> friends I do hang out with are not into clubs, so this would be a solo
>>> outing for me. Thanks , Ginny
>>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Briley Pollard" <brileyp at gmail.com>
>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 7:28 PM
>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>
>>>
>>>> Depending exclusively on a sighted guide is of course not wise. Having
>>>> no other mobility aid available is  foolish. However, using sighted
>>>> guide in addition to another mobility aid is useful at times such as in
>>>> loud and crowded environments such as night clubs. I'm not saying hang
>>>> on to your friends all night, (that is obviously awkward and defeats the
>>>> purpose of going tout to have fun), but it still can be helpful. Even
>>>> when I'm with blind friends, often someone might hold my arm while using
>>>> their cane just to insure we stay together in crowded environments. My
>>>> point is it shouldn't be disregarded as a viable tool in addition to
>>>> others.
>>>>
>>>> BrileyOn Jan 3, 2010, at 6:37 PM, Jedi wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> And that's why one should avoid depending  on a sighted guide if at all
>>>>> possible so that their decisions don't have to affect yours.
>>>>>
>>>>> Respectfully,
>>>>> Jedi
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Original message:
>>>>>> hmm no i wouldnt take my guide dog since music would be loud and there
>>>>>> would
>>>>>> just be too  much activity but i never really take a cane either. I
>>>>>> think
>>>>>> the first time i went to a bar since my vision loss or a  club yes i
>>>>>> had my
>>>>>> cell and my cane but after the first time i left it and went with
>>>>>> friends
>>>>>> sighted guide.
>>>>>
>>>>>> here is another question alittle off topic. What if you went sighted
>>>>>> guide
>>>>>> and your guide ended up drinking. do you drink too? what if you wanted
>>>>>> to
>>>>>> drink, would you do it in a nightblub or bar or even alittle further
>>>>>> in
>>>>>> public?
>>>>>
>>>>>>           -Teal
>>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>>> From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
>>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:16 PM
>>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>> I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
>>>>>>> others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is
>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>> last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
>>>>>>> whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
>>>>>>> friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell
>>>>>>> phone,
>>>>>>> and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
>>>>>>> this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
>>>>>>> ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
>>>>>>> keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
>>>>>>> happens.
>>>>>
>>>>>>> To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything
>>>>>>> extra
>>>>>>> that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
>>>>>>> anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
>>>>>>> trouble.
>>>>>
>>>>>>> Brice
>>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even
>>>>>>>> bring
>>>>>>>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't
>>>>>>>> want to
>>>>>>>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with
>>>>>>>> it. In
>>>>>>>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with
>>>>>>>> it
>>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted
>>>>>>>> guide.
>>>>>>>> I
>>>>>>>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I
>>>>>>>> go
>>>>>>>> with
>>>>>>>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel
>>>>>>>> silly
>>>>>>>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having
>>>>>>>> someone
>>>>>>>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it
>>>>>>>> yourself.
>>>>>>>> But
>>>>>>>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k.
>>>>>>>> and it
>>>>>>>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit
>>>>>>>> O.K.
>>>>>>>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type
>>>>>>>> in
>>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to
>>>>>>>> have a
>>>>>>>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your
>>>>>>>> number.
>>>>>>>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell
>>>>>>>> phones
>>>>>>>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if
>>>>>>>> you
>>>>>>>> can
>>>>>>>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful
>>>>>>>> with
>>>>>>>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you
>>>>>>>> move
>>>>>>>> funny or if your pants are tight.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>>>>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>>>>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>>>>>>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers
>>>>>>>>> are
>>>>>>>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note
>>>>>>>>> taker
>>>>>>>>> is a good option.
>>>>>>>>> Beth
>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a
>>>>>>>>>> discussion
>>>>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at
>>>>>>>>>> Verizon
>>>>>>>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>>>>>>>> rewarding. I
>>>>>>>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>>>>>>>> socialist
>>>>>>>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>               I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night
>>>>>>>>>> clubs
>>>>>>>>>> back
>>>>>>>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me
>>>>>>>>>> because the
>>>>>>>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I
>>>>>>>>>> would
>>>>>>>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their
>>>>>>>>>> number.
>>>>>>>>>> This
>>>>>>>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate.
>>>>>>>>>> I
>>>>>>>>>> use
>>>>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places
>>>>>>>>>> like
>>>>>>>>>> that.
>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> My
>>>>>>>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken
>>>>>>>>>> your
>>>>>>>>>> note
>>>>>>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I
>>>>>>>>>> believe
>>>>>>>>>> a
>>>>>>>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the
>>>>>>>>>> night
>>>>>>>>>> club
>>>>>>>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
>>>>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
>>>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
>>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit
>>>>> www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/ginisd%40sbcglobal.net
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/spangler.robert%40gmail.com
>


-- 
Robert Spangler
The University of Toledo
Student Senator - Administrative Affairs Committee Chair, College of
Arts and Sciences


From spangler.robert at gmail.com  Tue Jan  5 17:45:05 2010
From: spangler.robert at gmail.com (Robert Spangler)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 12:45:05 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] accessible phones with verizon -- or should we switch
	to AT&T?
In-Reply-To: <1256622173.5204451262653177799.JavaMail.root@sz0144a.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net>
References: <SNT128-W54B5E0D696C9F3EAA7C4C8A47D0@phx.gbl>
	<1256622173.5204451262653177799.JavaMail.root@sz0144a.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net>
Message-ID: <19ccaa051001050945s978c45dm5743b824ffb14aaa@mail.gmail.com>

If you switch to AT&T you may be able to get one of their Symbian
phones at a discount, with new service.  The Mobile Speak software is
only an aditional $90 or so from AT&T.

On 1/4/10, Amy Sabo <amylsabo at comcast.net> wrote:
> hello mandy and all,
>
> i too have the htc ozone phone and i love it! talks sucks imo! but, there is
> another screen reader that works on the phone. it's called mobile speak and
> you can find it and purchase it at www.atguyss.com for about $250.00.
>
> i hope this is helpful for you and for your boyfriend too!
>
>
> hugs,
> from amy
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Mandi Marks
> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> Sent: Sat, 26 Dec 2009 02:22:02 +0000 (UTC)
> Subject: [nabs-l] accessible phones with verizon -- or should we switch to
> AT&T?
>
>
> Last week my boyfriend upgraded his phone at Verizon Wireless to the HTC
> Ozone with Talks, and it has turned out to be an utter disappointment.
> Though the HTC Ozone appears to be a good phone in itself, it seems
> completely incapable of handling the Talks program. The phone crashes almost
> daily and frequently freezes up if you tap the keys too quickly. Verizon
> also requires him to pay an
> extra $30 a month for the data package (since it's a smart phone), and the
> program isn't capable
> of running anything that the data package is needed for. The software uses
> so much of the phone's processor that the
> internet times out before it can even get a web page loaded. We have yet to
> be able to try out the internet or any of the apps on this phone because we
> simply can't get them to work with TALKS running.
>
> He is about ready to give up on it to say the least, but we are having a
> hard time finding another phone with Verizon that will give him the
> accessibility he wants. Really all he wants to do is to be able to know
> who's calling, manage his contacts, customize the sounds and ringtones, and
> text. I have an EnV which will do all those things and read text messages
> but won't read who they're from. He is somewhat considering switching to
> AT&T and getting the iPhone but that is a last  resort. So I'm really just
> looking for input from other blind cell phone users who have Verizon. Or
> even if you own an iPhone I'd love to hear what you think of it. Also, I
> heard that in 2010 Verizon will be releasing an Android software upgrade for
> their Droid phones which could provide free text-to-speech software, but I'm
> not able to find much information about it on the internet. Does anyone know
> anything about this?
>
> Your feedback is greatly appreciated.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/amylsabo%40comcast.net
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/spangler.robert%40gmail.com
>


-- 
Robert Spangler
The University of Toledo
Student Senator - Administrative Affairs Committee Chair, College of
Arts and Sciences


From trev.saunders at gmail.com  Tue Jan  5 17:48:19 2010
From: trev.saunders at gmail.com (trev.saunders at gmail.com)
Date: Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:48:19 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Google Calendar
In-Reply-To: <54AA845F2B574B378DB9A42A2E59CF8F@Rufus>
References: <54AA845F2B574B378DB9A42A2E59CF8F@Rufus>
Message-ID: <E1NSDVz-0007N5-BB@main>

Hi,

I just took a quick look at google calendar, it seemed reasonably accssible to me with firefox.
there were some things that could have been better but it was certianly usable.
I saw at the top of  the page a link to a version using  ARIA I would suggest trying that and maybe if you dont' like that disabling javascript.

tbsaunde


From trev.saunders at gmail.com  Tue Jan  5 18:07:25 2010
From: trev.saunders at gmail.com (trev.saunders at gmail.com)
Date: Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:07:25 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Gmail Chat accessibility
In-Reply-To: <5096b4731001041948k1985c46bk715c803d4a08b620@mail.gmail.com>
References: <5096b4731001041948k1985c46bk715c803d4a08b620@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <E1NSDoT-0007cZ-4I@main>

Hi,

I tried quickly on an android phone, and it seemed to work.

tbsaunde


From jj at bestmidi.com  Tue Jan  5 19:34:37 2010
From: jj at bestmidi.com (J.J. Meddaugh)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 14:34:37 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
References: <FEEA069F9B104DB9BB28822D9BF9C3BB@kevin9ee0841f6><auto-000133323289@mailfront2.g2host.com><632092011001011441u3295eed5h5144b06e498f156d@mail.gmail.com>
	<5F0A86A3D6CA4F51BBFCE95DEEEEA927@Ashley>
Message-ID: <D14CADE9287649CB9BA8C851CC822D2A@jage>

What about one of those digital voice recorders, the cheap ones that only 
cost $10-20?
If you can slate well that works well, and you can get a stylus cover to 
solve Adrianne's comment about getting poked with one.

I definitely would not take a notetaker to a club. Think about how you would 
look to others carrying one of those things around. The only exception I 
could think of is if you could fit it in a pocket.

J.J. Meddaugh - ATGuys.com
A premier Licensed Code Factory and KNFB Reader distributor
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ashley Bramlett" <bookwormahb at earthlink.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 11:33 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


> Aziza,
> Yes sighted people trade phones for that.  My brother did that.  At a 
> club I want as less as I can manage so having someone put a number in my 
> phone wouldn't bother me.  Another option is for them to write it down and 
> you have someone read it to you later.  I don't go to clubs much so this 
> hasn't been an issue but that's what I'd do.
>
> Ashley
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Aziza C" <daydreamingncolor at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:41 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>>I agree with Dave, but isn't letting someone put their number in your
>> phone what sighted people do too? I've seen my sister trade phones
>> with her new friends and they input their numbers in each others
>> phones. Or, one person will input the number in the other's phone,
>> then the person will call them and the first person will save the
>> number when it shows up on the missed call list.
>> Aziza
>>
>> On 1/1/10, David Andrews <dandrews at visi.com> wrote:
>>> I would take a slate and stylus.  There are small ones that Braille
>>> on cards.  Using one makes you independent -- having someone put a
>>> number in your cell phone seems more dependent to me.
>>>
>>> Dave
>>>
>>> At 10:11 AM 1/1/2010, you wrote:
>>>>Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a
>>>>discussion on here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have
>>>>a job at Verizon Wireless working at a call center. It is
>>>>challenging. How it is rewarding. I am glad to finely get off of
>>>>social security soon. Or as I call it socialist insecurity. But
>>>>that's another story.
>>>>
>>>>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night
>>>> clubs back in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with
>>>> me because the thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded
>>>> strange. But I would always have a problem if I met someone and
>>>> wanted to get their number. This was because the music was so loud
>>>> that it was hard to communicate. I use to have people program
>>>> numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like that. My question
>>>> to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your note
>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I
>>>> believe a Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some
>>>> like the night club sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/daydreamingncolor%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jj%40bestmidi.com
> 



From trev.saunders at gmail.com  Tue Jan  5 20:03:21 2010
From: trev.saunders at gmail.com (trev.saunders at gmail.com)
Date: Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:03:21 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] College Math / Algebra with a reader
In-Reply-To: <5096b4731001031440o3fc9619aua8ca9b75a99ba808@mail.gmail.com>
References: <fc8eb2b1001030945o15478aa9s9405625ad88317e9@mail.gmail.com>
	<3fea3c411001031111w5df04672kda52aeacec45632a@mail.gmail.com>
	<5096b4731001031440o3fc9619aua8ca9b75a99ba808@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <E1NSFcf-0007zn-Kx@main>

Hi,

if you want to ask try the blind-math list on nfbnet.

tbsaunde


From daydreamingncolor at gmail.com  Tue Jan  5 20:08:25 2010
From: daydreamingncolor at gmail.com (Aziza C)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 12:08:25 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
In-Reply-To: <19ccaa051001050941u76a9955bx7baf25ee78ad2782@mail.gmail.com>
References: <20100104003735.20899.34863@web2.serotek.com>
	<56359C7E-1A7E-4751-98A9-E3C5F78C3F13@gmail.com>
	<9CE30F106C984D2FA4E7CB250FC6EA5A@windows4c0ed96>
	<43ED0879583C45ADBA9115E5F371C37B@teal6e6857f643>
	<A957A6A6-0DD1-4E35-9C99-0C6693EC0D37@gmail.com>
	<19ccaa051001050941u76a9955bx7baf25ee78ad2782@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <632092011001051208g7d6ba1feof070875113607429@mail.gmail.com>

Sometimes people need to learn from experience. Which is why I find
this list and others most helpful, if I don't know what to do I can
get others' oppinions, but it all comes down to me still having to
make the decision of what I think is best for me. Therefore, anyone's
position is valued and respected, even if not agreed with.
Aziza

On 1/5/10, Robert Spangler <spangler.robert at gmail.com> wrote:
> You have the right to take any pose that you wish and, of course, to
> face the consequences that come with that pose.  However, I would
> recommend you to change it for your own good.  Your first step should
> be to place a higher value on your cane.  You just never know when you
> will be left alone (it could happen) and without a cane will make it
> pure hell.  but take it one thing at a time.
>
> On 1/4/10, Briley Pollard <brileyp at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I have usually had more sighted friends than blind ones as well, but
>> using
>> a cane or using braille doesn't make you different or awkward. I'm not
>> saying dance with your cane or anything like that, or that letting people
>> help you sometimes is wrong, because it isn't. But having a set of
>> alternative skills is what makes you independent, (please don't take this
>> as
>> me saying you aren't, I'm just speaking in general terms). Being able to
>> do
>> things on  your own without help though is what integrates us as blind
>> people into a sighted world. On Jan 4, 2010, at 4:07 PM, Teal Bloodworth
>> wrote:
>>
>>> yeah i dont trust myself to go out in that environment without a group of
>>> friends. Taking my side kick guide dog is not realistic because of the
>>> crowded and loud room and i would misplace a white cane so i would latch
>>> on to some friends and go out. I wasnt looked at as depending on them and
>>> being socially awkward. Living in a smaller college campus with all the
>>> other colleges being small too you see  alot of the same people and most
>>> of them have had a class with me which allowed for small talk or even
>>> them
>>> approaching me to begin with.
>>>
>>> If i were getting someones phone number either as a friend or an intimate
>>> interest i would either have them call me and leave a message  then i
>>> would hand them the phone and have them put it in there and tell me the
>>> speed dial number. Or just hand it to them and have them do that. I am
>>> not
>>> braille literate because i dont like braille and it doesnt like me. I
>>> wouldnt want to take an expensive device with me in case i sat it down
>>> and
>>> forgetfully leave it. Yes my pose may seem foolish to you all and maybe
>>> this undignifys me by making it seem like i depend on people who are
>>> sighted but i used to be one of them. I treat them like they treat me and
>>> i have more sighted friends than blind or visually impaired because where
>>> i live i am the only blind person. This is in my home town and at my
>>> small
>>> private college. Maybe i just have really good friends who packed me home
>>> on a night where i had too much and had to learn the hard way. who always
>>> returned my personal posessions and wouldnt pity me for being blind but
>>> rather expected for me to act no different.
>>>
>>>       -Teal
>>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "V Nork" <ginisd at sbcglobal.net>
>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 10:28 PM
>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>
>>>
>>>> Hello list, As I read this great thread, I wonder, as a woman, what the
>>>> thinking is about going out to clubs and bars alone, with just a cane
>>>> and
>>>> cell phone?  I have never tried this, but I would like to venture out
>>>> alone, maybe you could share your experiences and ideas?  Most of my
>>>> friends I do hang out with are not into clubs, so this would be a solo
>>>> outing for me. Thanks , Ginny
>>>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Briley Pollard" <brileyp at gmail.com>
>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 7:28 PM
>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> Depending exclusively on a sighted guide is of course not wise. Having
>>>>> no other mobility aid available is  foolish. However, using sighted
>>>>> guide in addition to another mobility aid is useful at times such as in
>>>>> loud and crowded environments such as night clubs. I'm not saying hang
>>>>> on to your friends all night, (that is obviously awkward and defeats
>>>>> the
>>>>> purpose of going tout to have fun), but it still can be helpful. Even
>>>>> when I'm with blind friends, often someone might hold my arm while
>>>>> using
>>>>> their cane just to insure we stay together in crowded environments. My
>>>>> point is it shouldn't be disregarded as a viable tool in addition to
>>>>> others.
>>>>>
>>>>> BrileyOn Jan 3, 2010, at 6:37 PM, Jedi wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> And that's why one should avoid depending  on a sighted guide if at
>>>>>> all
>>>>>> possible so that their decisions don't have to affect yours.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Respectfully,
>>>>>> Jedi
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Original message:
>>>>>>> hmm no i wouldnt take my guide dog since music would be loud and
>>>>>>> there
>>>>>>> would
>>>>>>> just be too  much activity but i never really take a cane either. I
>>>>>>> think
>>>>>>> the first time i went to a bar since my vision loss or a  club yes i
>>>>>>> had my
>>>>>>> cell and my cane but after the first time i left it and went with
>>>>>>> friends
>>>>>>> sighted guide.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> here is another question alittle off topic. What if you went sighted
>>>>>>> guide
>>>>>>> and your guide ended up drinking. do you drink too? what if you
>>>>>>> wanted
>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>> drink, would you do it in a nightblub or bar or even alittle further
>>>>>>> in
>>>>>>> public?
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>           -Teal
>>>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>>>> From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
>>>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:16 PM
>>>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
>>>>>>>> others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is
>>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>>> last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of
>>>>>>>> independence
>>>>>>>> whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
>>>>>>>> friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell
>>>>>>>> phone,
>>>>>>>> and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
>>>>>>>> this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
>>>>>>>> ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything
>>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>>> keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something
>>>>>>>> unexpected
>>>>>>>> happens.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything
>>>>>>>> extra
>>>>>>>> that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never
>>>>>>>> carry
>>>>>>>> anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking
>>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>>> trouble.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Brice
>>>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't
>>>>>>>>> even
>>>>>>>>> bring
>>>>>>>>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't
>>>>>>>>> want to
>>>>>>>>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with
>>>>>>>>> it. In
>>>>>>>>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do
>>>>>>>>> with
>>>>>>>>> it
>>>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>>>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted
>>>>>>>>> guide.
>>>>>>>>> I
>>>>>>>>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I
>>>>>>>>> go
>>>>>>>>> with
>>>>>>>>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel
>>>>>>>>> silly
>>>>>>>>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having
>>>>>>>>> someone
>>>>>>>>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it
>>>>>>>>> yourself.
>>>>>>>>> But
>>>>>>>>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k.
>>>>>>>>> and it
>>>>>>>>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit
>>>>>>>>> O.K.
>>>>>>>>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type
>>>>>>>>> in
>>>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>>>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to
>>>>>>>>> have a
>>>>>>>>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your
>>>>>>>>> number.
>>>>>>>>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell
>>>>>>>>> phones
>>>>>>>>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to
>>>>>>>>> if
>>>>>>>>> you
>>>>>>>>> can
>>>>>>>>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be
>>>>>>>>> careful
>>>>>>>>> with
>>>>>>>>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you
>>>>>>>>> move
>>>>>>>>> funny or if your pants are tight.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>>>>>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>>>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>>>>>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>>>>>>>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers
>>>>>>>>>> are
>>>>>>>>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note
>>>>>>>>>> taker
>>>>>>>>>> is a good option.
>>>>>>>>>> Beth
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a
>>>>>>>>>>> discussion
>>>>>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>>>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at
>>>>>>>>>>> Verizon
>>>>>>>>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>>>>>>>>> rewarding. I
>>>>>>>>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call
>>>>>>>>>>> it
>>>>>>>>>>> socialist
>>>>>>>>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>               I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night
>>>>>>>>>>> clubs
>>>>>>>>>>> back
>>>>>>>>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me
>>>>>>>>>>> because the
>>>>>>>>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But
>>>>>>>>>>> I
>>>>>>>>>>> would
>>>>>>>>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their
>>>>>>>>>>> number.
>>>>>>>>>>> This
>>>>>>>>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to
>>>>>>>>>>> communicate.
>>>>>>>>>>> I
>>>>>>>>>>> use
>>>>>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>>>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places
>>>>>>>>>>> like
>>>>>>>>>>> that.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> My
>>>>>>>>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken
>>>>>>>>>>> your
>>>>>>>>>>> note
>>>>>>>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I
>>>>>>>>>>> believe
>>>>>>>>>>> a
>>>>>>>>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the
>>>>>>>>>>> night
>>>>>>>>>>> club
>>>>>>>>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
>>>>>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
>>>>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
>>>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
>>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net
>>>>>>
>>>>>> --
>>>>>> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit
>>>>>> www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/ginisd%40sbcglobal.net
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/spangler.robert%40gmail.com
>>
>
>
> --
> Robert Spangler
> The University of Toledo
> Student Senator - Administrative Affairs Committee Chair, College of
> Arts and Sciences
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/daydreamingncolor%40gmail.com
>


From daydreamingncolor at gmail.com  Tue Jan  5 20:53:12 2010
From: daydreamingncolor at gmail.com (Aziza C)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 12:53:12 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
In-Reply-To: <D14CADE9287649CB9BA8C851CC822D2A@jage>
References: <FEEA069F9B104DB9BB28822D9BF9C3BB@kevin9ee0841f6>
	<auto-000133323289@mailfront2.g2host.com>
	<632092011001011441u3295eed5h5144b06e498f156d@mail.gmail.com>
	<5F0A86A3D6CA4F51BBFCE95DEEEEA927@Ashley>
	<D14CADE9287649CB9BA8C851CC822D2A@jage>
Message-ID: <632092011001051253r2303135ne9a6edcb219520e9@mail.gmail.com>

A digital recorder would deffinetely be a simple way of taking care of
all the problems.
Aziza

On 1/5/10, J.J. Meddaugh <jj at bestmidi.com> wrote:
> What about one of those digital voice recorders, the cheap ones that only
> cost $10-20?
> If you can slate well that works well, and you can get a stylus cover to
> solve Adrianne's comment about getting poked with one.
>
> I definitely would not take a notetaker to a club. Think about how you would
> look to others carrying one of those things around. The only exception I
> could think of is if you could fit it in a pocket.
>
> J.J. Meddaugh - ATGuys.com
> A premier Licensed Code Factory and KNFB Reader distributor
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Ashley Bramlett" <bookwormahb at earthlink.net>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 11:33 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>> Aziza,
>> Yes sighted people trade phones for that.  My brother did that.  At a
>> club I want as less as I can manage so having someone put a number in my
>> phone wouldn't bother me.  Another option is for them to write it down and
>>
>> you have someone read it to you later.  I don't go to clubs much so this
>> hasn't been an issue but that's what I'd do.
>>
>> Ashley
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Aziza C" <daydreamingncolor at gmail.com>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:41 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>
>>
>>>I agree with Dave, but isn't letting someone put their number in your
>>> phone what sighted people do too? I've seen my sister trade phones
>>> with her new friends and they input their numbers in each others
>>> phones. Or, one person will input the number in the other's phone,
>>> then the person will call them and the first person will save the
>>> number when it shows up on the missed call list.
>>> Aziza
>>>
>>> On 1/1/10, David Andrews <dandrews at visi.com> wrote:
>>>> I would take a slate and stylus.  There are small ones that Braille
>>>> on cards.  Using one makes you independent -- having someone put a
>>>> number in your cell phone seems more dependent to me.
>>>>
>>>> Dave
>>>>
>>>> At 10:11 AM 1/1/2010, you wrote:
>>>>>Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a
>>>>>discussion on here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have
>>>>>a job at Verizon Wireless working at a call center. It is
>>>>>challenging. How it is rewarding. I am glad to finely get off of
>>>>>social security soon. Or as I call it socialist insecurity. But
>>>>>that's another story.
>>>>>
>>>>>                 I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night
>>>>> clubs back in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with
>>>>> me because the thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded
>>>>> strange. But I would always have a problem if I met someone and
>>>>> wanted to get their number. This was because the music was so loud
>>>>> that it was hard to communicate. I use to have people program
>>>>> numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like that. My question
>>>>> to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your note
>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I
>>>>> believe a Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some
>>>>> like the night club sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/daydreamingncolor%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jj%40bestmidi.com
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/daydreamingncolor%40gmail.com
>


From raniaismail04 at gmail.com  Tue Jan  5 21:39:22 2010
From: raniaismail04 at gmail.com (Rania)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 16:39:22 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] A question about windows 7 and jaws
Message-ID: <000a01ca8e4f$8c571bc0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>

Hi I just had my labtop replaced. it has windows 7 on it. I am using jaws 9.0.2169.
I am still currently using the labtop with xp home until I get the replacement set up.
My question is will jaws 9.0.2169 work with jaws?
Thank you.
Rania,
"For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
See you at the finish line."
~Christopher Reeve

From brileyp at gmail.com  Tue Jan  5 22:35:11 2010
From: brileyp at gmail.com (Briley Pollard)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 16:35:11 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] A question about windows 7 and jaws
In-Reply-To: <000a01ca8e4f$8c571bc0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>
References: <000a01ca8e4f$8c571bc0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>
Message-ID: <43D9A14E-161F-4EF2-8CFE-E08DD1F011D2@gmail.com>

I don't think Windows 7 and Jaws 9 are very compatible. Freedom Scientific's website would have more info, but I think Jaws 11 is going to be your best bet.

Best of luck.On Jan 5, 2010, at 3:39 PM, Rania wrote:

> Hi I just had my labtop replaced. it has windows 7 on it. I am using jaws 9.0.2169.
> I am still currently using the labtop with xp home until I get the replacement set up.
> My question is will jaws 9.0.2169 work with jaws?
> Thank you.
> Rania,
> "For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
> For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
> For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
> See you at the finish line."
> ~Christopher Reeve
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com



From djdrocks4ever at gmail.com  Tue Jan  5 22:46:51 2010
From: djdrocks4ever at gmail.com (David Dunphy)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 17:46:51 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] A question about windows 7 and jaws
References: <000a01ca8e4f$8c571bc0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>
Message-ID: <ECECEF40B7324FB38424B8AD57377509@radio360usa>

Nope, Jaws9 will not work on Windows 7. For best performance with Windows 7 
and Jaws, you should really go to 11. 10 will sort of work, but 11 is what 
you should run. 


__________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 4746 (20100105) __________

The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.

http://www.eset.com





From aec732 at msn.com  Tue Jan  5 23:02:17 2010
From: aec732 at msn.com (Annemarie Cooke)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 18:02:17 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] reply to Hope and Beignet re: exercise routine
In-Reply-To: <mailman.17.1262628002.23511.nabs-l_nfbnet.org@nfbnet.org>
References: <mailman.17.1262628002.23511.nabs-l_nfbnet.org@nfbnet.org>
Message-ID: <SNT103-W39FC07B06B6643C0A05A9D94730@phx.gbl>


Hi Hope, ack in the days of cassette ttpes, the folks at Western MI University did a well described set of aerobics routines for blindpeople. Not sure iif one stille xists; would you have a way to play a tape? Also, the NFB had a wonderful yohga teacher who did a well described set of poses and stretches on CD. Marc Riccabono had been in her class so try reaching out for him -- he

s in the main office in Baltimore atthe Jernigan UInstititute.

 

I will post your request on the sports and rec list and see if anyone there has resources for you.

 

PS can you afford one or two sessions with a personal trainer who understands your requirement for specigfic and detailed information? What state do you live in?
 		 	   		  

From lawnmower84 at hotmail.com  Tue Jan  5 23:09:07 2010
From: lawnmower84 at hotmail.com (Jacob Struiksma)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 15:09:07 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] A question about windows 7 and jaws
In-Reply-To: <000a01ca8e4f$8c571bc0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>
References: <000a01ca8e4f$8c571bc0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>
Message-ID: <COL107-DS39CF1865357A4276834A3B5730@phx.gbl>

NO NO JAWS w9.0 will not work with windows 7.  you need JAWS 11 for windows
7
From
Jacob Struiksma
 

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Rania
Sent: Tuesday, January 05, 2010 1:39 PM
To: nabs
Subject: [nabs-l] A question about windows 7 and jaws

Hi I just had my labtop replaced. it has windows 7 on it. I am using jaws
9.0.2169.
I am still currently using the labtop with xp home until I get the
replacement set up.
My question is will jaws 9.0.2169 work with jaws?
Thank you.
Rania,
"For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
See you at the finish line."
~Christopher Reeve
_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/lawnmower84%40hotmai
l.com



From thebluesisloose at gmail.com  Tue Jan  5 23:29:39 2010
From: thebluesisloose at gmail.com (Beth)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 18:29:39 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] A question about windows 7 and jaws
In-Reply-To: <000a01ca8e4f$8c571bc0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>
References: <000a01ca8e4f$8c571bc0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>
Message-ID: <4383d01d1001051529o4c4a9788m939a45c220d91b34@mail.gmail.com>

For Windows 7, you need the latest JAWS, so JAWS 11 will give you
optimal perforance and accessibility.  My dad and I recently replaced
my XP laptop with a Vista one, not a good thing huh?  But JAWS 10
works with 64-bit Vista.
Beth

On 1/5/10, Rania <raniaismail04 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi I just had my labtop replaced. it has windows 7 on it. I am using jaws
> 9.0.2169.
> I am still currently using the labtop with xp home until I get the
> replacement set up.
> My question is will jaws 9.0.2169 work with jaws?
> Thank you.
> Rania,
> "For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
> For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
> For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
> See you at the finish line."
> ~Christopher Reeve
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>


From hope.paulos at maine.edu  Wed Jan  6 00:02:17 2010
From: hope.paulos at maine.edu (Hope Paulos)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 19:02:17 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] reply to Hope and Beignet re: exercise routine
References: <mailman.17.1262628002.23511.nabs-l_nfbnet.org@nfbnet.org>
	<SNT103-W39FC07B06B6643C0A05A9D94730@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <0F23CBF288C04FFF815A025F3A1421B8@Hope>

Thank you so much. I'm in Maine.
Hope and Beignet
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Annemarie Cooke" <aec732 at msn.com>
To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 05, 2010 6:02 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] reply to Hope and Beignet re: exercise routine


>
> Hi Hope, ack in the days of cassette ttpes, the folks at Western MI 
> University did a well described set of aerobics routines for blindpeople. 
> Not sure iif one stille xists; would you have a way to play a tape? Also, 
> the NFB had a wonderful yohga teacher who did a well described set of 
> poses and stretches on CD. Marc Riccabono had been in her class so try 
> reaching out for him -- he
>
> s in the main office in Baltimore atthe Jernigan UInstititute.
>
>
>
> I will post your request on the sports and rec list and see if anyone 
> there has resources for you.
>
>
>
> PS can you afford one or two sessions with a personal trainer who 
> understands your requirement for specigfic and detailed information? What 
> state do you live in?
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/hope.paulos%40maine.edu 



From jessica.trask.reagan at gmail.com  Wed Jan  6 00:19:28 2010
From: jessica.trask.reagan at gmail.com (Jess)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 19:19:28 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] A question about windows 7 and jaws
In-Reply-To: <000a01ca8e4f$8c571bc0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>
References: <000a01ca8e4f$8c571bc0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>
Message-ID: <999C002B3D194AF5AFFD8B7EFBAE7FA6@Jessica>

Rania,
The version of JAWS you have will not work with Windows 7. Call Freedom 
Scientific just to double check. But, I believe that you will have to 
upgrade to JAWS 11. With that being said there are still authorization 
problems with JAWS  11 and Windows 7.
Jessica
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rania" <raniaismail04 at gmail.com>
To: "nabs" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 05, 2010 4:39 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] A question about windows 7 and jaws


> Hi I just had my labtop replaced. it has windows 7 on it. I am using jaws 
> 9.0.2169.
> I am still currently using the labtop with xp home until I get the 
> replacement set up.
> My question is will jaws 9.0.2169 work with jaws?
> Thank you.
> Rania,
> "For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
> For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
> For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
> See you at the finish line."
> ~Christopher Reeve
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jessica.trask.reagan%40gmail.com 




From william.odonnell1 at yahoo.com  Wed Jan  6 00:56:18 2010
From: william.odonnell1 at yahoo.com (William ODonnell)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 16:56:18 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [nabs-l] University of Phoenix question
In-Reply-To: <FED903FB37EB466A9C505665EFF50F22@PAULLAPTOP>
Message-ID: <341208.57136.qm@web30901.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

I am also interested in the university.  So, if anyone can provide any information, I would greatly appreciate it.  My personal email is william.odonnell1 at yahoo.com
Thank you in advance,
William O'Donnell

--- On Tue, 1/5/10, Maryann Migliorelli <mrsmigs at migliorelli.org> wrote:

> From: Maryann Migliorelli <mrsmigs at migliorelli.org>
> Subject: [nabs-l] University of Phoenix question
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Date: Tuesday, January 5, 2010, 12:34 PM
> Hi all,  Is anyone on the list
> attending University of Phoenix?  I'm looking at it for
> some online classes and am wondering about accessibility.
> Please share your thoughts and experiences either on or of
> list.
> Thanks.
> Maryann Migliorelli
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your
> account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/william.odonnell1%40yahoo.com
> 


      


From alberto.2500 at gmail.com  Wed Jan  6 01:09:07 2010
From: alberto.2500 at gmail.com (Alberto Arreola)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 18:09:07 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] A question about windows 7 and jaws
In-Reply-To: <999C002B3D194AF5AFFD8B7EFBAE7FA6@Jessica>
References: <000a01ca8e4f$8c571bc0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>
	<999C002B3D194AF5AFFD8B7EFBAE7FA6@Jessica>
Message-ID: <4b43e2b0.e701be0a.4cf2.ffff8663@mx.google.com>

I heard that the last version that kind of works with Windows 7 is jaws 10.

For good functionality it would be Jaws 11, with a couple of updates the FS
has made in the past couple of months that are supposed to fix the problems
that appeared when jaws 11 was initially released.

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Jess
Sent: Tuesday, January 05, 2010 5:19 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] A question about windows 7 and jaws

Rania,
The version of JAWS you have will not work with Windows 7. Call Freedom 
Scientific just to double check. But, I believe that you will have to 
upgrade to JAWS 11. With that being said there are still authorization 
problems with JAWS  11 and Windows 7.
Jessica
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rania" <raniaismail04 at gmail.com>
To: "nabs" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 05, 2010 4:39 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] A question about windows 7 and jaws


> Hi I just had my labtop replaced. it has windows 7 on it. I am using jaws 
> 9.0.2169.
> I am still currently using the labtop with xp home until I get the 
> replacement set up.
> My question is will jaws 9.0.2169 work with jaws?
> Thank you.
> Rania,
> "For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
> For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
> For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
> See you at the finish line."
> ~Christopher Reeve
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jessica.trask.reagan
%40gmail.com 



_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/alberto.2500%40gmail
.com



From raniaismail04 at gmail.com  Wed Jan  6 01:18:15 2010
From: raniaismail04 at gmail.com (Rania)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 20:18:15 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] A question about windows 7 and jaws
References: <000a01ca8e4f$8c571bc0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>
	<999C002B3D194AF5AFFD8B7EFBAE7FA6@Jessica>
Message-ID: <004701ca8e6e$20201280$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>

Thank you.
Rania,
"For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
See you at the finish line."
~Christopher Reeve

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jess" <jessica.trask.reagan at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 05, 2010 7:19 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] A question about windows 7 and jaws


> Rania,
> The version of JAWS you have will not work with Windows 7. Call Freedom 
> Scientific just to double check. But, I believe that you will have to 
> upgrade to JAWS 11. With that being said there are still authorization 
> problems with JAWS  11 and Windows 7.
> Jessica
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Rania" <raniaismail04 at gmail.com>
> To: "nabs" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, January 05, 2010 4:39 PM
> Subject: [nabs-l] A question about windows 7 and jaws
>
>
>> Hi I just had my labtop replaced. it has windows 7 on it. I am using jaws 
>> 9.0.2169.
>> I am still currently using the labtop with xp home until I get the 
>> replacement set up.
>> My question is will jaws 9.0.2169 work with jaws?
>> Thank you.
>> Rania,
>> "For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
>> For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
>> For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
>> See you at the finish line."
>> ~Christopher Reeve
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jessica.trask.reagan%40gmail.com
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaismail04%40gmail.com 



From Annemarie.Cooke at dhs.state.nj.us  Wed Jan  6 02:56:44 2010
From: Annemarie.Cooke at dhs.state.nj.us (Annemarie Cooke)
Date: Tue, 05 Jan 2010 20:56:44 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] FW: [VR Business Consultants] NET Update
Message-ID: <auto-000134051907@mailfront1.g2host.com>

-----Original Message-----

opportunities at GAO (Government Accountability Office). The internships
are
in various fields at the both graduate and undergraduate level. There
are
opportunities in D.C. and nationwide. The link at the end of the email
will
take you to the GAO career website where you can obtain additional
information.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has again been rated the #2
large
agency to work for in the Federal government.  Here is the latest
vacancy
announcement from the Government Accountability Office.

Vacancy Number:  GAO-10-ARM-0801/1301-01 Vacancy Title:  General
Engineer/Physical Sciences Summer Graduate Student Intern
Opening Date:   1/4/2010
Closing Date:   1/22/2010
Grade/Band Level:  07/09
Salary level:   $42209.00 - $51630.00
Location(s):    Washington DC Metro Area, DC

Vacancy Number:  GAO-10-FMA-0599-04
Vacancy Title:  Financial Auditor Student Undergraduate Intern
Opening Date:   1/4/2010
Closing Date:   2/26/2010
Grade/Band Level:  04
Salary level:   $38575.00 - $38575.00
Location(s):    Washington DC Metro Area, DC

Vacancy Number:  GAO-10-FMA-0511-05
Vacancy Title:  Financial Auditor Student Graduate Intern
Opening Date:   1/4/2010
Closing Date:   2/26/2010
Grade/Band Level:  05/07
Salary level:   $43158.00 - $53468.00
Location(s):    Washington DC Metro Area, DC

Vacancy Number:  GAO-10-IT-2299-10
Vacancy Title:  Information Technology Undergraduate Summer Student
Intern
Opening Date:   1/4/2010
Closing Date:   2/26/2010
Grade/Band Level:  04
Salary level:   $29248.00 - $29586.00
Location(s):    Throughout the Nation, US

Vacancy Number:  GAO-10-IT-2210-09
Vacancy Title:  Information Technology Summer Graduate Student Intern
Opening Date:   1/4/2010
Closing Date:   2/26/2010
Grade/Band Level:  07/09
Salary level:   $45192.00 - $54032.00
Location(s):    Throughout the Nation, US

Vacancy Number:  GAO-10-IT-1599-07
Vacancy Title:  Computer Scientist (IT Analyst) Summer Undergraduate
Student
Intern
Opening Date:   1/4/2010
Closing Date:   2/26/2010
Grade/Band Level:  04
Salary level:   $29248.00 - $30456.00
Location(s):    Throughout the Nation, US

Vacancy Number:  GAO-10-IT-1550-08
Vacancy Title:  Computer Scientist (IT Analyst) Summer Graduate Student
Intern
Opening Date:   1/4/2010
Closing Date:   2/26/2010
Grade/Band Level:  07/09
Salary level:   $45192.00 - $54032.00
Location(s):    Throughout the Nation, US


To see this and other available job listings with GAO, click (or copy
and
paste) the following URL into your browser address bar:
http://www.gao.gov/careers/.  Then click on Browse Vacancies on the
left-hand side of the screen.

Please solicit interest from among your students, alumni, and any others
who
might be interested and encourage them to apply.  Tell them to pay
particular attention to the Qualification Requirements and the How to
Apply
sections of the announcement.  Contact the person listed on the vacancy
announcement for any questions.

Thank you.


Recruiting and Hiring Center
Human Capital Office
Government Accountability Office



This E-mail, including any attachments, may be intended solely for 
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and confidential use of the sender and recipient(s) named above. This message
may include advisory, consultative and/or deliberative material and, as such,
would be privileged and confidential and not a public document. Any Information
in this e-mail identifying a client of the Department of Human 
Services (DHS) is
confidential. If you have received this e-mail in error, you must not review,
transmit, convert to hard copy, copy, use or disseminate this e-mail or any
attachments to it and you must delete this message. You are requested to
notify the sender by return e-mail.


This E-mail, including any attachments, may be intended solely for 
the personal
and confidential use of the sender and recipient(s) named above. This message
may include advisory, consultative and/or deliberative material and, as such,
would be privileged and confidential and not a public document. Any 
Information
in this e-mail identifying a client of the Department of Human Services is
confidential. If you have received this e-mail in error, you must not review,
transmit, convert to hard copy, copy, use or disseminate this e-mail or any
attachments to it and you must delete this message. You are requested 
to notify
the sender by return e-mail.



From jsorozco at gmail.com  Wed Jan  6 03:08:29 2010
From: jsorozco at gmail.com (Joe Orozco)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 22:08:29 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Tactile Keys for the iPhone
Message-ID: <01B631485C28473CB3945DD68B450B28@Rufus>

For anyone who's interested, there's a company that is selling tactile
overlays for the iPhone.  It's a general public product, not blindness
specific.  It's supposed to be for people who are generally having trouble
making the switch from QWERTY to touch screen when it comes to texting and
general data input.  It does not detract from the phone's style.  Anyway, if
you're interested, you can read more at:

http://technologyexpert.blogspot.com/2009/11/4ithumbs-gives-iphone-tactile-k
eyboard.html

Joe Orozco

"A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the
crowd."--Max Lucado
 

__________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature
database 4746 (20100105) __________

The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.

http://www.eset.com
 



From adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com  Wed Jan  6 03:19:15 2010
From: adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com (Adrianne Dempsey)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 22:19:15 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
References: <20100104003735.20899.34863@web2.serotek.com><56359C7E-1A7E-4751-98A9-E3C5F78C3F13@gmail.com>
	<9CE30F106C984D2FA4E7CB250FC6EA5A@windows4c0ed96>
Message-ID: <36C460C5792D497EAAF4999B7A7F6390@YOUR314E04A90B>

I as a woman feel comfortable going allot of places on my own because I know 
how to defend myself.  However going to a club or bar alone is not vary fun 
in my opinion.  Many people do enjoy going to such places alone in the hopes 
that they will meet someone, but as a female even if you go with friends you 
will still have the opportunity to meet people.  This is just my opinion 
their are many different views.  Men at clubs are like vultures, and if you 
have interest in one of them your friends will back off a bit but still 
watch your back, and if you have no interest in them, your friends will help 
you maneuver away from the creep.  You can do it politely or roodly 
depending on the aggressiveness of the guy.  So while I could go to a club 
with out a friend I would never want to.  It for me would lose some  fun and 
that little safety net.  You just have to decide what you want.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "V Nork" <ginisd at sbcglobal.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 11:28 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


> Hello list, As I read this great thread, I wonder, as a woman, what the 
> thinking is about going out to clubs and bars alone, with just a cane and 
> cell phone?  I have never tried this, but I would like to venture out 
> alone, maybe you could share your experiences and ideas?  Most of my 
> friends I do hang out with are not into clubs, so this would be a solo 
> outing for me. Thanks , Ginny
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Briley Pollard" <brileyp at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 7:28 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>> Depending exclusively on a sighted guide is of course not wise. Having no 
>> other mobility aid available is  foolish. However, using sighted guide in 
>> addition to another mobility aid is useful at times such as in loud and 
>> crowded environments such as night clubs. I'm not saying hang on to your 
>> friends all night, (that is obviously awkward and defeats the purpose of 
>> going tout to have fun), but it still can be helpful. Even when I'm with 
>> blind friends, often someone might hold my arm while using their cane 
>> just to insure we stay together in crowded environments. My point is it 
>> shouldn't be disregarded as a viable tool in addition to others.
>>
>> BrileyOn Jan 3, 2010, at 6:37 PM, Jedi wrote:
>>
>>> And that's why one should avoid depending  on a sighted guide if at all 
>>> possible so that their decisions don't have to affect yours.
>>>
>>> Respectfully,
>>> Jedi
>>>
>>>
>>> Original message:
>>>> hmm no i wouldnt take my guide dog since music would be loud and there 
>>>> would
>>>> just be too  much activity but i never really take a cane either. I 
>>>> think
>>>> the first time i went to a bar since my vision loss or a  club yes i 
>>>> had my
>>>> cell and my cane but after the first time i left it and went with 
>>>> friends
>>>> sighted guide.
>>>
>>>> here is another question alittle off topic. What if you went sighted 
>>>> guide
>>>> and your guide ended up drinking. do you drink too? what if you wanted 
>>>> to
>>>> drink, would you do it in a nightblub or bar or even alittle further in
>>>> public?
>>>
>>>>            -Teal
>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>> From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:16 PM
>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>
>>>
>>>>> I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
>>>>> others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is the
>>>>> last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
>>>>> whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
>>>>> friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell phone,
>>>>> and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
>>>>> this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
>>>>> ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
>>>>> keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
>>>>> happens.
>>>
>>>>> To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything extra
>>>>> that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
>>>>> anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
>>>>> trouble.
>>>
>>>>> Brice
>>>>> On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even
>>>>>> bring
>>>>>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't 
>>>>>> want to
>>>>>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with it. 
>>>>>> In
>>>>>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with 
>>>>>> it
>>>>>> on
>>>>>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted 
>>>>>> guide.
>>>>>> I
>>>>>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I go
>>>>>> with
>>>>>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel 
>>>>>> silly
>>>>>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having 
>>>>>> someone
>>>>>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it 
>>>>>> yourself.
>>>>>> But
>>>>>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. 
>>>>>> and it
>>>>>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit 
>>>>>> O.K.
>>>>>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type 
>>>>>> in
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to have 
>>>>>> a
>>>>>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your 
>>>>>> number.
>>>>>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell
>>>>>> phones
>>>>>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if 
>>>>>> you
>>>>>> can
>>>>>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful 
>>>>>> with
>>>>>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you 
>>>>>> move
>>>>>> funny or if your pants are tight.
>>>
>>>
>>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>
>>>
>>>>>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>>>>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers 
>>>>>>> are
>>>>>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note taker
>>>>>>> is a good option.
>>>>>>> Beth
>>>
>>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a 
>>>>>>>> discussion
>>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at 
>>>>>>>> Verizon
>>>>>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>>>>>> rewarding. I
>>>>>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>>>>>> socialist
>>>>>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>>>
>>>>>>>>                I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night 
>>>>>>>> clubs
>>>>>>>> back
>>>>>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me because 
>>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I
>>>>>>>> would
>>>>>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their 
>>>>>>>> number.
>>>>>>>> This
>>>>>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. 
>>>>>>>> I
>>>>>>>> use
>>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places like
>>>>>>>> that.
>>>
>>>>>>>> My
>>>>>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken your
>>>>>>>> note
>>>>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I 
>>>>>>>> believe
>>>>>>>> a
>>>>>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the 
>>>>>>>> night
>>>>>>>> club
>>>>>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info 
>>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>
>>>
>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info 
>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>>>
>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com
>>>
>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com
>>>
>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit 
>>> www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/ginisd%40sbcglobal.net
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
> 



From brownbears at mchsi.com  Wed Jan  6 04:11:46 2010
From: brownbears at mchsi.com (Miranda brown)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 22:11:46 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] University of Phoenix question
In-Reply-To: <341208.57136.qm@web30901.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References: <FED903FB37EB466A9C505665EFF50F22@PAULLAPTOP>
	<341208.57136.qm@web30901.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <F38AF23036604F9FB4867AB04FF9BC1E@MIRANDA>

I am also interested in the University of Phoenix, if you could email me off
list to brownbears at mchsi.com 

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of William ODonnell
Sent: Tuesday, January 05, 2010 6:56 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] University of Phoenix question

I am also interested in the university.  So, if anyone can provide any
information, I would greatly appreciate it.  My personal email is
william.odonnell1 at yahoo.com Thank you in advance, William O'Donnell

--- On Tue, 1/5/10, Maryann Migliorelli <mrsmigs at migliorelli.org> wrote:

> From: Maryann Migliorelli <mrsmigs at migliorelli.org>
> Subject: [nabs-l] University of Phoenix question
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Date: Tuesday, January 5, 2010, 12:34 PM Hi all,  Is anyone on the 
> list attending University of Phoenix?  I'm looking at it for some 
> online classes and am wondering about accessibility.
> Please share your thoughts and experiences either on or of list.
> Thanks.
> Maryann Migliorelli
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/william.odonne
> ll1%40yahoo.com
> 


      

_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brownbears%40mchsi.c
om
No virus found in this incoming message.
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19:35:00



From carter.tjoseph at gmail.com  Wed Jan  6 10:27:51 2010
From: carter.tjoseph at gmail.com (T. Joseph Carter)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 02:27:51 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] [lady-potter@comcast.net: [oregon-l] Oppose Gelser's
	Nomination]
Message-ID: <20100106102751.GA63360@yumi.bluecherry.net>

Another point of common ground with the Oregon ACB.  Oregon Rep. 
Gelser drove a ruthless campaign against near universal opposition to 
shut down the Oregon School for the Blind and worry about what to do 
with the students sometime after the valuable property of the school 
had been ordered sold off.

She knew it wouldn't save money, and admitted it.  She knew Oregon's 
education infrastructure was unsuited to educate these students, and 
admitted it.  She knew the property would be worth more when the real 
estate market settled, and admitted that too.

But this self-styled "disability rights advocate" fought hard to 
serve her special interests to the detriment of blind kids in Oregon 
who are, predictably, performing poorly back in their home districts 
because of inadequate educational services and budget constraints.

Please read Kae's email and express your outrage at the President 
nominating such a person to this important position.

Thanks,

Joseph

----- Forwarded message from Kae Seth <lady-potter at comcast.net> -----

Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 21:35:54 -0800
From: Kae Seth <lady-potter at comcast.net>
To: oregon-l at acb.org
Subject: [oregon-l] Oppose Gelser's Nomination
Message-ID: <011201ca8e92$37cafde0$0300000a at tiny>

Representative Sarah Gelser from Corvallis has been nominated to be a 
member of the National Council on Disabilities by President Obama.  We 
strongly urge you to notify the White House of your opposition to her 
appointment. Sarah Gelser spearheaded and wrote the bill which 
ultimately was passed and signed into law that closed the Oregon 
School for the blind.  The following is a note from Kathy OMally 
providing particulars as to how you can bombard the White House if you 
feel as many of us do!

I have written, and encourage everyone to do the same!


Kae Seth

I need your help!



It has been interesting to see the lack of attention and knowledge 
over the past two weeks trying to get some information from the White 
House in regards to the recent nomination of Rep. Sara Gelser to the 
National Council on Disability.   I have not had success in finding 
out when the vote will go to the Senate, but I think we need to flood 
the White House with our comments via e-mail over the next several 
days regarding Obama's choice.



Please....take a few minutes and post your comments:

     .  Go to www.whitehouse.gov;

     .  Select  'Contact Us'  at the top right corner;

     .  Complete required info and type in your message.

     .  Hit   'Submit'

...and then forward this to your family members and friends to do!!



This will only take a few minutes to complete.  Your message can be 
short...just stress the fact that you are outraged that Oregon's House 
Rep. Sara Gelser would be nominated to the National Council on 
Disability since she is the individual responsible for the bill that 
closed Oregon School for the Blind -- after serving our blind 
community in their educational needs after 137 years.   (Feel free to 
add any of your comments!!)



Those of you with access via FAX, you may also send your 
comments/letters to:  (202)456-2461.



I was told the comments are 'grouped' by topic at the end of each 
business day and presented to the executive staff, so let's storm 
their system with something other than topics relating to health care, 
economy or the war!



Kathy O'Malley



_______________________________________________
oregon-l mailing list
oregon-l at acb.org
http://www.acb.org/mailman/listinfo/oregon-l

----- End forwarded message -----


From carter.tjoseph at gmail.com  Wed Jan  6 10:34:25 2010
From: carter.tjoseph at gmail.com (T. Joseph Carter)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 02:34:25 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
 town?
In-Reply-To: <409c235c1001041940q2102a13em21b90591f17093fb@mail.gmail.com>
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Message-ID: <20100106103425.GB63360@yumi.bluecherry.net>

Darian,

What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed, 
for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and teachers the 
importance of Braille education.

Joseph


On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate  focused
>upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
>   What does this  make those who arn't very good braille readers,
>don't want to know, or  don't know braille?
>
> Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille readers?
>  respectfullly,
>  Darian
>
>On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi:
>>
>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.
>>
>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
>> display.
>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
>> as I should.
>>
>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.
>>
>> Braille readers are leaders!
>>
>> Kerri+
>>
>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>>> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
>>> leaders, they say.
>>> Beth
>>>
>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> This
>>>> Listening to Braille
>>>>
>>>> By RACHEL AVIV
>>>>
>>>> Published: December 30, 2009
>>>>
>>>> AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
>>>> voice, and she
>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
>>>> Financial Times
>>>> to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The
>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the
>>>> magazine.
>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
>>>> poring over the
>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>>>> does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
>>>> from my finger to
>>>> my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>>>> doesn’t think of a
>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way
>>>> before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the
>>>> blind. “Literacy
>>>> evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time,
>>>> blindness
>>>>  was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”
>>>>
>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
>>>> the written word.
>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>>>> “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has
>>>> become a reality for
>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>>>> learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says
>>>> she thinks that
>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>>>> “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should
>>>> be abolished,”
>>>> she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”
>>>>
>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
>>>> house in Boston,
>>>> printed the
>>>> Harry Potter
>>>>  series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
>>>> $1,000 and there’s
>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>>>> computer-screen-reading software.
>>>>
>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
>>>> of the 1.3 million
>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>>>> low as 1 in 10,
>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight”
>>>> for Braille
>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in
>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
>>>> of premature
>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for
>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
>>>> has inspired
>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re
>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and
>>>> illiterate,” Jim
>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our
>>>> nation’s blind children
>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their
>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
>>>> learn the
>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language.”
>>>>
>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
>>>> visually impaired
>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read;
>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
>>>> read the individual
>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>>>> educators.
>>>>
>>>> “If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
>>>> mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>>>> Access Journal, told
>>>> me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel
>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many
>>>> Braille readers,
>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
>>>> still extremely
>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going
>>>> back to the 1400s,
>>>> before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only
>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were
>>>> the illiterate
>>>> masses, the peasants.”
>>>>
>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture.
>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
>>>> outlined in felt
>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>>>> studying a cipher
>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
>>>> the code so that
>>>> it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol
>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
>>>> rows and two
>>>> columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>>>> “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of
>>>> written communication
>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
>>>> and spiritual
>>>> savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
>>>> a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
>>>> from hopeless
>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal.”
>>>>
>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but
>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>>>> innocent and malleable,
>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
>>>> his 1933 book, “The
>>>> Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
>>>> assimilated into
>>>> the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some
>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
>>>> light because,
>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>>>> blind children as
>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>>>> “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>>>> misguided in his argument
>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series
>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>>>> blind are not
>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>>>> in the parts of
>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
>>>>
>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
>>>> Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as
>>>> the visual cortex
>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity,
>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading —
>>>> whether the information
>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than
>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
>>>> of the brain is
>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>>>> found that blind subjects
>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>>>> memory
>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by
>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
>>>> brains.
>>>>
>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
>>>> wired for print literacy.
>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>>>> activity of reading
>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>>>> illiterate former
>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their
>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares
>>>> 20 adults
>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
>>>> not yet begun it. In
>>>> M.R.I.
>>>>  scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
>>>> and more white
>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in
>>>> dyslexics, and the study
>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their
>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
>>>>
>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
>>>> debate. In moving
>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to
>>>> avoid. In one of
>>>> the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent,
>>>> a teacher of
>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t
>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
>>>> listening to their
>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
>>>> character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:
>>>>
>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
>>>> his bed sleeping
>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
>>>>
>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>>>> societies think differently
>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the
>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them —
>>>> transformed the shape
>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
>>>> readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
>>>> container, shaken
>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The
>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>>>> emerging in the
>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>>>> concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized
>>>> sequence and complex
>>>> thought that we value in a literate society.”
>>>>
>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
>>>> blind people makes
>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people would
>>>> no longer be
>>>> “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put it
>>>> — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>>>> moral dimension
>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
>>>> culture seen as primitive
>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
>>>> Britain, are now
>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia,
>>>> told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of
>>>> being poor.”
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>>>> blindness that it has assumed
>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
>>>> try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
>>>> from their
>>>> faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
>>>> for the blind.
>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille to
>>>> Abraham Lincoln
>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy”
>>>> repeated everywhere,
>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school
>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>>>> children who don’t
>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily
>>>> ever after” is made up of three separate words.
>>>>
>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner
>>>> of the Rehabilitation
>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>>>> reading skills. “I
>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I
>>>> realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to
>>>> lower something,”
>>>> he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re
>>>> not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit
>>>> it.”
>>>>
>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>>>> David A. Paterson
>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help
>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every
>>>> morning. (He
>>>> calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was
>>>> “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m
>>>> not really supposed
>>>> to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend
>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
>>>> blind person
>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
>>>>
>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
>>>> to be employed as
>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were
>>>> sometimes made
>>>> to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
>>>> from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>>>> text-to-speech
>>>> software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world,
>>>> then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”
>>>>
>>>> When deaf people began getting
>>>> cochlear implants
>>>>  in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as
>>>> an identity
>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities,
>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is
>>>> physically natural,
>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle
>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>>>> since birth, told me that
>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
>>>> photographs of
>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>>>> vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”
>>>>
>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you
>>>> are viewed as ignorant
>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your
>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
>>>> designed to function
>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
>>>> once it has been digitized,
>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
>>>> for many blind people
>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
>>>> members recited to
>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
>>>>
>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>>>> Times.
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>> before us;
>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>> past and future generations,
>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>> done, and
>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
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>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>>
>
>
>--
>The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>
>
>"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>before us;
>if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>past and future generations,
>then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>done, and
>usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>
>_______________________________________________
>nabs-l mailing list
>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40gmail.com


From loneblindjedi at samobile.net  Wed Jan  6 16:31:21 2010
From: loneblindjedi at samobile.net (Jedi)
Date: Wed, 06 Jan 2010 11:31:21 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
	town?
Message-ID: <20100106163121.2032.34938@web2.serotek.com>

What I'm about to say may sound harsh, but here it goes.

Literacy matters, and those who have the capacity for literacy need to 
be able to read the written word for success. that does not mean that 
those who are, by means of some disability, unable to read won't be 
successful. Quite the contrary. But reading definitely makes a 
difference in the lives of those who can do it. For the sighted, 
reading means print. For the blind, reading means Braille. That does 
not mean that either group shouldn't make use of audio materials or 
other technologies to access the printed word. However, these new 
technologies should not be an excuse not to learn to read. Those who 
feel disenfranchised or chastized by certain members of the federation 
because they don't use Braille even though they could ought to give 
Braille a second thought rather than complain that support for Braille 
is unyielding to the point of exclusion. Yes, learning to read is 
painstaking and challenging, but that doesn't mean that it can't or 
shouldn't be done. granted, if there is a disability that really does 
prevent written literacy, then the circumstances are totally different. 
But for most blind people, that simply isn't the case. Does that mean 
that non-readers should blame themselves for not reading Braille? No. 
There may be a number of reasons why Braille isn't a part of their 
lives. However, there are sufficient resources available to individuals 
wanting to learn that there really is no excuse not to.

Respectfully,
Jedi


Original message:
> Darian,

> What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
> for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and teachers the
> importance of Braille education.

> Joseph


> On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>> I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate  focused
>> upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
>>   What does this  make those who arn't very good braille readers,
>> don't want to know, or  don't know braille?

>> Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille readers?
>>  respectfullly,
>>  Darian

>> On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi:

>>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.

>>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
>>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
>>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
>>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
>>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
>>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
>>> display.
>>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
>>> as I should.

>>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
>>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
>>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.

>>> Braille readers are leaders!

>>> Kerri+

>>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
>>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>>>> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
>>>> leaders, they say.
>>>> Beth

>>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> This
>>>>> Listening to Braille

>>>>> By RACHEL AVIV

>>>>> Published: December 30, 2009

>>>>> AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
>>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
>>>>> voice, and she
>>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
>>>>> Financial Times
>>>>> to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The
>>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the
>>>>> magazine.
>>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
>>>>> poring over the
>>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>>>>> does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
>>>>> from my finger to
>>>>> my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>>>>> doesn’t think of a
>>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way
>>>>> before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the
>>>>> blind. “Literacy
>>>>> evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time,
>>>>> blindness
>>>>>  was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”

>>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
>>>>> the written word.
>>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>>>>> “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has
>>>>> become a reality for
>>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>>>>> learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says
>>>>> she thinks that
>>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>>>>> “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should
>>>>> be abolished,”
>>>>> she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”

>>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
>>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
>>>>> house in Boston,
>>>>> printed the
>>>>> Harry Potter
>>>>>  series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
>>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
>>>>> $1,000 and there’s
>>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
>>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>>>>> computer-screen-reading software.

>>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
>>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
>>>>> of the 1.3 million
>>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>>>>> low as 1 in 10,
>>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
>>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight”
>>>>> for Braille
>>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in
>>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
>>>>> of premature
>>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for
>>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
>>>>> has inspired
>>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re
>>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and
>>>>> illiterate,” Jim
>>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
>>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our
>>>>> nation’s blind children
>>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their
>>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
>>>>> learn the
>>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language.”

>>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
>>>>> visually impaired
>>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read;
>>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
>>>>> read the individual
>>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>>>>> educators.

>>>>> “If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
>>>>> mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>>>>> Access Journal, told
>>>>> me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel
>>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many
>>>>> Braille readers,
>>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
>>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
>>>>> still extremely
>>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
>>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going
>>>>> back to the 1400s,
>>>>> before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only
>>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were
>>>>> the illiterate
>>>>> masses, the peasants.”

>>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture.
>>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
>>>>> outlined in felt
>>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
>>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>>>>> studying a cipher
>>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
>>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
>>>>> the code so that
>>>>> it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol
>>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
>>>>> rows and two
>>>>> columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>>>>> “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of
>>>>> written communication
>>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
>>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
>>>>> and spiritual
>>>>> savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
>>>>> a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
>>>>> from hopeless
>>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal.”

>>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but
>>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>>>>> innocent and malleable,
>>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
>>>>> his 1933 book, “The
>>>>> Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
>>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
>>>>> assimilated into
>>>>> the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some
>>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
>>>>> light because,
>>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>>>>> blind children as
>>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>>>>> “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>>>>> misguided in his argument
>>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series
>>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>>>>> blind are not
>>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>>>>> in the parts of
>>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.

>>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
>>>>> Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as
>>>>> the visual cortex
>>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity,
>>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading —
>>>>> whether the information
>>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than
>>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
>>>>> of the brain is
>>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>>>>> found that blind subjects
>>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>>>>> memory
>>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by
>>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
>>>>> brains.

>>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
>>>>> wired for print literacy.
>>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
>>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>>>>> activity of reading
>>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
>>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>>>>> illiterate former
>>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their
>>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares
>>>>> 20 adults
>>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
>>>>> not yet begun it. In
>>>>> M.R.I.
>>>>>  scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
>>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
>>>>> and more white
>>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in
>>>>> dyslexics, and the study
>>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their
>>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.

>>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
>>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
>>>>> debate. In moving
>>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
>>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to
>>>>> avoid. In one of
>>>>> the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
>>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent,
>>>>> a teacher of
>>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t
>>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
>>>>> listening to their
>>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
>>>>> character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:

>>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
>>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
>>>>> his bed sleeping
>>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
>>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.

>>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
>>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>>>>> societies think differently
>>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the
>>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them —
>>>>> transformed the shape
>>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
>>>>> readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
>>>>> container, shaken
>>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The
>>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>>>>> emerging in the
>>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>>>>> concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized
>>>>> sequence and complex
>>>>> thought that we value in a literate society.”

>>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
>>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
>>>>> blind people makes
>>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people would
>>>>> no longer be
>>>>> “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put it
>>>>> — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>>>>> moral dimension
>>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
>>>>> culture seen as primitive
>>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
>>>>> Britain, are now
>>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
>>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia,
>>>>> told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of
>>>>> being poor.”


>>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>>>>> blindness that it has assumed
>>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
>>>>> try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
>>>>> from their
>>>>> faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
>>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
>>>>> for the blind.
>>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille to
>>>>> Abraham Lincoln
>>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy”
>>>>> repeated everywhere,
>>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school
>>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>>>>> children who don’t
>>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily
>>>>> ever after” is made up of three separate words.

>>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
>>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner
>>>>> of the Rehabilitation
>>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
>>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>>>>> reading skills. “I
>>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I
>>>>> realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to
>>>>> lower something,”
>>>>> he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re
>>>>> not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit
>>>>> it.”

>>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>>>>> David A. Paterson
>>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help
>>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
>>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
>>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every
>>>>> morning. (He
>>>>> calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was
>>>>> “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m
>>>>> not really supposed
>>>>> to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend
>>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
>>>>> blind person
>>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.

>>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
>>>>> to be employed as
>>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were
>>>>> sometimes made
>>>>> to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
>>>>> from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>>>>> text-to-speech
>>>>> software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world,
>>>>> then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”

>>>>> When deaf people began getting
>>>>> cochlear implants
>>>>>  in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
>>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as
>>>>> an identity
>>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities,
>>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is
>>>>> physically natural,
>>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle
>>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>>>>> since birth, told me that
>>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
>>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
>>>>> photographs of
>>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>>>>> vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”

>>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you
>>>>> are viewed as ignorant
>>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your
>>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
>>>>> designed to function
>>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
>>>>> once it has been digitized,
>>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
>>>>> for many blind people
>>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
>>>>> members recited to
>>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.

>>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
>>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>>>>> Times.

>>>>> --
>>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org


>>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>>> before us;
>>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>>> past and future generations,
>>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>>> done, and
>>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama

>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com


>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
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>> --
>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org


>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>> before us;
>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>> past and future generations,
>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>> done, and
>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama

>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40gmail.com

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From dsmithnfb at gmail.com  Wed Jan  6 18:07:31 2010
From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 10:07:31 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
	town?
In-Reply-To: <20100106103425.GB63360@yumi.bluecherry.net>
References: <409c235c1001041459k20d160aeo96faa1d05e2241a1@mail.gmail.com>
	<4383d01d1001041555w619b636en31f036e8b2380a4b@mail.gmail.com>
	<e5a820711001041844h1c6bf4faw24b826f1777df07e@mail.gmail.com>
	<409c235c1001041940q2102a13em21b90591f17093fb@mail.gmail.com>
	<20100106103425.GB63360@yumi.bluecherry.net>
Message-ID: <409c235c1001061007r1e1f82abg8f18f8255532007f@mail.gmail.com>

Joseph,

 With the advant of and advances in  digital technologies  would one
not argue that people are  actually more likely to be employed because
access to information is  better than it was even five years ago?
  can it  be said that the blind who knnow braille are superior to the
blind who arn't? if so, who makes this determination?
  Respectfully,
  Darian


On 1/6/10, T. Joseph Carter <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
> Darian,
>
> What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
> for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and teachers the
> importance of Braille education.
>
> Joseph
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>>I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate  focused
>>upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
>>   What does this  make those who arn't very good braille readers,
>>don't want to know, or  don't know braille?
>>
>> Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille readers?
>>  respectfullly,
>>  Darian
>>
>>On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi:
>>>
>>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.
>>>
>>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
>>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
>>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
>>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
>>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
>>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
>>> display.
>>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
>>> as I should.
>>>
>>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
>>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
>>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.
>>>
>>> Braille readers are leaders!
>>>
>>> Kerri+
>>>
>>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
>>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>>>> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
>>>> leaders, they say.
>>>> Beth
>>>>
>>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> This
>>>>> Listening to Braille
>>>>>
>>>>> By RACHEL AVIV
>>>>>
>>>>> Published: December 30, 2009
>>>>>
>>>>> AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
>>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
>>>>> voice, and she
>>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
>>>>> Financial Times
>>>>> to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The
>>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the
>>>>> magazine.
>>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
>>>>> poring over the
>>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>>>>> does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
>>>>> from my finger to
>>>>> my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>>>>> doesn’t think of a
>>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way
>>>>> before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the
>>>>> blind. “Literacy
>>>>> evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time,
>>>>> blindness
>>>>>  was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”
>>>>>
>>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
>>>>> the written word.
>>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>>>>> “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has
>>>>> become a reality for
>>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>>>>> learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says
>>>>> she thinks that
>>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>>>>> “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should
>>>>> be abolished,”
>>>>> she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”
>>>>>
>>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
>>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
>>>>> house in Boston,
>>>>> printed the
>>>>> Harry Potter
>>>>>  series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
>>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
>>>>> $1,000 and there’s
>>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
>>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>>>>> computer-screen-reading software.
>>>>>
>>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
>>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
>>>>> of the 1.3 million
>>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>>>>> low as 1 in 10,
>>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
>>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight”
>>>>> for Braille
>>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in
>>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
>>>>> of premature
>>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for
>>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
>>>>> has inspired
>>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re
>>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and
>>>>> illiterate,” Jim
>>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
>>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our
>>>>> nation’s blind children
>>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their
>>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
>>>>> learn the
>>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language.”
>>>>>
>>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
>>>>> visually impaired
>>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read;
>>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
>>>>> read the individual
>>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>>>>> educators.
>>>>>
>>>>> “If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
>>>>> mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>>>>> Access Journal, told
>>>>> me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel
>>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many
>>>>> Braille readers,
>>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
>>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
>>>>> still extremely
>>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
>>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going
>>>>> back to the 1400s,
>>>>> before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only
>>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were
>>>>> the illiterate
>>>>> masses, the peasants.”
>>>>>
>>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture.
>>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
>>>>> outlined in felt
>>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
>>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>>>>> studying a cipher
>>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
>>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
>>>>> the code so that
>>>>> it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol
>>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
>>>>> rows and two
>>>>> columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>>>>> “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of
>>>>> written communication
>>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
>>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
>>>>> and spiritual
>>>>> savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
>>>>> a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
>>>>> from hopeless
>>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal.”
>>>>>
>>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but
>>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>>>>> innocent and malleable,
>>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
>>>>> his 1933 book, “The
>>>>> Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
>>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
>>>>> assimilated into
>>>>> the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some
>>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
>>>>> light because,
>>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>>>>> blind children as
>>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>>>>> “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>>>>> misguided in his argument
>>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series
>>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>>>>> blind are not
>>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>>>>> in the parts of
>>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
>>>>>
>>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
>>>>> Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as
>>>>> the visual cortex
>>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity,
>>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading —
>>>>> whether the information
>>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than
>>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
>>>>> of the brain is
>>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>>>>> found that blind subjects
>>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>>>>> memory
>>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by
>>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
>>>>> brains.
>>>>>
>>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
>>>>> wired for print literacy.
>>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
>>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>>>>> activity of reading
>>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
>>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>>>>> illiterate former
>>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their
>>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares
>>>>> 20 adults
>>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
>>>>> not yet begun it. In
>>>>> M.R.I.
>>>>>  scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
>>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
>>>>> and more white
>>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in
>>>>> dyslexics, and the study
>>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their
>>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
>>>>>
>>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
>>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
>>>>> debate. In moving
>>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
>>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to
>>>>> avoid. In one of
>>>>> the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
>>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent,
>>>>> a teacher of
>>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t
>>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
>>>>> listening to their
>>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
>>>>> character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:
>>>>>
>>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
>>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
>>>>> his bed sleeping
>>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
>>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
>>>>>
>>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
>>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>>>>> societies think differently
>>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the
>>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them —
>>>>> transformed the shape
>>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
>>>>> readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
>>>>> container, shaken
>>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The
>>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>>>>> emerging in the
>>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>>>>> concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized
>>>>> sequence and complex
>>>>> thought that we value in a literate society.”
>>>>>
>>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
>>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
>>>>> blind people makes
>>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people would
>>>>> no longer be
>>>>> “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put it
>>>>> — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>>>>> moral dimension
>>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
>>>>> culture seen as primitive
>>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
>>>>> Britain, are now
>>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
>>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia,
>>>>> told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of
>>>>> being poor.”
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>>>>> blindness that it has assumed
>>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
>>>>> try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
>>>>> from their
>>>>> faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
>>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
>>>>> for the blind.
>>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille
>>>>> to
>>>>> Abraham Lincoln
>>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy”
>>>>> repeated everywhere,
>>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school
>>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>>>>> children who don’t
>>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily
>>>>> ever after” is made up of three separate words.
>>>>>
>>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
>>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner
>>>>> of the Rehabilitation
>>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
>>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>>>>> reading skills. “I
>>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I
>>>>> realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to
>>>>> lower something,”
>>>>> he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re
>>>>> not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit
>>>>> it.”
>>>>>
>>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>>>>> David A. Paterson
>>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help
>>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
>>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
>>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every
>>>>> morning. (He
>>>>> calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was
>>>>> “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m
>>>>> not really supposed
>>>>> to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend
>>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
>>>>> blind person
>>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
>>>>>
>>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
>>>>> to be employed as
>>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were
>>>>> sometimes made
>>>>> to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
>>>>> from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>>>>> text-to-speech
>>>>> software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world,
>>>>> then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”
>>>>>
>>>>> When deaf people began getting
>>>>> cochlear implants
>>>>>  in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
>>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as
>>>>> an identity
>>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities,
>>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is
>>>>> physically natural,
>>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle
>>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>>>>> since birth, told me that
>>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
>>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
>>>>> photographs of
>>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>>>>> vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”
>>>>>
>>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you
>>>>> are viewed as ignorant
>>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your
>>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
>>>>> designed to function
>>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
>>>>> once it has been digitized,
>>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
>>>>> for many blind people
>>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
>>>>> members recited to
>>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
>>>>>
>>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
>>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>>>>> Times.
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>>> before us;
>>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>>> past and future generations,
>>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>>> done, and
>>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
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>>>
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>>
>>
>>--
>>The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>
>>
>>"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>before us;
>>if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>past and future generations,
>>then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>done, and
>>usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>nabs-l mailing list
>>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40gmail.com
>
> _______________________________________________
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>


-- 
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
before us;
if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
past and future generations,
then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
done, and
usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama


From nabs.president at gmail.com  Wed Jan  6 18:21:30 2010
From: nabs.president at gmail.com (Arielle Silverman)
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 05:21:30 +1100
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
	town?
In-Reply-To: <409c235c1001061007r1e1f82abg8f18f8255532007f@mail.gmail.com>
References: <409c235c1001041459k20d160aeo96faa1d05e2241a1@mail.gmail.com>
	<4383d01d1001041555w619b636en31f036e8b2380a4b@mail.gmail.com>
	<e5a820711001041844h1c6bf4faw24b826f1777df07e@mail.gmail.com>
	<409c235c1001041940q2102a13em21b90591f17093fb@mail.gmail.com>
	<20100106103425.GB63360@yumi.bluecherry.net>
	<409c235c1001061007r1e1f82abg8f18f8255532007f@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <85ff10071001061021w2bab3bb7y1bb6a9041b163260@mail.gmail.com>

Hi all,

In  my mind, it's not a question of which reading medium is better
than the other. It's a matter of options. Knowing two skills is always
better than knowing one, and in my opinion it really doesn't hurt a
young child to learn Braille. They may or may not use it all the time,
but it can't hurt and  very well could help them in a significant way.
If it's a given in  our society that sighted children will read and
write independently, why is this not a given for the blind?

Arielle

On 1/7/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
> Joseph,
>
>  With the advant of and advances in  digital technologies  would one
> not argue that people are  actually more likely to be employed because
> access to information is  better than it was even five years ago?
>   can it  be said that the blind who knnow braille are superior to the
> blind who arn't? if so, who makes this determination?
>   Respectfully,
>   Darian
>
>
> On 1/6/10, T. Joseph Carter <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Darian,
>>
>> What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
>> for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and teachers the
>> importance of Braille education.
>>
>> Joseph
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>>>I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate  focused
>>>upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
>>>   What does this  make those who arn't very good braille readers,
>>>don't want to know, or  don't know braille?
>>>
>>> Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille readers?
>>>  respectfullly,
>>>  Darian
>>>
>>>On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Hi:
>>>>
>>>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.
>>>>
>>>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
>>>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
>>>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
>>>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
>>>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
>>>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
>>>> display.
>>>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
>>>> as I should.
>>>>
>>>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
>>>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
>>>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.
>>>>
>>>> Braille readers are leaders!
>>>>
>>>> Kerri+
>>>>
>>>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
>>>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>>>>> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
>>>>> leaders, they say.
>>>>> Beth
>>>>>
>>>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> This
>>>>>> Listening to Braille
>>>>>>
>>>>>> By RACHEL AVIV
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Published: December 30, 2009
>>>>>>
>>>>>> AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
>>>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
>>>>>> voice, and she
>>>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>>>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
>>>>>> Financial Times
>>>>>> to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The
>>>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the
>>>>>> magazine.
>>>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>>>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
>>>>>> poring over the
>>>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>>>>>> does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
>>>>>> from my finger to
>>>>>> my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>>>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>>>>>> doesn’t think of a
>>>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way
>>>>>> before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the
>>>>>> blind. “Literacy
>>>>>> evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>>>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time,
>>>>>> blindness
>>>>>>  was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>>>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
>>>>>> the written word.
>>>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>>>>>> “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has
>>>>>> become a reality for
>>>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>>>>>> learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says
>>>>>> she thinks that
>>>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>>>>>> “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should
>>>>>> be abolished,”
>>>>>> she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
>>>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
>>>>>> house in Boston,
>>>>>> printed the
>>>>>> Harry Potter
>>>>>>  series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
>>>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
>>>>>> $1,000 and there’s
>>>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
>>>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
>>>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
>>>>>> of the 1.3 million
>>>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>>>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>>>>>> low as 1 in 10,
>>>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
>>>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight”
>>>>>> for Braille
>>>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in
>>>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
>>>>>> of premature
>>>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for
>>>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
>>>>>> has inspired
>>>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re
>>>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and
>>>>>> illiterate,” Jim
>>>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
>>>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our
>>>>>> nation’s blind children
>>>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their
>>>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
>>>>>> learn the
>>>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>>>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
>>>>>> visually impaired
>>>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read;
>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
>>>>>> read the individual
>>>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>>>>>> educators.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> “If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
>>>>>> mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>>>>>> Access Journal, told
>>>>>> me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel
>>>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many
>>>>>> Braille readers,
>>>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
>>>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
>>>>>> still extremely
>>>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
>>>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going
>>>>>> back to the 1400s,
>>>>>> before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only
>>>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were
>>>>>> the illiterate
>>>>>> masses, the peasants.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture.
>>>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
>>>>>> outlined in felt
>>>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
>>>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>>>>>> studying a cipher
>>>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
>>>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
>>>>>> the code so that
>>>>>> it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol
>>>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
>>>>>> rows and two
>>>>>> columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>>>>>> “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of
>>>>>> written communication
>>>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
>>>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
>>>>>> and spiritual
>>>>>> savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
>>>>>> a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
>>>>>> from hopeless
>>>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but
>>>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>>>>>> innocent and malleable,
>>>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>>>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
>>>>>> his 1933 book, “The
>>>>>> Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
>>>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
>>>>>> assimilated into
>>>>>> the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some
>>>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
>>>>>> light because,
>>>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>>>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>>>>>> blind children as
>>>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>>>>>> “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>>>>>> misguided in his argument
>>>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series
>>>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>>>>>> blind are not
>>>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>>>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>>>>>> in the parts of
>>>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
>>>>>> Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as
>>>>>> the visual cortex
>>>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity,
>>>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading —
>>>>>> whether the information
>>>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than
>>>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
>>>>>> of the brain is
>>>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>>>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>>>>>> found that blind subjects
>>>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>>>>>> memory
>>>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by
>>>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
>>>>>> brains.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>>>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
>>>>>> wired for print literacy.
>>>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
>>>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>>>>>> activity of reading
>>>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
>>>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>>>>>> illiterate former
>>>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their
>>>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares
>>>>>> 20 adults
>>>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
>>>>>> not yet begun it. In
>>>>>> M.R.I.
>>>>>>  scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
>>>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
>>>>>> and more white
>>>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>>>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in
>>>>>> dyslexics, and the study
>>>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their
>>>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
>>>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
>>>>>> debate. In moving
>>>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
>>>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to
>>>>>> avoid. In one of
>>>>>> the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
>>>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent,
>>>>>> a teacher of
>>>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t
>>>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
>>>>>> listening to their
>>>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
>>>>>> character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
>>>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
>>>>>> his bed sleeping
>>>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
>>>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
>>>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>>>>>> societies think differently
>>>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the
>>>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them —
>>>>>> transformed the shape
>>>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
>>>>>> readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
>>>>>> container, shaken
>>>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The
>>>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>>>>>> emerging in the
>>>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>>>>>> concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized
>>>>>> sequence and complex
>>>>>> thought that we value in a literate society.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
>>>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
>>>>>> blind people makes
>>>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>>>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people would
>>>>>> no longer be
>>>>>> “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put it
>>>>>> — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>>>>>> moral dimension
>>>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>>>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
>>>>>> culture seen as primitive
>>>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>>>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
>>>>>> Britain, are now
>>>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
>>>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>>>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>>>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia,
>>>>>> told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of
>>>>>> being poor.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>>>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>>>>>> blindness that it has assumed
>>>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
>>>>>> try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
>>>>>> from their
>>>>>> faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
>>>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
>>>>>> for the blind.
>>>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille
>>>>>> to
>>>>>> Abraham Lincoln
>>>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>>>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy”
>>>>>> repeated everywhere,
>>>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school
>>>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>>>>>> children who don’t
>>>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily
>>>>>> ever after” is made up of three separate words.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
>>>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner
>>>>>> of the Rehabilitation
>>>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
>>>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>>>>>> reading skills. “I
>>>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I
>>>>>> realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to
>>>>>> lower something,”
>>>>>> he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re
>>>>>> not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit
>>>>>> it.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>>>>>> David A. Paterson
>>>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help
>>>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>>>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
>>>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
>>>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every
>>>>>> morning. (He
>>>>>> calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was
>>>>>> “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m
>>>>>> not really supposed
>>>>>> to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend
>>>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
>>>>>> blind person
>>>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>>>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
>>>>>> to be employed as
>>>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>>>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were
>>>>>> sometimes made
>>>>>> to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
>>>>>> from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>>>>>> text-to-speech
>>>>>> software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world,
>>>>>> then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> When deaf people began getting
>>>>>> cochlear implants
>>>>>>  in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
>>>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as
>>>>>> an identity
>>>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities,
>>>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is
>>>>>> physically natural,
>>>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle
>>>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>>>>>> since birth, told me that
>>>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
>>>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
>>>>>> photographs of
>>>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>>>>>> vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>>>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you
>>>>>> are viewed as ignorant
>>>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your
>>>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
>>>>>> designed to function
>>>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>>>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
>>>>>> once it has been digitized,
>>>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>>>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
>>>>>> for many blind people
>>>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>>>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
>>>>>> members recited to
>>>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>>>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
>>>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>>>>>> Times.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> --
>>>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>>>> before us;
>>>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>>>> past and future generations,
>>>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>>>> done, and
>>>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>--
>>>The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>
>>>
>>>"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>before us;
>>>if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>past and future generations,
>>>then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>done, and
>>>usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>
>>>_______________________________________________
>>>nabs-l mailing list
>>>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40gmail.com
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>>
>
>
> --
> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>
>
> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
> before us;
> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
> past and future generations,
> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
> done, and
> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/nabs.president%40gmail.com
>


-- 
Arielle Silverman
President, National Association of Blind Students
Phone:  602-502-2255
Email:
nabs.president at gmail.com
Website:
www.nabslink.org


From brileyp at gmail.com  Wed Jan  6 18:27:42 2010
From: brileyp at gmail.com (Briley Pollard)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 13:27:42 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
	town?
In-Reply-To: <20100106163121.2032.34938@web2.serotek.com>
References: <20100106163121.2032.34938@web2.serotek.com>
Message-ID: <45D20DE8-10AE-4BB8-93C6-755AF03F0209@gmail.com>

I'm with you on this one, Jedi. Are sighted people who can't read print thought of as illiterate? Yes. So why should the standard be different for the blind, (of course barring other issues which may compound the problem).

Briley 
On Jan 6, 2010, at 11:31 AM, Jedi wrote:

> What I'm about to say may sound harsh, but here it goes.
> 
> Literacy matters, and those who have the capacity for literacy need to be able to read the written word for success. that does not mean that those who are, by means of some disability, unable to read won't be successful. Quite the contrary. But reading definitely makes a difference in the lives of those who can do it. For the sighted, reading means print. For the blind, reading means Braille. That does not mean that either group shouldn't make use of audio materials or other technologies to access the printed word. However, these new technologies should not be an excuse not to learn to read. Those who feel disenfranchised or chastized by certain members of the federation because they don't use Braille even though they could ought to give Braille a second thought rather than complain that support for Braille is unyielding to the point of exclusion. Yes, learning to read is painstaking and challenging, but that doesn't mean that it can't or shouldn't be done. granted, if there is a disability that really does prevent written literacy, then the circumstances are totally different. But for most blind people, that simply isn't the case. Does that mean that non-readers should blame themselves for not reading Braille? No. There may be a number of reasons why Braille isn't a part of their lives. However, there are sufficient resources available to individuals wanting to learn that there really is no excuse not to.
> 
> Respectfully,
> Jedi
> 
> 
> Original message:
>> Darian,
> 
>> What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
>> for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and teachers the
>> importance of Braille education.
> 
>> Joseph
> 
> 
>> On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>>> I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate  focused
>>> upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
>>>  What does this  make those who arn't very good braille readers,
>>> don't want to know, or  don't know braille?
> 
>>> Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille readers?
>>> respectfullly,
>>> Darian
> 
>>> On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Hi:
> 
>>>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.
> 
>>>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
>>>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
>>>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
>>>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
>>>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
>>>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
>>>> display.
>>>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
>>>> as I should.
> 
>>>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
>>>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
>>>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.
> 
>>>> Braille readers are leaders!
> 
>>>> Kerri+
> 
>>>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
>>>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>>>>> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
>>>>> leaders, they say.
>>>>> Beth
> 
>>>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> This
>>>>>> Listening to Braille
> 
>>>>>> By RACHEL AVIV
> 
>>>>>> Published: December 30, 2009
> 
>>>>>> AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
>>>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
>>>>>> voice, and she
>>>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>>>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
>>>>>> Financial Times
>>>>>> to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The
>>>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the
>>>>>> magazine.
>>>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>>>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
>>>>>> poring over the
>>>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>>>>>> does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
>>>>>> from my finger to
>>>>>> my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>>>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>>>>>> doesn’t think of a
>>>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way
>>>>>> before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the
>>>>>> blind. “Literacy
>>>>>> evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>>>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time,
>>>>>> blindness
>>>>>> was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”
> 
>>>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>>>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
>>>>>> the written word.
>>>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>>>>>> “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has
>>>>>> become a reality for
>>>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>>>>>> learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says
>>>>>> she thinks that
>>>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>>>>>> “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should
>>>>>> be abolished,”
>>>>>> she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”
> 
>>>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
>>>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
>>>>>> house in Boston,
>>>>>> printed the
>>>>>> Harry Potter
>>>>>> series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
>>>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
>>>>>> $1,000 and there’s
>>>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
>>>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software.
> 
>>>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
>>>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
>>>>>> of the 1.3 million
>>>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>>>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>>>>>> low as 1 in 10,
>>>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
>>>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight”
>>>>>> for Braille
>>>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in
>>>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
>>>>>> of premature
>>>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for
>>>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
>>>>>> has inspired
>>>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re
>>>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and
>>>>>> illiterate,” Jim
>>>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
>>>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our
>>>>>> nation’s blind children
>>>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their
>>>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
>>>>>> learn the
>>>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language.”
> 
>>>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>>>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
>>>>>> visually impaired
>>>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read;
>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
>>>>>> read the individual
>>>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>>>>>> educators.
> 
>>>>>> “If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
>>>>>> mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>>>>>> Access Journal, told
>>>>>> me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel
>>>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many
>>>>>> Braille readers,
>>>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
>>>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
>>>>>> still extremely
>>>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
>>>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going
>>>>>> back to the 1400s,
>>>>>> before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only
>>>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were
>>>>>> the illiterate
>>>>>> masses, the peasants.”
> 
>>>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture.
>>>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
>>>>>> outlined in felt
>>>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
>>>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>>>>>> studying a cipher
>>>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
>>>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
>>>>>> the code so that
>>>>>> it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol
>>>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
>>>>>> rows and two
>>>>>> columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>>>>>> “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of
>>>>>> written communication
>>>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
>>>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
>>>>>> and spiritual
>>>>>> savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
>>>>>> a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
>>>>>> from hopeless
>>>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal.”
> 
>>>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but
>>>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>>>>>> innocent and malleable,
>>>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>>>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
>>>>>> his 1933 book, “The
>>>>>> Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
>>>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
>>>>>> assimilated into
>>>>>> the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some
>>>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
>>>>>> light because,
>>>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>>>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>>>>>> blind children as
>>>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>>>>>> “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>>>>>> misguided in his argument
>>>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series
>>>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>>>>>> blind are not
>>>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>>>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>>>>>> in the parts of
>>>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
> 
>>>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
>>>>>> Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as
>>>>>> the visual cortex
>>>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity,
>>>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading —
>>>>>> whether the information
>>>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than
>>>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
>>>>>> of the brain is
>>>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>>>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>>>>>> found that blind subjects
>>>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>>>>>> memory
>>>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by
>>>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
>>>>>> brains.
> 
>>>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>>>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
>>>>>> wired for print literacy.
>>>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
>>>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>>>>>> activity of reading
>>>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
>>>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>>>>>> illiterate former
>>>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their
>>>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares
>>>>>> 20 adults
>>>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
>>>>>> not yet begun it. In
>>>>>> M.R.I.
>>>>>> scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
>>>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
>>>>>> and more white
>>>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>>>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in
>>>>>> dyslexics, and the study
>>>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their
>>>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
> 
>>>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
>>>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
>>>>>> debate. In moving
>>>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
>>>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to
>>>>>> avoid. In one of
>>>>>> the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
>>>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent,
>>>>>> a teacher of
>>>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t
>>>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
>>>>>> listening to their
>>>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
>>>>>> character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:
> 
>>>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
>>>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
>>>>>> his bed sleeping
>>>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
>>>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
> 
>>>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
>>>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>>>>>> societies think differently
>>>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the
>>>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them —
>>>>>> transformed the shape
>>>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
>>>>>> readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
>>>>>> container, shaken
>>>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The
>>>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>>>>>> emerging in the
>>>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>>>>>> concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized
>>>>>> sequence and complex
>>>>>> thought that we value in a literate society.”
> 
>>>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
>>>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
>>>>>> blind people makes
>>>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>>>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people would
>>>>>> no longer be
>>>>>> “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put it
>>>>>> — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>>>>>> moral dimension
>>>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>>>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
>>>>>> culture seen as primitive
>>>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>>>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
>>>>>> Britain, are now
>>>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
>>>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>>>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>>>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia,
>>>>>> told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of
>>>>>> being poor.”
> 
> 
>>>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>>>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>>>>>> blindness that it has assumed
>>>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
>>>>>> try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
>>>>>> from their
>>>>>> faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
>>>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
>>>>>> for the blind.
>>>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille to
>>>>>> Abraham Lincoln
>>>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>>>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy”
>>>>>> repeated everywhere,
>>>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school
>>>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>>>>>> children who don’t
>>>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily
>>>>>> ever after” is made up of three separate words.
> 
>>>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
>>>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner
>>>>>> of the Rehabilitation
>>>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
>>>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>>>>>> reading skills. “I
>>>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I
>>>>>> realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to
>>>>>> lower something,”
>>>>>> he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re
>>>>>> not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit
>>>>>> it.”
> 
>>>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>>>>>> David A. Paterson
>>>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help
>>>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>>>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
>>>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
>>>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every
>>>>>> morning. (He
>>>>>> calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was
>>>>>> “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m
>>>>>> not really supposed
>>>>>> to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend
>>>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
>>>>>> blind person
>>>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
> 
>>>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>>>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
>>>>>> to be employed as
>>>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>>>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were
>>>>>> sometimes made
>>>>>> to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
>>>>>> from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>>>>>> text-to-speech
>>>>>> software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world,
>>>>>> then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”
> 
>>>>>> When deaf people began getting
>>>>>> cochlear implants
>>>>>> in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
>>>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as
>>>>>> an identity
>>>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities,
>>>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is
>>>>>> physically natural,
>>>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle
>>>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>>>>>> since birth, told me that
>>>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
>>>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
>>>>>> photographs of
>>>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>>>>>> vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”
> 
>>>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>>>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you
>>>>>> are viewed as ignorant
>>>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your
>>>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
>>>>>> designed to function
>>>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>>>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
>>>>>> once it has been digitized,
>>>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>>>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
>>>>>> for many blind people
>>>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>>>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
>>>>>> members recited to
>>>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>>>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
> 
>>>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
>>>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>>>>>> Times.
> 
>>>>>> --
>>>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
> 
> 
>>>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>>>> before us;
>>>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>>>> past and future generations,
>>>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>>>> done, and
>>>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
> 
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
> 
> 
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
> 
> 
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
> 
> 
> 
>>> --
>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
> 
> 
>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>> before us;
>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>> past and future generations,
>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>> done, and
>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40gmail.com
> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net
> 
> -- 
> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
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From liz.bottner at gmail.com  Wed Jan  6 18:43:59 2010
From: liz.bottner at gmail.com (Liz Bottner)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 13:43:59 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
	town?
In-Reply-To: <45D20DE8-10AE-4BB8-93C6-755AF03F0209@gmail.com>
References: <20100106163121.2032.34938@web2.serotek.com>
	<45D20DE8-10AE-4BB8-93C6-755AF03F0209@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4b44d9ea.1602be0a.61ba.ffffb1b6@mx.google.com>

I'm with Jedi and Briley on this issue. Harsh? Perhaps, but it is what it
is.

Liz

email: 
liz.bottner at gmail.com 
Visit my livejournal: 
http://unsilenceddream.livejournal.com 
Follow me on Twitter: 
http://twitter.com/lizbot 




From ginisd at sbcglobal.net  Wed Jan  6 19:15:44 2010
From: ginisd at sbcglobal.net (V Nork)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 11:15:44 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
References: <20100104003735.20899.34863@web2.serotek.com><56359C7E-1A7E-4751-98A9-E3C5F78C3F13@gmail.com><9CE30F106C984D2FA4E7CB250FC6EA5A@windows4c0ed96>
	<36C460C5792D497EAAF4999B7A7F6390@YOUR314E04A90B>
Message-ID: <9C86140E598846E4992E2F404D060AF2@windows4c0ed96>

thanks adrienne, and all who responded, I feel my opinion shifting and 
reshifting in response to all the collective experience members of the list 
have shared.  In a perfect world, women could travel alone with no fear. 
But as for now, we all have to weigh risks and benefits.   Thanks, Ginny
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Adrianne Dempsey" <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 05, 2010 7:19 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs


>I as a woman feel comfortable going allot of places on my own because I 
>know how to defend myself.  However going to a club or bar alone is not 
>vary fun in my opinion.  Many people do enjoy going to such places alone in 
>the hopes that they will meet someone, but as a female even if you go with 
>friends you will still have the opportunity to meet people.  This is just 
>my opinion their are many different views.  Men at clubs are like vultures, 
>and if you have interest in one of them your friends will back off a bit 
>but still watch your back, and if you have no interest in them, your 
>friends will help you maneuver away from the creep.  You can do it politely 
>or roodly depending on the aggressiveness of the guy.  So while I could go 
>to a club with out a friend I would never want to.  It for me would lose 
>some  fun and that little safety net.  You just have to decide what you 
>want.
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "V Nork" <ginisd at sbcglobal.net>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 11:28 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>
>
>> Hello list, As I read this great thread, I wonder, as a woman, what the 
>> thinking is about going out to clubs and bars alone, with just a cane and 
>> cell phone?  I have never tried this, but I would like to venture out 
>> alone, maybe you could share your experiences and ideas?  Most of my 
>> friends I do hang out with are not into clubs, so this would be a solo 
>> outing for me. Thanks , Ginny
>> ----- Original Message ----- 
>> From: "Briley Pollard" <brileyp at gmail.com>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 7:28 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>
>>
>>> Depending exclusively on a sighted guide is of course not wise. Having 
>>> no other mobility aid available is  foolish. However, using sighted 
>>> guide in addition to another mobility aid is useful at times such as in 
>>> loud and crowded environments such as night clubs. I'm not saying hang 
>>> on to your friends all night, (that is obviously awkward and defeats the 
>>> purpose of going tout to have fun), but it still can be helpful. Even 
>>> when I'm with blind friends, often someone might hold my arm while using 
>>> their cane just to insure we stay together in crowded environments. My 
>>> point is it shouldn't be disregarded as a viable tool in addition to 
>>> others.
>>>
>>> BrileyOn Jan 3, 2010, at 6:37 PM, Jedi wrote:
>>>
>>>> And that's why one should avoid depending  on a sighted guide if at all 
>>>> possible so that their decisions don't have to affect yours.
>>>>
>>>> Respectfully,
>>>> Jedi
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Original message:
>>>>> hmm no i wouldnt take my guide dog since music would be loud and there 
>>>>> would
>>>>> just be too  much activity but i never really take a cane either. I 
>>>>> think
>>>>> the first time i went to a bar since my vision loss or a  club yes i 
>>>>> had my
>>>>> cell and my cane but after the first time i left it and went with 
>>>>> friends
>>>>> sighted guide.
>>>>
>>>>> here is another question alittle off topic. What if you went sighted 
>>>>> guide
>>>>> and your guide ended up drinking. do you drink too? what if you wanted 
>>>>> to
>>>>> drink, would you do it in a nightblub or bar or even alittle further 
>>>>> in
>>>>> public?
>>>>
>>>>>            -Teal
>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>> From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 5:16 PM
>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>> I know this is slightly off topic from the original question and
>>>>>> others might have different opinions on this, but a club or bar is 
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> last environment I'd feel comfortable losing any type of independence
>>>>>> whatsoever. What happens if you find yourself separated from your
>>>>>> friends? As a guy I never go out at night without my cane, cell 
>>>>>> phone,
>>>>>> and some extra cash ... and for good reason women usually worry over
>>>>>> this more than guys do. Buy an identification cane or one of the new
>>>>>> ambutech telescoping canes if you need something light -- anything to
>>>>>> keep yourself feeling and looking independent if something unexpected
>>>>>> happens.
>>>>
>>>>>> To add to the original question, ditch the notetaker or anything 
>>>>>> extra
>>>>>> that unnecessarily weighs you down. Except for my cane, I never carry
>>>>>> anything that can't fit into my pocket. Doing otherwise is asking for
>>>>>> trouble.
>>>>
>>>>>> Brice
>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Adrianne Dempsey <adrianne.dempsey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> I think taking a note taker to the club is a bad idea.  I don't even
>>>>>>> bring
>>>>>>> my purse because it is just something to carry around.  You don't 
>>>>>>> want to
>>>>>>> set it down somewhere, and you would just look silly dancing with 
>>>>>>> it. In
>>>>>>> fact I don't even bring my cane because I don't know what to do with 
>>>>>>> it
>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>> the dance floor.  I usually go with a friend and just go sighted 
>>>>>>> guide.
>>>>>>> I
>>>>>>> hate loosing a bit of independence but what ells can you do.  If I 
>>>>>>> go
>>>>>>> with
>>>>>>> other blind friends then I usually bring my cane but I always feel 
>>>>>>> silly
>>>>>>> with it at the club.  As far as phone numbers...  I think having 
>>>>>>> someone
>>>>>>> ells program it in to your phone is fine if you can not do it 
>>>>>>> yourself.
>>>>>>> But
>>>>>>> my phone is not very accessible and I can do it.  I just  hit o.k. 
>>>>>>> and it
>>>>>>> brings up a menu the first thing on the menu is add contact.  I hit 
>>>>>>> O.K.
>>>>>>> again, and then you can type in the number then down arrow and type 
>>>>>>> in
>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>> name. Then hit o.k. again and their it is.  Another option is to 
>>>>>>> have a
>>>>>>> bizness card with your info, so you can give the new person your 
>>>>>>> number.
>>>>>>> This is probably not so necessary as pretty much every one has cell
>>>>>>> phones
>>>>>>> now but it is a thought.  The slate and stylist is a good idea to if 
>>>>>>> you
>>>>>>> can
>>>>>>> get a hold of one of those ninny slates.  But you have to be careful 
>>>>>>> with
>>>>>>> this option, because you could get stabbed with the stylist if you 
>>>>>>> move
>>>>>>> funny or if your pants are tight.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>>>> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>>>> Sent: Friday, January 01, 2010 4:24 PM
>>>>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] phone numbers at night clubs
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>>>> Hmmmmm. Interesting subject.  I would've taken the notetaker just
>>>>>>>> because I'm pretty touchy feely about my information.  The numbers 
>>>>>>>> are
>>>>>>>> not programmable by a blind person in my cell phone, so a note 
>>>>>>>> taker
>>>>>>>> is a good option.
>>>>>>>> Beth
>>>>
>>>>>>>> On 1/1/10, Kevin Wassmer <commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>>>>>> Hello folks. It's been a long time sense I have bought up a 
>>>>>>>>> discussion
>>>>>>>>> on
>>>>>>>>> here. First of all, I will say I am doing fine. I have a job at 
>>>>>>>>> Verizon
>>>>>>>>> Wireless working at a call center. It is challenging. How it is
>>>>>>>>> rewarding. I
>>>>>>>>> am glad to finely get off of social security soon. Or as I call it
>>>>>>>>> socialist
>>>>>>>>> insecurity. But that's another story.
>>>>
>>>>>>>>>                I want to bring up a topic. I use to go to night 
>>>>>>>>> clubs
>>>>>>>>> back
>>>>>>>>> in the day. I did not want to bring my Braille Note with me 
>>>>>>>>> because the
>>>>>>>>> thought back then of bringing my note taker sounded strange. But I
>>>>>>>>> would
>>>>>>>>> always have a problem if I met someone and wanted to get their 
>>>>>>>>> number.
>>>>>>>>> This
>>>>>>>>> was because the music was so loud that it was hard to communicate. 
>>>>>>>>> I
>>>>>>>>> use
>>>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>>>> have people program numbers in to my cell phone at nosy places 
>>>>>>>>> like
>>>>>>>>> that.
>>>>
>>>>>>>>> My
>>>>>>>>> question to you all is this. Being blind, would you have taken 
>>>>>>>>> your
>>>>>>>>> note
>>>>>>>>> taker to the night club? The more I think about it, the more I 
>>>>>>>>> believe
>>>>>>>>> a
>>>>>>>>> Slate and Styles would have been a great option for some like the 
>>>>>>>>> night
>>>>>>>>> club
>>>>>>>>> sidereal. What would you have done?
>>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info 
>>>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info 
>>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/adrianne.dempsey%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>> nabs-l:
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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>>>>>> nabs-l:
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>>>>> nabs-l:
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>>>>
>>>> -- 
>>>> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit 
>>>> www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>
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>>
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From jsorozco at gmail.com  Wed Jan  6 19:48:37 2010
From: jsorozco at gmail.com (Joe Orozco)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 14:48:37 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
	intown?
In-Reply-To: <409c235c1001061007r1e1f82abg8f18f8255532007f@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <D75CD2A6EAD6494C9DB9DDC13086FDFB@Rufus>

Darian,

The question is not directed at me, but my thought is that neither side can
really claim better employment prospects as an advantage.  Learning Braille,
in my opinion, heightens a person's ability to perform tasks, but this is a
skill that helps the individual, not something that would generally
contribute to the fulfillment of the job unless said job was in
rehabilitation training or education.  The same is true about technology.
Emerging technology is great, but this does not substitute work experience
or active evidence of how the technology is used.

I use and typically endorse any campaign to promote Braille.  However, I
disagree with the premise that Braille equals employment in the black and
white fashion we seem to advance.

As for Braille leaders and feelings about some blind people being better
than others, Eleanor Roosevelt pretty much summed it up when she said" "No
one can make you feel inferior without your consent."

Personal Translation: If the shoe fits, wear it.  Otherwise, just do what
you do and never mind the rest.

Joe Orozco

"A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the
crowd."--Max Lucado 

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org 
[mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Darian Smith
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 1:08 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for 
only one intown?

Joseph,

 With the advant of and advances in  digital technologies  would one
not argue that people are  actually more likely to be employed because
access to information is  better than it was even five years ago?
  can it  be said that the blind who knnow braille are superior to the
blind who arn't? if so, who makes this determination?
  Respectfully,
  Darian


On 1/6/10, T. Joseph Carter <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
> Darian,
>
> What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
> for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and teachers the
> importance of Braille education.
>
> Joseph
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>>I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate  focused
>>upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
>>   What does this  make those who arn't very good braille readers,
>>don't want to know, or  don't know braille?
>>
>> Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  
non-braille readers?
>>  respectfullly,
>>  Darian
>>
>>On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi:
>>>
>>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.
>>>
>>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
>>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader 
Stream, I really
>>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with 
a braille
>>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
>>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
>>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on 
a braille
>>> display.
>>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use 
braille as much
>>> as I should.
>>>
>>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
>>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
>>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.
>>>
>>> Braille readers are leaders!
>>>
>>> Kerri+
>>>
>>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and 
my vision
>>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>>>> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
>>>> leaders, they say.
>>>> Beth
>>>>
>>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> This
>>>>> Listening to Braille
>>>>>
>>>>> By RACHEL AVIV
>>>>>
>>>>> Published: December 30, 2009
>>>>>
>>>>> AT 4 O'CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her 
daily reading.
>>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in 
a synthetic
>>>>> voice, and she
>>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an 
assistant reads The
>>>>> Financial Times
>>>>> to her while she uses her computer's text-to-speech 
system to play The
>>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the 
other to the
>>>>> magazine.
>>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads 
constantly,
>>>>> poring over the
>>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>>>>> does not use Braille. "Knowledge goes from my ears to my 
brain, not
>>>>> from my finger to
>>>>> my brain," she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>>>>> doesn't think of a
>>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as "a stop 
on the way
>>>>> before continuing." This, she says, is the future of 
reading for the
>>>>> blind. "Literacy
>>>>> evolves," she told me. "When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn't even have radio. 
At that time,
>>>>> blindness
>>>>>  was a disability. Now it's just a minor, minor impairment."
>>>>>
>>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of 
media eclipsed
>>>>> the written word.
>>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>>>>> "tribal and oral pattern." But the decline of written language has
>>>>> become a reality for
>>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>>>>> learning to spell in her youth - she writes by dictation 
- she says
>>>>> she thinks that
>>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>>>>> "It's an arcane means of communication, which for the 
most part should
>>>>> be abolished,"
>>>>> she told me. "It's just not needed today."
>>>>>
>>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring 
reams of thick,
>>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 
83-year-old publishing
>>>>> house in Boston,
>>>>> printed the
>>>>> Harry Potter
>>>>>  series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 
56 volumes,
>>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can 
cost more than
>>>>> $1,000 and there's
>>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, 
visually impaired
>>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>>>>> computer-screen-reading software.
>>>>>
>>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of 
the Blind,
>>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less 
than 10 percent
>>>>> of the 1.3 million
>>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that 
number is as
>>>>> low as 1 in 10,
>>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial 
because there
>>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has 
"too much sight"
>>>>> for Braille
>>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the 
decades - in
>>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple 
disabilities, because
>>>>> of premature
>>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has 
been waning for
>>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, 
and the report
>>>>> has inspired
>>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. 
"What we're
>>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able - and
>>>>> illiterate," Jim
>>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the 
Association on
>>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. "We stopped teaching our
>>>>> nation's blind children
>>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a 
computer, on their
>>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They 
never got to
>>>>> learn the
>>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language."
>>>>>
>>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the 
words. Today,
>>>>> visually impaired
>>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing 
how to read;
>>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down 
each word and
>>>>> read the individual
>>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>>>>> educators.
>>>>>
>>>>> "If all you have in the world is what you hear people 
say, then your
>>>>> mind is limited," Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>>>>> Access Journal, told
>>>>> me. "You need written symbols to organize your mind. If 
you can't feel
>>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is 
gone." Like many
>>>>> Braille readers,
>>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single 
line of Braille
>>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these 
devices are
>>>>> still extremely
>>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the 
decline in Braille
>>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: "This is 
like going
>>>>> back to the 1400s,
>>>>> before Gutenberg's printing press came on the scene," he 
said. "Only
>>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And 
then there were
>>>>> the illiterate
>>>>> masses, the peasants."
>>>>>
>>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an 
oral culture.
>>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed 
by wire or
>>>>> outlined in felt
>>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, 
Louis Braille, a
>>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>>>>> studying a cipher
>>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a 
French Army
>>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. 
Braille modified
>>>>> the code so that
>>>>> it could be read more efficiently - each letter or 
punctuation symbol
>>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a 
matrix of three
>>>>> rows and two
>>>>> columns - and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>>>>> "knowledge," "people" and "Lord." Endowed with a reliable 
method of
>>>>> written communication
>>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a 
significant rise in
>>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind 
of liberator
>>>>> and spiritual
>>>>> savior. With his "godlike courage," Helen Keller wrote, 
Braille built
>>>>> a "firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human 
beings to climb
>>>>> from hopeless
>>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal."
>>>>>
>>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence 
of sight but
>>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>>>>> innocent and malleable,
>>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual 
experience. In
>>>>> his 1933 book, "The
>>>>> Blind in School and Society," the psychologist Thomas 
Cutsforth, who
>>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were 
too rapidly
>>>>> assimilated into
>>>>> the sighted world would become lost in "verbal unreality." At some
>>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that 
referenced color or
>>>>> light because,
>>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>>>>> blind children as
>>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>>>>> "look," "touch" and "see." And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>>>>> misguided in his argument
>>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 
1990s, a series
>>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>>>>> blind are not
>>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense 
activation
>>>>> in the parts of
>>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
>>>>>
>>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators 
as proof that
>>>>> Braille is essential for blind children's cognitive 
development, as
>>>>> the visual cortex
>>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the 
brain's plasticity,
>>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading -
>>>>> whether the information
>>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina - is inherently better than
>>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The 
architecture
>>>>> of the brain is
>>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>>>>> found that blind subjects
>>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>>>>> memory
>>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors 
suggested, by
>>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual 
regions of their
>>>>> brains.
>>>>>
>>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are 
naturally
>>>>> wired for print literacy.
>>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years 
(and literacy
>>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>>>>> activity of reading
>>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report 
released in 2009
>>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>>>>> illiterate former
>>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had 
abandoned their
>>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. 
Carreiras compares
>>>>> 20 adults
>>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 
people who had
>>>>> not yet begun it. In
>>>>> M.R.I.
>>>>>  scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects 
showed more gray
>>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for 
language processing,
>>>>> and more white
>>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were 
previously observed in
>>>>> dyslexics, and the study
>>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren't the cause of their
>>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
>>>>>
>>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, 
but how this
>>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still 
a matter of
>>>>> debate. In moving
>>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest 
consequences for blind
>>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural - a loss much harder to
>>>>> avoid. In one of
>>>>> the few studies of blind people's prose, Doug Brent, a 
professor of
>>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, 
Diana Brent,
>>>>> a teacher of
>>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students 
who didn't
>>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and 
edited by
>>>>> listening to their
>>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional 
story about a
>>>>> character named Mark who had "sleep bombs":
>>>>>
>>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his 
dad was walking
>>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo 
and fell on
>>>>> his bed sleeping
>>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt 
his dad lept
>>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell 
down asleep.
>>>>>
>>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents 
invoked the
>>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>>>>> societies think differently
>>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said - the
>>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them -
>>>>> transformed the shape
>>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many 
audio-only
>>>>> readers as disorganized, "as if all of their ideas are 
crammed into a
>>>>> container, shaken
>>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto 
a table." The
>>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>>>>> emerging in the
>>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>>>>> concluded, "It just doesn't seem to reflect the qualities 
of organized
>>>>> sequence and complex
>>>>> thought that we value in a literate society."
>>>>>
>>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as 
our tools
>>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of 
literacy for
>>>>> blind people makes
>>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system - so that blind 
people would
>>>>> no longer be
>>>>> "despised or patronized by condescending sighted people," 
as he put it
>>>>> - there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>>>>> moral dimension
>>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away 
from an oral
>>>>> culture seen as primitive
>>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like 
the U.S. and
>>>>> Britain, are now
>>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in 
developing ones,
>>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company 
in Australia,
>>>>> told me that he has heard this described as "one of the 
advantages of
>>>>> being poor."
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>>>>> blindness that it has assumed
>>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual 
vision and still
>>>>> try to read print - very slowly or by holding the page an 
inch or two
>>>>> from their
>>>>> faces - are generally frowned upon by the National 
Federation of the
>>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil 
rights movement
>>>>> for the blind.
>>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares 
Louis Braille
>>>>> to
>>>>> Abraham Lincoln
>>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra "listening is not literacy"
>>>>> repeated everywhere,
>>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among 
middle-school
>>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>>>>> children who don't
>>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or 
that "happily
>>>>> ever after" is made up of three separate words.
>>>>>
>>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of 
passage. A vice
>>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as 
commissioner
>>>>> of the Rehabilitation
>>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and 
relies primarily
>>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>>>>> reading skills. "I
>>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn't until two months 
ago that I
>>>>> realized that 'dissent,' to disagree, is different than 
'descent,' to
>>>>> lower something,"
>>>>> he told me. "I'm functionally illiterate. People say, 
'Oh, no, you're
>>>>> not.' Yes, I am. I'm sorry about it, but I'm not 
embarrassed to admit
>>>>> it."
>>>>>
>>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>>>>> David A. Paterson
>>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve 
without the help
>>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
>>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select 
pertinent
>>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his 
voice mail every
>>>>> morning. (He
>>>>> calls himself "overassimilated" and told me that as a child he was
>>>>> "mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the 
message that I'm
>>>>> not really supposed
>>>>> to be blind.") Among people with fewer resources, 
Braille-readers tend
>>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more 
plausible for a
>>>>> blind person
>>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
>>>>>
>>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than 
twice as likely
>>>>> to be employed as
>>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn't know 
Braille were
>>>>> sometimes made
>>>>> to feel like outsiders. "There is definitely a sense of 
peer pressure
>>>>> from the older guard," James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>>>>> text-to-speech
>>>>> software, told me. "If we could live in our own little 
Braille world,
>>>>> then that'd be perfect," he added. "But we live in a 
visual world."
>>>>>
>>>>> When deaf people began getting
>>>>> cochlear implants
>>>>>  in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt 
betrayed. The new
>>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a 
new way - as
>>>>> an identity
>>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many 
disabilities,
>>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people's sense 
of what is
>>>>> physically natural,
>>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until "fixed." Arielle
>>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>>>>> since birth, told me that
>>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure 
she would take
>>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine 
that takes
>>>>> photographs of
>>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>>>>> vision like that, as "just another piece of technology."
>>>>>
>>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability - the extent to 
which you
>>>>> are viewed as ignorant
>>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent - determined largely by your
>>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, 
Braille books were
>>>>> designed to function
>>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because 
information,
>>>>> once it has been digitized,
>>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively 
subtle, but
>>>>> for many blind people
>>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several 
federation
>>>>> members recited to
>>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
>>>>>
>>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health 
journalism
>>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>>>>> Times.
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a 
nationwide teacher
>>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we 
need your
>>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you 
feel destiny
>>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless 
possibility stretching
>>>>> before us;
>>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>>> past and future generations,
>>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, 
and work with
>>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work 
that needs to be
>>>>> done, and
>>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your 
account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
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isloose%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>
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>>
>>
>>--
>>The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>
>>
>>"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>before us;
>>if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>past and future generations,
>>then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>done, and
>>usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>nabs-l mailing list
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>
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-- 
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
before us;
if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
past and future generations,
then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
done, and
usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama

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From brileyp at gmail.com  Wed Jan  6 20:11:36 2010
From: brileyp at gmail.com (Briley Pollard)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 15:11:36 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
	town?
In-Reply-To: <409c235c1001061007r1e1f82abg8f18f8255532007f@mail.gmail.com>
References: <409c235c1001041459k20d160aeo96faa1d05e2241a1@mail.gmail.com>
	<4383d01d1001041555w619b636en31f036e8b2380a4b@mail.gmail.com>
	<e5a820711001041844h1c6bf4faw24b826f1777df07e@mail.gmail.com>
	<409c235c1001041940q2102a13em21b90591f17093fb@mail.gmail.com>
	<20100106103425.GB63360@yumi.bluecherry.net>
	<409c235c1001061007r1e1f82abg8f18f8255532007f@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <BDA3A8C4-3733-458C-ADCA-160AA706F6D1@gmail.com>

It isn't that people who know Braille are superior, but there is a lot to be said for being literate. A lot of jobs are opened up by both technology, and one's ability to read. Braille displays make it possible for blind people to hold jobs previously inaccessible, and this is an area where technology and literacy go hand in hand.
On Jan 6, 2010, at 1:07 PM, Darian Smith wrote:

> Joseph,
> 
> With the advant of and advances in  digital technologies  would one
> not argue that people are  actually more likely to be employed because
> access to information is  better than it was even five years ago?
>  can it  be said that the blind who knnow braille are superior to the
> blind who arn't? if so, who makes this determination?
>  Respectfully,
>  Darian
> 
> 
> On 1/6/10, T. Joseph Carter <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Darian,
>> 
>> What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
>> for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and teachers the
>> importance of Braille education.
>> 
>> Joseph
>> 
>> 
>> On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>>> I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate  focused
>>> upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
>>>  What does this  make those who arn't very good braille readers,
>>> don't want to know, or  don't know braille?
>>> 
>>> Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille readers?
>>> respectfullly,
>>> Darian
>>> 
>>> On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Hi:
>>>> 
>>>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.
>>>> 
>>>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
>>>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
>>>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
>>>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
>>>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
>>>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
>>>> display.
>>>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
>>>> as I should.
>>>> 
>>>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
>>>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
>>>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.
>>>> 
>>>> Braille readers are leaders!
>>>> 
>>>> Kerri+
>>>> 
>>>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
>>>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>>>>> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
>>>>> leaders, they say.
>>>>> Beth
>>>>> 
>>>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> This
>>>>>> Listening to Braille
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> By RACHEL AVIV
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Published: December 30, 2009
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
>>>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
>>>>>> voice, and she
>>>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>>>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
>>>>>> Financial Times
>>>>>> to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The
>>>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the
>>>>>> magazine.
>>>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>>>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
>>>>>> poring over the
>>>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>>>>>> does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
>>>>>> from my finger to
>>>>>> my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>>>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>>>>>> doesn’t think of a
>>>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way
>>>>>> before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the
>>>>>> blind. “Literacy
>>>>>> evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>>>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time,
>>>>>> blindness
>>>>>> was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>>>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
>>>>>> the written word.
>>>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>>>>>> “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has
>>>>>> become a reality for
>>>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>>>>>> learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says
>>>>>> she thinks that
>>>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>>>>>> “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should
>>>>>> be abolished,”
>>>>>> she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
>>>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
>>>>>> house in Boston,
>>>>>> printed the
>>>>>> Harry Potter
>>>>>> series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
>>>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
>>>>>> $1,000 and there’s
>>>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
>>>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
>>>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
>>>>>> of the 1.3 million
>>>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>>>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>>>>>> low as 1 in 10,
>>>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
>>>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight”
>>>>>> for Braille
>>>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in
>>>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
>>>>>> of premature
>>>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for
>>>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
>>>>>> has inspired
>>>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re
>>>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and
>>>>>> illiterate,” Jim
>>>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
>>>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our
>>>>>> nation’s blind children
>>>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their
>>>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
>>>>>> learn the
>>>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language.”
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>>>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
>>>>>> visually impaired
>>>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read;
>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
>>>>>> read the individual
>>>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>>>>>> educators.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> “If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
>>>>>> mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>>>>>> Access Journal, told
>>>>>> me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel
>>>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many
>>>>>> Braille readers,
>>>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
>>>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
>>>>>> still extremely
>>>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
>>>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going
>>>>>> back to the 1400s,
>>>>>> before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only
>>>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were
>>>>>> the illiterate
>>>>>> masses, the peasants.”
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture.
>>>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
>>>>>> outlined in felt
>>>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
>>>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>>>>>> studying a cipher
>>>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
>>>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
>>>>>> the code so that
>>>>>> it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol
>>>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
>>>>>> rows and two
>>>>>> columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>>>>>> “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of
>>>>>> written communication
>>>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
>>>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
>>>>>> and spiritual
>>>>>> savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
>>>>>> a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
>>>>>> from hopeless
>>>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal.”
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but
>>>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>>>>>> innocent and malleable,
>>>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>>>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
>>>>>> his 1933 book, “The
>>>>>> Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
>>>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
>>>>>> assimilated into
>>>>>> the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some
>>>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
>>>>>> light because,
>>>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>>>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>>>>>> blind children as
>>>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>>>>>> “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>>>>>> misguided in his argument
>>>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series
>>>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>>>>>> blind are not
>>>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>>>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>>>>>> in the parts of
>>>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
>>>>>> Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as
>>>>>> the visual cortex
>>>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity,
>>>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading —
>>>>>> whether the information
>>>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than
>>>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
>>>>>> of the brain is
>>>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>>>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>>>>>> found that blind subjects
>>>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>>>>>> memory
>>>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by
>>>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
>>>>>> brains.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>>>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
>>>>>> wired for print literacy.
>>>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
>>>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>>>>>> activity of reading
>>>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
>>>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>>>>>> illiterate former
>>>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their
>>>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares
>>>>>> 20 adults
>>>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
>>>>>> not yet begun it. In
>>>>>> M.R.I.
>>>>>> scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
>>>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
>>>>>> and more white
>>>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>>>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in
>>>>>> dyslexics, and the study
>>>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their
>>>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
>>>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
>>>>>> debate. In moving
>>>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
>>>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to
>>>>>> avoid. In one of
>>>>>> the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
>>>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent,
>>>>>> a teacher of
>>>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t
>>>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
>>>>>> listening to their
>>>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
>>>>>> character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
>>>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
>>>>>> his bed sleeping
>>>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
>>>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
>>>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>>>>>> societies think differently
>>>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the
>>>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them —
>>>>>> transformed the shape
>>>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
>>>>>> readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
>>>>>> container, shaken
>>>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The
>>>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>>>>>> emerging in the
>>>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>>>>>> concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized
>>>>>> sequence and complex
>>>>>> thought that we value in a literate society.”
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
>>>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
>>>>>> blind people makes
>>>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>>>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people would
>>>>>> no longer be
>>>>>> “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put it
>>>>>> — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>>>>>> moral dimension
>>>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>>>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
>>>>>> culture seen as primitive
>>>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>>>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
>>>>>> Britain, are now
>>>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
>>>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>>>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>>>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia,
>>>>>> told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of
>>>>>> being poor.”
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>>>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>>>>>> blindness that it has assumed
>>>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
>>>>>> try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
>>>>>> from their
>>>>>> faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
>>>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
>>>>>> for the blind.
>>>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille
>>>>>> to
>>>>>> Abraham Lincoln
>>>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>>>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy”
>>>>>> repeated everywhere,
>>>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school
>>>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>>>>>> children who don’t
>>>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily
>>>>>> ever after” is made up of three separate words.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
>>>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner
>>>>>> of the Rehabilitation
>>>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
>>>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>>>>>> reading skills. “I
>>>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I
>>>>>> realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to
>>>>>> lower something,”
>>>>>> he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re
>>>>>> not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit
>>>>>> it.”
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>>>>>> David A. Paterson
>>>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help
>>>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>>>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
>>>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
>>>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every
>>>>>> morning. (He
>>>>>> calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was
>>>>>> “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m
>>>>>> not really supposed
>>>>>> to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend
>>>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
>>>>>> blind person
>>>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>>>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
>>>>>> to be employed as
>>>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>>>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were
>>>>>> sometimes made
>>>>>> to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
>>>>>> from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>>>>>> text-to-speech
>>>>>> software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world,
>>>>>> then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> When deaf people began getting
>>>>>> cochlear implants
>>>>>> in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
>>>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as
>>>>>> an identity
>>>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities,
>>>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is
>>>>>> physically natural,
>>>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle
>>>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>>>>>> since birth, told me that
>>>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
>>>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
>>>>>> photographs of
>>>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>>>>>> vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>>>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you
>>>>>> are viewed as ignorant
>>>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your
>>>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
>>>>>> designed to function
>>>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>>>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
>>>>>> once it has been digitized,
>>>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>>>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
>>>>>> for many blind people
>>>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>>>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
>>>>>> members recited to
>>>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>>>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
>>>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>>>>>> Times.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> --
>>>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>>>> before us;
>>>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>>>> past and future generations,
>>>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>>>> done, and
>>>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
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>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> --
>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>> 
>>> 
>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>> before us;
>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>> past and future generations,
>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>> done, and
>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
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>> 
>> _______________________________________________
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>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
> 
> 
> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
> before us;
> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
> past and future generations,
> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
> done, and
> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
> 
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com



From jj at bestmidi.com  Wed Jan  6 20:23:08 2010
From: jj at bestmidi.com (J.J. Meddaugh)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 15:23:08 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] DC Rooms on the Weekend
Message-ID: <987C51AC99B34382B471CF53DBBFD80F@jage>

Is anyone going to be having a room in DC either Friday or Saturday night? I have a friend who's looking.
Thanks for any help.

From jdraichle at gmail.com  Wed Jan  6 20:44:05 2010
From: jdraichle at gmail.com (Jessica Raichle)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 15:44:05 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] VR Stream pros and cons
References: <4b3f802c.8602be0a.4f9a.fffff1ea@mx.google.com><ABBD27AE5DE4443086B0C8C4197CB32D@Ashley>
	<7B095004529C4F6799671A7279AA23D9@Jessica>
Message-ID: <E2E2C17C4E1E497FAE0E71CBAE9DD80B@D4763CK1>

I got my Stream a little over a year ago and love it. However, I noticed 
that music does not play very loudly on it even at the highest volume, and 
that's saying a lot since I don't like music played very loudly.  I find 
that to try and listen to music in any setting with any noise at all around 
is difficult.  But the talking books play absolutely wonderfully!  And I do 
use it with a pair of speakers to listen to music.
Jessica
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jess" <jessica.trask.reagan at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 6:07 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] VR Stream pros and cons


> Ashley,
>>From following this thread. Yes the Humanware Companion Software does come
> with the VR Stream. Because from my understanding it transfers the files 
> between the VR Stream and the computer.
> Jessica
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Ashley Bramlett" <bookwormahb at earthlink.net>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 6:43 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] VR Stream pros and cons
>
>
>> Chelse,
>> Thanks for this information.  Good to know about the download process.  I 
>> do have web braille.
>> Does Human ware stream come with the VR stream unit?  What does it do?
>>
>> Ashley
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- 
>> From: "Chelsea Cook" <astrochem119 at gmail.com>
>> To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Saturday, January 02, 2010 12:24 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] VR Stream pros and cons
>>
>>
>>> Ashley,
>>>
>>>  I love my Stream! At first I was reluctant to get one, but then I found 
>>> out what it can do.  I use it all the time for reading books from NLS 
>>> and RFBD.  It is easy to get authorization keys from these places.  If 
>>> you have a Web Braille account or are affiliated with your library, you 
>>> should be able to complete an application for the new download site. 
>>> With RFBD, go to your My Account on the online version and select 
>>> "Authorize New Player." Then you just type in the serial number.  I 
>>> don't use it for recording as much now, but that may change.
>>>  There is a program that comes with it called HumanWare Stream 
>>> Companion. This makes your talking books from NLS easy to transfer. 
>>> RFBD is more tedious, but I'm trying to see if there's an easier way to 
>>> do it.  You can create bookmarks and transfer notes (recordings), to 
>>> your computer with this program.  I've never tried playlists, but I love 
>>> the Random music feature, similar to the concept of the IPod shuffle. 
>>> You can't navigate by song title and artist, per se, but if you know how 
>>> your music structure is laid out, you can find a specific song by 
>>> knowing its file and folder coordinates.  The Stream will accept those. 
>>> The only other problem I face sometimes is with the NLS books, you can't 
>>> do page navigation.  It doesn't support Word documents yet.  Only t x t, 
>>> b r f, and Html.  You can do word searches in these documents, and it 
>>> makes it easier if you know how to text because it uses those same 
>>> conventions for numbers.  I haven't had the practice yet.
>>>  Overall: If you're in college and use NLS and RFBD for most of your 
>>> reading, it's an excellent, all-in-one device.  You can put up to a 16 
>>> gig HC SD.  card in it (I hear it has issues with anything higher), as 
>>> well as USB flash drives.
>>> Hope this helps,
>>> Chelsea
>>> "I ask you to look both ways.  For the road to a knowledge of the stars 
>>> leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been 
>>> reached through the stars."
>>> Sir Arthur Eddington, British astrophysicist (1882-1944), Stars and 
>>> Atoms (1928), Lecture 1
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>>> nabs-l:
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>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
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>
>
>
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From dennisgclark at sbcglobal.net  Wed Jan  6 20:55:35 2010
From: dennisgclark at sbcglobal.net (Dennis Clark)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 12:55:35 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
	intown?
References: <20100106163121.2032.34938@web2.serotek.com>
Message-ID: <017301ca8f12$986639a0$6601a8c0@server>

It would be helpful for me and I think most readers if those discussing 
Braille could talk a little about what they do for a living and how Braille 
is an integral part of their job.  The woman discussed in the article is the 
head of a New York Stock Brokerage firm and as such is earning several 
million dollars per year and therefore does not need my advice about Braille 
or anything else.  Her accomplishments greatly exceed mine by quite a lot 
and for me to advise or criticize her would require an almost unimaginable 
level of arrogance.  My advice to all those earning seven figure salaries is 
keep on doing what your doing because it is working great! For the rest of 
us earning 4 or 5 digit salaries, it would be interesting to hear what you 
do for a living and how you use Braille in your work, and what you would not 
be able to do in your job without Braille.
Warmest regards,
Dennis

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jedi" <loneblindjedi at samobile.net>
To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 8:31 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one 
intown?


> What I'm about to say may sound harsh, but here it goes.
>
> Literacy matters, and those who have the capacity for literacy need to be 
> able to read the written word for success. that does not mean that those 
> who are, by means of some disability, unable to read won't be successful. 
> Quite the contrary. But reading definitely makes a difference in the lives 
> of those who can do it. For the sighted, reading means print. For the 
> blind, reading means Braille. That does not mean that either group 
> shouldn't make use of audio materials or other technologies to access the 
> printed word. However, these new technologies should not be an excuse not 
> to learn to read. Those who feel disenfranchised or chastized by certain 
> members of the federation because they don't use Braille even though they 
> could ought to give Braille a second thought rather than complain that 
> support for Braille is unyielding to the point of exclusion. Yes, learning 
> to read is painstaking and challenging, but that doesn't mean that it 
> can't or shouldn't be done. granted, if there is a disability that really 
> does prevent written literacy, then the circumstances are totally 
> different. But for most blind people, that simply isn't the case. Does 
> that mean that non-readers should blame themselves for not reading 
> Braille? No. There may be a number of reasons why Braille isn't a part of 
> their lives. However, there are sufficient resources available to 
> individuals wanting to learn that there really is no excuse not to.
>
> Respectfully,
> Jedi
>
>
> Original message:
>> Darian,
>
>> What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
>> for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and teachers the
>> importance of Braille education.
>
>> Joseph
>
>
>> On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>>> I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate  focused
>>> upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
>>>   What does this  make those who arn't very good braille readers,
>>> don't want to know, or  don't know braille?
>
>>> Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille 
>>> readers?
>>>  respectfullly,
>>>  Darian
>
>>> On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Hi:
>
>>>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.
>
>>>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
>>>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
>>>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
>>>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
>>>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
>>>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
>>>> display.
>>>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
>>>> as I should.
>
>>>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
>>>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
>>>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.
>
>>>> Braille readers are leaders!
>
>>>> Kerri+
>
>>>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
>>>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>>>>> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
>>>>> leaders, they say.
>>>>> Beth
>
>>>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> This
>>>>>> Listening to Braille
>
>>>>>> By RACHEL AVIV
>
>>>>>> Published: December 30, 2009
>
>>>>>> AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
>>>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
>>>>>> voice, and she
>>>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>>>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads 
>>>>>> The
>>>>>> Financial Times
>>>>>> to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play 
>>>>>> The
>>>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to 
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> magazine.
>>>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>>>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
>>>>>> poring over the
>>>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>>>>>> does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
>>>>>> from my finger to
>>>>>> my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>>>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>>>>>> doesn’t think of a
>>>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way
>>>>>> before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the
>>>>>> blind. “Literacy
>>>>>> evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>>>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that 
>>>>>> time,
>>>>>> blindness
>>>>>>  was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”
>
>>>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>>>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
>>>>>> the written word.
>>>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>>>>>> “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has
>>>>>> become a reality for
>>>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>>>>>> learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says
>>>>>> she thinks that
>>>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>>>>>> “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part 
>>>>>> should
>>>>>> be abolished,”
>>>>>> she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”
>
>>>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
>>>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
>>>>>> house in Boston,
>>>>>> printed the
>>>>>> Harry Potter
>>>>>>  series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
>>>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
>>>>>> $1,000 and there’s
>>>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
>>>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software.
>
>>>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
>>>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
>>>>>> of the 1.3 million
>>>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>>>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>>>>>> low as 1 in 10,
>>>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
>>>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much 
>>>>>>  sight”
>>>>>> for Braille
>>>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — 
>>>>>> in
>>>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
>>>>>> of premature
>>>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning 
>>>>>> for
>>>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
>>>>>> has inspired
>>>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re
>>>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and
>>>>>> illiterate,” Jim
>>>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
>>>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our
>>>>>> nation’s blind children
>>>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on 
>>>>>> their
>>>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
>>>>>> learn the
>>>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language.”
>
>>>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>>>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
>>>>>> visually impaired
>>>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to 
>>>>>> read;
>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
>>>>>> read the individual
>>>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>>>>>> educators.
>
>>>>>> “If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
>>>>>> mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>>>>>> Access Journal, told
>>>>>> me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t 
>>>>>> feel
>>>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many
>>>>>> Braille readers,
>>>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
>>>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
>>>>>> still extremely
>>>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
>>>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going
>>>>>> back to the 1400s,
>>>>>> before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only
>>>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there 
>>>>>> were
>>>>>> the illiterate
>>>>>> masses, the peasants.”
>
>>>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral 
>>>>>> culture.
>>>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
>>>>>> outlined in felt
>>>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
>>>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>>>>>> studying a cipher
>>>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
>>>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
>>>>>> the code so that
>>>>>> it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol
>>>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
>>>>>> rows and two
>>>>>> columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>>>>>> “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of
>>>>>> written communication
>>>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
>>>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
>>>>>> and spiritual
>>>>>> savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
>>>>>> a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
>>>>>> from hopeless
>>>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal.”
>
>>>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight 
>>>>>> but
>>>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>>>>>> innocent and malleable,
>>>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>>>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
>>>>>> his 1933 book, “The
>>>>>> Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
>>>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
>>>>>> assimilated into
>>>>>> the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some
>>>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
>>>>>> light because,
>>>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>>>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>>>>>> blind children as
>>>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>>>>>> “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>>>>>> misguided in his argument
>>>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a 
>>>>>> series
>>>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>>>>>> blind are not
>>>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>>>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>>>>>> in the parts of
>>>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
>
>>>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
>>>>>> Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as
>>>>>> the visual cortex
>>>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s 
>>>>>> plasticity,
>>>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading —
>>>>>> whether the information
>>>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than
>>>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
>>>>>> of the brain is
>>>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>>>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>>>>>> found that blind subjects
>>>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>>>>>> memory
>>>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, 
>>>>>> by
>>>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
>>>>>> brains.
>
>>>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>>>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
>>>>>> wired for print literacy.
>>>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
>>>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>>>>>> activity of reading
>>>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
>>>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>>>>>> illiterate former
>>>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned 
>>>>>> their
>>>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras 
>>>>>> compares
>>>>>> 20 adults
>>>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
>>>>>> not yet begun it. In
>>>>>> M.R.I.
>>>>>>  scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
>>>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language 
>>>>>> processing,
>>>>>> and more white
>>>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>>>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed 
>>>>>> in
>>>>>> dyslexics, and the study
>>>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their
>>>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
>
>>>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
>>>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
>>>>>> debate. In moving
>>>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
>>>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to
>>>>>> avoid. In one of
>>>>>> the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
>>>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana 
>>>>>> Brent,
>>>>>> a teacher of
>>>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t
>>>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
>>>>>> listening to their
>>>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
>>>>>> character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:
>
>>>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was 
>>>>>> walking
>>>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
>>>>>> his bed sleeping
>>>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
>>>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
>
>>>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
>>>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>>>>>> societies think differently
>>>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the
>>>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them —
>>>>>> transformed the shape
>>>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
>>>>>> readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
>>>>>> container, shaken
>>>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” 
>>>>>> The
>>>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>>>>>> emerging in the
>>>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>>>>>> concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of 
>>>>>> organized
>>>>>> sequence and complex
>>>>>> thought that we value in a literate society.”
>
>>>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
>>>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
>>>>>> blind people makes
>>>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>>>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people 
>>>>>> would
>>>>>> no longer be
>>>>>> “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put 
>>>>>> it
>>>>>> — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>>>>>> moral dimension
>>>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>>>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
>>>>>> culture seen as primitive
>>>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>>>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
>>>>>> Britain, are now
>>>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
>>>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>>>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>>>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in 
>>>>>> Australia,
>>>>>> told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of
>>>>>> being poor.”
>
>
>>>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>>>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>>>>>> blindness that it has assumed
>>>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
>>>>>> try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
>>>>>> from their
>>>>>> faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
>>>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
>>>>>> for the blind.
>>>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis 
>>>>>> Braille to
>>>>>> Abraham Lincoln
>>>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>>>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy”
>>>>>> repeated everywhere,
>>>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among 
>>>>>> middle-school
>>>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>>>>>> children who don’t
>>>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that 
>>>>>> “happily
>>>>>> ever after” is made up of three separate words.
>
>>>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
>>>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as 
>>>>>> commissioner
>>>>>> of the Rehabilitation
>>>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
>>>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>>>>>> reading skills. “I
>>>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I
>>>>>> realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to
>>>>>> lower something,”
>>>>>> he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re
>>>>>> not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit
>>>>>> it.”
>
>>>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>>>>>> David A. Paterson
>>>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the 
>>>>>> help
>>>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>>>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
>>>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
>>>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail 
>>>>>> every
>>>>>> morning. (He
>>>>>> calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was
>>>>>> “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m
>>>>>> not really supposed
>>>>>> to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers 
>>>>>> tend
>>>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
>>>>>> blind person
>>>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
>
>>>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>>>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
>>>>>> to be employed as
>>>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>>>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were
>>>>>> sometimes made
>>>>>> to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
>>>>>> from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>>>>>> text-to-speech
>>>>>> software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world,
>>>>>> then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”
>
>>>>>> When deaf people began getting
>>>>>> cochlear implants
>>>>>>  in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
>>>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as
>>>>>> an identity
>>>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many 
>>>>>> disabilities,
>>>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is
>>>>>> physically natural,
>>>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle
>>>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>>>>>> since birth, told me that
>>>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
>>>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
>>>>>> photographs of
>>>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>>>>>> vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”
>
>>>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>>>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you
>>>>>> are viewed as ignorant
>>>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your
>>>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
>>>>>> designed to function
>>>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>>>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
>>>>>> once it has been digitized,
>>>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>>>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
>>>>>> for many blind people
>>>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>>>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
>>>>>> members recited to
>>>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>>>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
>
>>>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
>>>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>>>>>> Times.
>
>>>>>> --
>>>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide 
>>>>>> teacher
>>>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>
>
>>>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel 
>>>>>> destiny
>>>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>>>> before us;
>>>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>>>> past and future generations,
>>>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work 
>>>>>> with
>>>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to 
>>>>>> be
>>>>>> done, and
>>>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
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>>>>>> nabs-l:
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>
>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
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>
>
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>
>
>
>>> --
>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>
>
>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>> before us;
>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>> past and future generations,
>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>> done, and
>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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From brileyp at gmail.com  Wed Jan  6 21:14:10 2010
From: brileyp at gmail.com (Briley Pollard)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 16:14:10 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
	town?
In-Reply-To: <409c235c1001041940q2102a13em21b90591f17093fb@mail.gmail.com>
References: <409c235c1001041459k20d160aeo96faa1d05e2241a1@mail.gmail.com>
	<4383d01d1001041555w619b636en31f036e8b2380a4b@mail.gmail.com>
	<e5a820711001041844h1c6bf4faw24b826f1777df07e@mail.gmail.com>
	<409c235c1001041940q2102a13em21b90591f17093fb@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <17461534-95E9-4FF4-85E2-92012C92F639@gmail.com>

I don't think it is a harsh position to think that blind people should be literate. Why would we expect anything less from our own community then we would from sighted people?

I understand that some people didn't have the chance to learn braille until they were older, and may not be able to achieve 300 words a minute. This is understandable and no one should ever judge or look down anyone for that. It isn't about how fast you can read, it is about having the skill to use in conjunction with others. I've never met anyone that has put the time and effort into learning braille that has regretted it, even people who lose their sight when they are older.

BrileyOn Jan 4, 2010, at 10:40 PM, Darian Smith wrote:

> I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate  focused
> upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
>   What does this  make those who arn't very good braille readers,
> don't want to know, or  don't know braille?
> 
> Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille readers?
>  respectfullly,
>  Darian
> 
> On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi:
>> 
>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.
>> 
>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
>> display.
>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
>> as I should.
>> 
>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.
>> 
>> Braille readers are leaders!
>> 
>> Kerri+
>> 
>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>>> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
>>> leaders, they say.
>>> Beth
>>> 
>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> This
>>>> Listening to Braille
>>>> 
>>>> By RACHEL AVIV
>>>> 
>>>> Published: December 30, 2009
>>>> 
>>>> AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
>>>> voice, and she
>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
>>>> Financial Times
>>>> to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The
>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the
>>>> magazine.
>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
>>>> poring over the
>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>>>> does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
>>>> from my finger to
>>>> my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>>>> doesn’t think of a
>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way
>>>> before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the
>>>> blind. “Literacy
>>>> evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time,
>>>> blindness
>>>> was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”
>>>> 
>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
>>>> the written word.
>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>>>> “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has
>>>> become a reality for
>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>>>> learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says
>>>> she thinks that
>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>>>> “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should
>>>> be abolished,”
>>>> she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”
>>>> 
>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
>>>> house in Boston,
>>>> printed the
>>>> Harry Potter
>>>> series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
>>>> $1,000 and there’s
>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>>>> computer-screen-reading software.
>>>> 
>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
>>>> of the 1.3 million
>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>>>> low as 1 in 10,
>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight”
>>>> for Braille
>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in
>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
>>>> of premature
>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for
>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
>>>> has inspired
>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re
>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and
>>>> illiterate,” Jim
>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our
>>>> nation’s blind children
>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their
>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
>>>> learn the
>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language.”
>>>> 
>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
>>>> visually impaired
>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read;
>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
>>>> read the individual
>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>>>> educators.
>>>> 
>>>> “If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
>>>> mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>>>> Access Journal, told
>>>> me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel
>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many
>>>> Braille readers,
>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
>>>> still extremely
>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going
>>>> back to the 1400s,
>>>> before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only
>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were
>>>> the illiterate
>>>> masses, the peasants.”
>>>> 
>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture.
>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
>>>> outlined in felt
>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>>>> studying a cipher
>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
>>>> the code so that
>>>> it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol
>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
>>>> rows and two
>>>> columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>>>> “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of
>>>> written communication
>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
>>>> and spiritual
>>>> savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
>>>> a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
>>>> from hopeless
>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal.”
>>>> 
>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but
>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>>>> innocent and malleable,
>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
>>>> his 1933 book, “The
>>>> Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
>>>> assimilated into
>>>> the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some
>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
>>>> light because,
>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>>>> blind children as
>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>>>> “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>>>> misguided in his argument
>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series
>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>>>> blind are not
>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>>>> in the parts of
>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
>>>> 
>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
>>>> Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as
>>>> the visual cortex
>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity,
>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading —
>>>> whether the information
>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than
>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
>>>> of the brain is
>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>>>> found that blind subjects
>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>>>> memory
>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by
>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
>>>> brains.
>>>> 
>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
>>>> wired for print literacy.
>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>>>> activity of reading
>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>>>> illiterate former
>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their
>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares
>>>> 20 adults
>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
>>>> not yet begun it. In
>>>> M.R.I.
>>>> scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
>>>> and more white
>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in
>>>> dyslexics, and the study
>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their
>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
>>>> 
>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
>>>> debate. In moving
>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to
>>>> avoid. In one of
>>>> the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent,
>>>> a teacher of
>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t
>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
>>>> listening to their
>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
>>>> character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:
>>>> 
>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
>>>> his bed sleeping
>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
>>>> 
>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>>>> societies think differently
>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the
>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them —
>>>> transformed the shape
>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
>>>> readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
>>>> container, shaken
>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The
>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>>>> emerging in the
>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>>>> concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized
>>>> sequence and complex
>>>> thought that we value in a literate society.”
>>>> 
>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
>>>> blind people makes
>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people would
>>>> no longer be
>>>> “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put it
>>>> — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>>>> moral dimension
>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
>>>> culture seen as primitive
>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
>>>> Britain, are now
>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia,
>>>> told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of
>>>> being poor.”
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>>>> blindness that it has assumed
>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
>>>> try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
>>>> from their
>>>> faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
>>>> for the blind.
>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille to
>>>> Abraham Lincoln
>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy”
>>>> repeated everywhere,
>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school
>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>>>> children who don’t
>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily
>>>> ever after” is made up of three separate words.
>>>> 
>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner
>>>> of the Rehabilitation
>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>>>> reading skills. “I
>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I
>>>> realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to
>>>> lower something,”
>>>> he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re
>>>> not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit
>>>> it.”
>>>> 
>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>>>> David A. Paterson
>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help
>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every
>>>> morning. (He
>>>> calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was
>>>> “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m
>>>> not really supposed
>>>> to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend
>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
>>>> blind person
>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
>>>> 
>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
>>>> to be employed as
>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were
>>>> sometimes made
>>>> to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
>>>> from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>>>> text-to-speech
>>>> software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world,
>>>> then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”
>>>> 
>>>> When deaf people began getting
>>>> cochlear implants
>>>> in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as
>>>> an identity
>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities,
>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is
>>>> physically natural,
>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle
>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>>>> since birth, told me that
>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
>>>> photographs of
>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>>>> vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”
>>>> 
>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you
>>>> are viewed as ignorant
>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your
>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
>>>> designed to function
>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
>>>> once it has been digitized,
>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
>>>> for many blind people
>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
>>>> members recited to
>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
>>>> 
>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>>>> Times.
>>>> 
>>>> --
>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>> before us;
>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>> past and future generations,
>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>> done, and
>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>> 
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>> 
>>> 
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>> 
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> 
> 
> -- 
> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
> 
> 
> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
> before us;
> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
> past and future generations,
> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
> done, and
> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
> 
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
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From dennisgclark at sbcglobal.net  Wed Jan  6 21:18:11 2010
From: dennisgclark at sbcglobal.net (Dennis Clark)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 13:18:11 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
	intown?
References: <409c235c1001041459k20d160aeo96faa1d05e2241a1@mail.gmail.com><4383d01d1001041555w619b636en31f036e8b2380a4b@mail.gmail.com><e5a820711001041844h1c6bf4faw24b826f1777df07e@mail.gmail.com><409c235c1001041940q2102a13em21b90591f17093fb@mail.gmail.com><20100106103425.GB63360@yumi.bluecherry.net>
	<409c235c1001061007r1e1f82abg8f18f8255532007f@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <01a001ca8f15$c0786000$6601a8c0@server>

It would be helpful for me and I think most readers if those discussing
Braille could talk a little about what they do for a living and how Braille
is an integral part of their job.  The woman discussed in the article is the
head of a New York Stock Brokerage firm and as such is earning several
million dollars per year and therefore does not need my advice about Braille
or anything else.  Her accomplishments greatly exceed mine by quite a lot
and for me to advise or criticize her would require an almost unimaginable
level of arrogance.  My advice to all those earning seven figure salaries is
keep on doing what your doing because it is working great! For the rest of
us earning 4 or 5 digit salaries, it would be interesting to hear what you
do for a living and how you use Braille in your work, and what you would not
be able to do in your job without Braille.
Warmest regards,
Dennis


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Darian Smith" <dsmithnfb at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 10:07 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one 
intown?


Joseph,

 With the advant of and advances in  digital technologies  would one
not argue that people are  actually more likely to be employed because
access to information is  better than it was even five years ago?
  can it  be said that the blind who knnow braille are superior to the
blind who arn't? if so, who makes this determination?
  Respectfully,
  Darian


On 1/6/10, T. Joseph Carter <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
> Darian,
>
> What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
> for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and teachers the
> importance of Braille education.
>
> Joseph
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>>I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate  focused
>>upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
>>   What does this  make those who arn't very good braille readers,
>>don't want to know, or  don't know braille?
>>
>> Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille readers?
>>  respectfullly,
>>  Darian
>>
>>On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi:
>>>
>>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.
>>>
>>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
>>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
>>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
>>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
>>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
>>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
>>> display.
>>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
>>> as I should.
>>>
>>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
>>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
>>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.
>>>
>>> Braille readers are leaders!
>>>
>>> Kerri+
>>>
>>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
>>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>>>> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
>>>> leaders, they say.
>>>> Beth
>>>>
>>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> This
>>>>> Listening to Braille
>>>>>
>>>>> By RACHEL AVIV
>>>>>
>>>>> Published: December 30, 2009
>>>>>
>>>>> AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
>>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
>>>>> voice, and she
>>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
>>>>> Financial Times
>>>>> to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The
>>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the
>>>>> magazine.
>>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
>>>>> poring over the
>>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>>>>> does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
>>>>> from my finger to
>>>>> my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>>>>> doesn’t think of a
>>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way
>>>>> before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the
>>>>> blind. “Literacy
>>>>> evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time,
>>>>> blindness
>>>>>  was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”
>>>>>
>>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
>>>>> the written word.
>>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>>>>> “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has
>>>>> become a reality for
>>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>>>>> learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says
>>>>> she thinks that
>>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>>>>> “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should
>>>>> be abolished,”
>>>>> she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”
>>>>>
>>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
>>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
>>>>> house in Boston,
>>>>> printed the
>>>>> Harry Potter
>>>>>  series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
>>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
>>>>> $1,000 and there’s
>>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
>>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>>>>> computer-screen-reading software.
>>>>>
>>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
>>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
>>>>> of the 1.3 million
>>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>>>>> low as 1 in 10,
>>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
>>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight”
>>>>> for Braille
>>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in
>>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
>>>>> of premature
>>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for
>>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
>>>>> has inspired
>>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re
>>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and
>>>>> illiterate,” Jim
>>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
>>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our
>>>>> nation’s blind children
>>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their
>>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
>>>>> learn the
>>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language.”
>>>>>
>>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
>>>>> visually impaired
>>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read;
>>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
>>>>> read the individual
>>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>>>>> educators.
>>>>>
>>>>> “If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
>>>>> mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>>>>> Access Journal, told
>>>>> me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel
>>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many
>>>>> Braille readers,
>>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
>>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
>>>>> still extremely
>>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
>>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going
>>>>> back to the 1400s,
>>>>> before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only
>>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were
>>>>> the illiterate
>>>>> masses, the peasants.”
>>>>>
>>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture.
>>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
>>>>> outlined in felt
>>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
>>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>>>>> studying a cipher
>>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
>>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
>>>>> the code so that
>>>>> it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol
>>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
>>>>> rows and two
>>>>> columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>>>>> “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of
>>>>> written communication
>>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
>>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
>>>>> and spiritual
>>>>> savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
>>>>> a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
>>>>> from hopeless
>>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal.”
>>>>>
>>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but
>>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>>>>> innocent and malleable,
>>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
>>>>> his 1933 book, “The
>>>>> Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
>>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
>>>>> assimilated into
>>>>> the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some
>>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
>>>>> light because,
>>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>>>>> blind children as
>>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>>>>> “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>>>>> misguided in his argument
>>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series
>>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>>>>> blind are not
>>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>>>>> in the parts of
>>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
>>>>>
>>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
>>>>> Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as
>>>>> the visual cortex
>>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity,
>>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading —
>>>>> whether the information
>>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than
>>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
>>>>> of the brain is
>>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>>>>> found that blind subjects
>>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>>>>> memory
>>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by
>>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
>>>>> brains.
>>>>>
>>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
>>>>> wired for print literacy.
>>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
>>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>>>>> activity of reading
>>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
>>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>>>>> illiterate former
>>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their
>>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares
>>>>> 20 adults
>>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
>>>>> not yet begun it. In
>>>>> M.R.I.
>>>>>  scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
>>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
>>>>> and more white
>>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in
>>>>> dyslexics, and the study
>>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their
>>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
>>>>>
>>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
>>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
>>>>> debate. In moving
>>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
>>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to
>>>>> avoid. In one of
>>>>> the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
>>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent,
>>>>> a teacher of
>>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t
>>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
>>>>> listening to their
>>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
>>>>> character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:
>>>>>
>>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
>>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
>>>>> his bed sleeping
>>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
>>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
>>>>>
>>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
>>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>>>>> societies think differently
>>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the
>>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them —
>>>>> transformed the shape
>>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
>>>>> readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
>>>>> container, shaken
>>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The
>>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>>>>> emerging in the
>>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>>>>> concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized
>>>>> sequence and complex
>>>>> thought that we value in a literate society.”
>>>>>
>>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
>>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
>>>>> blind people makes
>>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people would
>>>>> no longer be
>>>>> “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put it
>>>>> — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>>>>> moral dimension
>>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
>>>>> culture seen as primitive
>>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
>>>>> Britain, are now
>>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
>>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia,
>>>>> told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of
>>>>> being poor.”
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>>>>> blindness that it has assumed
>>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
>>>>> try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
>>>>> from their
>>>>> faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
>>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
>>>>> for the blind.
>>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille
>>>>> to
>>>>> Abraham Lincoln
>>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy”
>>>>> repeated everywhere,
>>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school
>>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>>>>> children who don’t
>>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily
>>>>> ever after” is made up of three separate words.
>>>>>
>>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
>>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner
>>>>> of the Rehabilitation
>>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
>>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>>>>> reading skills. “I
>>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I
>>>>> realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to
>>>>> lower something,”
>>>>> he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re
>>>>> not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit
>>>>> it.”
>>>>>
>>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>>>>> David A. Paterson
>>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help
>>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
>>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
>>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every
>>>>> morning. (He
>>>>> calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was
>>>>> “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m
>>>>> not really supposed
>>>>> to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend
>>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
>>>>> blind person
>>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
>>>>>
>>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
>>>>> to be employed as
>>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were
>>>>> sometimes made
>>>>> to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
>>>>> from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>>>>> text-to-speech
>>>>> software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world,
>>>>> then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”
>>>>>
>>>>> When deaf people began getting
>>>>> cochlear implants
>>>>>  in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
>>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as
>>>>> an identity
>>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities,
>>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is
>>>>> physically natural,
>>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle
>>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>>>>> since birth, told me that
>>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
>>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
>>>>> photographs of
>>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>>>>> vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”
>>>>>
>>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you
>>>>> are viewed as ignorant
>>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your
>>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
>>>>> designed to function
>>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
>>>>> once it has been digitized,
>>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
>>>>> for many blind people
>>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
>>>>> members recited to
>>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
>>>>>
>>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
>>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>>>>> Times.
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>>> before us;
>>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>>> past and future generations,
>>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>>> done, and
>>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>> nabs-l:
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>>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
>>--
>>The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>
>>
>>"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>before us;
>>if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>past and future generations,
>>then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>done, and
>>usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>nabs-l mailing list
>>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
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>
> _______________________________________________
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>


-- 
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
before us;
if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
past and future generations,
then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
done, and
usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama

_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
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http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
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From carter.tjoseph at gmail.com  Wed Jan  6 21:53:21 2010
From: carter.tjoseph at gmail.com (T. Joseph Carter)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 13:53:21 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
 town?
In-Reply-To: <409c235c1001061007r1e1f82abg8f18f8255532007f@mail.gmail.com>
References: <409c235c1001041459k20d160aeo96faa1d05e2241a1@mail.gmail.com>
	<4383d01d1001041555w619b636en31f036e8b2380a4b@mail.gmail.com>
	<e5a820711001041844h1c6bf4faw24b826f1777df07e@mail.gmail.com>
	<409c235c1001041940q2102a13em21b90591f17093fb@mail.gmail.com>
	<20100106103425.GB63360@yumi.bluecherry.net>
	<409c235c1001061007r1e1f82abg8f18f8255532007f@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20100106215321.GF63360@yumi.bluecherry.net>

Darian,

You can argue the maybes and possible futures.  TODAY, Braille is the 
difference between high employment and extremely low.

I'm going to be more harsh than even Jedi was and say that this list 
often demonstrates just how completely pathetic the language skills 
of those who communicate using primarily speech alone actually are.  
There are people on this list who cannot spell words at even the 
second grade level.  Some have no concept of even a sentence, let 
alone a paragraph.  As far as the world is concerned, they are 
illiterate.

Few indeed are the jobs for which complete illiteracy is not a 
factor.  Not only that, if you demonstrate the level of literacy 
sometimes evidenced on this list, you could be an absolute genius and 
the average ignorant sighted person is going to assume you're at the 
very least cognitively deficient.

At this time, we have a whole generation of blind people who have in 
large part grown up functionally illiterate.  They are suffering the 
consequences in that most are unemployed and beginning to come to the 
conclusion that they may in fact be unemployable.  The education 
system has completely failed these people, and it ought to inspire 
nothing short of rage at the notion that it should be allowed to 
continue.

Joseph

On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 10:07:31AM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>Joseph,
>
> With the advant of and advances in  digital technologies  would one
>not argue that people are  actually more likely to be employed because
>access to information is  better than it was even five years ago?
>  can it  be said that the blind who knnow braille are superior to the
>blind who arn't? if so, who makes this determination?
>  Respectfully,
>  Darian
>
>
>On 1/6/10, T. Joseph Carter <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Darian,
>>
>> What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
>> for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and teachers the
>> importance of Braille education.
>>
>> Joseph
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>>>I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate  focused
>>>upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
>>>   What does this  make those who arn't very good braille readers,
>>>don't want to know, or  don't know braille?
>>>
>>> Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille readers?
>>>  respectfullly,
>>>  Darian
>>>
>>>On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Hi:
>>>>
>>>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.
>>>>
>>>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
>>>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
>>>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
>>>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
>>>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
>>>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
>>>> display.
>>>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
>>>> as I should.
>>>>
>>>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
>>>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
>>>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.
>>>>
>>>> Braille readers are leaders!
>>>>
>>>> Kerri+
>>>>
>>>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
>>>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>>>>> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
>>>>> leaders, they say.
>>>>> Beth
>>>>>
>>>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> This
>>>>>> Listening to Braille
>>>>>>
>>>>>> By RACHEL AVIV
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Published: December 30, 2009
>>>>>>
>>>>>> AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
>>>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
>>>>>> voice, and she
>>>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>>>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
>>>>>> Financial Times
>>>>>> to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The
>>>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the
>>>>>> magazine.
>>>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>>>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
>>>>>> poring over the
>>>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>>>>>> does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
>>>>>> from my finger to
>>>>>> my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>>>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>>>>>> doesn’t think of a
>>>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way
>>>>>> before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the
>>>>>> blind. “Literacy
>>>>>> evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>>>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time,
>>>>>> blindness
>>>>>>  was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>>>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
>>>>>> the written word.
>>>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>>>>>> “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has
>>>>>> become a reality for
>>>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>>>>>> learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says
>>>>>> she thinks that
>>>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>>>>>> “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should
>>>>>> be abolished,”
>>>>>> she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
>>>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
>>>>>> house in Boston,
>>>>>> printed the
>>>>>> Harry Potter
>>>>>>  series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
>>>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
>>>>>> $1,000 and there’s
>>>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
>>>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
>>>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
>>>>>> of the 1.3 million
>>>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>>>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>>>>>> low as 1 in 10,
>>>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
>>>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight”
>>>>>> for Braille
>>>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in
>>>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
>>>>>> of premature
>>>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for
>>>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
>>>>>> has inspired
>>>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re
>>>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and
>>>>>> illiterate,” Jim
>>>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
>>>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our
>>>>>> nation’s blind children
>>>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their
>>>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
>>>>>> learn the
>>>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>>>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
>>>>>> visually impaired
>>>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read;
>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
>>>>>> read the individual
>>>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>>>>>> educators.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> “If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
>>>>>> mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>>>>>> Access Journal, told
>>>>>> me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel
>>>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many
>>>>>> Braille readers,
>>>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
>>>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
>>>>>> still extremely
>>>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
>>>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going
>>>>>> back to the 1400s,
>>>>>> before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only
>>>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were
>>>>>> the illiterate
>>>>>> masses, the peasants.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture.
>>>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
>>>>>> outlined in felt
>>>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
>>>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>>>>>> studying a cipher
>>>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
>>>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
>>>>>> the code so that
>>>>>> it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol
>>>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
>>>>>> rows and two
>>>>>> columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>>>>>> “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of
>>>>>> written communication
>>>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
>>>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
>>>>>> and spiritual
>>>>>> savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
>>>>>> a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
>>>>>> from hopeless
>>>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but
>>>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>>>>>> innocent and malleable,
>>>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>>>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
>>>>>> his 1933 book, “The
>>>>>> Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
>>>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
>>>>>> assimilated into
>>>>>> the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some
>>>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
>>>>>> light because,
>>>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>>>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>>>>>> blind children as
>>>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>>>>>> “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>>>>>> misguided in his argument
>>>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series
>>>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>>>>>> blind are not
>>>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>>>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>>>>>> in the parts of
>>>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
>>>>>> Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as
>>>>>> the visual cortex
>>>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity,
>>>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading —
>>>>>> whether the information
>>>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than
>>>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
>>>>>> of the brain is
>>>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>>>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>>>>>> found that blind subjects
>>>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>>>>>> memory
>>>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by
>>>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
>>>>>> brains.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>>>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
>>>>>> wired for print literacy.
>>>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
>>>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>>>>>> activity of reading
>>>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
>>>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>>>>>> illiterate former
>>>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their
>>>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares
>>>>>> 20 adults
>>>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
>>>>>> not yet begun it. In
>>>>>> M.R.I.
>>>>>>  scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
>>>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
>>>>>> and more white
>>>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>>>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in
>>>>>> dyslexics, and the study
>>>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their
>>>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
>>>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
>>>>>> debate. In moving
>>>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
>>>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to
>>>>>> avoid. In one of
>>>>>> the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
>>>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent,
>>>>>> a teacher of
>>>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t
>>>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
>>>>>> listening to their
>>>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
>>>>>> character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
>>>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
>>>>>> his bed sleeping
>>>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
>>>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
>>>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>>>>>> societies think differently
>>>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the
>>>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them —
>>>>>> transformed the shape
>>>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
>>>>>> readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
>>>>>> container, shaken
>>>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The
>>>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>>>>>> emerging in the
>>>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>>>>>> concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized
>>>>>> sequence and complex
>>>>>> thought that we value in a literate society.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
>>>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
>>>>>> blind people makes
>>>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>>>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people would
>>>>>> no longer be
>>>>>> “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put it
>>>>>> — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>>>>>> moral dimension
>>>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>>>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
>>>>>> culture seen as primitive
>>>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>>>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
>>>>>> Britain, are now
>>>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
>>>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>>>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>>>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia,
>>>>>> told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of
>>>>>> being poor.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>>>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>>>>>> blindness that it has assumed
>>>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
>>>>>> try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
>>>>>> from their
>>>>>> faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
>>>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
>>>>>> for the blind.
>>>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille
>>>>>> to
>>>>>> Abraham Lincoln
>>>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>>>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy”
>>>>>> repeated everywhere,
>>>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school
>>>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>>>>>> children who don’t
>>>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily
>>>>>> ever after” is made up of three separate words.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
>>>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner
>>>>>> of the Rehabilitation
>>>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
>>>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>>>>>> reading skills. “I
>>>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I
>>>>>> realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to
>>>>>> lower something,”
>>>>>> he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re
>>>>>> not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit
>>>>>> it.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>>>>>> David A. Paterson
>>>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help
>>>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>>>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
>>>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
>>>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every
>>>>>> morning. (He
>>>>>> calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was
>>>>>> “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m
>>>>>> not really supposed
>>>>>> to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend
>>>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
>>>>>> blind person
>>>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>>>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
>>>>>> to be employed as
>>>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>>>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were
>>>>>> sometimes made
>>>>>> to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
>>>>>> from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>>>>>> text-to-speech
>>>>>> software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world,
>>>>>> then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> When deaf people began getting
>>>>>> cochlear implants
>>>>>>  in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
>>>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as
>>>>>> an identity
>>>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities,
>>>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is
>>>>>> physically natural,
>>>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle
>>>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>>>>>> since birth, told me that
>>>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
>>>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
>>>>>> photographs of
>>>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>>>>>> vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>>>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you
>>>>>> are viewed as ignorant
>>>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your
>>>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
>>>>>> designed to function
>>>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>>>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
>>>>>> once it has been digitized,
>>>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>>>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
>>>>>> for many blind people
>>>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>>>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
>>>>>> members recited to
>>>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>>>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
>>>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>>>>>> Times.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> --
>>>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>>>> before us;
>>>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>>>> past and future generations,
>>>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>>>> done, and
>>>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>--
>>>The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>
>>>
>>>"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>before us;
>>>if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>past and future generations,
>>>then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>done, and
>>>usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>
>>>_______________________________________________
>>>nabs-l mailing list
>>>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40gmail.com
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>>
>
>
>--
>The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>
>
>"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>before us;
>if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>past and future generations,
>then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>done, and
>usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>
>_______________________________________________
>nabs-l mailing list
>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40gmail.com


From dsmithnfb at gmail.com  Wed Jan  6 22:04:32 2010
From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 14:04:32 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
	town?
In-Reply-To: <4b44d9ea.1602be0a.61ba.ffffb1b6@mx.google.com>
References: <20100106163121.2032.34938@web2.serotek.com>
	<45D20DE8-10AE-4BB8-93C6-755AF03F0209@gmail.com>
	<4b44d9ea.1602be0a.61ba.ffffb1b6@mx.google.com>
Message-ID: <409c235c1001061404y486fc473jf105ba04e1b042d5@mail.gmail.com>

personally, I find validity and what everybody  has said.
 However I do think it's rather short- sighted to say that  it's more
essential to use one medium over another.  I think the beauty of the
cross-section  of individuals in the NFB and their degree of success
using different alternitive techniques speaks to how it's probably not
the best thing to say that one  particular skill  will make you
successful.  Are there individuals (sighted and blind alike) that may
not know  how to read very well, yet still hold jobs?   Indeed there
are.   Consider for a moment the idea of saying that "Cane users are
leaders".  Like  braille readers, are there successful cane travelers?
 Yes.  That said, are there  people who don't use canes and are just
as successful?  Yes.   So, what then determines success?    Do I think
Braille should be offered as anoption for those who want it? I
absolutely do.   But, I wouldn't want to see it forced or
peer-pressured.  The main thing is, can somebody read? can they
survive?  Can they be successful as they see it?  In much the same way
as I view braille I view the ability to travel; can one get from
point A to point B? can they do so without putting other people around
them in a  position where they feel they have to take care of   the
blind individual?  The end  result I would like is to see  a high
level of education for blind people, and the option for the blind
person to take it.  I won't judge  the blind person who doesn't want
to read braille nor the blind person who wants to(nor am I suggesting
that anybody would ),but what i will do is fight for either to have
the  choice to access  whatever  medium they like.
 Respectfully,
  Darian

On 1/6/10, Liz Bottner <liz.bottner at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm with Jedi and Briley on this issue. Harsh? Perhaps, but it is what it
> is.
>
> Liz
>
> email:
> liz.bottner at gmail.com
> Visit my livejournal:
> http://unsilenceddream.livejournal.com
> Follow me on Twitter:
> http://twitter.com/lizbot
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>


-- 
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
before us;
if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
past and future generations,
then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
done, and
usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama


From dsmithnfb at gmail.com  Wed Jan  6 22:10:39 2010
From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 14:10:39 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
	town?
In-Reply-To: <409c235c1001061404y486fc473jf105ba04e1b042d5@mail.gmail.com>
References: <20100106163121.2032.34938@web2.serotek.com>
	<45D20DE8-10AE-4BB8-93C6-755AF03F0209@gmail.com>
	<4b44d9ea.1602be0a.61ba.ffffb1b6@mx.google.com>
	<409c235c1001061404y486fc473jf105ba04e1b042d5@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <409c235c1001061410pa6cca18u138bb8ffd68cde01@mail.gmail.com>

I do agree with Briley's  stated  opinion   that I don't think it's
Harsh to expect anybody at all to know how to read. But  there are
many people (both blind and sighted) that

On 1/6/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
> personally, I find validity and what everybody  has said.
>  However I do think it's rather short- sighted to say that  it's more
> essential to use one medium over another.  I think the beauty of the
> cross-section  of individuals in the NFB and their degree of success
> using different alternitive techniques speaks to how it's probably not
> the best thing to say that one  particular skill  will make you
> successful.  Are there individuals (sighted and blind alike) that may
> not know  how to read very well, yet still hold jobs?   Indeed there
> are.   Consider for a moment the idea of saying that "Cane users are
> leaders".  Like  braille readers, are there successful cane travelers?
>  Yes.  That said, are there  people who don't use canes and are just
> as successful?  Yes.   So, what then determines success?    Do I think
> Braille should be offered as anoption for those who want it? I
> absolutely do.   But, I wouldn't want to see it forced or
> peer-pressured.  The main thing is, can somebody read? can they
> survive?  Can they be successful as they see it?  In much the same way
> as I view braille I view the ability to travel; can one get from
> point A to point B? can they do so without putting other people around
> them in a  position where they feel they have to take care of   the
> blind individual?  The end  result I would like is to see  a high
> level of education for blind people, and the option for the blind
> person to take it.  I won't judge  the blind person who doesn't want
> to read braille nor the blind person who wants to(nor am I suggesting
> that anybody would ),but what i will do is fight for either to have
> the  choice to access  whatever  medium they like.
>  Respectfully,
>   Darian
>
> On 1/6/10, Liz Bottner <liz.bottner at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm with Jedi and Briley on this issue. Harsh? Perhaps, but it is what it
>> is.
>>
>> Liz
>>
>> email:
>> liz.bottner at gmail.com
>> Visit my livejournal:
>> http://unsilenceddream.livejournal.com
>> Follow me on Twitter:
>> http://twitter.com/lizbot
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>>
>
>
> --
> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>
>
> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
> before us;
> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
> past and future generations,
> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
> done, and
> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>


-- 
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
before us;
if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
past and future generations,
then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
done, and
usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama


From aphelps at BISM.org  Wed Jan  6 22:18:42 2010
From: aphelps at BISM.org (Amy Phelps)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 17:18:42 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Washington Seminar
In-Reply-To: <01a001ca8f15$c0786000$6601a8c0@server>
References: <409c235c1001041459k20d160aeo96faa1d05e2241a1@mail.gmail.com><4383d01d1001041555w619b636en31f036e8b2380a4b@mail.gmail.com><e5a820711001041844h1c6bf4faw24b826f1777df07e@mail.gmail.com><409c235c1001041940q2102a13em21b90591f17093fb@mail.gmail.com><20100106103425.GB63360@yumi.bluecherry.net><409c235c1001061007r1e1f82abg8f18f8255532007f@mail.gmail.com>
	<01a001ca8f15$c0786000$6601a8c0@server>
Message-ID: <144BBD32E57C5045B736FBC8D447D0EC02635384@blindmail.BISM.COM>

When is the student seminar? 

Warm regards, 
Amy C. Phelps  
Amy C. Phelps, CRC, NOMC
Director of Rehabilitation Services 

Phone: 410-737-2642
Mobile: 410-274-1647
E-mail: aphelps at bism.org

"A frog in a well, can only see its piece of the sky" ~Unknown



Confidentiality Note:  The information contained in this message may be privileged and confidential and protected from disclosure. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, or an employee or agent responsible for delivering this message to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to the message and deleting it from your computer.

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Dennis Clark
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 4:18 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only oneintown?

It would be helpful for me and I think most readers if those discussing
Braille could talk a little about what they do for a living and how Braille
is an integral part of their job.  The woman discussed in the article is the
head of a New York Stock Brokerage firm and as such is earning several
million dollars per year and therefore does not need my advice about Braille
or anything else.  Her accomplishments greatly exceed mine by quite a lot
and for me to advise or criticize her would require an almost unimaginable
level of arrogance.  My advice to all those earning seven figure salaries is
keep on doing what your doing because it is working great! For the rest of
us earning 4 or 5 digit salaries, it would be interesting to hear what you
do for a living and how you use Braille in your work, and what you would not
be able to do in your job without Braille.
Warmest regards,
Dennis


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Darian Smith" <dsmithnfb at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 10:07 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one 
intown?


Joseph,

 With the advant of and advances in  digital technologies  would one
not argue that people are  actually more likely to be employed because
access to information is  better than it was even five years ago?
  can it  be said that the blind who knnow braille are superior to the
blind who arn't? if so, who makes this determination?
  Respectfully,
  Darian


On 1/6/10, T. Joseph Carter <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
> Darian,
>
> What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
> for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and teachers the
> importance of Braille education.
>
> Joseph
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>>I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate  focused
>>upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
>>   What does this  make those who arn't very good braille readers,
>>don't want to know, or  don't know braille?
>>
>> Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille readers?
>>  respectfullly,
>>  Darian
>>
>>On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi:
>>>
>>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.
>>>
>>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
>>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
>>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
>>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
>>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
>>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
>>> display.
>>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
>>> as I should.
>>>
>>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
>>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
>>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.
>>>
>>> Braille readers are leaders!
>>>
>>> Kerri+
>>>
>>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
>>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>>>> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
>>>> leaders, they say.
>>>> Beth
>>>>
>>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> This
>>>>> Listening to Braille
>>>>>
>>>>> By RACHEL AVIV
>>>>>
>>>>> Published: December 30, 2009
>>>>>
>>>>> AT 4 O'CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
>>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
>>>>> voice, and she
>>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
>>>>> Financial Times
>>>>> to her while she uses her computer's text-to-speech system to play The
>>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the
>>>>> magazine.
>>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
>>>>> poring over the
>>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>>>>> does not use Braille. "Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
>>>>> from my finger to
>>>>> my brain," she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>>>>> doesn't think of a
>>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as "a stop on the way
>>>>> before continuing." This, she says, is the future of reading for the
>>>>> blind. "Literacy
>>>>> evolves," she told me. "When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn't even have radio. At that time,
>>>>> blindness
>>>>>  was a disability. Now it's just a minor, minor impairment."
>>>>>
>>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
>>>>> the written word.
>>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>>>>> "tribal and oral pattern." But the decline of written language has
>>>>> become a reality for
>>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>>>>> learning to spell in her youth - she writes by dictation - she says
>>>>> she thinks that
>>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>>>>> "It's an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should
>>>>> be abolished,"
>>>>> she told me. "It's just not needed today."
>>>>>
>>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
>>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
>>>>> house in Boston,
>>>>> printed the
>>>>> Harry Potter
>>>>>  series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
>>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
>>>>> $1,000 and there's
>>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
>>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>>>>> computer-screen-reading software.
>>>>>
>>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
>>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
>>>>> of the 1.3 million
>>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>>>>> low as 1 in 10,
>>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
>>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has "too much sight"
>>>>> for Braille
>>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades - in
>>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
>>>>> of premature
>>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for
>>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
>>>>> has inspired
>>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. "What we're
>>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able - and
>>>>> illiterate," Jim
>>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
>>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. "We stopped teaching our
>>>>> nation's blind children
>>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their
>>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
>>>>> learn the
>>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language."
>>>>>
>>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
>>>>> visually impaired
>>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read;
>>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
>>>>> read the individual
>>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>>>>> educators.
>>>>>
>>>>> "If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
>>>>> mind is limited," Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>>>>> Access Journal, told
>>>>> me. "You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can't feel
>>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone." Like many
>>>>> Braille readers,
>>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
>>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
>>>>> still extremely
>>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
>>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: "This is like going
>>>>> back to the 1400s,
>>>>> before Gutenberg's printing press came on the scene," he said. "Only
>>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were
>>>>> the illiterate
>>>>> masses, the peasants."
>>>>>
>>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture.
>>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
>>>>> outlined in felt
>>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
>>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>>>>> studying a cipher
>>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
>>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
>>>>> the code so that
>>>>> it could be read more efficiently - each letter or punctuation symbol
>>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
>>>>> rows and two
>>>>> columns - and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>>>>> "knowledge," "people" and "Lord." Endowed with a reliable method of
>>>>> written communication
>>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
>>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
>>>>> and spiritual
>>>>> savior. With his "godlike courage," Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
>>>>> a "firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
>>>>> from hopeless
>>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal."
>>>>>
>>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but
>>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>>>>> innocent and malleable,
>>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
>>>>> his 1933 book, "The
>>>>> Blind in School and Society," the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
>>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
>>>>> assimilated into
>>>>> the sighted world would become lost in "verbal unreality." At some
>>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
>>>>> light because,
>>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>>>>> blind children as
>>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>>>>> "look," "touch" and "see." And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>>>>> misguided in his argument
>>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series
>>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>>>>> blind are not
>>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>>>>> in the parts of
>>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
>>>>>
>>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
>>>>> Braille is essential for blind children's cognitive development, as
>>>>> the visual cortex
>>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain's plasticity,
>>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading -
>>>>> whether the information
>>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina - is inherently better than
>>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
>>>>> of the brain is
>>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>>>>> found that blind subjects
>>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>>>>> memory
>>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by
>>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
>>>>> brains.
>>>>>
>>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
>>>>> wired for print literacy.
>>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
>>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>>>>> activity of reading
>>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
>>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>>>>> illiterate former
>>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their
>>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares
>>>>> 20 adults
>>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
>>>>> not yet begun it. In
>>>>> M.R.I.
>>>>>  scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
>>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
>>>>> and more white
>>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in
>>>>> dyslexics, and the study
>>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren't the cause of their
>>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
>>>>>
>>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
>>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
>>>>> debate. In moving
>>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
>>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural - a loss much harder to
>>>>> avoid. In one of
>>>>> the few studies of blind people's prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
>>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent,
>>>>> a teacher of
>>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn't
>>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
>>>>> listening to their
>>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
>>>>> character named Mark who had "sleep bombs":
>>>>>
>>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
>>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
>>>>> his bed sleeping
>>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
>>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
>>>>>
>>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
>>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>>>>> societies think differently
>>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said - the
>>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them -
>>>>> transformed the shape
>>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
>>>>> readers as disorganized, "as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
>>>>> container, shaken
>>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table." The
>>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>>>>> emerging in the
>>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>>>>> concluded, "It just doesn't seem to reflect the qualities of organized
>>>>> sequence and complex
>>>>> thought that we value in a literate society."
>>>>>
>>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
>>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
>>>>> blind people makes
>>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system - so that blind people would
>>>>> no longer be
>>>>> "despised or patronized by condescending sighted people," as he put it
>>>>> - there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>>>>> moral dimension
>>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
>>>>> culture seen as primitive
>>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
>>>>> Britain, are now
>>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
>>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia,
>>>>> told me that he has heard this described as "one of the advantages of
>>>>> being poor."
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>>>>> blindness that it has assumed
>>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
>>>>> try to read print - very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
>>>>> from their
>>>>> faces - are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
>>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
>>>>> for the blind.
>>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille
>>>>> to
>>>>> Abraham Lincoln
>>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra "listening is not literacy"
>>>>> repeated everywhere,
>>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school
>>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>>>>> children who don't
>>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that "happily
>>>>> ever after" is made up of three separate words.
>>>>>
>>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
>>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner
>>>>> of the Rehabilitation
>>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
>>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>>>>> reading skills. "I
>>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn't until two months ago that I
>>>>> realized that 'dissent,' to disagree, is different than 'descent,' to
>>>>> lower something,"
>>>>> he told me. "I'm functionally illiterate. People say, 'Oh, no, you're
>>>>> not.' Yes, I am. I'm sorry about it, but I'm not embarrassed to admit
>>>>> it."
>>>>>
>>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>>>>> David A. Paterson
>>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help
>>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
>>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
>>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every
>>>>> morning. (He
>>>>> calls himself "overassimilated" and told me that as a child he was
>>>>> "mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I'm
>>>>> not really supposed
>>>>> to be blind.") Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend
>>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
>>>>> blind person
>>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
>>>>>
>>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
>>>>> to be employed as
>>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn't know Braille were
>>>>> sometimes made
>>>>> to feel like outsiders. "There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
>>>>> from the older guard," James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>>>>> text-to-speech
>>>>> software, told me. "If we could live in our own little Braille world,
>>>>> then that'd be perfect," he added. "But we live in a visual world."
>>>>>
>>>>> When deaf people began getting
>>>>> cochlear implants
>>>>>  in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
>>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way - as
>>>>> an identity
>>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities,
>>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people's sense of what is
>>>>> physically natural,
>>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until "fixed." Arielle
>>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>>>>> since birth, told me that
>>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
>>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
>>>>> photographs of
>>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>>>>> vision like that, as "just another piece of technology."
>>>>>
>>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability - the extent to which you
>>>>> are viewed as ignorant
>>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent - determined largely by your
>>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
>>>>> designed to function
>>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
>>>>> once it has been digitized,
>>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
>>>>> for many blind people
>>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
>>>>> members recited to
>>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
>>>>>
>>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
>>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>>>>> Times.
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>>> before us;
>>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>>> past and future generations,
>>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>>> done, and
>>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>
>>
>>--
>>The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>
>>
>>"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>before us;
>>if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>past and future generations,
>>then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>done, and
>>usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>nabs-l mailing list
>>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
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>
> _______________________________________________
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> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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> nabs-l:
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>


-- 
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
before us;
if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
past and future generations,
then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
done, and
usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama

_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
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http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
nabs-l:
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From dsmithnfb at gmail.com  Wed Jan  6 22:19:16 2010
From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 14:19:16 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
	town?
In-Reply-To: <409c235c1001061410pa6cca18u138bb8ffd68cde01@mail.gmail.com>
References: <20100106163121.2032.34938@web2.serotek.com>
	<45D20DE8-10AE-4BB8-93C6-755AF03F0209@gmail.com>
	<4b44d9ea.1602be0a.61ba.ffffb1b6@mx.google.com>
	<409c235c1001061404y486fc473jf105ba04e1b042d5@mail.gmail.com>
	<409c235c1001061410pa6cca18u138bb8ffd68cde01@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <409c235c1001061419r59f23229m476a1fb757820fd9@mail.gmail.com>

(sorry about  the early send)...   there are people who don't know how
 to read and are ashamed to admit it. because in society we tend to
look down upon someone  with a "deficiency"  when  we might be better
served to support. To me, it's as much about what we don't say  when
we trumpet the saying "braille readers are leaders" and  take the
stance we do.  Our aim as an organization is to secure better
education and  the aquisition of braille skills, and this is
wonderful, but sometimes it sounds as if we do look down upon.  If
this is so it's unfortunate to see people who have generally belooked
down upon do the same to members of it's own community.
  call it me thinking out loud but just figured I would share some of
my thoughts with you. Best,
  Darian

On 1/6/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
> I do agree with Briley's  stated  opinion   that I don't think it's
> Harsh to expect anybody at all to know how to read. But  there are
> many people (both blind and sighted) that
>
> On 1/6/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>> personally, I find validity and what everybody  has said.
>>  However I do think it's rather short- sighted to say that  it's more
>> essential to use one medium over another.  I think the beauty of the
>> cross-section  of individuals in the NFB and their degree of success
>> using different alternitive techniques speaks to how it's probably not
>> the best thing to say that one  particular skill  will make you
>> successful.  Are there individuals (sighted and blind alike) that may
>> not know  how to read very well, yet still hold jobs?   Indeed there
>> are.   Consider for a moment the idea of saying that "Cane users are
>> leaders".  Like  braille readers, are there successful cane travelers?
>>  Yes.  That said, are there  people who don't use canes and are just
>> as successful?  Yes.   So, what then determines success?    Do I think
>> Braille should be offered as anoption for those who want it? I
>> absolutely do.   But, I wouldn't want to see it forced or
>> peer-pressured.  The main thing is, can somebody read? can they
>> survive?  Can they be successful as they see it?  In much the same way
>> as I view braille I view the ability to travel; can one get from
>> point A to point B? can they do so without putting other people around
>> them in a  position where they feel they have to take care of   the
>> blind individual?  The end  result I would like is to see  a high
>> level of education for blind people, and the option for the blind
>> person to take it.  I won't judge  the blind person who doesn't want
>> to read braille nor the blind person who wants to(nor am I suggesting
>> that anybody would ),but what i will do is fight for either to have
>> the  choice to access  whatever  medium they like.
>>  Respectfully,
>>   Darian
>>
>> On 1/6/10, Liz Bottner <liz.bottner at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I'm with Jedi and Briley on this issue. Harsh? Perhaps, but it is what
>>> it
>>> is.
>>>
>>> Liz
>>>
>>> email:
>>> liz.bottner at gmail.com
>>> Visit my livejournal:
>>> http://unsilenceddream.livejournal.com
>>> Follow me on Twitter:
>>> http://twitter.com/lizbot
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>
>>
>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>> before us;
>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>> past and future generations,
>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>> done, and
>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>
>
>
> --
> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>
>
> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
> before us;
> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
> past and future generations,
> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
> done, and
> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>


-- 
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
before us;
if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
past and future generations,
then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
done, and
usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama


From davidb521 at gmail.com  Wed Jan  6 22:47:16 2010
From: davidb521 at gmail.com (David)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 16:47:16 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Washington Seminar
In-Reply-To: <144BBD32E57C5045B736FBC8D447D0EC02635384@blindmail.BISM.COM>
Message-ID: <4b451300.0807c00a.30e6.45c6@mx.google.com>

The student leadership seminar is January 8-10. I'm very excited about
attending.
David

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Amy Phelps
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 4:19 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: [nabs-l] Washington Seminar

When is the student seminar? 

Warm regards, 
Amy C. Phelps  
Amy C. Phelps, CRC, NOMC
Director of Rehabilitation Services 

Phone: 410-737-2642
Mobile: 410-274-1647
E-mail: aphelps at bism.org

"A frog in a well, can only see its piece of the sky" ~Unknown



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-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Dennis Clark
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 4:18 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only
oneintown?

It would be helpful for me and I think most readers if those discussing
Braille could talk a little about what they do for a living and how Braille
is an integral part of their job.  The woman discussed in the article is the
head of a New York Stock Brokerage firm and as such is earning several
million dollars per year and therefore does not need my advice about Braille
or anything else.  Her accomplishments greatly exceed mine by quite a lot
and for me to advise or criticize her would require an almost unimaginable
level of arrogance.  My advice to all those earning seven figure salaries is
keep on doing what your doing because it is working great! For the rest of
us earning 4 or 5 digit salaries, it would be interesting to hear what you
do for a living and how you use Braille in your work, and what you would not
be able to do in your job without Braille.
Warmest regards,
Dennis


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Darian Smith" <dsmithnfb at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 10:07 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one 
intown?


Joseph,

 With the advant of and advances in  digital technologies  would one
not argue that people are  actually more likely to be employed because
access to information is  better than it was even five years ago?
  can it  be said that the blind who knnow braille are superior to the
blind who arn't? if so, who makes this determination?
  Respectfully,
  Darian


On 1/6/10, T. Joseph Carter <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
> Darian,
>
> What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
> for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and teachers the
> importance of Braille education.
>
> Joseph
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>>I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate  focused
>>upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
>>   What does this  make those who arn't very good braille readers,
>>don't want to know, or  don't know braille?
>>
>> Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille readers?
>>  respectfullly,
>>  Darian
>>
>>On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi:
>>>
>>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.
>>>
>>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
>>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
>>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
>>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
>>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
>>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
>>> display.
>>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
>>> as I should.
>>>
>>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
>>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
>>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.
>>>
>>> Braille readers are leaders!
>>>
>>> Kerri+
>>>
>>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
>>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>>>> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
>>>> leaders, they say.
>>>> Beth
>>>>
>>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> This
>>>>> Listening to Braille
>>>>>
>>>>> By RACHEL AVIV
>>>>>
>>>>> Published: December 30, 2009
>>>>>
>>>>> AT 4 O'CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
>>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
>>>>> voice, and she
>>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
>>>>> Financial Times
>>>>> to her while she uses her computer's text-to-speech system to play The
>>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the
>>>>> magazine.
>>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
>>>>> poring over the
>>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>>>>> does not use Braille. "Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
>>>>> from my finger to
>>>>> my brain," she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>>>>> doesn't think of a
>>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as "a stop on the way
>>>>> before continuing." This, she says, is the future of reading for the
>>>>> blind. "Literacy
>>>>> evolves," she told me. "When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn't even have radio. At that time,
>>>>> blindness
>>>>>  was a disability. Now it's just a minor, minor impairment."
>>>>>
>>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
>>>>> the written word.
>>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>>>>> "tribal and oral pattern." But the decline of written language has
>>>>> become a reality for
>>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>>>>> learning to spell in her youth - she writes by dictation - she says
>>>>> she thinks that
>>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>>>>> "It's an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should
>>>>> be abolished,"
>>>>> she told me. "It's just not needed today."
>>>>>
>>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
>>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
>>>>> house in Boston,
>>>>> printed the
>>>>> Harry Potter
>>>>>  series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
>>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
>>>>> $1,000 and there's
>>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
>>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>>>>> computer-screen-reading software.
>>>>>
>>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
>>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
>>>>> of the 1.3 million
>>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>>>>> low as 1 in 10,
>>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
>>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has "too much sight"
>>>>> for Braille
>>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades - in
>>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
>>>>> of premature
>>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for
>>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
>>>>> has inspired
>>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. "What we're
>>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able - and
>>>>> illiterate," Jim
>>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
>>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. "We stopped teaching our
>>>>> nation's blind children
>>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their
>>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
>>>>> learn the
>>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language."
>>>>>
>>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
>>>>> visually impaired
>>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read;
>>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
>>>>> read the individual
>>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>>>>> educators.
>>>>>
>>>>> "If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
>>>>> mind is limited," Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>>>>> Access Journal, told
>>>>> me. "You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can't feel
>>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone." Like many
>>>>> Braille readers,
>>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
>>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
>>>>> still extremely
>>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
>>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: "This is like going
>>>>> back to the 1400s,
>>>>> before Gutenberg's printing press came on the scene," he said. "Only
>>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were
>>>>> the illiterate
>>>>> masses, the peasants."
>>>>>
>>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture.
>>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
>>>>> outlined in felt
>>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
>>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>>>>> studying a cipher
>>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
>>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
>>>>> the code so that
>>>>> it could be read more efficiently - each letter or punctuation symbol
>>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
>>>>> rows and two
>>>>> columns - and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>>>>> "knowledge," "people" and "Lord." Endowed with a reliable method of
>>>>> written communication
>>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
>>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
>>>>> and spiritual
>>>>> savior. With his "godlike courage," Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
>>>>> a "firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
>>>>> from hopeless
>>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal."
>>>>>
>>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but
>>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>>>>> innocent and malleable,
>>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
>>>>> his 1933 book, "The
>>>>> Blind in School and Society," the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
>>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
>>>>> assimilated into
>>>>> the sighted world would become lost in "verbal unreality." At some
>>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
>>>>> light because,
>>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>>>>> blind children as
>>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>>>>> "look," "touch" and "see." And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>>>>> misguided in his argument
>>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series
>>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>>>>> blind are not
>>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>>>>> in the parts of
>>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
>>>>>
>>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
>>>>> Braille is essential for blind children's cognitive development, as
>>>>> the visual cortex
>>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain's plasticity,
>>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading -
>>>>> whether the information
>>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina - is inherently better than
>>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
>>>>> of the brain is
>>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>>>>> found that blind subjects
>>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>>>>> memory
>>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by
>>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
>>>>> brains.
>>>>>
>>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
>>>>> wired for print literacy.
>>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
>>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>>>>> activity of reading
>>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
>>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>>>>> illiterate former
>>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their
>>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares
>>>>> 20 adults
>>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
>>>>> not yet begun it. In
>>>>> M.R.I.
>>>>>  scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
>>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
>>>>> and more white
>>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in
>>>>> dyslexics, and the study
>>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren't the cause of their
>>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
>>>>>
>>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
>>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
>>>>> debate. In moving
>>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
>>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural - a loss much harder to
>>>>> avoid. In one of
>>>>> the few studies of blind people's prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
>>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent,
>>>>> a teacher of
>>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn't
>>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
>>>>> listening to their
>>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
>>>>> character named Mark who had "sleep bombs":
>>>>>
>>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
>>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
>>>>> his bed sleeping
>>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
>>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
>>>>>
>>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
>>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>>>>> societies think differently
>>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said - the
>>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them -
>>>>> transformed the shape
>>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
>>>>> readers as disorganized, "as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
>>>>> container, shaken
>>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table." The
>>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>>>>> emerging in the
>>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>>>>> concluded, "It just doesn't seem to reflect the qualities of organized
>>>>> sequence and complex
>>>>> thought that we value in a literate society."
>>>>>
>>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
>>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
>>>>> blind people makes
>>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system - so that blind people would
>>>>> no longer be
>>>>> "despised or patronized by condescending sighted people," as he put it
>>>>> - there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>>>>> moral dimension
>>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
>>>>> culture seen as primitive
>>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
>>>>> Britain, are now
>>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
>>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia,
>>>>> told me that he has heard this described as "one of the advantages of
>>>>> being poor."
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>>>>> blindness that it has assumed
>>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
>>>>> try to read print - very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
>>>>> from their
>>>>> faces - are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
>>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
>>>>> for the blind.
>>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille
>>>>> to
>>>>> Abraham Lincoln
>>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra "listening is not literacy"
>>>>> repeated everywhere,
>>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school
>>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>>>>> children who don't
>>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that "happily
>>>>> ever after" is made up of three separate words.
>>>>>
>>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
>>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner
>>>>> of the Rehabilitation
>>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
>>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>>>>> reading skills. "I
>>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn't until two months ago that I
>>>>> realized that 'dissent,' to disagree, is different than 'descent,' to
>>>>> lower something,"
>>>>> he told me. "I'm functionally illiterate. People say, 'Oh, no, you're
>>>>> not.' Yes, I am. I'm sorry about it, but I'm not embarrassed to admit
>>>>> it."
>>>>>
>>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>>>>> David A. Paterson
>>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help
>>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
>>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
>>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every
>>>>> morning. (He
>>>>> calls himself "overassimilated" and told me that as a child he was
>>>>> "mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I'm
>>>>> not really supposed
>>>>> to be blind.") Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend
>>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
>>>>> blind person
>>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
>>>>>
>>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
>>>>> to be employed as
>>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn't know Braille were
>>>>> sometimes made
>>>>> to feel like outsiders. "There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
>>>>> from the older guard," James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>>>>> text-to-speech
>>>>> software, told me. "If we could live in our own little Braille world,
>>>>> then that'd be perfect," he added. "But we live in a visual world."
>>>>>
>>>>> When deaf people began getting
>>>>> cochlear implants
>>>>>  in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
>>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way - as
>>>>> an identity
>>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities,
>>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people's sense of what is
>>>>> physically natural,
>>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until "fixed." Arielle
>>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>>>>> since birth, told me that
>>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
>>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
>>>>> photographs of
>>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>>>>> vision like that, as "just another piece of technology."
>>>>>
>>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability - the extent to which you
>>>>> are viewed as ignorant
>>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent - determined largely by your
>>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
>>>>> designed to function
>>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
>>>>> once it has been digitized,
>>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
>>>>> for many blind people
>>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
>>>>> members recited to
>>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
>>>>>
>>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
>>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>>>>> Times.
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>>> before us;
>>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>>> past and future generations,
>>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>>> done, and
>>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gm
ail.com
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
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>>>>
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om
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>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
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m
>>>
>>
>>
>>--
>>The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>
>>
>>"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>before us;
>>if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>past and future generations,
>>then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>done, and
>>usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>nabs-l mailing list
>>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40g
mail.com
>
> _______________________________________________
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> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.co
m
>


-- 
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
before us;
if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
past and future generations,
then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
done, and
usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama

_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
nabs-l:
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obal.net 


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m



From brileyp at gmail.com  Wed Jan  6 23:02:04 2010
From: brileyp at gmail.com (Briley Pollard)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 18:02:04 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
	town?
In-Reply-To: <409c235c1001061410pa6cca18u138bb8ffd68cde01@mail.gmail.com>
References: <20100106163121.2032.34938@web2.serotek.com>
	<45D20DE8-10AE-4BB8-93C6-755AF03F0209@gmail.com>
	<4b44d9ea.1602be0a.61ba.ffffb1b6@mx.google.com>
	<409c235c1001061404y486fc473jf105ba04e1b042d5@mail.gmail.com>
	<409c235c1001061410pa6cca18u138bb8ffd68cde01@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <BFE80D97-2603-4B73-ABD7-7CB9F6DE6870@gmail.com>

A valid question for you though, Darian, is would you respect a sighted person who "chose" not to learn print? Reading is taught in schools for a reason, and it shouldn't be optional for blind or sighted students. Yes, it should be a part of a skill set, and one skill shouldn't be more valuable than another. Everyone is going to use the skills to a different degree, but they should be required, particularly in an educational setting. Just like as a dog user I maintain my cane skills, (you never know when you might need them), someone should have braille in their toolbox, even if it is a backup for them. Technology fails, just like a dog may get sick or retire.

Briley
On Jan 6, 2010, at 5:10 PM, Darian Smith wrote:

> I do agree with Briley's  stated  opinion   that I don't think it's
> Harsh to expect anybody at all to know how to read. But  there are
> many people (both blind and sighted) that
> 
> On 1/6/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>> personally, I find validity and what everybody  has said.
>> However I do think it's rather short- sighted to say that  it's more
>> essential to use one medium over another.  I think the beauty of the
>> cross-section  of individuals in the NFB and their degree of success
>> using different alternitive techniques speaks to how it's probably not
>> the best thing to say that one  particular skill  will make you
>> successful.  Are there individuals (sighted and blind alike) that may
>> not know  how to read very well, yet still hold jobs?   Indeed there
>> are.   Consider for a moment the idea of saying that "Cane users are
>> leaders".  Like  braille readers, are there successful cane travelers?
>> Yes.  That said, are there  people who don't use canes and are just
>> as successful?  Yes.   So, what then determines success?    Do I think
>> Braille should be offered as anoption for those who want it? I
>> absolutely do.   But, I wouldn't want to see it forced or
>> peer-pressured.  The main thing is, can somebody read? can they
>> survive?  Can they be successful as they see it?  In much the same way
>> as I view braille I view the ability to travel; can one get from
>> point A to point B? can they do so without putting other people around
>> them in a  position where they feel they have to take care of   the
>> blind individual?  The end  result I would like is to see  a high
>> level of education for blind people, and the option for the blind
>> person to take it.  I won't judge  the blind person who doesn't want
>> to read braille nor the blind person who wants to(nor am I suggesting
>> that anybody would ),but what i will do is fight for either to have
>> the  choice to access  whatever  medium they like.
>> Respectfully,
>>  Darian
>> 
>> On 1/6/10, Liz Bottner <liz.bottner at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I'm with Jedi and Briley on this issue. Harsh? Perhaps, but it is what it
>>> is.
>>> 
>>> Liz
>>> 
>>> email:
>>> liz.bottner at gmail.com
>>> Visit my livejournal:
>>> http://unsilenceddream.livejournal.com
>>> Follow me on Twitter:
>>> http://twitter.com/lizbot
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>> 
>> 
>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>> before us;
>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>> past and future generations,
>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>> done, and
>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
> 
> 
> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
> before us;
> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
> past and future generations,
> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
> done, and
> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
> 
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com



From mworkman.lists at gmail.com  Wed Jan  6 23:30:22 2010
From: mworkman.lists at gmail.com (Marc Workman)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 16:30:22 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
	town?
In-Reply-To: <20100106215321.GF63360@yumi.bluecherry.net>
Message-ID: <LNEJJKLNICEECFDGEDGLOEBLFOAA.mworkman.lists@gmail.com>

I find this topic very interesting.

I suppose I am someone who advocates the learning and use of Braille, who thinks it is an important skill, but who almost never uses it.

I think at least two things are missing in this discussion.  First, there isn't much distinction being made between people who have never read print or Braille and those who have read print before going blind but haven't learned Braille.  Second, there are a lot of anecdotal claims being made without any concrete evidence.

As I said, I almost never use Braille.  In fact, I would barely classify myself as able to read Braille, but I did read print, all be it with some difficulty, up until the age of 20.  Am I illiterate since I can read neither print nor Braille? Did I lose my literacy as I lost my sight, or am I literate even though I can't read print anymore? I think my case and the many others that are similar suggest that the question of literacy is a little more complicated than some of the comments made thus far imply.

I agree that children need to be taught to read either using print or Braille.  If this isn't happening, it's a serious problem, but I'm not sure that Braille is as essential for someone who grew up reading print.  It's certainly a tremendous skill to possess, much like being capable of speaking three different languages, but it isn't essential for success.  I think this distinction between former print users and people who never read print is important and worth getting on the table.

Second, it's fine to speculate and relate your own experiences, but it would really help the discussion if there were some varified facts out there.  We can talk about the employment rate of Braille users, but does anyone have access to the actual studies that show that knowing Braille increases your employment prospects? Do these studies control for things like socio-economic status, age of onset of blindness, post-secondary education, and the myriad of other factors that affect employment prospects?  I have no idea.  Maybe they do, but perhaps they don't.

Again, you can point to this list as evidence of a decline in the writing skills of the blind, but I've graded dozens of essays in my role as a teaching assistant, and I don't think I could discern a definite difference between sighted and blind students.  If you want to see some pretty terrible writing, just read the comments posted to the average news story on any major news website.  Some will be written well; others will not.  This is all entirely anecdotal, and it means very little unless there are some studies to back it up.

It's an interesting discussion for sure, and it's typical of the thoughtful and important discussions that take place on this list.

Regards,

Marc

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org]On
Behalf Of T. Joseph Carter
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 2:53 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
in town?


Darian,

You can argue the maybes and possible futures.  TODAY, Braille is the 
difference between high employment and extremely low.

I'm going to be more harsh than even Jedi was and say that this list 
often demonstrates just how completely pathetic the language skills 
of those who communicate using primarily speech alone actually are.  
There are people on this list who cannot spell words at even the 
second grade level.  Some have no concept of even a sentence, let 
alone a paragraph.  As far as the world is concerned, they are 
illiterate.

Few indeed are the jobs for which complete illiteracy is not a 
factor.  Not only that, if you demonstrate the level of literacy 
sometimes evidenced on this list, you could be an absolute genius and 
the average ignorant sighted person is going to assume you're at the 
very least cognitively deficient.

At this time, we have a whole generation of blind people who have in 
large part grown up functionally illiterate.  They are suffering the 
consequences in that most are unemployed and beginning to come to the 
conclusion that they may in fact be unemployable.  The education 
system has completely failed these people, and it ought to inspire 
nothing short of rage at the notion that it should be allowed to 
continue.

Joseph

On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 10:07:31AM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>Joseph,
>
> With the advant of and advances in  digital technologies  would one
>not argue that people are  actually more likely to be employed because
>access to information is  better than it was even five years ago?
>  can it  be said that the blind who knnow braille are superior to the
>blind who arn't? if so, who makes this determination?
>  Respectfully,
>  Darian
>
>
>On 1/6/10, T. Joseph Carter <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Darian,
>>
>> What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
>> for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and teachers the
>> importance of Braille education.
>>
>> Joseph
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>>>I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate  focused
>>>upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
>>>   What does this  make those who arn't very good braille readers,
>>>don't want to know, or  don't know braille?
>>>
>>> Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille readers?
>>>  respectfullly,
>>>  Darian
>>>
>>>On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Hi:
>>>>
>>>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.
>>>>
>>>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
>>>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
>>>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
>>>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
>>>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
>>>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
>>>> display.
>>>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
>>>> as I should.
>>>>
>>>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
>>>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
>>>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.
>>>>
>>>> Braille readers are leaders!
>>>>
>>>> Kerri+
>>>>
>>>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
>>>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>>>>> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
>>>>> leaders, they say.
>>>>> Beth
>>>>>
>>>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> This
>>>>>> Listening to Braille
>>>>>>
>>>>>> By RACHEL AVIV
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Published: December 30, 2009
>>>>>>
>>>>>> AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
>>>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
>>>>>> voice, and she
>>>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>>>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
>>>>>> Financial Times
>>>>>> to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The
>>>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the
>>>>>> magazine.
>>>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>>>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
>>>>>> poring over the
>>>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>>>>>> does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
>>>>>> from my finger to
>>>>>> my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>>>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>>>>>> doesn’t think of a
>>>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way
>>>>>> before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the
>>>>>> blind. “Literacy
>>>>>> evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>>>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time,
>>>>>> blindness
>>>>>>  was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>>>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
>>>>>> the written word.
>>>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>>>>>> “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has
>>>>>> become a reality for
>>>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>>>>>> learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says
>>>>>> she thinks that
>>>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>>>>>> “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should
>>>>>> be abolished,”
>>>>>> she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
>>>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
>>>>>> house in Boston,
>>>>>> printed the
>>>>>> Harry Potter
>>>>>>  series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
>>>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
>>>>>> $1,000 and there’s
>>>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
>>>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
>>>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
>>>>>> of the 1.3 million
>>>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>>>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>>>>>> low as 1 in 10,
>>>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
>>>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight”
>>>>>> for Braille
>>>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in
>>>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
>>>>>> of premature
>>>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for
>>>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
>>>>>> has inspired
>>>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re
>>>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and
>>>>>> illiterate,” Jim
>>>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
>>>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our
>>>>>> nation’s blind children
>>>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their
>>>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
>>>>>> learn the
>>>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>>>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
>>>>>> visually impaired
>>>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read;
>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
>>>>>> read the individual
>>>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>>>>>> educators.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> “If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
>>>>>> mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>>>>>> Access Journal, told
>>>>>> me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel
>>>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many
>>>>>> Braille readers,
>>>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
>>>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
>>>>>> still extremely
>>>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
>>>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going
>>>>>> back to the 1400s,
>>>>>> before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only
>>>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were
>>>>>> the illiterate
>>>>>> masses, the peasants.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture.
>>>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
>>>>>> outlined in felt
>>>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
>>>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>>>>>> studying a cipher
>>>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
>>>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
>>>>>> the code so that
>>>>>> it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol
>>>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
>>>>>> rows and two
>>>>>> columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>>>>>> “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of
>>>>>> written communication
>>>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
>>>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
>>>>>> and spiritual
>>>>>> savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
>>>>>> a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
>>>>>> from hopeless
>>>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but
>>>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>>>>>> innocent and malleable,
>>>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>>>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
>>>>>> his 1933 book, “The
>>>>>> Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
>>>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
>>>>>> assimilated into
>>>>>> the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some
>>>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
>>>>>> light because,
>>>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>>>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>>>>>> blind children as
>>>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>>>>>> “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>>>>>> misguided in his argument
>>>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series
>>>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>>>>>> blind are not
>>>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>>>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>>>>>> in the parts of
>>>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
>>>>>> Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as
>>>>>> the visual cortex
>>>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity,
>>>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading —
>>>>>> whether the information
>>>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than
>>>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
>>>>>> of the brain is
>>>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>>>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>>>>>> found that blind subjects
>>>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>>>>>> memory
>>>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by
>>>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
>>>>>> brains.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>>>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
>>>>>> wired for print literacy.
>>>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
>>>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>>>>>> activity of reading
>>>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
>>>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>>>>>> illiterate former
>>>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their
>>>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares
>>>>>> 20 adults
>>>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
>>>>>> not yet begun it. In
>>>>>> M.R.I.
>>>>>>  scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
>>>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
>>>>>> and more white
>>>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>>>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in
>>>>>> dyslexics, and the study
>>>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their
>>>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
>>>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
>>>>>> debate. In moving
>>>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
>>>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to
>>>>>> avoid. In one of
>>>>>> the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
>>>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent,
>>>>>> a teacher of
>>>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t
>>>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
>>>>>> listening to their
>>>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
>>>>>> character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
>>>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
>>>>>> his bed sleeping
>>>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
>>>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
>>>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>>>>>> societies think differently
>>>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the
>>>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them —
>>>>>> transformed the shape
>>>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
>>>>>> readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
>>>>>> container, shaken
>>>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The
>>>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>>>>>> emerging in the
>>>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>>>>>> concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized
>>>>>> sequence and complex
>>>>>> thought that we value in a literate society.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
>>>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
>>>>>> blind people makes
>>>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>>>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people would
>>>>>> no longer be
>>>>>> “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put it
>>>>>> — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>>>>>> moral dimension
>>>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>>>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
>>>>>> culture seen as primitive
>>>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>>>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
>>>>>> Britain, are now
>>>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
>>>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>>>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>>>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia,
>>>>>> told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of
>>>>>> being poor.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>>>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>>>>>> blindness that it has assumed
>>>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
>>>>>> try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
>>>>>> from their
>>>>>> faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
>>>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
>>>>>> for the blind.
>>>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille
>>>>>> to
>>>>>> Abraham Lincoln
>>>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>>>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy”
>>>>>> repeated everywhere,
>>>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school
>>>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>>>>>> children who don’t
>>>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily
>>>>>> ever after” is made up of three separate words.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
>>>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner
>>>>>> of the Rehabilitation
>>>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
>>>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>>>>>> reading skills. “I
>>>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I
>>>>>> realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to
>>>>>> lower something,”
>>>>>> he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re
>>>>>> not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit
>>>>>> it.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>>>>>> David A. Paterson
>>>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help
>>>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>>>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
>>>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
>>>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every
>>>>>> morning. (He
>>>>>> calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was
>>>>>> “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m
>>>>>> not really supposed
>>>>>> to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend
>>>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
>>>>>> blind person
>>>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>>>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
>>>>>> to be employed as
>>>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>>>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were
>>>>>> sometimes made
>>>>>> to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
>>>>>> from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>>>>>> text-to-speech
>>>>>> software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world,
>>>>>> then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> When deaf people began getting
>>>>>> cochlear implants
>>>>>>  in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
>>>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as
>>>>>> an identity
>>>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities,
>>>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is
>>>>>> physically natural,
>>>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle
>>>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>>>>>> since birth, told me that
>>>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
>>>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
>>>>>> photographs of
>>>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>>>>>> vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>>>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you
>>>>>> are viewed as ignorant
>>>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your
>>>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
>>>>>> designed to function
>>>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>>>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
>>>>>> once it has been digitized,
>>>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>>>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
>>>>>> for many blind people
>>>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>>>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
>>>>>> members recited to
>>>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>>>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
>>>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>>>>>> Times.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> --
>>>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>>>> before us;
>>>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>>>> past and future generations,
>>>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>>>> done, and
>>>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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>>>>> nabs-l:
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>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>
>>>
>>>--
>>>The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>
>>>
>>>"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>before us;
>>>if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>past and future generations,
>>>then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>done, and
>>>usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>
>>>_______________________________________________
>>>nabs-l mailing list
>>>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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>>
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>>
>
>
>--
>The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>
>
>"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>before us;
>if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>past and future generations,
>then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>done, and
>usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>
>_______________________________________________
>nabs-l mailing list
>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
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From thebluesisloose at gmail.com  Wed Jan  6 23:30:49 2010
From: thebluesisloose at gmail.com (Beth)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 18:30:49 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
	town?
In-Reply-To: <20100106215321.GF63360@yumi.bluecherry.net>
References: <409c235c1001041459k20d160aeo96faa1d05e2241a1@mail.gmail.com>
	<4383d01d1001041555w619b636en31f036e8b2380a4b@mail.gmail.com>
	<e5a820711001041844h1c6bf4faw24b826f1777df07e@mail.gmail.com>
	<409c235c1001041940q2102a13em21b90591f17093fb@mail.gmail.com>
	<20100106103425.GB63360@yumi.bluecherry.net>
	<409c235c1001061007r1e1f82abg8f18f8255532007f@mail.gmail.com>
	<20100106215321.GF63360@yumi.bluecherry.net>
Message-ID: <4383d01d1001061530i622a671brd79926986966282f@mail.gmail.com>

I would have to wholeheartedly agree with Joseph.  I use Braille to
label stuff and read my planner and I happily use the Keysoft suite of
programs in my BrailleNote to collect people's phone numbers and even
keep track of stuff in databases.  I"m not so sure as to why people
would not want to use Braille.  But it's important to learn how to
read and write whether blind or sighted.  As far as I am concerned, I
am glad I learned Braille.  My accomplishments include winning 13thh
place in my county's spelling bee which was a result of, yep, Braille
education.
Beth

On 1/6/10, T. Joseph Carter <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
> Darian,
>
> You can argue the maybes and possible futures.  TODAY, Braille is the
> difference between high employment and extremely low.
>
> I'm going to be more harsh than even Jedi was and say that this list
> often demonstrates just how completely pathetic the language skills
> of those who communicate using primarily speech alone actually are.
> There are people on this list who cannot spell words at even the
> second grade level.  Some have no concept of even a sentence, let
> alone a paragraph.  As far as the world is concerned, they are
> illiterate.
>
> Few indeed are the jobs for which complete illiteracy is not a
> factor.  Not only that, if you demonstrate the level of literacy
> sometimes evidenced on this list, you could be an absolute genius and
> the average ignorant sighted person is going to assume you're at the
> very least cognitively deficient.
>
> At this time, we have a whole generation of blind people who have in
> large part grown up functionally illiterate.  They are suffering the
> consequences in that most are unemployed and beginning to come to the
> conclusion that they may in fact be unemployable.  The education
> system has completely failed these people, and it ought to inspire
> nothing short of rage at the notion that it should be allowed to
> continue.
>
> Joseph
>
> On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 10:07:31AM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>>Joseph,
>>
>> With the advant of and advances in  digital technologies  would one
>>not argue that people are  actually more likely to be employed because
>>access to information is  better than it was even five years ago?
>>  can it  be said that the blind who knnow braille are superior to the
>>blind who arn't? if so, who makes this determination?
>>  Respectfully,
>>  Darian
>>
>>
>>On 1/6/10, T. Joseph Carter <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Darian,
>>>
>>> What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
>>> for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and teachers the
>>> importance of Braille education.
>>>
>>> Joseph
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>>>>I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate  focused
>>>>upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
>>>>   What does this  make those who arn't very good braille readers,
>>>>don't want to know, or  don't know braille?
>>>>
>>>> Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille
>>>> readers?
>>>>  respectfullly,
>>>>  Darian
>>>>
>>>>On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> Hi:
>>>>>
>>>>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.
>>>>>
>>>>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
>>>>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
>>>>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
>>>>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
>>>>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
>>>>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
>>>>> display.
>>>>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
>>>>> as I should.
>>>>>
>>>>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
>>>>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
>>>>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.
>>>>>
>>>>> Braille readers are leaders!
>>>>>
>>>>> Kerri+
>>>>>
>>>>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
>>>>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>>>>>> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
>>>>>> leaders, they say.
>>>>>> Beth
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> This
>>>>>>> Listening to Braille
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> By RACHEL AVIV
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Published: December 30, 2009
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
>>>>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
>>>>>>> voice, and she
>>>>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>>>>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads
>>>>>>> The
>>>>>>> Financial Times
>>>>>>> to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play
>>>>>>> The
>>>>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to
>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>> magazine.
>>>>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>>>>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
>>>>>>> poring over the
>>>>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>>>>>>> does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
>>>>>>> from my finger to
>>>>>>> my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>>>>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>>>>>>> doesn’t think of a
>>>>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way
>>>>>>> before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the
>>>>>>> blind. “Literacy
>>>>>>> evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>>>>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that
>>>>>>> time,
>>>>>>> blindness
>>>>>>>  was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>>>>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
>>>>>>> the written word.
>>>>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>>>>>>> “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has
>>>>>>> become a reality for
>>>>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>>>>>>> learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says
>>>>>>> she thinks that
>>>>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>>>>>>> “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part
>>>>>>> should
>>>>>>> be abolished,”
>>>>>>> she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
>>>>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
>>>>>>> house in Boston,
>>>>>>> printed the
>>>>>>> Harry Potter
>>>>>>>  series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
>>>>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
>>>>>>> $1,000 and there’s
>>>>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
>>>>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
>>>>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
>>>>>>> of the 1.3 million
>>>>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>>>>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>>>>>>> low as 1 in 10,
>>>>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
>>>>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much
>>>>>>> sight”
>>>>>>> for Braille
>>>>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades —
>>>>>>> in
>>>>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
>>>>>>> of premature
>>>>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning
>>>>>>> for
>>>>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
>>>>>>> has inspired
>>>>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re
>>>>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and
>>>>>>> illiterate,” Jim
>>>>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
>>>>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our
>>>>>>> nation’s blind children
>>>>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on
>>>>>>> their
>>>>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
>>>>>>> learn the
>>>>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language.”
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>>>>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
>>>>>>> visually impaired
>>>>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to
>>>>>>> read;
>>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
>>>>>>> read the individual
>>>>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>>>>>>> educators.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> “If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
>>>>>>> mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>>>>>>> Access Journal, told
>>>>>>> me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t
>>>>>>> feel
>>>>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many
>>>>>>> Braille readers,
>>>>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
>>>>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
>>>>>>> still extremely
>>>>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
>>>>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going
>>>>>>> back to the 1400s,
>>>>>>> before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only
>>>>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there
>>>>>>> were
>>>>>>> the illiterate
>>>>>>> masses, the peasants.”
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral
>>>>>>> culture.
>>>>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
>>>>>>> outlined in felt
>>>>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
>>>>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>>>>>>> studying a cipher
>>>>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
>>>>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
>>>>>>> the code so that
>>>>>>> it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol
>>>>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
>>>>>>> rows and two
>>>>>>> columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>>>>>>> “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of
>>>>>>> written communication
>>>>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
>>>>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
>>>>>>> and spiritual
>>>>>>> savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
>>>>>>> a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
>>>>>>> from hopeless
>>>>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal.”
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight
>>>>>>> but
>>>>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>>>>>>> innocent and malleable,
>>>>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>>>>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
>>>>>>> his 1933 book, “The
>>>>>>> Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
>>>>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
>>>>>>> assimilated into
>>>>>>> the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some
>>>>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
>>>>>>> light because,
>>>>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>>>>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>>>>>>> blind children as
>>>>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>>>>>>> “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>>>>>>> misguided in his argument
>>>>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a
>>>>>>> series
>>>>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>>>>>>> blind are not
>>>>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>>>>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>>>>>>> in the parts of
>>>>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
>>>>>>> Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as
>>>>>>> the visual cortex
>>>>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s
>>>>>>> plasticity,
>>>>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading —
>>>>>>> whether the information
>>>>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than
>>>>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
>>>>>>> of the brain is
>>>>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>>>>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>>>>>>> found that blind subjects
>>>>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>>>>>>> memory
>>>>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested,
>>>>>>> by
>>>>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
>>>>>>> brains.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>>>>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
>>>>>>> wired for print literacy.
>>>>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
>>>>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>>>>>>> activity of reading
>>>>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
>>>>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>>>>>>> illiterate former
>>>>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned
>>>>>>> their
>>>>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras
>>>>>>> compares
>>>>>>> 20 adults
>>>>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
>>>>>>> not yet begun it. In
>>>>>>> M.R.I.
>>>>>>>  scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
>>>>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language
>>>>>>> processing,
>>>>>>> and more white
>>>>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>>>>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed
>>>>>>> in
>>>>>>> dyslexics, and the study
>>>>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their
>>>>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
>>>>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
>>>>>>> debate. In moving
>>>>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
>>>>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to
>>>>>>> avoid. In one of
>>>>>>> the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
>>>>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana
>>>>>>> Brent,
>>>>>>> a teacher of
>>>>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t
>>>>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
>>>>>>> listening to their
>>>>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
>>>>>>> character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was
>>>>>>> walking
>>>>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
>>>>>>> his bed sleeping
>>>>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
>>>>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
>>>>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>>>>>>> societies think differently
>>>>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the
>>>>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them —
>>>>>>> transformed the shape
>>>>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
>>>>>>> readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
>>>>>>> container, shaken
>>>>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.”
>>>>>>> The
>>>>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>>>>>>> emerging in the
>>>>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>>>>>>> concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of
>>>>>>> organized
>>>>>>> sequence and complex
>>>>>>> thought that we value in a literate society.”
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
>>>>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
>>>>>>> blind people makes
>>>>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>>>>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people
>>>>>>> would
>>>>>>> no longer be
>>>>>>> “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put
>>>>>>> it
>>>>>>> — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>>>>>>> moral dimension
>>>>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>>>>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
>>>>>>> culture seen as primitive
>>>>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>>>>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
>>>>>>> Britain, are now
>>>>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
>>>>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>>>>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>>>>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in
>>>>>>> Australia,
>>>>>>> told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of
>>>>>>> being poor.”
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>>>>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>>>>>>> blindness that it has assumed
>>>>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
>>>>>>> try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
>>>>>>> from their
>>>>>>> faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
>>>>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
>>>>>>> for the blind.
>>>>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis
>>>>>>> Braille
>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>> Abraham Lincoln
>>>>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>>>>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy”
>>>>>>> repeated everywhere,
>>>>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among
>>>>>>> middle-school
>>>>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>>>>>>> children who don’t
>>>>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that
>>>>>>> “happily
>>>>>>> ever after” is made up of three separate words.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
>>>>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as
>>>>>>> commissioner
>>>>>>> of the Rehabilitation
>>>>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
>>>>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>>>>>>> reading skills. “I
>>>>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I
>>>>>>> realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to
>>>>>>> lower something,”
>>>>>>> he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re
>>>>>>> not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit
>>>>>>> it.”
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>>>>>>> David A. Paterson
>>>>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the
>>>>>>> help
>>>>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>>>>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
>>>>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
>>>>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail
>>>>>>> every
>>>>>>> morning. (He
>>>>>>> calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was
>>>>>>> “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m
>>>>>>> not really supposed
>>>>>>> to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers
>>>>>>> tend
>>>>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
>>>>>>> blind person
>>>>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>>>>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
>>>>>>> to be employed as
>>>>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>>>>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were
>>>>>>> sometimes made
>>>>>>> to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
>>>>>>> from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>>>>>>> text-to-speech
>>>>>>> software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world,
>>>>>>> then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> When deaf people began getting
>>>>>>> cochlear implants
>>>>>>>  in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
>>>>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as
>>>>>>> an identity
>>>>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many
>>>>>>> disabilities,
>>>>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is
>>>>>>> physically natural,
>>>>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle
>>>>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>>>>>>> since birth, told me that
>>>>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
>>>>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
>>>>>>> photographs of
>>>>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>>>>>>> vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>>>>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you
>>>>>>> are viewed as ignorant
>>>>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your
>>>>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
>>>>>>> designed to function
>>>>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>>>>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
>>>>>>> once it has been digitized,
>>>>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>>>>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
>>>>>>> for many blind people
>>>>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>>>>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
>>>>>>> members recited to
>>>>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>>>>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
>>>>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>>>>>>> Times.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide
>>>>>>> teacher
>>>>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel
>>>>>>> destiny
>>>>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>>>>> before us;
>>>>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>>>>> past and future generations,
>>>>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work
>>>>>>> with
>>>>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to
>>>>>>> be
>>>>>>> done, and
>>>>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>--
>>>>The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>>recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>>individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>>help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>>www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>>calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>>before us;
>>>>if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>>slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>>past and future generations,
>>>>then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>>you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>>done, and
>>>>usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>>
>>>>_______________________________________________
>>>>nabs-l mailing list
>>>>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40gmail.com
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>>
>>--
>>The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>
>>
>>"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>before us;
>>if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>past and future generations,
>>then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>done, and
>>usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>nabs-l mailing list
>>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40gmail.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
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>


From albertyoo1 at hotmail.com  Wed Jan  6 23:39:44 2010
From: albertyoo1 at hotmail.com (Albert Yoo)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 18:39:44 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Washington Seminar
In-Reply-To: <144BBD32E57C5045B736FBC8D447D0EC02635384@blindmail.BISM.COM>
References: <409c235c1001041459k20d160aeo96faa1d05e2241a1@mail.gmail.com><4383d01d1001041555w619b636en31f036e8b2380a4b@mail.gmail.com><e5a820711001041844h1c6bf4faw24b826f1777df07e@mail.gmail.com><409c235c1001041940q2102a13em21b90591f17093fb@mail.gmail.com><20100106103425.GB63360@yumi.bluecherry.net><409c235c1001061007r1e1f82abg8f18f8255532007f@mail.gmail.com>,
	<01a001ca8f15$c0786000$6601a8c0@server>,
	<144BBD32E57C5045B736FBC8D447D0EC02635384@blindmail.BISM.COM>
Message-ID: <BAY139-W235F1B7D6F4130E4299D0F8B720@phx.gbl>


Sunday February 1 
 
> Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 17:18:42 -0500
> From: aphelps at BISM.org
> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> Subject: [nabs-l] Washington Seminar
> 
> When is the student seminar? 
> 
> Warm regards, 
> Amy C. Phelps  
> Amy C. Phelps, CRC, NOMC
> Director of Rehabilitation Services 
> 
> Phone: 410-737-2642
> Mobile: 410-274-1647
> E-mail: aphelps at bism.org
> 
> "A frog in a well, can only see its piece of the sky" ~Unknown
> 
> 
> 
> Confidentiality Note:  The information contained in this message may be privileged and confidential and protected from disclosure. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, or an employee or agent responsible for delivering this message to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to the message and deleting it from your computer.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Dennis Clark
> Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 4:18 PM
> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only oneintown?
> 
> It would be helpful for me and I think most readers if those discussing
> Braille could talk a little about what they do for a living and how Braille
> is an integral part of their job. The woman discussed in the article is the
> head of a New York Stock Brokerage firm and as such is earning several
> million dollars per year and therefore does not need my advice about Braille
> or anything else. Her accomplishments greatly exceed mine by quite a lot
> and for me to advise or criticize her would require an almost unimaginable
> level of arrogance. My advice to all those earning seven figure salaries is
> keep on doing what your doing because it is working great! For the rest of
> us earning 4 or 5 digit salaries, it would be interesting to hear what you
> do for a living and how you use Braille in your work, and what you would not
> be able to do in your job without Braille.
> Warmest regards,
> Dennis
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Darian Smith" <dsmithnfb at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 10:07 AM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one 
> intown?
> 
> 
> Joseph,
> 
> With the advant of and advances in digital technologies would one
> not argue that people are actually more likely to be employed because
> access to information is better than it was even five years ago?
> can it be said that the blind who knnow braille are superior to the
> blind who arn't? if so, who makes this determination?
> Respectfully,
> Darian
> 
> 
> On 1/6/10, T. Joseph Carter <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Darian,
> >
> > What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
> > for one thing. That alone should convince parents and teachers the
> > importance of Braille education.
> >
> > Joseph
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
> >>I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate focused
> >>upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
> >> What does this make those who arn't very good braille readers,
> >>don't want to know, or don't know braille?
> >>
> >> Do you feel the Organization (the nfb) frowns upon non-braille readers?
> >> respectfullly,
> >> Darian
> >>
> >>On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> Hi:
> >>>
> >>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.
> >>>
> >>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
> >>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
> >>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
> >>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
> >>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
> >>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
> >>> display.
> >>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
> >>> as I should.
> >>>
> >>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
> >>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
> >>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.
> >>>
> >>> Braille readers are leaders!
> >>>
> >>> Kerri+
> >>>
> >>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>> Wow. I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
> >>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
> >>>> today's children are not taught that way. Braille readers are
> >>>> leaders, they say.
> >>>> Beth
> >>>>
> >>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>>> This
> >>>>> Listening to Braille
> >>>>>
> >>>>> By RACHEL AVIV
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Published: December 30, 2009
> >>>>>
> >>>>> AT 4 O'CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
> >>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
> >>>>> voice, and she
> >>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
> >>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
> >>>>> Financial Times
> >>>>> to her while she uses her computer's text-to-speech system to play The
> >>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the
> >>>>> magazine.
> >>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
> >>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
> >>>>> poring over the
> >>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
> >>>>> does not use Braille. "Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
> >>>>> from my finger to
> >>>>> my brain," she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
> >>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
> >>>>> doesn't think of a
> >>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as "a stop on the way
> >>>>> before continuing." This, she says, is the future of reading for the
> >>>>> blind. "Literacy
> >>>>> evolves," she told me. "When Braille was invented, in the 19th
> >>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn't even have radio. At that time,
> >>>>> blindness
> >>>>> was a disability. Now it's just a minor, minor impairment."
> >>>>>
> >>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
> >>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
> >>>>> the written word.
> >>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
> >>>>> "tribal and oral pattern." But the decline of written language has
> >>>>> become a reality for
> >>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
> >>>>> learning to spell in her youth - she writes by dictation - she says
> >>>>> she thinks that
> >>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
> >>>>> "It's an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should
> >>>>> be abolished,"
> >>>>> she told me. "It's just not needed today."
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
> >>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
> >>>>> house in Boston,
> >>>>> printed the
> >>>>> Harry Potter
> >>>>> series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
> >>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
> >>>>> $1,000 and there's
> >>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
> >>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
> >>>>> computer-screen-reading software.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
> >>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
> >>>>> of the 1.3 million
> >>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
> >>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
> >>>>> low as 1 in 10,
> >>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
> >>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has "too much sight"
> >>>>> for Braille
> >>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades - in
> >>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
> >>>>> of premature
> >>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for
> >>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
> >>>>> has inspired
> >>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. "What we're
> >>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able - and
> >>>>> illiterate," Jim
> >>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
> >>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. "We stopped teaching our
> >>>>> nation's blind children
> >>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their
> >>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
> >>>>> learn the
> >>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language."
> >>>>>
> >>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
> >>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
> >>>>> visually impaired
> >>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read;
> >>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
> >>>>> read the individual
> >>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
> >>>>> educators.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> "If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
> >>>>> mind is limited," Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
> >>>>> Access Journal, told
> >>>>> me. "You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can't feel
> >>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone." Like many
> >>>>> Braille readers,
> >>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
> >>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
> >>>>> still extremely
> >>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
> >>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: "This is like going
> >>>>> back to the 1400s,
> >>>>> before Gutenberg's printing press came on the scene," he said. "Only
> >>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were
> >>>>> the illiterate
> >>>>> masses, the peasants."
> >>>>>
> >>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture.
> >>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
> >>>>> outlined in felt
> >>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
> >>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
> >>>>> studying a cipher
> >>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
> >>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
> >>>>> the code so that
> >>>>> it could be read more efficiently - each letter or punctuation symbol
> >>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
> >>>>> rows and two
> >>>>> columns - and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
> >>>>> "knowledge," "people" and "Lord." Endowed with a reliable method of
> >>>>> written communication
> >>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
> >>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
> >>>>> and spiritual
> >>>>> savior. With his "godlike courage," Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
> >>>>> a "firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
> >>>>> from hopeless
> >>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal."
> >>>>>
> >>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but
> >>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
> >>>>> innocent and malleable,
> >>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
> >>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
> >>>>> his 1933 book, "The
> >>>>> Blind in School and Society," the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
> >>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
> >>>>> assimilated into
> >>>>> the sighted world would become lost in "verbal unreality." At some
> >>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
> >>>>> light because,
> >>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
> >>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
> >>>>> blind children as
> >>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
> >>>>> "look," "touch" and "see." And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
> >>>>> misguided in his argument
> >>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series
> >>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
> >>>>> blind are not
> >>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
> >>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
> >>>>> in the parts of
> >>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
> >>>>> Braille is essential for blind children's cognitive development, as
> >>>>> the visual cortex
> >>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain's plasticity,
> >>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading -
> >>>>> whether the information
> >>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina - is inherently better than
> >>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
> >>>>> of the brain is
> >>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
> >>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
> >>>>> found that blind subjects
> >>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
> >>>>> memory
> >>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by
> >>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
> >>>>> brains.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
> >>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
> >>>>> wired for print literacy.
> >>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
> >>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
> >>>>> activity of reading
> >>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
> >>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
> >>>>> illiterate former
> >>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their
> >>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares
> >>>>> 20 adults
> >>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
> >>>>> not yet begun it. In
> >>>>> M.R.I.
> >>>>> scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
> >>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
> >>>>> and more white
> >>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
> >>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in
> >>>>> dyslexics, and the study
> >>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren't the cause of their
> >>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
> >>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
> >>>>> debate. In moving
> >>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
> >>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural - a loss much harder to
> >>>>> avoid. In one of
> >>>>> the few studies of blind people's prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
> >>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent,
> >>>>> a teacher of
> >>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn't
> >>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
> >>>>> listening to their
> >>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
> >>>>> character named Mark who had "sleep bombs":
> >>>>>
> >>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
> >>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
> >>>>> his bed sleeping
> >>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
> >>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
> >>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
> >>>>> societies think differently
> >>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said - the
> >>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them -
> >>>>> transformed the shape
> >>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
> >>>>> readers as disorganized, "as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
> >>>>> container, shaken
> >>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table." The
> >>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
> >>>>> emerging in the
> >>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
> >>>>> concluded, "It just doesn't seem to reflect the qualities of organized
> >>>>> sequence and complex
> >>>>> thought that we value in a literate society."
> >>>>>
> >>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
> >>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
> >>>>> blind people makes
> >>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
> >>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system - so that blind people would
> >>>>> no longer be
> >>>>> "despised or patronized by condescending sighted people," as he put it
> >>>>> - there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
> >>>>> moral dimension
> >>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
> >>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
> >>>>> culture seen as primitive
> >>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
> >>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
> >>>>> Britain, are now
> >>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
> >>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
> >>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
> >>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia,
> >>>>> told me that he has heard this described as "one of the advantages of
> >>>>> being poor."
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
> >>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
> >>>>> blindness that it has assumed
> >>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
> >>>>> try to read print - very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
> >>>>> from their
> >>>>> faces - are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
> >>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
> >>>>> for the blind.
> >>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille
> >>>>> to
> >>>>> Abraham Lincoln
> >>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
> >>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra "listening is not literacy"
> >>>>> repeated everywhere,
> >>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school
> >>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
> >>>>> children who don't
> >>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that "happily
> >>>>> ever after" is made up of three separate words.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
> >>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner
> >>>>> of the Rehabilitation
> >>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
> >>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
> >>>>> reading skills. "I
> >>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn't until two months ago that I
> >>>>> realized that 'dissent,' to disagree, is different than 'descent,' to
> >>>>> lower something,"
> >>>>> he told me. "I'm functionally illiterate. People say, 'Oh, no, you're
> >>>>> not.' Yes, I am. I'm sorry about it, but I'm not embarrassed to admit
> >>>>> it."
> >>>>>
> >>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
> >>>>> David A. Paterson
> >>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help
> >>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
> >>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
> >>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
> >>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every
> >>>>> morning. (He
> >>>>> calls himself "overassimilated" and told me that as a child he was
> >>>>> "mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I'm
> >>>>> not really supposed
> >>>>> to be blind.") Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend
> >>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
> >>>>> blind person
> >>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
> >>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
> >>>>> to be employed as
> >>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
> >>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn't know Braille were
> >>>>> sometimes made
> >>>>> to feel like outsiders. "There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
> >>>>> from the older guard," James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
> >>>>> text-to-speech
> >>>>> software, told me. "If we could live in our own little Braille world,
> >>>>> then that'd be perfect," he added. "But we live in a visual world."
> >>>>>
> >>>>> When deaf people began getting
> >>>>> cochlear implants
> >>>>> in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
> >>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way - as
> >>>>> an identity
> >>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities,
> >>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people's sense of what is
> >>>>> physically natural,
> >>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until "fixed." Arielle
> >>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
> >>>>> since birth, told me that
> >>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
> >>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
> >>>>> photographs of
> >>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
> >>>>> vision like that, as "just another piece of technology."
> >>>>>
> >>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
> >>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability - the extent to which you
> >>>>> are viewed as ignorant
> >>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent - determined largely by your
> >>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
> >>>>> designed to function
> >>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
> >>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
> >>>>> once it has been digitized,
> >>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
> >>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
> >>>>> for many blind people
> >>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
> >>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
> >>>>> members recited to
> >>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
> >>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
> >>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
> >>>>> Times.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> --
> >>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
> >>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
> >>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
> >>>>> help! To Get Involved go to:
> >>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
> >>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
> >>>>> before us;
> >>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
> >>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
> >>>>> past and future generations,
> >>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
> >>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
> >>>>> done, and
> >>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
> >>>>>
> >>>>> _______________________________________________
> >>>>> nabs-l mailing list
> >>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> >>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> >>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> >>>>> nabs-l:
> >>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
> >>>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> _______________________________________________
> >>>> nabs-l mailing list
> >>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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> >>>> nabs-l:
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> >>>>
> >>>
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> nabs-l mailing list
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> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >>--
> >>The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
> >>recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
> >>individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
> >>help! To Get Involved go to:
> >>www.TeachBlindStudents.org
> >>
> >>
> >>"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
> >>calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
> >>before us;
> >>if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
> >>slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
> >>past and future generations,
> >>then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
> >>you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
> >>done, and
> >>usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
> >>
> >>_______________________________________________
> >>nabs-l mailing list
> >>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> >>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> >>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> >> nabs-l:
> >>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40gmail.com
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > nabs-l mailing list
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> >
> 
> 
> -- 
> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
> help! To Get Involved go to:
> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
> 
> 
> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
> before us;
> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
> past and future generations,
> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
> done, and
> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
> 
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
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From nabs.president at gmail.com  Thu Jan  7 00:40:00 2010
From: nabs.president at gmail.com (Arielle Silverman)
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 11:40:00 +1100
Subject: [nabs-l] Washington Seminar
In-Reply-To: <BAY139-W235F1B7D6F4130E4299D0F8B720@phx.gbl>
References: <409c235c1001041459k20d160aeo96faa1d05e2241a1@mail.gmail.com>
	<4383d01d1001041555w619b636en31f036e8b2380a4b@mail.gmail.com>
	<e5a820711001041844h1c6bf4faw24b826f1777df07e@mail.gmail.com>
	<409c235c1001041940q2102a13em21b90591f17093fb@mail.gmail.com>
	<20100106103425.GB63360@yumi.bluecherry.net>
	<409c235c1001061007r1e1f82abg8f18f8255532007f@mail.gmail.com>
	<01a001ca8f15$c0786000$6601a8c0@server>
	<144BBD32E57C5045B736FBC8D447D0EC02635384@blindmail.BISM.COM>
	<BAY139-W235F1B7D6F4130E4299D0F8B720@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <85ff10071001061640g6b932c4ctf3756a1425fc7ead@mail.gmail.com>

Hi all,

The Washington student seminar will be on Sunday, Jan. 31 from 10:00
a.m. to 5:00 p.m. We will also be having a mixer on Sunday evening
from 8:00 p.m.-midnight and a NABS student open house on Monday from
10:30-noon. I will announce this again in my bulletin which  will go
out on Monday.

This weekend a few of us are going to be having a small NABS
leadership seminar which I will also describe in my bulletin.

Arielle

On 1/7/10, Albert Yoo <albertyoo1 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Sunday February 1
>
>> Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 17:18:42 -0500
>> From: aphelps at BISM.org
>> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> Subject: [nabs-l] Washington Seminar
>>
>> When is the student seminar?
>>
>> Warm regards,
>> Amy C. Phelps
>> Amy C. Phelps, CRC, NOMC
>> Director of Rehabilitation Services
>>
>> Phone: 410-737-2642
>> Mobile: 410-274-1647
>> E-mail: aphelps at bism.org
>>
>> "A frog in a well, can only see its piece of the sky" ~Unknown
>>
>>
>>
>> Confidentiality Note:  The information contained in this message may be
>> privileged and confidential and protected from disclosure. If the reader
>> of this message is not the intended recipient, or an employee or agent
>> responsible for delivering this message to the intended recipient, you are
>> hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this
>> communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this
>> communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to the
>> message and deleting it from your computer.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
>> Behalf Of Dennis Clark
>> Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 4:18 PM
>> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only
>> oneintown?
>>
>> It would be helpful for me and I think most readers if those discussing
>> Braille could talk a little about what they do for a living and how
>> Braille
>> is an integral part of their job. The woman discussed in the article is
>> the
>> head of a New York Stock Brokerage firm and as such is earning several
>> million dollars per year and therefore does not need my advice about
>> Braille
>> or anything else. Her accomplishments greatly exceed mine by quite a lot
>> and for me to advise or criticize her would require an almost unimaginable
>> level of arrogance. My advice to all those earning seven figure salaries
>> is
>> keep on doing what your doing because it is working great! For the rest of
>> us earning 4 or 5 digit salaries, it would be interesting to hear what you
>> do for a living and how you use Braille in your work, and what you would
>> not
>> be able to do in your job without Braille.
>> Warmest regards,
>> Dennis
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Darian Smith" <dsmithnfb at gmail.com>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 10:07 AM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
>> intown?
>>
>>
>> Joseph,
>>
>> With the advant of and advances in digital technologies would one
>> not argue that people are actually more likely to be employed because
>> access to information is better than it was even five years ago?
>> can it be said that the blind who knnow braille are superior to the
>> blind who arn't? if so, who makes this determination?
>> Respectfully,
>> Darian
>>
>>
>> On 1/6/10, T. Joseph Carter <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Darian,
>> >
>> > What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
>> > for one thing. That alone should convince parents and teachers the
>> > importance of Braille education.
>> >
>> > Joseph
>> >
>> >
>> > On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>> >>I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate focused
>> >>upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
>> >> What does this make those who arn't very good braille readers,
>> >>don't want to know, or don't know braille?
>> >>
>> >> Do you feel the Organization (the nfb) frowns upon non-braille readers?
>> >> respectfullly,
>> >> Darian
>> >>
>> >>On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>> Hi:
>> >>>
>> >>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.
>> >>>
>> >>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
>> >>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
>> >>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
>> >>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
>> >>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
>> >>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
>> >>> display.
>> >>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
>> >>> as I should.
>> >>>
>> >>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
>> >>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
>> >>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.
>> >>>
>> >>> Braille readers are leaders!
>> >>>
>> >>> Kerri+
>> >>>
>> >>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>>> Wow. I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
>> >>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>> >>>> today's children are not taught that way. Braille readers are
>> >>>> leaders, they say.
>> >>>> Beth
>> >>>>
>> >>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>>>> This
>> >>>>> Listening to Braille
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> By RACHEL AVIV
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> Published: December 30, 2009
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> AT 4 O'CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
>> >>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
>> >>>>> voice, and she
>> >>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>> >>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads
>> >>>>> The
>> >>>>> Financial Times
>> >>>>> to her while she uses her computer's text-to-speech system to play
>> >>>>> The
>> >>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to
>> >>>>> the
>> >>>>> magazine.
>> >>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>> >>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads
>> >>>>> constantly,
>> >>>>> poring over the
>> >>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>> >>>>> does not use Braille. "Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
>> >>>>> from my finger to
>> >>>>> my brain," she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>> >>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>> >>>>> doesn't think of a
>> >>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as "a stop on the way
>> >>>>> before continuing." This, she says, is the future of reading for the
>> >>>>> blind. "Literacy
>> >>>>> evolves," she told me. "When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>> >>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn't even have radio. At that
>> >>>>> time,
>> >>>>> blindness
>> >>>>> was a disability. Now it's just a minor, minor impairment."
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>> >>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media
>> >>>>> eclipsed
>> >>>>> the written word.
>> >>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>> >>>>> "tribal and oral pattern." But the decline of written language has
>> >>>>> become a reality for
>> >>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>> >>>>> learning to spell in her youth - she writes by dictation - she says
>> >>>>> she thinks that
>> >>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>> >>>>> "It's an arcane means of communication, which for the most part
>> >>>>> should
>> >>>>> be abolished,"
>> >>>>> she told me. "It's just not needed today."
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of
>> >>>>> thick,
>> >>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old
>> >>>>> publishing
>> >>>>> house in Boston,
>> >>>>> printed the
>> >>>>> Harry Potter
>> >>>>> series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
>> >>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more
>> >>>>> than
>> >>>>> $1,000 and there's
>> >>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
>> >>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>> >>>>> computer-screen-reading software.
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
>> >>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10
>> >>>>> percent
>> >>>>> of the 1.3 million
>> >>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>> >>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>> >>>>> low as 1 in 10,
>> >>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
>> >>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has "too much
>> >>>>> sight"
>> >>>>> for Braille
>> >>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades -
>> >>>>> in
>> >>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
>> >>>>> of premature
>> >>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning
>> >>>>> for
>> >>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the
>> >>>>> report
>> >>>>> has inspired
>> >>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. "What we're
>> >>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able - and
>> >>>>> illiterate," Jim
>> >>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
>> >>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. "We stopped teaching our
>> >>>>> nation's blind children
>> >>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on
>> >>>>> their
>> >>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got
>> >>>>> to
>> >>>>> learn the
>> >>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language."
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>> >>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words.
>> >>>>> Today,
>> >>>>> visually impaired
>> >>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to
>> >>>>> read;
>> >>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
>> >>>>> read the individual
>> >>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>> >>>>> educators.
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> "If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
>> >>>>> mind is limited," Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>> >>>>> Access Journal, told
>> >>>>> me. "You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can't
>> >>>>> feel
>> >>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone." Like
>> >>>>> many
>> >>>>> Braille readers,
>> >>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of
>> >>>>> Braille
>> >>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices
>> >>>>> are
>> >>>>> still extremely
>> >>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in
>> >>>>> Braille
>> >>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: "This is like going
>> >>>>> back to the 1400s,
>> >>>>> before Gutenberg's printing press came on the scene," he said. "Only
>> >>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there
>> >>>>> were
>> >>>>> the illiterate
>> >>>>> masses, the peasants."
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral
>> >>>>> culture.
>> >>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
>> >>>>> outlined in felt
>> >>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille,
>> >>>>> a
>> >>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>> >>>>> studying a cipher
>> >>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
>> >>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille
>> >>>>> modified
>> >>>>> the code so that
>> >>>>> it could be read more efficiently - each letter or punctuation
>> >>>>> symbol
>> >>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
>> >>>>> rows and two
>> >>>>> columns - and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>> >>>>> "knowledge," "people" and "Lord." Endowed with a reliable method of
>> >>>>> written communication
>> >>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise
>> >>>>> in
>> >>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
>> >>>>> and spiritual
>> >>>>> savior. With his "godlike courage," Helen Keller wrote, Braille
>> >>>>> built
>> >>>>> a "firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to
>> >>>>> climb
>> >>>>> from hopeless
>> >>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal."
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight
>> >>>>> but
>> >>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>> >>>>> innocent and malleable,
>> >>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>> >>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
>> >>>>> his 1933 book, "The
>> >>>>> Blind in School and Society," the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
>> >>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
>> >>>>> assimilated into
>> >>>>> the sighted world would become lost in "verbal unreality." At some
>> >>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
>> >>>>> light because,
>> >>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>> >>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>> >>>>> blind children as
>> >>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>> >>>>> "look," "touch" and "see." And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>> >>>>> misguided in his argument
>> >>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a
>> >>>>> series
>> >>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>> >>>>> blind are not
>> >>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>> >>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>> >>>>> in the parts of
>> >>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof
>> >>>>> that
>> >>>>> Braille is essential for blind children's cognitive development, as
>> >>>>> the visual cortex
>> >>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain's
>> >>>>> plasticity,
>> >>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading -
>> >>>>> whether the information
>> >>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina - is inherently better than
>> >>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The
>> >>>>> architecture
>> >>>>> of the brain is
>> >>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>> >>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>> >>>>> found that blind subjects
>> >>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>> >>>>> memory
>> >>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested,
>> >>>>> by
>> >>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
>> >>>>> brains.
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>> >>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
>> >>>>> wired for print literacy.
>> >>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and
>> >>>>> literacy
>> >>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>> >>>>> activity of reading
>> >>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
>> >>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>> >>>>> illiterate former
>> >>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned
>> >>>>> their
>> >>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras
>> >>>>> compares
>> >>>>> 20 adults
>> >>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
>> >>>>> not yet begun it. In
>> >>>>> M.R.I.
>> >>>>> scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
>> >>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language
>> >>>>> processing,
>> >>>>> and more white
>> >>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>> >>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed
>> >>>>> in
>> >>>>> dyslexics, and the study
>> >>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren't the cause of their
>> >>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how
>> >>>>> this
>> >>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter
>> >>>>> of
>> >>>>> debate. In moving
>> >>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
>> >>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural - a loss much harder to
>> >>>>> avoid. In one of
>> >>>>> the few studies of blind people's prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
>> >>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana
>> >>>>> Brent,
>> >>>>> a teacher of
>> >>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn't
>> >>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
>> >>>>> listening to their
>> >>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
>> >>>>> character named Mark who had "sleep bombs":
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was
>> >>>>> walking
>> >>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
>> >>>>> his bed sleeping
>> >>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad
>> >>>>> lept
>> >>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
>> >>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>> >>>>> societies think differently
>> >>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said - the
>> >>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them -
>> >>>>> transformed the shape
>> >>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
>> >>>>> readers as disorganized, "as if all of their ideas are crammed into
>> >>>>> a
>> >>>>> container, shaken
>> >>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table."
>> >>>>> The
>> >>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>> >>>>> emerging in the
>> >>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>> >>>>> concluded, "It just doesn't seem to reflect the qualities of
>> >>>>> organized
>> >>>>> sequence and complex
>> >>>>> thought that we value in a literate society."
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
>> >>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy
>> >>>>> for
>> >>>>> blind people makes
>> >>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>> >>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system - so that blind people
>> >>>>> would
>> >>>>> no longer be
>> >>>>> "despised or patronized by condescending sighted people," as he put
>> >>>>> it
>> >>>>> - there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>> >>>>> moral dimension
>> >>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>> >>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
>> >>>>> culture seen as primitive
>> >>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>> >>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S.
>> >>>>> and
>> >>>>> Britain, are now
>> >>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing
>> >>>>> ones,
>> >>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>> >>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>> >>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in
>> >>>>> Australia,
>> >>>>> told me that he has heard this described as "one of the advantages
>> >>>>> of
>> >>>>> being poor."
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>> >>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>> >>>>> blindness that it has assumed
>> >>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and
>> >>>>> still
>> >>>>> try to read print - very slowly or by holding the page an inch or
>> >>>>> two
>> >>>>> from their
>> >>>>> faces - are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
>> >>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights
>> >>>>> movement
>> >>>>> for the blind.
>> >>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis
>> >>>>> Braille
>> >>>>> to
>> >>>>> Abraham Lincoln
>> >>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>> >>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra "listening is not literacy"
>> >>>>> repeated everywhere,
>> >>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among
>> >>>>> middle-school
>> >>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>> >>>>> children who don't
>> >>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that
>> >>>>> "happily
>> >>>>> ever after" is made up of three separate words.
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
>> >>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as
>> >>>>> commissioner
>> >>>>> of the Rehabilitation
>> >>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
>> >>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>> >>>>> reading skills. "I
>> >>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn't until two months ago that I
>> >>>>> realized that 'dissent,' to disagree, is different than 'descent,'
>> >>>>> to
>> >>>>> lower something,"
>> >>>>> he told me. "I'm functionally illiterate. People say, 'Oh, no,
>> >>>>> you're
>> >>>>> not.' Yes, I am. I'm sorry about it, but I'm not embarrassed to
>> >>>>> admit
>> >>>>> it."
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>> >>>>> David A. Paterson
>> >>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the
>> >>>>> help
>> >>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>> >>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
>> >>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
>> >>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail
>> >>>>> every
>> >>>>> morning. (He
>> >>>>> calls himself "overassimilated" and told me that as a child he was
>> >>>>> "mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that
>> >>>>> I'm
>> >>>>> not really supposed
>> >>>>> to be blind.") Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers
>> >>>>> tend
>> >>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
>> >>>>> blind person
>> >>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>> >>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
>> >>>>> to be employed as
>> >>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>> >>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn't know Braille were
>> >>>>> sometimes made
>> >>>>> to feel like outsiders. "There is definitely a sense of peer
>> >>>>> pressure
>> >>>>> from the older guard," James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>> >>>>> text-to-speech
>> >>>>> software, told me. "If we could live in our own little Braille
>> >>>>> world,
>> >>>>> then that'd be perfect," he added. "But we live in a visual world."
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> When deaf people began getting
>> >>>>> cochlear implants
>> >>>>> in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
>> >>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way -
>> >>>>> as
>> >>>>> an identity
>> >>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many
>> >>>>> disabilities,
>> >>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people's sense of what is
>> >>>>> physically natural,
>> >>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until "fixed." Arielle
>> >>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>> >>>>> since birth, told me that
>> >>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would
>> >>>>> take
>> >>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
>> >>>>> photographs of
>> >>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>> >>>>> vision like that, as "just another piece of technology."
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>> >>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability - the extent to which you
>> >>>>> are viewed as ignorant
>> >>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent - determined largely by your
>> >>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books
>> >>>>> were
>> >>>>> designed to function
>> >>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>> >>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
>> >>>>> once it has been digitized,
>> >>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>> >>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle,
>> >>>>> but
>> >>>>> for many blind people
>> >>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>> >>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
>> >>>>> members recited to
>> >>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>> >>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
>> >>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>> >>>>> Times.
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> --
>> >>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide
>> >>>>> teacher
>> >>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>> >>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>> >>>>> help! To Get Involved go to:
>> >>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel
>> >>>>> destiny
>> >>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility
>> >>>>> stretching
>> >>>>> before us;
>> >>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>> >>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>> >>>>> past and future generations,
>> >>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work
>> >>>>> with
>> >>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to
>> >>>>> be
>> >>>>> done, and
>> >>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> _______________________________________________
>> >>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>> >>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> >>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> >>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
>> >>>>> for
>> >>>>> nabs-l:
>> >>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>
>> >>>> _______________________________________________
>> >>>> nabs-l mailing list
>> >>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> >>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> >>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> >>>> nabs-l:
>> >>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>> >>>>
>> >>>
>> >>> _______________________________________________
>> >>> nabs-l mailing list
>> >>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> >>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> >>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> >>> nabs-l:
>> >>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>> >>>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>--
>> >>The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>> >>recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>> >>individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>> >>help! To Get Involved go to:
>> >>www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>> >>calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>> >>before us;
>> >>if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>> >>slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>> >>past and future generations,
>> >>then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>> >>you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>> >>done, and
>> >>usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>> >>
>> >>_______________________________________________
>> >>nabs-l mailing list
>> >>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> >>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> >>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> >> nabs-l:
>> >>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40gmail.com
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > nabs-l mailing list
>> > nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> > To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> > nabs-l:
>> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>> >
>>
>>
>> --
>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>> help! To Get Involved go to:
>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>
>>
>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>> before us;
>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>> past and future generations,
>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>> done, and
>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dennisgclark%40sbcglobal.net
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/aphelps%40bism.org
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/albertyoo1%40hotmail.com
>  		 	   		
> _________________________________________________________________
> Hotmail: Trusted email with Microsoft’s powerful SPAM protection.
> http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390706/direct/01/
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
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>


-- 
Arielle Silverman
President, National Association of Blind Students
Phone:  602-502-2255
Email:
nabs.president at gmail.com
Website:
www.nabslink.org


From astrochem119 at gmail.com  Thu Jan  7 01:10:30 2010
From: astrochem119 at gmail.com (Chelsea Cook)
Date: Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:10:30 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Importance of Using Braille
Message-ID: <4b453330.0604c00a.66be.3774@mx.google.com>

I agree with Briley and Jedi on this matter.  I am not employed, 
but feel as though Braille has been the one secret, or key, to my 
success as a student.  I'm going to post below my signature a 
speech I delivered at the 2009 NFB of Virginia State Convention 
(sorry if I posted it before; can't remember.) Please comment; I 
welcome feedback.  I like the comment about the shoe fits and 
doing what you love no matter what.  Enjoy the speech.  As a 
final note: did anyone read the description of the tactile art in 
the January Braille Monitor? That also captures the essence of 
what I am about to say and has significant meaning for me.
Thanks,
Chelsea
"I ask you to look both ways.  For the road to a knowledge of the 
stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom 
has been reached through the stars."
Sir Arthur Eddington, British astrophysicist (1882-1944), Stars 
and Atoms (1928), Lecture 1

Literacy and Opportunity:
Learning Braille, Using Braille
by Chelsea Cook

  Believe it or not, there was a time when I didn't want to learn 
Braille.  I vaguely remember my mother sitting me down in front 
of small alphabet flash cards and forcing my fingers down upon 
those wretched dots which felt so strange.  I was probably not 
even four, and did not yet know the power this code brought: to 
me or to the rest of the blind.
  Then I found it.  I don't know how and I don't know when, but 
somewhere along the way, Braille clicked.  It was the catalyst 
that set off all my other academic adventures.  Because of my 
early start and my parents' persistence, I developed a love of 
reading that holds true to this day.  I have pulled that trick 
many times over the years of staying up late into the night with 
a book under the covers, as many Braille readers out there can 
relate.  On a few such occasions, those books were textbooks: 
Noreen Greice's Touch the Stars, for example, or a few sacred 
volumes of our eighth-grade science book.  The school had 
switched the grade levels' books when I was in seventh, but I 
didn't care.  I was reading physics and chemistry a year ahead of 
the standard biology curriculum to satisfy what I now know was 
the beginning of an unquenchable thirst for knowledge that only 
understanding of the physical sciences could provide.  Even now, 
when I do college-level physics, I can visualize the mathematical 
relationships between quantities only by remembering their Nemeth 
symbols.  Last year, going through a period of no physics at all, 
my vision teacher Brailled out a twenty-one page formula sheet.  
The equations under my fingertips radiated a tangible energy; it 
was as though I were connecting with the very scientists who had 
developed them.  They held the secrets of the universe.  All I 
had to do was learn and follow.
  I read extensively out of school as well.  By third grade, I 
had read all the Braille books in my elementary school's library.  
Bookshare and Web Braille were far-distant dreams then, and even 
now it still awes me how there are so many books being produced.  
The Harry Potter series has always been one of my favorites; I 
have bookcases filled with all seven.  The words of authors took 
me places.  Traveling through space and time with Robert Hineline 
and Madeline L'Engle, I discovered the wonder of science fiction 
and decided to write my own.  I compose novels and poetry so that 
one day, readers will read my work and I can spread the message 
of hope and literacy.  There is a special pleasure in reading 
poetry in Braille, a suspense as to what the next line will 
invoke.  As far as learning the "music" of the words, audio does 
not measure up.
  I cannot imagine what it is like when other blind people tell 
me they don't know or have never learned Braille.  Braille has 
given me every opportunity in life: It allowed me to hold office 
in the NFB at the national level; it allowed me to return home 
from Colorado with my plane tickets properly labeled and 
identified; it brought amazement to my classmates when they found 
out I don't have to abbreviate my notes.  Earlier this year, Dr.  
Schroeder asked me if I was going into space with the Louis 
Braille coins.  I told him I wished I could, and someday intend 
to follow them to the final frontier.  As I was listening to the 
shuttle launch, I smiled at all the familiar radio calls as 
everything was reported to be nominal.  When they made it into 
orbit, I thought I was there with them, circling the globe at 
17500 miles per hour, looking around at the stars and the small 
blue planet we call home, realizing my dream of being an 
astronaut.  The symbolism of knowledge gained by blind people and 
by astronomers studying the depths of the universe with the 
Hubble Space Telescope was not lost on me; it was amplified.  
Those coins being launched were my two worlds coming together, 
and they were just waiting for me to join them.
  We must keep teaching Braille.  Those six dots unlock doors.  
Those six dots help solve the mysteries of the universe.  Those 
six dots give freedom.  Braille makes dreams reality.  While 
important, it is not rocket fuel, but Braille that will carry me 
to the stars.  Braille gives us words; words give us knowledge; 
knowledge gives us power.


From brileyp at gmail.com  Thu Jan  7 02:03:57 2010
From: brileyp at gmail.com (Briley Pollard)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 21:03:57 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
	town?
In-Reply-To: <LNEJJKLNICEECFDGEDGLOEBLFOAA.mworkman.lists@gmail.com>
References: <LNEJJKLNICEECFDGEDGLOEBLFOAA.mworkman.lists@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <9B835CC7-3EEC-4F98-B04F-A1E42CE1A5E7@gmail.com>

My answer to this is simple. I agree that more studies need to be done specifically on the employment of braille readers. However, the answer is the same. Do you think and employer would higher a sighted person who couldn't read print? No, I think not, (of course some jobs don't really require it, so this isn't true for ALL jobs). Why should the blind community be held to a different standard? If we expect to be treated equally, shouldn't we be held to the same standards?
On Jan 6, 2010, at 6:30 PM, Marc Workman wrote:

> I find this topic very interesting.
> 
> I suppose I am someone who advocates the learning and use of Braille, who thinks it is an important skill, but who almost never uses it.
> 
> I think at least two things are missing in this discussion.  First, there isn't much distinction being made between people who have never read print or Braille and those who have read print before going blind but haven't learned Braille.  Second, there are a lot of anecdotal claims being made without any concrete evidence.
> 
> As I said, I almost never use Braille.  In fact, I would barely classify myself as able to read Braille, but I did read print, all be it with some difficulty, up until the age of 20.  Am I illiterate since I can read neither print nor Braille? Did I lose my literacy as I lost my sight, or am I literate even though I can't read print anymore? I think my case and the many others that are similar suggest that the question of literacy is a little more complicated than some of the comments made thus far imply.
> 
> I agree that children need to be taught to read either using print or Braille.  If this isn't happening, it's a serious problem, but I'm not sure that Braille is as essential for someone who grew up reading print.  It's certainly a tremendous skill to possess, much like being capable of speaking three different languages, but it isn't essential for success.  I think this distinction between former print users and people who never read print is important and worth getting on the table.
> 
> Second, it's fine to speculate and relate your own experiences, but it would really help the discussion if there were some varified facts out there.  We can talk about the employment rate of Braille users, but does anyone have access to the actual studies that show that knowing Braille increases your employment prospects? Do these studies control for things like socio-economic status, age of onset of blindness, post-secondary education, and the myriad of other factors that affect employment prospects?  I have no idea.  Maybe they do, but perhaps they don't.
> 
> Again, you can point to this list as evidence of a decline in the writing skills of the blind, but I've graded dozens of essays in my role as a teaching assistant, and I don't think I could discern a definite difference between sighted and blind students.  If you want to see some pretty terrible writing, just read the comments posted to the average news story on any major news website.  Some will be written well; others will not.  This is all entirely anecdotal, and it means very little unless there are some studies to back it up.
> 
> It's an interesting discussion for sure, and it's typical of the thoughtful and important discussions that take place on this list.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Marc
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org]On
> Behalf Of T. Joseph Carter
> Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 2:53 PM
> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
> in town?
> 
> 
> Darian,
> 
> You can argue the maybes and possible futures.  TODAY, Braille is the 
> difference between high employment and extremely low.
> 
> I'm going to be more harsh than even Jedi was and say that this list 
> often demonstrates just how completely pathetic the language skills 
> of those who communicate using primarily speech alone actually are.  
> There are people on this list who cannot spell words at even the 
> second grade level.  Some have no concept of even a sentence, let 
> alone a paragraph.  As far as the world is concerned, they are 
> illiterate.
> 
> Few indeed are the jobs for which complete illiteracy is not a 
> factor.  Not only that, if you demonstrate the level of literacy 
> sometimes evidenced on this list, you could be an absolute genius and 
> the average ignorant sighted person is going to assume you're at the 
> very least cognitively deficient.
> 
> At this time, we have a whole generation of blind people who have in 
> large part grown up functionally illiterate.  They are suffering the 
> consequences in that most are unemployed and beginning to come to the 
> conclusion that they may in fact be unemployable.  The education 
> system has completely failed these people, and it ought to inspire 
> nothing short of rage at the notion that it should be allowed to 
> continue.
> 
> Joseph
> 
> On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 10:07:31AM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>> Joseph,
>> 
>> With the advant of and advances in  digital technologies  would one
>> not argue that people are  actually more likely to be employed because
>> access to information is  better than it was even five years ago?
>> can it  be said that the blind who knnow braille are superior to the
>> blind who arn't? if so, who makes this determination?
>> Respectfully,
>> Darian
>> 
>> 
>> On 1/6/10, T. Joseph Carter <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Darian,
>>> 
>>> What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
>>> for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and teachers the
>>> importance of Braille education.
>>> 
>>> Joseph
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>>>> I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate  focused
>>>> upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
>>>>  What does this  make those who arn't very good braille readers,
>>>> don't want to know, or  don't know braille?
>>>> 
>>>> Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille readers?
>>>> respectfullly,
>>>> Darian
>>>> 
>>>> On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> Hi:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
>>>>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
>>>>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
>>>>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
>>>>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
>>>>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
>>>>> display.
>>>>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
>>>>> as I should.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
>>>>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
>>>>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Braille readers are leaders!
>>>>> 
>>>>> Kerri+
>>>>> 
>>>>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
>>>>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>>>>>> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
>>>>>> leaders, they say.
>>>>>> Beth
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> This
>>>>>>> Listening to Braille
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> By RACHEL AVIV
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Published: December 30, 2009
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
>>>>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
>>>>>>> voice, and she
>>>>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>>>>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
>>>>>>> Financial Times
>>>>>>> to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The
>>>>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the
>>>>>>> magazine.
>>>>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>>>>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
>>>>>>> poring over the
>>>>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>>>>>>> does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
>>>>>>> from my finger to
>>>>>>> my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>>>>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>>>>>>> doesn’t think of a
>>>>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way
>>>>>>> before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the
>>>>>>> blind. “Literacy
>>>>>>> evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>>>>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time,
>>>>>>> blindness
>>>>>>> was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>>>>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
>>>>>>> the written word.
>>>>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>>>>>>> “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has
>>>>>>> become a reality for
>>>>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>>>>>>> learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says
>>>>>>> she thinks that
>>>>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>>>>>>> “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should
>>>>>>> be abolished,”
>>>>>>> she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
>>>>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
>>>>>>> house in Boston,
>>>>>>> printed the
>>>>>>> Harry Potter
>>>>>>> series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
>>>>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
>>>>>>> $1,000 and there’s
>>>>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
>>>>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
>>>>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
>>>>>>> of the 1.3 million
>>>>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>>>>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>>>>>>> low as 1 in 10,
>>>>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
>>>>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight”
>>>>>>> for Braille
>>>>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in
>>>>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
>>>>>>> of premature
>>>>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for
>>>>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
>>>>>>> has inspired
>>>>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re
>>>>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and
>>>>>>> illiterate,” Jim
>>>>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
>>>>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our
>>>>>>> nation’s blind children
>>>>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their
>>>>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
>>>>>>> learn the
>>>>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language.”
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>>>>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
>>>>>>> visually impaired
>>>>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read;
>>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
>>>>>>> read the individual
>>>>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>>>>>>> educators.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> “If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
>>>>>>> mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>>>>>>> Access Journal, told
>>>>>>> me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel
>>>>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many
>>>>>>> Braille readers,
>>>>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
>>>>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
>>>>>>> still extremely
>>>>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
>>>>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going
>>>>>>> back to the 1400s,
>>>>>>> before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only
>>>>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were
>>>>>>> the illiterate
>>>>>>> masses, the peasants.”
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture.
>>>>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
>>>>>>> outlined in felt
>>>>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
>>>>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>>>>>>> studying a cipher
>>>>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
>>>>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
>>>>>>> the code so that
>>>>>>> it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol
>>>>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
>>>>>>> rows and two
>>>>>>> columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>>>>>>> “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of
>>>>>>> written communication
>>>>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
>>>>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
>>>>>>> and spiritual
>>>>>>> savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
>>>>>>> a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
>>>>>>> from hopeless
>>>>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal.”
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but
>>>>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>>>>>>> innocent and malleable,
>>>>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>>>>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
>>>>>>> his 1933 book, “The
>>>>>>> Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
>>>>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
>>>>>>> assimilated into
>>>>>>> the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some
>>>>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
>>>>>>> light because,
>>>>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>>>>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>>>>>>> blind children as
>>>>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>>>>>>> “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>>>>>>> misguided in his argument
>>>>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series
>>>>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>>>>>>> blind are not
>>>>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>>>>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>>>>>>> in the parts of
>>>>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
>>>>>>> Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as
>>>>>>> the visual cortex
>>>>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity,
>>>>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading —
>>>>>>> whether the information
>>>>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than
>>>>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
>>>>>>> of the brain is
>>>>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>>>>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>>>>>>> found that blind subjects
>>>>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>>>>>>> memory
>>>>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by
>>>>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
>>>>>>> brains.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>>>>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
>>>>>>> wired for print literacy.
>>>>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
>>>>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>>>>>>> activity of reading
>>>>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
>>>>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>>>>>>> illiterate former
>>>>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their
>>>>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares
>>>>>>> 20 adults
>>>>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
>>>>>>> not yet begun it. In
>>>>>>> M.R.I.
>>>>>>> scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
>>>>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
>>>>>>> and more white
>>>>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>>>>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in
>>>>>>> dyslexics, and the study
>>>>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their
>>>>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
>>>>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
>>>>>>> debate. In moving
>>>>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
>>>>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to
>>>>>>> avoid. In one of
>>>>>>> the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
>>>>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent,
>>>>>>> a teacher of
>>>>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t
>>>>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
>>>>>>> listening to their
>>>>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
>>>>>>> character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
>>>>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
>>>>>>> his bed sleeping
>>>>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
>>>>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
>>>>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>>>>>>> societies think differently
>>>>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the
>>>>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them —
>>>>>>> transformed the shape
>>>>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
>>>>>>> readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
>>>>>>> container, shaken
>>>>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The
>>>>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>>>>>>> emerging in the
>>>>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>>>>>>> concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized
>>>>>>> sequence and complex
>>>>>>> thought that we value in a literate society.”
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
>>>>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
>>>>>>> blind people makes
>>>>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>>>>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people would
>>>>>>> no longer be
>>>>>>> “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put it
>>>>>>> — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>>>>>>> moral dimension
>>>>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>>>>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
>>>>>>> culture seen as primitive
>>>>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>>>>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
>>>>>>> Britain, are now
>>>>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
>>>>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>>>>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>>>>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia,
>>>>>>> told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of
>>>>>>> being poor.”
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>>>>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>>>>>>> blindness that it has assumed
>>>>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
>>>>>>> try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
>>>>>>> from their
>>>>>>> faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
>>>>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
>>>>>>> for the blind.
>>>>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille
>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>> Abraham Lincoln
>>>>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>>>>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy”
>>>>>>> repeated everywhere,
>>>>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school
>>>>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>>>>>>> children who don’t
>>>>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily
>>>>>>> ever after” is made up of three separate words.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
>>>>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner
>>>>>>> of the Rehabilitation
>>>>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
>>>>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>>>>>>> reading skills. “I
>>>>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I
>>>>>>> realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to
>>>>>>> lower something,”
>>>>>>> he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re
>>>>>>> not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit
>>>>>>> it.”
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>>>>>>> David A. Paterson
>>>>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help
>>>>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>>>>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
>>>>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
>>>>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every
>>>>>>> morning. (He
>>>>>>> calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was
>>>>>>> “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m
>>>>>>> not really supposed
>>>>>>> to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend
>>>>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
>>>>>>> blind person
>>>>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>>>>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
>>>>>>> to be employed as
>>>>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>>>>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were
>>>>>>> sometimes made
>>>>>>> to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
>>>>>>> from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>>>>>>> text-to-speech
>>>>>>> software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world,
>>>>>>> then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> When deaf people began getting
>>>>>>> cochlear implants
>>>>>>> in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
>>>>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as
>>>>>>> an identity
>>>>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities,
>>>>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is
>>>>>>> physically natural,
>>>>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle
>>>>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>>>>>>> since birth, told me that
>>>>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
>>>>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
>>>>>>> photographs of
>>>>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>>>>>>> vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>>>>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you
>>>>>>> are viewed as ignorant
>>>>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your
>>>>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
>>>>>>> designed to function
>>>>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>>>>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
>>>>>>> once it has been digitized,
>>>>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>>>>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
>>>>>>> for many blind people
>>>>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>>>>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
>>>>>>> members recited to
>>>>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>>>>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
>>>>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>>>>>>> Times.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>>>>> before us;
>>>>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>>>>> past and future generations,
>>>>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>>>>> done, and
>>>>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> --
>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>> before us;
>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>> past and future generations,
>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>> done, and
>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>> 
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40gmail.com
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>> 
>> 
>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>> before us;
>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>> past and future generations,
>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>> done, and
>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40gmail.com
> 
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/mworkman.lists%40gmail.com
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com



From serenacucco at verizon.net  Thu Jan  7 02:17:00 2010
From: serenacucco at verizon.net (Serena)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 21:17:00 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Importance of Using Braille
References: <4b453330.0604c00a.66be.3774@mx.google.com>
Message-ID: <003601ca8f3f$7f089160$0201a8c0@Serene>

Great speech!

Serena

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chelsea Cook" <astrochem119 at gmail.com>
To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 8:10 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] Importance of Using Braille


>I agree with Briley and Jedi on this matter.  I am not employed, but feel 
>as though Braille has been the one secret, or key, to my success as a 
>student.  I'm going to post below my signature a speech I delivered at the 
>2009 NFB of Virginia State Convention (sorry if I posted it before; can't 
>remember.) Please comment; I welcome feedback.  I like the comment about 
>the shoe fits and doing what you love no matter what.  Enjoy the speech. 
>As a final note: did anyone read the description of the tactile art in the 
>January Braille Monitor? That also captures the essence of what I am about 
>to say and has significant meaning for me.
> Thanks,
> Chelsea
> "I ask you to look both ways.  For the road to a knowledge of the stars 
> leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been 
> reached through the stars."
> Sir Arthur Eddington, British astrophysicist (1882-1944), Stars and Atoms 
> (1928), Lecture 1
>
> Literacy and Opportunity:
> Learning Braille, Using Braille
> by Chelsea Cook
>
>  Believe it or not, there was a time when I didn't want to learn Braille. 
> I vaguely remember my mother sitting me down in front of small alphabet 
> flash cards and forcing my fingers down upon those wretched dots which 
> felt so strange.  I was probably not even four, and did not yet know the 
> power this code brought: to me or to the rest of the blind.
>  Then I found it.  I don't know how and I don't know when, but somewhere 
> along the way, Braille clicked.  It was the catalyst that set off all my 
> other academic adventures.  Because of my early start and my parents' 
> persistence, I developed a love of reading that holds true to this day.  I 
> have pulled that trick many times over the years of staying up late into 
> the night with a book under the covers, as many Braille readers out there 
> can relate.  On a few such occasions, those books were textbooks: Noreen 
> Greice's Touch the Stars, for example, or a few sacred volumes of our 
> eighth-grade science book.  The school had switched the grade levels' 
> books when I was in seventh, but I didn't care.  I was reading physics and 
> chemistry a year ahead of the standard biology curriculum to satisfy what 
> I now know was the beginning of an unquenchable thirst for knowledge that 
> only understanding of the physical sciences could provide.  Even now, when 
> I do college-level physics, I can visualize the mathematical relationships 
> between quantities only by remembering their Nemeth symbols.  Last year, 
> going through a period of no physics at all, my vision teacher Brailled 
> out a twenty-one page formula sheet.  The equations under my fingertips 
> radiated a tangible energy; it was as though I were connecting with the 
> very scientists who had developed them.  They held the secrets of the 
> universe.  All I had to do was learn and follow.
>  I read extensively out of school as well.  By third grade, I had read all 
> the Braille books in my elementary school's library.  Bookshare and Web 
> Braille were far-distant dreams then, and even now it still awes me how 
> there are so many books being produced.  The Harry Potter series has 
> always been one of my favorites; I have bookcases filled with all seven. 
> The words of authors took me places.  Traveling through space and time 
> with Robert Hineline and Madeline L'Engle, I discovered the wonder of 
> science fiction and decided to write my own.  I compose novels and poetry 
> so that one day, readers will read my work and I can spread the message of 
> hope and literacy.  There is a special pleasure in reading poetry in 
> Braille, a suspense as to what the next line will invoke.  As far as 
> learning the "music" of the words, audio does not measure up.
>  I cannot imagine what it is like when other blind people tell me they 
> don't know or have never learned Braille.  Braille has given me every 
> opportunity in life: It allowed me to hold office in the NFB at the 
> national level; it allowed me to return home from Colorado with my plane 
> tickets properly labeled and identified; it brought amazement to my 
> classmates when they found out I don't have to abbreviate my notes. 
> Earlier this year, Dr.  Schroeder asked me if I was going into space with 
> the Louis Braille coins.  I told him I wished I could, and someday intend 
> to follow them to the final frontier.  As I was listening to the shuttle 
> launch, I smiled at all the familiar radio calls as everything was 
> reported to be nominal.  When they made it into orbit, I thought I was 
> there with them, circling the globe at 17500 miles per hour, looking 
> around at the stars and the small blue planet we call home, realizing my 
> dream of being an astronaut.  The symbolism of knowledge gained by blind 
> people and by astronomers studying the depths of the universe with the 
> Hubble Space Telescope was not lost on me; it was amplified.  Those coins 
> being launched were my two worlds coming together, and they were just 
> waiting for me to join them.
>  We must keep teaching Braille.  Those six dots unlock doors.  Those six 
> dots help solve the mysteries of the universe.  Those six dots give 
> freedom.  Braille makes dreams reality.  While important, it is not rocket 
> fuel, but Braille that will carry me to the stars.  Braille gives us 
> words; words give us knowledge; knowledge gives us power.
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net 



From kevin at kevinlarose.net  Thu Jan  7 02:26:30 2010
From: kevin at kevinlarose.net (Kevin LaRose)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 18:26:30 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Candle in the Window 2010
Message-ID: <AEDAA42533404D5187261D4A92B310EE@acer6e40e97492>

Why not make Candle in the Window part of your year's plans!

The topic this year is "Transitions". We are working to make this year's
conference a great experience for all who attend.

Where: Wooded Glen, Henryville IN
When: August 4-8.

We are interested in your input as well as your attendance. If you have
ideas for presentations, or would like to present a session please feel free
to contact Becky Barnes beckyjimb at optonline.net or Nancy Trzcinski
baxman at adelphia.net.

Also, if you would like more information, or to make a reservation for this
year's conference, contact Nancy Trzcinski (413) 441-2305.

Feel free to forward this announcement to all who may be interested in
attending this year's Candle in the Window conference!

Kevin LaRose
<kevin at kevinlarose.net> 


I'm protected by SpamBrave
http://www.spambrave.com/



From albertyoo1 at hotmail.com  Thu Jan  7 02:28:49 2010
From: albertyoo1 at hotmail.com (Albert Yoo)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 21:28:49 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Washington Seminar
In-Reply-To: <85ff10071001061640g6b932c4ctf3756a1425fc7ead@mail.gmail.com>
References: <409c235c1001041459k20d160aeo96faa1d05e2241a1@mail.gmail.com>,
	<4383d01d1001041555w619b636en31f036e8b2380a4b@mail.gmail.com>,
	<e5a820711001041844h1c6bf4faw24b826f1777df07e@mail.gmail.com>,
	<409c235c1001041940q2102a13em21b90591f17093fb@mail.gmail.com>,
	<20100106103425.GB63360@yumi.bluecherry.net>,
	<409c235c1001061007r1e1f82abg8f18f8255532007f@mail.gmail.com>,
	<01a001ca8f15$c0786000$6601a8c0@server>,
	<144BBD32E57C5045B736FBC8D447D0EC02635384@blindmail.BISM.COM>,
	<BAY139-W235F1B7D6F4130E4299D0F8B720@phx.gbl>,
	<85ff10071001061640g6b932c4ctf3756a1425fc7ead@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <BAY139-W11CE5893E34EBE6F0C40908B710@phx.gbl>


Will the leadership seminar be posted online? Where is the leadership seminar? Is it in Baltimore? 
 
> Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 11:40:00 +1100
> From: nabs.president at gmail.com
> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Washington Seminar
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> The Washington student seminar will be on Sunday, Jan. 31 from 10:00
> a.m. to 5:00 p.m. We will also be having a mixer on Sunday evening
> from 8:00 p.m.-midnight and a NABS student open house on Monday from
> 10:30-noon. I will announce this again in my bulletin which will go
> out on Monday.
> 
> This weekend a few of us are going to be having a small NABS
> leadership seminar which I will also describe in my bulletin.
> 
> Arielle
> 
> On 1/7/10, Albert Yoo <albertyoo1 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Sunday February 1
> >
> >> Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 17:18:42 -0500
> >> From: aphelps at BISM.org
> >> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> >> Subject: [nabs-l] Washington Seminar
> >>
> >> When is the student seminar?
> >>
> >> Warm regards,
> >> Amy C. Phelps
> >> Amy C. Phelps, CRC, NOMC
> >> Director of Rehabilitation Services
> >>
> >> Phone: 410-737-2642
> >> Mobile: 410-274-1647
> >> E-mail: aphelps at bism.org
> >>
> >> "A frog in a well, can only see its piece of the sky" ~Unknown
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> Confidentiality Note: The information contained in this message may be
> >> privileged and confidential and protected from disclosure. If the reader
> >> of this message is not the intended recipient, or an employee or agent
> >> responsible for delivering this message to the intended recipient, you are
> >> hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this
> >> communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this
> >> communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to the
> >> message and deleting it from your computer.
> >>
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
> >> Behalf Of Dennis Clark
> >> Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 4:18 PM
> >> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
> >> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only
> >> oneintown?
> >>
> >> It would be helpful for me and I think most readers if those discussing
> >> Braille could talk a little about what they do for a living and how
> >> Braille
> >> is an integral part of their job. The woman discussed in the article is
> >> the
> >> head of a New York Stock Brokerage firm and as such is earning several
> >> million dollars per year and therefore does not need my advice about
> >> Braille
> >> or anything else. Her accomplishments greatly exceed mine by quite a lot
> >> and for me to advise or criticize her would require an almost unimaginable
> >> level of arrogance. My advice to all those earning seven figure salaries
> >> is
> >> keep on doing what your doing because it is working great! For the rest of
> >> us earning 4 or 5 digit salaries, it would be interesting to hear what you
> >> do for a living and how you use Braille in your work, and what you would
> >> not
> >> be able to do in your job without Braille.
> >> Warmest regards,
> >> Dennis
> >>
> >>
> >> ----- Original Message -----
> >> From: "Darian Smith" <dsmithnfb at gmail.com>
> >> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
> >> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> >> Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 10:07 AM
> >> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
> >> intown?
> >>
> >>
> >> Joseph,
> >>
> >> With the advant of and advances in digital technologies would one
> >> not argue that people are actually more likely to be employed because
> >> access to information is better than it was even five years ago?
> >> can it be said that the blind who knnow braille are superior to the
> >> blind who arn't? if so, who makes this determination?
> >> Respectfully,
> >> Darian
> >>
> >>
> >> On 1/6/10, T. Joseph Carter <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> > Darian,
> >> >
> >> > What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
> >> > for one thing. That alone should convince parents and teachers the
> >> > importance of Braille education.
> >> >
> >> > Joseph
> >> >
> >> >
> >> > On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
> >> >>I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate focused
> >> >>upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
> >> >> What does this make those who arn't very good braille readers,
> >> >>don't want to know, or don't know braille?
> >> >>
> >> >> Do you feel the Organization (the nfb) frowns upon non-braille readers?
> >> >> respectfullly,
> >> >> Darian
> >> >>
> >> >>On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> >>> Hi:
> >> >>>
> >> >>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.
> >> >>>
> >> >>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
> >> >>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
> >> >>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
> >> >>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
> >> >>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
> >> >>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
> >> >>> display.
> >> >>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
> >> >>> as I should.
> >> >>>
> >> >>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
> >> >>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
> >> >>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.
> >> >>>
> >> >>> Braille readers are leaders!
> >> >>>
> >> >>> Kerri+
> >> >>>
> >> >>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> >>>> Wow. I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
> >> >>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
> >> >>>> today's children are not taught that way. Braille readers are
> >> >>>> leaders, they say.
> >> >>>> Beth
> >> >>>>
> >> >>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> >>>>> This
> >> >>>>> Listening to Braille
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> By RACHEL AVIV
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> Published: December 30, 2009
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> AT 4 O'CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
> >> >>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
> >> >>>>> voice, and she
> >> >>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
> >> >>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads
> >> >>>>> The
> >> >>>>> Financial Times
> >> >>>>> to her while she uses her computer's text-to-speech system to play
> >> >>>>> The
> >> >>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to
> >> >>>>> the
> >> >>>>> magazine.
> >> >>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
> >> >>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads
> >> >>>>> constantly,
> >> >>>>> poring over the
> >> >>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
> >> >>>>> does not use Braille. "Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
> >> >>>>> from my finger to
> >> >>>>> my brain," she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
> >> >>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
> >> >>>>> doesn't think of a
> >> >>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as "a stop on the way
> >> >>>>> before continuing." This, she says, is the future of reading for the
> >> >>>>> blind. "Literacy
> >> >>>>> evolves," she told me. "When Braille was invented, in the 19th
> >> >>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn't even have radio. At that
> >> >>>>> time,
> >> >>>>> blindness
> >> >>>>> was a disability. Now it's just a minor, minor impairment."
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
> >> >>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media
> >> >>>>> eclipsed
> >> >>>>> the written word.
> >> >>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
> >> >>>>> "tribal and oral pattern." But the decline of written language has
> >> >>>>> become a reality for
> >> >>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
> >> >>>>> learning to spell in her youth - she writes by dictation - she says
> >> >>>>> she thinks that
> >> >>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
> >> >>>>> "It's an arcane means of communication, which for the most part
> >> >>>>> should
> >> >>>>> be abolished,"
> >> >>>>> she told me. "It's just not needed today."
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of
> >> >>>>> thick,
> >> >>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old
> >> >>>>> publishing
> >> >>>>> house in Boston,
> >> >>>>> printed the
> >> >>>>> Harry Potter
> >> >>>>> series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
> >> >>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more
> >> >>>>> than
> >> >>>>> $1,000 and there's
> >> >>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
> >> >>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
> >> >>>>> computer-screen-reading software.
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
> >> >>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10
> >> >>>>> percent
> >> >>>>> of the 1.3 million
> >> >>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
> >> >>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
> >> >>>>> low as 1 in 10,
> >> >>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
> >> >>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has "too much
> >> >>>>> sight"
> >> >>>>> for Braille
> >> >>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades -
> >> >>>>> in
> >> >>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
> >> >>>>> of premature
> >> >>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning
> >> >>>>> for
> >> >>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the
> >> >>>>> report
> >> >>>>> has inspired
> >> >>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. "What we're
> >> >>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able - and
> >> >>>>> illiterate," Jim
> >> >>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
> >> >>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. "We stopped teaching our
> >> >>>>> nation's blind children
> >> >>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on
> >> >>>>> their
> >> >>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got
> >> >>>>> to
> >> >>>>> learn the
> >> >>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language."
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
> >> >>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words.
> >> >>>>> Today,
> >> >>>>> visually impaired
> >> >>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to
> >> >>>>> read;
> >> >>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
> >> >>>>> read the individual
> >> >>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
> >> >>>>> educators.
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> "If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
> >> >>>>> mind is limited," Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
> >> >>>>> Access Journal, told
> >> >>>>> me. "You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can't
> >> >>>>> feel
> >> >>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone." Like
> >> >>>>> many
> >> >>>>> Braille readers,
> >> >>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of
> >> >>>>> Braille
> >> >>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices
> >> >>>>> are
> >> >>>>> still extremely
> >> >>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in
> >> >>>>> Braille
> >> >>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: "This is like going
> >> >>>>> back to the 1400s,
> >> >>>>> before Gutenberg's printing press came on the scene," he said. "Only
> >> >>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there
> >> >>>>> were
> >> >>>>> the illiterate
> >> >>>>> masses, the peasants."
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral
> >> >>>>> culture.
> >> >>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
> >> >>>>> outlined in felt
> >> >>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille,
> >> >>>>> a
> >> >>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
> >> >>>>> studying a cipher
> >> >>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
> >> >>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille
> >> >>>>> modified
> >> >>>>> the code so that
> >> >>>>> it could be read more efficiently - each letter or punctuation
> >> >>>>> symbol
> >> >>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
> >> >>>>> rows and two
> >> >>>>> columns - and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
> >> >>>>> "knowledge," "people" and "Lord." Endowed with a reliable method of
> >> >>>>> written communication
> >> >>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise
> >> >>>>> in
> >> >>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
> >> >>>>> and spiritual
> >> >>>>> savior. With his "godlike courage," Helen Keller wrote, Braille
> >> >>>>> built
> >> >>>>> a "firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to
> >> >>>>> climb
> >> >>>>> from hopeless
> >> >>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal."
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight
> >> >>>>> but
> >> >>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
> >> >>>>> innocent and malleable,
> >> >>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
> >> >>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
> >> >>>>> his 1933 book, "The
> >> >>>>> Blind in School and Society," the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
> >> >>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
> >> >>>>> assimilated into
> >> >>>>> the sighted world would become lost in "verbal unreality." At some
> >> >>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
> >> >>>>> light because,
> >> >>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
> >> >>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
> >> >>>>> blind children as
> >> >>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
> >> >>>>> "look," "touch" and "see." And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
> >> >>>>> misguided in his argument
> >> >>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a
> >> >>>>> series
> >> >>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
> >> >>>>> blind are not
> >> >>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
> >> >>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
> >> >>>>> in the parts of
> >> >>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof
> >> >>>>> that
> >> >>>>> Braille is essential for blind children's cognitive development, as
> >> >>>>> the visual cortex
> >> >>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain's
> >> >>>>> plasticity,
> >> >>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading -
> >> >>>>> whether the information
> >> >>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina - is inherently better than
> >> >>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The
> >> >>>>> architecture
> >> >>>>> of the brain is
> >> >>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
> >> >>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
> >> >>>>> found that blind subjects
> >> >>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
> >> >>>>> memory
> >> >>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested,
> >> >>>>> by
> >> >>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
> >> >>>>> brains.
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
> >> >>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
> >> >>>>> wired for print literacy.
> >> >>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and
> >> >>>>> literacy
> >> >>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
> >> >>>>> activity of reading
> >> >>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
> >> >>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
> >> >>>>> illiterate former
> >> >>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned
> >> >>>>> their
> >> >>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras
> >> >>>>> compares
> >> >>>>> 20 adults
> >> >>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
> >> >>>>> not yet begun it. In
> >> >>>>> M.R.I.
> >> >>>>> scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
> >> >>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language
> >> >>>>> processing,
> >> >>>>> and more white
> >> >>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
> >> >>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed
> >> >>>>> in
> >> >>>>> dyslexics, and the study
> >> >>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren't the cause of their
> >> >>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how
> >> >>>>> this
> >> >>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter
> >> >>>>> of
> >> >>>>> debate. In moving
> >> >>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
> >> >>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural - a loss much harder to
> >> >>>>> avoid. In one of
> >> >>>>> the few studies of blind people's prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
> >> >>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana
> >> >>>>> Brent,
> >> >>>>> a teacher of
> >> >>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn't
> >> >>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
> >> >>>>> listening to their
> >> >>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
> >> >>>>> character named Mark who had "sleep bombs":
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was
> >> >>>>> walking
> >> >>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
> >> >>>>> his bed sleeping
> >> >>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad
> >> >>>>> lept
> >> >>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
> >> >>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
> >> >>>>> societies think differently
> >> >>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said - the
> >> >>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them -
> >> >>>>> transformed the shape
> >> >>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
> >> >>>>> readers as disorganized, "as if all of their ideas are crammed into
> >> >>>>> a
> >> >>>>> container, shaken
> >> >>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table."
> >> >>>>> The
> >> >>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
> >> >>>>> emerging in the
> >> >>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
> >> >>>>> concluded, "It just doesn't seem to reflect the qualities of
> >> >>>>> organized
> >> >>>>> sequence and complex
> >> >>>>> thought that we value in a literate society."
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
> >> >>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy
> >> >>>>> for
> >> >>>>> blind people makes
> >> >>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
> >> >>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system - so that blind people
> >> >>>>> would
> >> >>>>> no longer be
> >> >>>>> "despised or patronized by condescending sighted people," as he put
> >> >>>>> it
> >> >>>>> - there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
> >> >>>>> moral dimension
> >> >>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
> >> >>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
> >> >>>>> culture seen as primitive
> >> >>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
> >> >>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S.
> >> >>>>> and
> >> >>>>> Britain, are now
> >> >>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing
> >> >>>>> ones,
> >> >>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
> >> >>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
> >> >>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in
> >> >>>>> Australia,
> >> >>>>> told me that he has heard this described as "one of the advantages
> >> >>>>> of
> >> >>>>> being poor."
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
> >> >>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
> >> >>>>> blindness that it has assumed
> >> >>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and
> >> >>>>> still
> >> >>>>> try to read print - very slowly or by holding the page an inch or
> >> >>>>> two
> >> >>>>> from their
> >> >>>>> faces - are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
> >> >>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights
> >> >>>>> movement
> >> >>>>> for the blind.
> >> >>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis
> >> >>>>> Braille
> >> >>>>> to
> >> >>>>> Abraham Lincoln
> >> >>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
> >> >>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra "listening is not literacy"
> >> >>>>> repeated everywhere,
> >> >>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among
> >> >>>>> middle-school
> >> >>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
> >> >>>>> children who don't
> >> >>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that
> >> >>>>> "happily
> >> >>>>> ever after" is made up of three separate words.
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
> >> >>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as
> >> >>>>> commissioner
> >> >>>>> of the Rehabilitation
> >> >>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
> >> >>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
> >> >>>>> reading skills. "I
> >> >>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn't until two months ago that I
> >> >>>>> realized that 'dissent,' to disagree, is different than 'descent,'
> >> >>>>> to
> >> >>>>> lower something,"
> >> >>>>> he told me. "I'm functionally illiterate. People say, 'Oh, no,
> >> >>>>> you're
> >> >>>>> not.' Yes, I am. I'm sorry about it, but I'm not embarrassed to
> >> >>>>> admit
> >> >>>>> it."
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
> >> >>>>> David A. Paterson
> >> >>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the
> >> >>>>> help
> >> >>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
> >> >>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
> >> >>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
> >> >>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail
> >> >>>>> every
> >> >>>>> morning. (He
> >> >>>>> calls himself "overassimilated" and told me that as a child he was
> >> >>>>> "mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that
> >> >>>>> I'm
> >> >>>>> not really supposed
> >> >>>>> to be blind.") Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers
> >> >>>>> tend
> >> >>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
> >> >>>>> blind person
> >> >>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
> >> >>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
> >> >>>>> to be employed as
> >> >>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
> >> >>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn't know Braille were
> >> >>>>> sometimes made
> >> >>>>> to feel like outsiders. "There is definitely a sense of peer
> >> >>>>> pressure
> >> >>>>> from the older guard," James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
> >> >>>>> text-to-speech
> >> >>>>> software, told me. "If we could live in our own little Braille
> >> >>>>> world,
> >> >>>>> then that'd be perfect," he added. "But we live in a visual world."
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> When deaf people began getting
> >> >>>>> cochlear implants
> >> >>>>> in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
> >> >>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way -
> >> >>>>> as
> >> >>>>> an identity
> >> >>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many
> >> >>>>> disabilities,
> >> >>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people's sense of what is
> >> >>>>> physically natural,
> >> >>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until "fixed." Arielle
> >> >>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
> >> >>>>> since birth, told me that
> >> >>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would
> >> >>>>> take
> >> >>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
> >> >>>>> photographs of
> >> >>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
> >> >>>>> vision like that, as "just another piece of technology."
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
> >> >>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability - the extent to which you
> >> >>>>> are viewed as ignorant
> >> >>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent - determined largely by your
> >> >>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books
> >> >>>>> were
> >> >>>>> designed to function
> >> >>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
> >> >>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
> >> >>>>> once it has been digitized,
> >> >>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
> >> >>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle,
> >> >>>>> but
> >> >>>>> for many blind people
> >> >>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
> >> >>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
> >> >>>>> members recited to
> >> >>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
> >> >>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
> >> >>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
> >> >>>>> Times.
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> --
> >> >>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide
> >> >>>>> teacher
> >> >>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
> >> >>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
> >> >>>>> help! To Get Involved go to:
> >> >>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel
> >> >>>>> destiny
> >> >>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility
> >> >>>>> stretching
> >> >>>>> before us;
> >> >>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
> >> >>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
> >> >>>>> past and future generations,
> >> >>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work
> >> >>>>> with
> >> >>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to
> >> >>>>> be
> >> >>>>> done, and
> >> >>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>> _______________________________________________
> >> >>>>> nabs-l mailing list
> >> >>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> >> >>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> >> >>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
> >> >>>>> for
> >> >>>>> nabs-l:
> >> >>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
> >> >>>>>
> >> >>>>
> >> >>>> _______________________________________________
> >> >>>> nabs-l mailing list
> >> >>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> >> >>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> >> >>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> >> >>>> nabs-l:
> >> >>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
> >> >>>>
> >> >>>
> >> >>> _______________________________________________
> >> >>> nabs-l mailing list
> >> >>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> >> >>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> >> >>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> >> >>> nabs-l:
> >> >>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
> >> >>>
> >> >>
> >> >>
> >> >>--
> >> >>The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
> >> >>recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
> >> >>individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
> >> >>help! To Get Involved go to:
> >> >>www.TeachBlindStudents.org
> >> >>
> >> >>
> >> >>"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
> >> >>calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
> >> >>before us;
> >> >>if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
> >> >>slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
> >> >>past and future generations,
> >> >>then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
> >> >>you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
> >> >>done, and
> >> >>usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
> >> >>
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> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
> >> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
> >> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
> >> help! To Get Involved go to:
> >> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
> >>
> >>
> >> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
> >> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
> >> before us;
> >> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
> >> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
> >> past and future generations,
> >> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
> >> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
> >> done, and
> >> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> nabs-l mailing list
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> 
> -- 
> Arielle Silverman
> President, National Association of Blind Students
> Phone: 602-502-2255
> Email:
> nabs.president at gmail.com
> Website:
> www.nabslink.org
> 
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From mworkman.lists at gmail.com  Thu Jan  7 02:47:00 2010
From: mworkman.lists at gmail.com (Marc Workman)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 19:47:00 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
	intown?
In-Reply-To: <9B835CC7-3EEC-4F98-B04F-A1E42CE1A5E7@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <LNEJJKLNICEECFDGEDGLEECDFOAA.mworkman.lists@gmail.com>

Briley,

I think what matters most is getting the job done.  If a sighted person
unable to read print (e.g., a person with a severe learning disability) used
alternative techniques to do his or her job effectively, then I absolutely
think he or she should be hired by the employer.  We should be held to the
same standard, but the standard should be a matter of whether we can do the
job efficiently and effectively, not a matter of how exactly the job is
done.

As I said before, it would be wrong if children were not taught to read
either print or Braille, and it would be wrong if a child that wanted to
learn Braille were denied that opportunity, but I think some here have come
close to suggesting that Braille is essential if you want to get a job, if
you want to get an education, and if you want to write clearly and
articulately.  This simply isn't true.  Being able to read Braille helps
with all of these things I'm sure, but it definitely isn't essential, and I
just wonder exactly how much it helps.

Marc

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org]On
Behalf Of Briley Pollard
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 7:04 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
intown?


My answer to this is simple. I agree that more studies need to be done
specifically on the employment of braille readers. However, the answer is
the same. Do you think and employer would higher a sighted person who
couldn't read print? No, I think not, (of course some jobs don't really
require it, so this isn't true for ALL jobs). Why should the blind community
be held to a different standard? If we expect to be treated equally,
shouldn't we be held to the same standards?
On Jan 6, 2010, at 6:30 PM, Marc Workman wrote:

> I find this topic very interesting.
>
> I suppose I am someone who advocates the learning and use of Braille, who
thinks it is an important skill, but who almost never uses it.
>
> I think at least two things are missing in this discussion.  First, there
isn't much distinction being made between people who have never read print
or Braille and those who have read print before going blind but haven't
learned Braille.  Second, there are a lot of anecdotal claims being made
without any concrete evidence.
>
> As I said, I almost never use Braille.  In fact, I would barely classify
myself as able to read Braille, but I did read print, all be it with some
difficulty, up until the age of 20.  Am I illiterate since I can read
neither print nor Braille? Did I lose my literacy as I lost my sight, or am
I literate even though I can't read print anymore? I think my case and the
many others that are similar suggest that the question of literacy is a
little more complicated than some of the comments made thus far imply.
>
> I agree that children need to be taught to read either using print or
Braille.  If this isn't happening, it's a serious problem, but I'm not sure
that Braille is as essential for someone who grew up reading print.  It's
certainly a tremendous skill to possess, much like being capable of speaking
three different languages, but it isn't essential for success.  I think this
distinction between former print users and people who never read print is
important and worth getting on the table.
>
> Second, it's fine to speculate and relate your own experiences, but it
would really help the discussion if there were some varified facts out
there.  We can talk about the employment rate of Braille users, but does
anyone have access to the actual studies that show that knowing Braille
increases your employment prospects? Do these studies control for things
like socio-economic status, age of onset of blindness, post-secondary
education, and the myriad of other factors that affect employment prospects?
I have no idea.  Maybe they do, but perhaps they don't.
>
> Again, you can point to this list as evidence of a decline in the writing
skills of the blind, but I've graded dozens of essays in my role as a
teaching assistant, and I don't think I could discern a definite difference
between sighted and blind students.  If you want to see some pretty terrible
writing, just read the comments posted to the average news story on any
major news website.  Some will be written well; others will not.  This is
all entirely anecdotal, and it means very little unless there are some
studies to back it up.
>
> It's an interesting discussion for sure, and it's typical of the
thoughtful and important discussions that take place on this list.
>
> Regards,
>
> Marc
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org]On
> Behalf Of T. Joseph Carter
> Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 2:53 PM
> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
> in town?
>
>
> Darian,
>
> You can argue the maybes and possible futures.  TODAY, Braille is the
> difference between high employment and extremely low.
>
> I'm going to be more harsh than even Jedi was and say that this list
> often demonstrates just how completely pathetic the language skills
> of those who communicate using primarily speech alone actually are.
> There are people on this list who cannot spell words at even the
> second grade level.  Some have no concept of even a sentence, let
> alone a paragraph.  As far as the world is concerned, they are
> illiterate.
>
> Few indeed are the jobs for which complete illiteracy is not a
> factor.  Not only that, if you demonstrate the level of literacy
> sometimes evidenced on this list, you could be an absolute genius and
> the average ignorant sighted person is going to assume you're at the
> very least cognitively deficient.
>
> At this time, we have a whole generation of blind people who have in
> large part grown up functionally illiterate.  They are suffering the
> consequences in that most are unemployed and beginning to come to the
> conclusion that they may in fact be unemployable.  The education
> system has completely failed these people, and it ought to inspire
> nothing short of rage at the notion that it should be allowed to
> continue.
>
> Joseph
>
> On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 10:07:31AM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>> Joseph,
>>
>> With the advant of and advances in  digital technologies  would one
>> not argue that people are  actually more likely to be employed because
>> access to information is  better than it was even five years ago?
>> can it  be said that the blind who knnow braille are superior to the
>> blind who arn't? if so, who makes this determination?
>> Respectfully,
>> Darian
>>
>>
>> On 1/6/10, T. Joseph Carter <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Darian,
>>>
>>> What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
>>> for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and teachers the
>>> importance of Braille education.
>>>
>>> Joseph
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>>>> I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate  focused
>>>> upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
>>>>  What does this  make those who arn't very good braille readers,
>>>> don't want to know, or  don't know braille?
>>>>
>>>> Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille
readers?
>>>> respectfullly,
>>>> Darian
>>>>
>>>> On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> Hi:
>>>>>
>>>>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.
>>>>>
>>>>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
>>>>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
>>>>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
>>>>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
>>>>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
>>>>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
>>>>> display.
>>>>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
>>>>> as I should.
>>>>>
>>>>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
>>>>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
>>>>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.
>>>>>
>>>>> Braille readers are leaders!
>>>>>
>>>>> Kerri+
>>>>>
>>>>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
>>>>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>>>>>> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
>>>>>> leaders, they say.
>>>>>> Beth
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> This
>>>>>>> Listening to Braille
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> By RACHEL AVIV
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Published: December 30, 2009
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
>>>>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
>>>>>>> voice, and she
>>>>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>>>>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads
The
>>>>>>> Financial Times
>>>>>>> to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play
The
>>>>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to
the
>>>>>>> magazine.
>>>>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>>>>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads
constantly,
>>>>>>> poring over the
>>>>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>>>>>>> does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
>>>>>>> from my finger to
>>>>>>> my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>>>>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>>>>>>> doesn’t think of a
>>>>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way
>>>>>>> before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the
>>>>>>> blind. “Literacy
>>>>>>> evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>>>>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that
time,
>>>>>>> blindness
>>>>>>> was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>>>>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media
eclipsed
>>>>>>> the written word.
>>>>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>>>>>>> “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has
>>>>>>> become a reality for
>>>>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>>>>>>> learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says
>>>>>>> she thinks that
>>>>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>>>>>>> “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part
should
>>>>>>> be abolished,”
>>>>>>> she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of
thick,
>>>>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old
publishing
>>>>>>> house in Boston,
>>>>>>> printed the
>>>>>>> Harry Potter
>>>>>>> series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
>>>>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more
than
>>>>>>> $1,000 and there’s
>>>>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
>>>>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
>>>>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10
percent
>>>>>>> of the 1.3 million
>>>>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>>>>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>>>>>>> low as 1 in 10,
>>>>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
>>>>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much
sight”
>>>>>>> for Braille
>>>>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades —
in
>>>>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
>>>>>>> of premature
>>>>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning
for
>>>>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the
report
>>>>>>> has inspired
>>>>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re
>>>>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and
>>>>>>> illiterate,” Jim
>>>>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
>>>>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our
>>>>>>> nation’s blind children
>>>>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on
their
>>>>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got
to
>>>>>>> learn the
>>>>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language.”
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>>>>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words.
Today,
>>>>>>> visually impaired
>>>>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to
read;
>>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
>>>>>>> read the individual
>>>>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>>>>>>> educators.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> “If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
>>>>>>> mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>>>>>>> Access Journal, told
>>>>>>> me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t
feel
>>>>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like
many
>>>>>>> Braille readers,
>>>>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of
Braille
>>>>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices
are
>>>>>>> still extremely
>>>>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in
Braille
>>>>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going
>>>>>>> back to the 1400s,
>>>>>>> before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only
>>>>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there
were
>>>>>>> the illiterate
>>>>>>> masses, the peasants.”
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral
culture.
>>>>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
>>>>>>> outlined in felt
>>>>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille,
a
>>>>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>>>>>>> studying a cipher
>>>>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
>>>>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille
modified
>>>>>>> the code so that
>>>>>>> it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation
symbol
>>>>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
>>>>>>> rows and two
>>>>>>> columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>>>>>>> “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of
>>>>>>> written communication
>>>>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise
in
>>>>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
>>>>>>> and spiritual
>>>>>>> savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille
built
>>>>>>> a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to
climb
>>>>>>> from hopeless
>>>>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal.”
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight
but
>>>>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>>>>>>> innocent and malleable,
>>>>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>>>>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
>>>>>>> his 1933 book, “The
>>>>>>> Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
>>>>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
>>>>>>> assimilated into
>>>>>>> the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some
>>>>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
>>>>>>> light because,
>>>>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>>>>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>>>>>>> blind children as
>>>>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>>>>>>> “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>>>>>>> misguided in his argument
>>>>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a
series
>>>>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>>>>>>> blind are not
>>>>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>>>>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>>>>>>> in the parts of
>>>>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof
that
>>>>>>> Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as
>>>>>>> the visual cortex
>>>>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s
plasticity,
>>>>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading —
>>>>>>> whether the information
>>>>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than
>>>>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The
architecture
>>>>>>> of the brain is
>>>>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>>>>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>>>>>>> found that blind subjects
>>>>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>>>>>>> memory
>>>>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested,
by
>>>>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
>>>>>>> brains.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>>>>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
>>>>>>> wired for print literacy.
>>>>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and
literacy
>>>>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>>>>>>> activity of reading
>>>>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
>>>>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>>>>>>> illiterate former
>>>>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned
their
>>>>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras
compares
>>>>>>> 20 adults
>>>>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
>>>>>>> not yet begun it. In
>>>>>>> M.R.I.
>>>>>>> scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
>>>>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language
processing,
>>>>>>> and more white
>>>>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>>>>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed
in
>>>>>>> dyslexics, and the study
>>>>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their
>>>>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how
this
>>>>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter
of
>>>>>>> debate. In moving
>>>>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
>>>>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to
>>>>>>> avoid. In one of
>>>>>>> the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
>>>>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana
Brent,
>>>>>>> a teacher of
>>>>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t
>>>>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
>>>>>>> listening to their
>>>>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
>>>>>>> character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was
walking
>>>>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
>>>>>>> his bed sleeping
>>>>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad
lept
>>>>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
>>>>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>>>>>>> societies think differently
>>>>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the
>>>>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them —
>>>>>>> transformed the shape
>>>>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
>>>>>>> readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into
a
>>>>>>> container, shaken
>>>>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.”
The
>>>>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>>>>>>> emerging in the
>>>>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>>>>>>> concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of
organized
>>>>>>> sequence and complex
>>>>>>> thought that we value in a literate society.”
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
>>>>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy
for
>>>>>>> blind people makes
>>>>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>>>>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people
would
>>>>>>> no longer be
>>>>>>> “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put
it
>>>>>>> — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>>>>>>> moral dimension
>>>>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>>>>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
>>>>>>> culture seen as primitive
>>>>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>>>>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S.
and
>>>>>>> Britain, are now
>>>>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing
ones,
>>>>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>>>>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>>>>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in
Australia,
>>>>>>> told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages
of
>>>>>>> being poor.”
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>>>>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>>>>>>> blindness that it has assumed
>>>>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and
still
>>>>>>> try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or
two
>>>>>>> from their
>>>>>>> faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
>>>>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights
movement
>>>>>>> for the blind.
>>>>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis
Braille
>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>> Abraham Lincoln
>>>>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>>>>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy”
>>>>>>> repeated everywhere,
>>>>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among
middle-school
>>>>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>>>>>>> children who don’t
>>>>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that
“happily
>>>>>>> ever after” is made up of three separate words.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
>>>>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as
commissioner
>>>>>>> of the Rehabilitation
>>>>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
>>>>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>>>>>>> reading skills. “I
>>>>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I
>>>>>>> realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’
to
>>>>>>> lower something,”
>>>>>>> he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’
re
>>>>>>> not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to
admit
>>>>>>> it.”
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>>>>>>> David A. Paterson
>>>>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the
help
>>>>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>>>>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
>>>>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
>>>>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail
every
>>>>>>> morning. (He
>>>>>>> calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was
>>>>>>> “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’
m
>>>>>>> not really supposed
>>>>>>> to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers
tend
>>>>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
>>>>>>> blind person
>>>>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>>>>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
>>>>>>> to be employed as
>>>>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>>>>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were
>>>>>>> sometimes made
>>>>>>> to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer
pressure
>>>>>>> from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>>>>>>> text-to-speech
>>>>>>> software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille
world,
>>>>>>> then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> When deaf people began getting
>>>>>>> cochlear implants
>>>>>>> in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
>>>>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way —
as
>>>>>>> an identity
>>>>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many
disabilities,
>>>>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is
>>>>>>> physically natural,
>>>>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle
>>>>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>>>>>>> since birth, told me that
>>>>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would
take
>>>>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
>>>>>>> photographs of
>>>>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>>>>>>> vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>>>>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you
>>>>>>> are viewed as ignorant
>>>>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your
>>>>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books
were
>>>>>>> designed to function
>>>>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>>>>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
>>>>>>> once it has been digitized,
>>>>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>>>>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle,
but
>>>>>>> for many blind people
>>>>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>>>>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
>>>>>>> members recited to
>>>>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>>>>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
>>>>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>>>>>>> Times.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide
teacher
>>>>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel
destiny
>>>>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility
stretching
>>>>>>> before us;
>>>>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>>>>> past and future generations,
>>>>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work
with
>>>>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to
be
>>>>>>> done, and
>>>>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
for
>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gm
ail.com
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>
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om
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>
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m
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>> before us;
>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>> past and future generations,
>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>> done, and
>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40gma
il.com
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>>
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m
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>
>>
>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>> before us;
>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>> past and future generations,
>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>> done, and
>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
>>
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il.com
>
> _______________________________________________
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> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
>
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>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
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From albertyoo1 at hotmail.com  Thu Jan  7 02:55:25 2010
From: albertyoo1 at hotmail.com (Albert Yoo)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 21:55:25 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Washington Seminar
In-Reply-To: <BAY139-W11CE5893E34EBE6F0C40908B710@phx.gbl>
References: <409c235c1001041459k20d160aeo96faa1d05e2241a1@mail.gmail.com>, ,
	<4383d01d1001041555w619b636en31f036e8b2380a4b@mail.gmail.com>, ,
	<e5a820711001041844h1c6bf4faw24b826f1777df07e@mail.gmail.com>, ,
	<409c235c1001041940q2102a13em21b90591f17093fb@mail.gmail.com>, ,
	<20100106103425.GB63360@yumi.bluecherry.net>, ,
	<409c235c1001061007r1e1f82abg8f18f8255532007f@mail.gmail.com>, ,
	<01a001ca8f15$c0786000$6601a8c0@server>, ,
	<144BBD32E57C5045B736FBC8D447D0EC02635384@blindmail.BISM.COM>, ,
	<BAY139-W235F1B7D6F4130E4299D0F8B720@phx.gbl>, ,
	<85ff10071001061640g6b932c4ctf3756a1425fc7ead@mail.gmail.com>,
	<BAY139-W11CE5893E34EBE6F0C40908B710@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <BAY139-W1310D7A583E7EAB08EE2F38B710@phx.gbl>


Will the leadership seminar be posted through the nfb website as a stream audio? It is for students isn't it? 
 
> From: albertyoo1 at hotmail.com
> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 21:28:49 -0500
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Washington Seminar
> 
> 
> Will the leadership seminar be posted online? Where is the leadership seminar? Is it in Baltimore? 
> 
> > Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 11:40:00 +1100
> > From: nabs.president at gmail.com
> > To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> > Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Washington Seminar
> > 
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > The Washington student seminar will be on Sunday, Jan. 31 from 10:00
> > a.m. to 5:00 p.m. We will also be having a mixer on Sunday evening
> > from 8:00 p.m.-midnight and a NABS student open house on Monday from
> > 10:30-noon. I will announce this again in my bulletin which will go
> > out on Monday.
> > 
> > This weekend a few of us are going to be having a small NABS
> > leadership seminar which I will also describe in my bulletin.
> > 
> > Arielle
> > 
> > On 1/7/10, Albert Yoo <albertyoo1 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Sunday February 1
> > >
> > >> Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 17:18:42 -0500
> > >> From: aphelps at BISM.org
> > >> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> > >> Subject: [nabs-l] Washington Seminar
> > >>
> > >> When is the student seminar?
> > >>
> > >> Warm regards,
> > >> Amy C. Phelps
> > >> Amy C. Phelps, CRC, NOMC
> > >> Director of Rehabilitation Services
> > >>
> > >> Phone: 410-737-2642
> > >> Mobile: 410-274-1647
> > >> E-mail: aphelps at bism.org
> > >>
> > >> "A frog in a well, can only see its piece of the sky" ~Unknown
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> Confidentiality Note: The information contained in this message may be
> > >> privileged and confidential and protected from disclosure. If the reader
> > >> of this message is not the intended recipient, or an employee or agent
> > >> responsible for delivering this message to the intended recipient, you are
> > >> hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this
> > >> communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this
> > >> communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to the
> > >> message and deleting it from your computer.
> > >>
> > >> -----Original Message-----
> > >> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
> > >> Behalf Of Dennis Clark
> > >> Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 4:18 PM
> > >> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
> > >> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only
> > >> oneintown?
> > >>
> > >> It would be helpful for me and I think most readers if those discussing
> > >> Braille could talk a little about what they do for a living and how
> > >> Braille
> > >> is an integral part of their job. The woman discussed in the article is
> > >> the
> > >> head of a New York Stock Brokerage firm and as such is earning several
> > >> million dollars per year and therefore does not need my advice about
> > >> Braille
> > >> or anything else. Her accomplishments greatly exceed mine by quite a lot
> > >> and for me to advise or criticize her would require an almost unimaginable
> > >> level of arrogance. My advice to all those earning seven figure salaries
> > >> is
> > >> keep on doing what your doing because it is working great! For the rest of
> > >> us earning 4 or 5 digit salaries, it would be interesting to hear what you
> > >> do for a living and how you use Braille in your work, and what you would
> > >> not
> > >> be able to do in your job without Braille.
> > >> Warmest regards,
> > >> Dennis
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> ----- Original Message -----
> > >> From: "Darian Smith" <dsmithnfb at gmail.com>
> > >> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
> > >> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> > >> Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 10:07 AM
> > >> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
> > >> intown?
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> Joseph,
> > >>
> > >> With the advant of and advances in digital technologies would one
> > >> not argue that people are actually more likely to be employed because
> > >> access to information is better than it was even five years ago?
> > >> can it be said that the blind who knnow braille are superior to the
> > >> blind who arn't? if so, who makes this determination?
> > >> Respectfully,
> > >> Darian
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> On 1/6/10, T. Joseph Carter <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >> > Darian,
> > >> >
> > >> > What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
> > >> > for one thing. That alone should convince parents and teachers the
> > >> > importance of Braille education.
> > >> >
> > >> > Joseph
> > >> >
> > >> >
> > >> > On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
> > >> >>I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate focused
> > >> >>upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
> > >> >> What does this make those who arn't very good braille readers,
> > >> >>don't want to know, or don't know braille?
> > >> >>
> > >> >> Do you feel the Organization (the nfb) frowns upon non-braille readers?
> > >> >> respectfullly,
> > >> >> Darian
> > >> >>
> > >> >>On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >> >>> Hi:
> > >> >>>
> > >> >>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.
> > >> >>>
> > >> >>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
> > >> >>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
> > >> >>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
> > >> >>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
> > >> >>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
> > >> >>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
> > >> >>> display.
> > >> >>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
> > >> >>> as I should.
> > >> >>>
> > >> >>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
> > >> >>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
> > >> >>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.
> > >> >>>
> > >> >>> Braille readers are leaders!
> > >> >>>
> > >> >>> Kerri+
> > >> >>>
> > >> >>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >> >>>> Wow. I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
> > >> >>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
> > >> >>>> today's children are not taught that way. Braille readers are
> > >> >>>> leaders, they say.
> > >> >>>> Beth
> > >> >>>>
> > >> >>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >> >>>>> This
> > >> >>>>> Listening to Braille
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> By RACHEL AVIV
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> Published: December 30, 2009
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> AT 4 O'CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
> > >> >>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
> > >> >>>>> voice, and she
> > >> >>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
> > >> >>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads
> > >> >>>>> The
> > >> >>>>> Financial Times
> > >> >>>>> to her while she uses her computer's text-to-speech system to play
> > >> >>>>> The
> > >> >>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to
> > >> >>>>> the
> > >> >>>>> magazine.
> > >> >>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
> > >> >>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads
> > >> >>>>> constantly,
> > >> >>>>> poring over the
> > >> >>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
> > >> >>>>> does not use Braille. "Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
> > >> >>>>> from my finger to
> > >> >>>>> my brain," she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
> > >> >>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
> > >> >>>>> doesn't think of a
> > >> >>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as "a stop on the way
> > >> >>>>> before continuing." This, she says, is the future of reading for the
> > >> >>>>> blind. "Literacy
> > >> >>>>> evolves," she told me. "When Braille was invented, in the 19th
> > >> >>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn't even have radio. At that
> > >> >>>>> time,
> > >> >>>>> blindness
> > >> >>>>> was a disability. Now it's just a minor, minor impairment."
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
> > >> >>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media
> > >> >>>>> eclipsed
> > >> >>>>> the written word.
> > >> >>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
> > >> >>>>> "tribal and oral pattern." But the decline of written language has
> > >> >>>>> become a reality for
> > >> >>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
> > >> >>>>> learning to spell in her youth - she writes by dictation - she says
> > >> >>>>> she thinks that
> > >> >>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
> > >> >>>>> "It's an arcane means of communication, which for the most part
> > >> >>>>> should
> > >> >>>>> be abolished,"
> > >> >>>>> she told me. "It's just not needed today."
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of
> > >> >>>>> thick,
> > >> >>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old
> > >> >>>>> publishing
> > >> >>>>> house in Boston,
> > >> >>>>> printed the
> > >> >>>>> Harry Potter
> > >> >>>>> series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
> > >> >>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more
> > >> >>>>> than
> > >> >>>>> $1,000 and there's
> > >> >>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
> > >> >>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
> > >> >>>>> computer-screen-reading software.
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
> > >> >>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10
> > >> >>>>> percent
> > >> >>>>> of the 1.3 million
> > >> >>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
> > >> >>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
> > >> >>>>> low as 1 in 10,
> > >> >>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
> > >> >>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has "too much
> > >> >>>>> sight"
> > >> >>>>> for Braille
> > >> >>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades -
> > >> >>>>> in
> > >> >>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
> > >> >>>>> of premature
> > >> >>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning
> > >> >>>>> for
> > >> >>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the
> > >> >>>>> report
> > >> >>>>> has inspired
> > >> >>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. "What we're
> > >> >>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able - and
> > >> >>>>> illiterate," Jim
> > >> >>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
> > >> >>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. "We stopped teaching our
> > >> >>>>> nation's blind children
> > >> >>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on
> > >> >>>>> their
> > >> >>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got
> > >> >>>>> to
> > >> >>>>> learn the
> > >> >>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language."
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
> > >> >>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words.
> > >> >>>>> Today,
> > >> >>>>> visually impaired
> > >> >>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to
> > >> >>>>> read;
> > >> >>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
> > >> >>>>> read the individual
> > >> >>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
> > >> >>>>> educators.
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> "If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
> > >> >>>>> mind is limited," Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
> > >> >>>>> Access Journal, told
> > >> >>>>> me. "You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can't
> > >> >>>>> feel
> > >> >>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone." Like
> > >> >>>>> many
> > >> >>>>> Braille readers,
> > >> >>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of
> > >> >>>>> Braille
> > >> >>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices
> > >> >>>>> are
> > >> >>>>> still extremely
> > >> >>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in
> > >> >>>>> Braille
> > >> >>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: "This is like going
> > >> >>>>> back to the 1400s,
> > >> >>>>> before Gutenberg's printing press came on the scene," he said. "Only
> > >> >>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there
> > >> >>>>> were
> > >> >>>>> the illiterate
> > >> >>>>> masses, the peasants."
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral
> > >> >>>>> culture.
> > >> >>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
> > >> >>>>> outlined in felt
> > >> >>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille,
> > >> >>>>> a
> > >> >>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
> > >> >>>>> studying a cipher
> > >> >>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
> > >> >>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille
> > >> >>>>> modified
> > >> >>>>> the code so that
> > >> >>>>> it could be read more efficiently - each letter or punctuation
> > >> >>>>> symbol
> > >> >>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
> > >> >>>>> rows and two
> > >> >>>>> columns - and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
> > >> >>>>> "knowledge," "people" and "Lord." Endowed with a reliable method of
> > >> >>>>> written communication
> > >> >>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise
> > >> >>>>> in
> > >> >>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
> > >> >>>>> and spiritual
> > >> >>>>> savior. With his "godlike courage," Helen Keller wrote, Braille
> > >> >>>>> built
> > >> >>>>> a "firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to
> > >> >>>>> climb
> > >> >>>>> from hopeless
> > >> >>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal."
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight
> > >> >>>>> but
> > >> >>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
> > >> >>>>> innocent and malleable,
> > >> >>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
> > >> >>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
> > >> >>>>> his 1933 book, "The
> > >> >>>>> Blind in School and Society," the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
> > >> >>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
> > >> >>>>> assimilated into
> > >> >>>>> the sighted world would become lost in "verbal unreality." At some
> > >> >>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
> > >> >>>>> light because,
> > >> >>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
> > >> >>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
> > >> >>>>> blind children as
> > >> >>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
> > >> >>>>> "look," "touch" and "see." And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
> > >> >>>>> misguided in his argument
> > >> >>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a
> > >> >>>>> series
> > >> >>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
> > >> >>>>> blind are not
> > >> >>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
> > >> >>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
> > >> >>>>> in the parts of
> > >> >>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof
> > >> >>>>> that
> > >> >>>>> Braille is essential for blind children's cognitive development, as
> > >> >>>>> the visual cortex
> > >> >>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain's
> > >> >>>>> plasticity,
> > >> >>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading -
> > >> >>>>> whether the information
> > >> >>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina - is inherently better than
> > >> >>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The
> > >> >>>>> architecture
> > >> >>>>> of the brain is
> > >> >>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
> > >> >>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
> > >> >>>>> found that blind subjects
> > >> >>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
> > >> >>>>> memory
> > >> >>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested,
> > >> >>>>> by
> > >> >>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
> > >> >>>>> brains.
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
> > >> >>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
> > >> >>>>> wired for print literacy.
> > >> >>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and
> > >> >>>>> literacy
> > >> >>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
> > >> >>>>> activity of reading
> > >> >>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
> > >> >>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
> > >> >>>>> illiterate former
> > >> >>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned
> > >> >>>>> their
> > >> >>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras
> > >> >>>>> compares
> > >> >>>>> 20 adults
> > >> >>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
> > >> >>>>> not yet begun it. In
> > >> >>>>> M.R.I.
> > >> >>>>> scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
> > >> >>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language
> > >> >>>>> processing,
> > >> >>>>> and more white
> > >> >>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
> > >> >>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed
> > >> >>>>> in
> > >> >>>>> dyslexics, and the study
> > >> >>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren't the cause of their
> > >> >>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how
> > >> >>>>> this
> > >> >>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter
> > >> >>>>> of
> > >> >>>>> debate. In moving
> > >> >>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
> > >> >>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural - a loss much harder to
> > >> >>>>> avoid. In one of
> > >> >>>>> the few studies of blind people's prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
> > >> >>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana
> > >> >>>>> Brent,
> > >> >>>>> a teacher of
> > >> >>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn't
> > >> >>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
> > >> >>>>> listening to their
> > >> >>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
> > >> >>>>> character named Mark who had "sleep bombs":
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was
> > >> >>>>> walking
> > >> >>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
> > >> >>>>> his bed sleeping
> > >> >>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad
> > >> >>>>> lept
> > >> >>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
> > >> >>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
> > >> >>>>> societies think differently
> > >> >>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said - the
> > >> >>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them -
> > >> >>>>> transformed the shape
> > >> >>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
> > >> >>>>> readers as disorganized, "as if all of their ideas are crammed into
> > >> >>>>> a
> > >> >>>>> container, shaken
> > >> >>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table."
> > >> >>>>> The
> > >> >>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
> > >> >>>>> emerging in the
> > >> >>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
> > >> >>>>> concluded, "It just doesn't seem to reflect the qualities of
> > >> >>>>> organized
> > >> >>>>> sequence and complex
> > >> >>>>> thought that we value in a literate society."
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
> > >> >>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy
> > >> >>>>> for
> > >> >>>>> blind people makes
> > >> >>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
> > >> >>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system - so that blind people
> > >> >>>>> would
> > >> >>>>> no longer be
> > >> >>>>> "despised or patronized by condescending sighted people," as he put
> > >> >>>>> it
> > >> >>>>> - there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
> > >> >>>>> moral dimension
> > >> >>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
> > >> >>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
> > >> >>>>> culture seen as primitive
> > >> >>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
> > >> >>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S.
> > >> >>>>> and
> > >> >>>>> Britain, are now
> > >> >>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing
> > >> >>>>> ones,
> > >> >>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
> > >> >>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
> > >> >>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in
> > >> >>>>> Australia,
> > >> >>>>> told me that he has heard this described as "one of the advantages
> > >> >>>>> of
> > >> >>>>> being poor."
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
> > >> >>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
> > >> >>>>> blindness that it has assumed
> > >> >>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and
> > >> >>>>> still
> > >> >>>>> try to read print - very slowly or by holding the page an inch or
> > >> >>>>> two
> > >> >>>>> from their
> > >> >>>>> faces - are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
> > >> >>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights
> > >> >>>>> movement
> > >> >>>>> for the blind.
> > >> >>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis
> > >> >>>>> Braille
> > >> >>>>> to
> > >> >>>>> Abraham Lincoln
> > >> >>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
> > >> >>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra "listening is not literacy"
> > >> >>>>> repeated everywhere,
> > >> >>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among
> > >> >>>>> middle-school
> > >> >>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
> > >> >>>>> children who don't
> > >> >>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that
> > >> >>>>> "happily
> > >> >>>>> ever after" is made up of three separate words.
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
> > >> >>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as
> > >> >>>>> commissioner
> > >> >>>>> of the Rehabilitation
> > >> >>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
> > >> >>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
> > >> >>>>> reading skills. "I
> > >> >>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn't until two months ago that I
> > >> >>>>> realized that 'dissent,' to disagree, is different than 'descent,'
> > >> >>>>> to
> > >> >>>>> lower something,"
> > >> >>>>> he told me. "I'm functionally illiterate. People say, 'Oh, no,
> > >> >>>>> you're
> > >> >>>>> not.' Yes, I am. I'm sorry about it, but I'm not embarrassed to
> > >> >>>>> admit
> > >> >>>>> it."
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
> > >> >>>>> David A. Paterson
> > >> >>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the
> > >> >>>>> help
> > >> >>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
> > >> >>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
> > >> >>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
> > >> >>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail
> > >> >>>>> every
> > >> >>>>> morning. (He
> > >> >>>>> calls himself "overassimilated" and told me that as a child he was
> > >> >>>>> "mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that
> > >> >>>>> I'm
> > >> >>>>> not really supposed
> > >> >>>>> to be blind.") Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers
> > >> >>>>> tend
> > >> >>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
> > >> >>>>> blind person
> > >> >>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
> > >> >>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
> > >> >>>>> to be employed as
> > >> >>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
> > >> >>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn't know Braille were
> > >> >>>>> sometimes made
> > >> >>>>> to feel like outsiders. "There is definitely a sense of peer
> > >> >>>>> pressure
> > >> >>>>> from the older guard," James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
> > >> >>>>> text-to-speech
> > >> >>>>> software, told me. "If we could live in our own little Braille
> > >> >>>>> world,
> > >> >>>>> then that'd be perfect," he added. "But we live in a visual world."
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> When deaf people began getting
> > >> >>>>> cochlear implants
> > >> >>>>> in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
> > >> >>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way -
> > >> >>>>> as
> > >> >>>>> an identity
> > >> >>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many
> > >> >>>>> disabilities,
> > >> >>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people's sense of what is
> > >> >>>>> physically natural,
> > >> >>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until "fixed." Arielle
> > >> >>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
> > >> >>>>> since birth, told me that
> > >> >>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would
> > >> >>>>> take
> > >> >>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
> > >> >>>>> photographs of
> > >> >>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
> > >> >>>>> vision like that, as "just another piece of technology."
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
> > >> >>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability - the extent to which you
> > >> >>>>> are viewed as ignorant
> > >> >>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent - determined largely by your
> > >> >>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books
> > >> >>>>> were
> > >> >>>>> designed to function
> > >> >>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
> > >> >>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
> > >> >>>>> once it has been digitized,
> > >> >>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
> > >> >>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle,
> > >> >>>>> but
> > >> >>>>> for many blind people
> > >> >>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
> > >> >>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
> > >> >>>>> members recited to
> > >> >>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
> > >> >>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
> > >> >>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
> > >> >>>>> Times.
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> --
> > >> >>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide
> > >> >>>>> teacher
> > >> >>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
> > >> >>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
> > >> >>>>> help! To Get Involved go to:
> > >> >>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel
> > >> >>>>> destiny
> > >> >>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility
> > >> >>>>> stretching
> > >> >>>>> before us;
> > >> >>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
> > >> >>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
> > >> >>>>> past and future generations,
> > >> >>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work
> > >> >>>>> with
> > >> >>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to
> > >> >>>>> be
> > >> >>>>> done, and
> > >> >>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>> _______________________________________________
> > >> >>>>> nabs-l mailing list
> > >> >>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> > >> >>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> > >> >>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
> > >> >>>>> for
> > >> >>>>> nabs-l:
> > >> >>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
> > >> >>>>>
> > >> >>>>
> > >> >>>> _______________________________________________
> > >> >>>> nabs-l mailing list
> > >> >>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> > >> >>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> > >> >>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> > >> >>>> nabs-l:
> > >> >>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
> > >> >>>>
> > >> >>>
> > >> >>> _______________________________________________
> > >> >>> nabs-l mailing list
> > >> >>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> > >> >>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> > >> >>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> > >> >>> nabs-l:
> > >> >>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
> > >> >>>
> > >> >>
> > >> >>
> > >> >>--
> > >> >>The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
> > >> >>recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
> > >> >>individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
> > >> >>help! To Get Involved go to:
> > >> >>www.TeachBlindStudents.org
> > >> >>
> > >> >>
> > >> >>"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
> > >> >>calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
> > >> >>before us;
> > >> >>if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
> > >> >>slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
> > >> >>past and future generations,
> > >> >>then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
> > >> >>you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
> > >> >>done, and
> > >> >>usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
> > >> >>
> > >> >>_______________________________________________
> > >> >>nabs-l mailing list
> > >> >>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> > >> >>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> > >> >>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> > >> >> nabs-l:
> > >> >>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40gmail.com
> > >> >
> > >> > _______________________________________________
> > >> > nabs-l mailing list
> > >> > nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> > >> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> > >> > To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> > >> > nabs-l:
> > >> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
> > >> >
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> --
> > >> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
> > >> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
> > >> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
> > >> help! To Get Involved go to:
> > >> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
> > >> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
> > >> before us;
> > >> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
> > >> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
> > >> past and future generations,
> > >> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
> > >> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
> > >> done, and
> > >> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
> > >>
> > >> _______________________________________________
> > >> nabs-l mailing list
> > >> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> > >> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> > >> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> > >> nabs-l:
> > >> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dennisgclark%40sbcglobal.net
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> _______________________________________________
> > >> nabs-l mailing list
> > >> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> > >> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> > >> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> > >> nabs-l:
> > >> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/aphelps%40bism.org
> > >>
> > >> _______________________________________________
> > >> nabs-l mailing list
> > >> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> > >> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> > >> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> > >> nabs-l:
> > >> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/albertyoo1%40hotmail.com
> > > 
> > > _________________________________________________________________
> > > Hotmail: Trusted email with Microsoft’s powerful SPAM protection.
> > > http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390706/direct/01/
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > nabs-l mailing list
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> > > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> > > To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> > > nabs-l:
> > > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/nabs.president%40gmail.com
> > >
> > 
> > 
> > -- 
> > Arielle Silverman
> > President, National Association of Blind Students
> > Phone: 602-502-2255
> > Email:
> > nabs.president at gmail.com
> > Website:
> > www.nabslink.org
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > nabs-l mailing list
> > nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> > To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/albertyoo1%40hotmail.com
> 
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From loneblindjedi at samobile.net  Thu Jan  7 03:03:47 2010
From: loneblindjedi at samobile.net (Jedi)
Date: Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:03:47 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only
	one	intown?
Message-ID: <20100107030347.1430.26596@web3.serotek.com>

Honestly, I would still advise her to learn Braille. It's great that 
she can listen to two things at a time, but Braille wouldn't kill her 
either. I know this woman by reputation. From what I've heard, she has 
little interest in associating herself with anything that has to do 
with blindness. So I think for her, the issue isn't a matter of 
independence, but is more a matter of deeply held beliefs and attitudes 
about whether it's respectable to be blind or not. I suspect that (and 
he's admitted it to some extent), that Paterson is of the same mold.

As for me, I am a full-time student at the moment. I use braille and 
have been doing so since I was seven. I have found it much easier to 
take and access notes in Braille than in audio format. I find it much 
easier to listen to the teacher and take notes in Braille rather than 
trying to take notes using just speech synthesis because, while I'm 
listening to one thing, I'm missing out on the other to some extent. I 
also find that I feel more open and able to listen when my ears aren't 
stopped up by headphones.

I also really like to edit papers using Braille. I'm in the process of 
switching technologies at this point, so I've missed out on having 
access to refreshable Braille all of last quarter. I have found that my 
papers have suffered as a result: they had more gramatical errors than 
usual, more spelling errors than usual, and they just didn't flow right.

Incidentally, does anyone have a Handytech Braille driver for talks 
they can send me? I have a Brailliant, and the Brailliant can act like 
A Handytech display. This is most especially important because the Baum 
protocol for Talks only spits out computer Braille and not grade 2. 
This isn't exactly horrible as I'm getting used to it, but it's not 
ideal for reading long pieces. Thanks.

Respectfully,
Jedi
Original message:
> It would be helpful for me and I think most readers if those discussing
> Braille could talk a little about what they do for a living and how Braille
> is an integral part of their job.  The woman discussed in the article is the
> head of a New York Stock Brokerage firm and as such is earning several
> million dollars per year and therefore does not need my advice about Braille
> or anything else.  Her accomplishments greatly exceed mine by quite a lot
> and for me to advise or criticize her would require an almost unimaginable
> level of arrogance.  My advice to all those earning seven figure salaries is
> keep on doing what your doing because it is working great! For the rest of
> us earning 4 or 5 digit salaries, it would be interesting to hear what you
> do for a living and how you use Braille in your work, and what you would not
> be able to do in your job without Braille.
> Warmest regards,
> Dennis


> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Darian Smith" <dsmithnfb at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 10:07 AM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
> intown?


> Joseph,

>  With the advant of and advances in  digital technologies  would one
> not argue that people are  actually more likely to be employed because
> access to information is  better than it was even five years ago?
>   can it  be said that the blind who knnow braille are superior to the
> blind who arn't? if so, who makes this determination?
>   Respectfully,
>   Darian


> On 1/6/10, T. Joseph Carter <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Darian,

>> What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
>> for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and teachers the
>> importance of Braille education.

>> Joseph


>> On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>>> I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate  focused
>>> upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
>>>   What does this  make those who arn't very good braille readers,
>>> don't want to know, or  don't know braille?

>>> Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille readers?
>>>  respectfullly,
>>>  Darian

>>> On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Hi:

>>>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.

>>>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
>>>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
>>>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
>>>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
>>>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
>>>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
>>>> display.
>>>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
>>>> as I should.

>>>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
>>>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
>>>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.

>>>> Braille readers are leaders!

>>>> Kerri+

>>>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
>>>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>>>>> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
>>>>> leaders, they say.
>>>>> Beth

>>>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> This
>>>>>> Listening to Braille

>>>>>> By RACHEL AVIV

>>>>>> Published: December 30, 2009

>>>>>> AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
>>>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
>>>>>> voice, and she
>>>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>>>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
>>>>>> Financial Times
>>>>>> to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The
>>>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the
>>>>>> magazine.
>>>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>>>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
>>>>>> poring over the
>>>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>>>>>> does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
>>>>>> from my finger to
>>>>>> my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>>>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>>>>>> doesn’t think of a
>>>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way
>>>>>> before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the
>>>>>> blind. “Literacy
>>>>>> evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>>>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time,
>>>>>> blindness
>>>>>>  was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”

>>>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>>>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
>>>>>> the written word.
>>>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>>>>>> “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has
>>>>>> become a reality for
>>>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>>>>>> learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says
>>>>>> she thinks that
>>>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>>>>>> “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should
>>>>>> be abolished,”
>>>>>> she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”

>>>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
>>>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
>>>>>> house in Boston,
>>>>>> printed the
>>>>>> Harry Potter
>>>>>>  series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
>>>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
>>>>>> $1,000 and there’s
>>>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
>>>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software.

>>>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
>>>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
>>>>>> of the 1.3 million
>>>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>>>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>>>>>> low as 1 in 10,
>>>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
>>>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight”
>>>>>> for Braille
>>>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in
>>>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
>>>>>> of premature
>>>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for
>>>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
>>>>>> has inspired
>>>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re
>>>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and
>>>>>> illiterate,” Jim
>>>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
>>>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our
>>>>>> nation’s blind children
>>>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their
>>>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
>>>>>> learn the
>>>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language.”

>>>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>>>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
>>>>>> visually impaired
>>>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read;
>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
>>>>>> read the individual
>>>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>>>>>> educators.

>>>>>> “If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
>>>>>> mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>>>>>> Access Journal, told
>>>>>> me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel
>>>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many
>>>>>> Braille readers,
>>>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
>>>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
>>>>>> still extremely
>>>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
>>>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going
>>>>>> back to the 1400s,
>>>>>> before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only
>>>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were
>>>>>> the illiterate
>>>>>> masses, the peasants.”

>>>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture.
>>>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
>>>>>> outlined in felt
>>>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
>>>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>>>>>> studying a cipher
>>>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
>>>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
>>>>>> the code so that
>>>>>> it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol
>>>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
>>>>>> rows and two
>>>>>> columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>>>>>> “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of
>>>>>> written communication
>>>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
>>>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
>>>>>> and spiritual
>>>>>> savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
>>>>>> a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
>>>>>> from hopeless
>>>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal.”

>>>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but
>>>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>>>>>> innocent and malleable,
>>>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>>>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
>>>>>> his 1933 book, “The
>>>>>> Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
>>>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
>>>>>> assimilated into
>>>>>> the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some
>>>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
>>>>>> light because,
>>>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>>>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>>>>>> blind children as
>>>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>>>>>> “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>>>>>> misguided in his argument
>>>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series
>>>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>>>>>> blind are not
>>>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>>>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>>>>>> in the parts of
>>>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.

>>>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
>>>>>> Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as
>>>>>> the visual cortex
>>>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity,
>>>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading —
>>>>>> whether the information
>>>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than
>>>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
>>>>>> of the brain is
>>>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>>>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>>>>>> found that blind subjects
>>>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>>>>>> memory
>>>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by
>>>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
>>>>>> brains.

>>>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>>>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
>>>>>> wired for print literacy.
>>>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
>>>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>>>>>> activity of reading
>>>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
>>>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>>>>>> illiterate former
>>>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their
>>>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares
>>>>>> 20 adults
>>>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
>>>>>> not yet begun it. In
>>>>>> M.R.I.
>>>>>>  scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
>>>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
>>>>>> and more white
>>>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>>>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in
>>>>>> dyslexics, and the study
>>>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their
>>>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.

>>>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
>>>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
>>>>>> debate. In moving
>>>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
>>>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to
>>>>>> avoid. In one of
>>>>>> the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
>>>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent,
>>>>>> a teacher of
>>>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t
>>>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
>>>>>> listening to their
>>>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
>>>>>> character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:

>>>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
>>>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
>>>>>> his bed sleeping
>>>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
>>>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.

>>>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
>>>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>>>>>> societies think differently
>>>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the
>>>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them —
>>>>>> transformed the shape
>>>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
>>>>>> readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
>>>>>> container, shaken
>>>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The
>>>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>>>>>> emerging in the
>>>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>>>>>> concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized
>>>>>> sequence and complex
>>>>>> thought that we value in a literate society.”

>>>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
>>>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
>>>>>> blind people makes
>>>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>>>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people would
>>>>>> no longer be
>>>>>> “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put it
>>>>>> — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>>>>>> moral dimension
>>>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>>>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
>>>>>> culture seen as primitive
>>>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>>>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
>>>>>> Britain, are now
>>>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
>>>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>>>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>>>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia,
>>>>>> told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of
>>>>>> being poor.”


>>>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>>>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>>>>>> blindness that it has assumed
>>>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
>>>>>> try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
>>>>>> from their
>>>>>> faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
>>>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
>>>>>> for the blind.
>>>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille
>>>>>> to
>>>>>> Abraham Lincoln
>>>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>>>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy”
>>>>>> repeated everywhere,
>>>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school
>>>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>>>>>> children who don’t
>>>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily
>>>>>> ever after” is made up of three separate words.

>>>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
>>>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner
>>>>>> of the Rehabilitation
>>>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
>>>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>>>>>> reading skills. “I
>>>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I
>>>>>> realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to
>>>>>> lower something,”
>>>>>> he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re
>>>>>> not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit
>>>>>> it.”

>>>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>>>>>> David A. Paterson
>>>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help
>>>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>>>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
>>>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
>>>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every
>>>>>> morning. (He
>>>>>> calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was
>>>>>> “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m
>>>>>> not really supposed
>>>>>> to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend
>>>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
>>>>>> blind person
>>>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.

>>>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>>>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
>>>>>> to be employed as
>>>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>>>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were
>>>>>> sometimes made
>>>>>> to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
>>>>>> from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>>>>>> text-to-speech
>>>>>> software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world,
>>>>>> then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”

>>>>>> When deaf people began getting
>>>>>> cochlear implants
>>>>>>  in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
>>>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as
>>>>>> an identity
>>>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities,
>>>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is
>>>>>> physically natural,
>>>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle
>>>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>>>>>> since birth, told me that
>>>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
>>>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
>>>>>> photographs of
>>>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>>>>>> vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”

>>>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>>>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you
>>>>>> are viewed as ignorant
>>>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your
>>>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
>>>>>> designed to function
>>>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>>>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
>>>>>> once it has been digitized,
>>>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>>>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
>>>>>> for many blind people
>>>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>>>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
>>>>>> members recited to
>>>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>>>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.

>>>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
>>>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>>>>>> Times.

>>>>>> --
>>>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org


>>>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>>>> before us;
>>>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>>>> past and future generations,
>>>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>>>> done, and
>>>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama

>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com


>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com


>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> --
>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org


>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>> before us;
>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>> past and future generations,
>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>> done, and
>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama

>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
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>> _______________________________________________
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>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
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> --
> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
> www.TeachBlindStudents.org


> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
> before us;
> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
> past and future generations,
> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
> done, and
> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama

> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dennisgclark%40sbcglobal.net


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From loneblindjedi at samobile.net  Thu Jan  7 03:19:56 2010
From: loneblindjedi at samobile.net (Jedi)
Date: Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:19:56 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
	town?
Message-ID: <20100107031956.1432.63953@web3.serotek.com>

Joseph,

Trust you of all people to outdo me on the harshness and cinicism 
scales. (grin) I think Mike freeman might have a competetor. In fact, I 
would pay to see a phorensic debate between you and freeman. Any bets? 
(Grins while shaking money bags)

In all seriousness, you do have a point that there are quite a few 
errors in posts made to this list. but I don't necessarily think that 
it's all a matter of whether or not someone reads Braille or not. I 
think that, in general, it can be said that some folks just don't care 
enough to spell check or reread/review what they've written. I'm 
guilty, and I suspect you are as well. That, unfortunately, is one 
common error in internet etiquette made by the blind, the sighted, the 
literate, and the illiterate.

I definitely must disagree with one of your points. You said that a 
generation of people (our generation) is beginning to see themselves as 
unemployable due to lacks in Braille education and overall lowered 
expectations. I think that blind people as a whole see themselves as 
employable. However, I think your point is valid in that our generation 
has become increasingly comfortable where it's at. For example, I have 
heard more people in our generation say that we should not judge 
others' levels of independence. I agree, but it's not a bad idea to 
really think and ask ourselves if we're really avoiding judgement or if 
we're allowing ourselves to stay comfortable with lowered expectations 
for ourselves. Am I making sense? I think these past discussions of 
whether or not to use a travel aid vs. human guide in a club and 
whether or not it's okay not to know Braille are good examples. I doubt 
I'm doing myself justice explaining this. Sorry. But it does seem to me 
that fewer people in our generation are really taking a hard look at 
themselves and figuring out where they could improve in favor of 
avoiding making judgements that seem exclusionary and dogmatic. While 
it's good to avoid dogma, going in the opposite direction isn't great, either.

Respectfully,
Jedi
Original message:
> Darian,

> You can argue the maybes and possible futures.  TODAY, Braille is the
> difference between high employment and extremely low.

> I'm going to be more harsh than even Jedi was and say that this list
> often demonstrates just how completely pathetic the language skills
> of those who communicate using primarily speech alone actually are.
> There are people on this list who cannot spell words at even the
> second grade level.  Some have no concept of even a sentence, let
> alone a paragraph.  As far as the world is concerned, they are
> illiterate.

> Few indeed are the jobs for which complete illiteracy is not a
> factor.  Not only that, if you demonstrate the level of literacy
> sometimes evidenced on this list, you could be an absolute genius and
> the average ignorant sighted person is going to assume you're at the
> very least cognitively deficient.

> At this time, we have a whole generation of blind people who have in
> large part grown up functionally illiterate.  They are suffering the
> consequences in that most are unemployed and beginning to come to the
> conclusion that they may in fact be unemployable.  The education
> system has completely failed these people, and it ought to inspire
> nothing short of rage at the notion that it should be allowed to
> continue.

> Joseph

> On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 10:07:31AM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>> Joseph,

>> With the advant of and advances in  digital technologies  would one
>> not argue that people are  actually more likely to be employed because
>> access to information is  better than it was even five years ago?
>>  can it  be said that the blind who knnow braille are superior to the
>> blind who arn't? if so, who makes this determination?
>>  Respectfully,
>>  Darian


>> On 1/6/10, T. Joseph Carter <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Darian,

>>> What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
>>> for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and teachers the
>>> importance of Braille education.

>>> Joseph


>>> On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>>>> I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate  focused
>>>> upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
>>>>   What does this  make those who arn't very good braille readers,
>>>> don't want to know, or  don't know braille?

>>>> Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille readers?
>>>>  respectfullly,
>>>>  Darian

>>>> On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> Hi:

>>>>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.

>>>>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
>>>>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
>>>>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
>>>>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
>>>>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
>>>>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
>>>>> display.
>>>>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
>>>>> as I should.

>>>>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
>>>>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
>>>>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.

>>>>> Braille readers are leaders!

>>>>> Kerri+

>>>>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
>>>>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>>>>>> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
>>>>>> leaders, they say.
>>>>>> Beth

>>>>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> This
>>>>>>> Listening to Braille

>>>>>>> By RACHEL AVIV

>>>>>>> Published: December 30, 2009

>>>>>>> AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
>>>>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
>>>>>>> voice, and she
>>>>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>>>>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
>>>>>>> Financial Times
>>>>>>> to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The
>>>>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the
>>>>>>> magazine.
>>>>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>>>>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
>>>>>>> poring over the
>>>>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>>>>>>> does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
>>>>>>> from my finger to
>>>>>>> my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>>>>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>>>>>>> doesn’t think of a
>>>>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way
>>>>>>> before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the
>>>>>>> blind. “Literacy
>>>>>>> evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>>>>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time,
>>>>>>> blindness
>>>>>>>  was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”

>>>>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>>>>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
>>>>>>> the written word.
>>>>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>>>>>>> “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has
>>>>>>> become a reality for
>>>>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>>>>>>> learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says
>>>>>>> she thinks that
>>>>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>>>>>>> “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should
>>>>>>> be abolished,”
>>>>>>> she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”

>>>>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
>>>>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
>>>>>>> house in Boston,
>>>>>>> printed the
>>>>>>> Harry Potter
>>>>>>>  series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
>>>>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
>>>>>>> $1,000 and there’s
>>>>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
>>>>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software.

>>>>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
>>>>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
>>>>>>> of the 1.3 million
>>>>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>>>>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>>>>>>> low as 1 in 10,
>>>>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
>>>>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight”
>>>>>>> for Braille
>>>>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in
>>>>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
>>>>>>> of premature
>>>>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for
>>>>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
>>>>>>> has inspired
>>>>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re
>>>>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and
>>>>>>> illiterate,” Jim
>>>>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
>>>>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our
>>>>>>> nation’s blind children
>>>>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their
>>>>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
>>>>>>> learn the
>>>>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language.”

>>>>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>>>>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
>>>>>>> visually impaired
>>>>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read;
>>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
>>>>>>> read the individual
>>>>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>>>>>>> educators.

>>>>>>> “If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
>>>>>>> mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>>>>>>> Access Journal, told
>>>>>>> me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel
>>>>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many
>>>>>>> Braille readers,
>>>>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
>>>>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
>>>>>>> still extremely
>>>>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
>>>>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going
>>>>>>> back to the 1400s,
>>>>>>> before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only
>>>>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were
>>>>>>> the illiterate
>>>>>>> masses, the peasants.”

>>>>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture.
>>>>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
>>>>>>> outlined in felt
>>>>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
>>>>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>>>>>>> studying a cipher
>>>>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
>>>>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
>>>>>>> the code so that
>>>>>>> it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol
>>>>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
>>>>>>> rows and two
>>>>>>> columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>>>>>>> “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of
>>>>>>> written communication
>>>>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
>>>>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
>>>>>>> and spiritual
>>>>>>> savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
>>>>>>> a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
>>>>>>> from hopeless
>>>>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal.”

>>>>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but
>>>>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>>>>>>> innocent and malleable,
>>>>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>>>>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
>>>>>>> his 1933 book, “The
>>>>>>> Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
>>>>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
>>>>>>> assimilated into
>>>>>>> the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some
>>>>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
>>>>>>> light because,
>>>>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>>>>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>>>>>>> blind children as
>>>>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>>>>>>> “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>>>>>>> misguided in his argument
>>>>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series
>>>>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>>>>>>> blind are not
>>>>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>>>>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>>>>>>> in the parts of
>>>>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.

>>>>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
>>>>>>> Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as
>>>>>>> the visual cortex
>>>>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity,
>>>>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading —
>>>>>>> whether the information
>>>>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than
>>>>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
>>>>>>> of the brain is
>>>>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>>>>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>>>>>>> found that blind subjects
>>>>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>>>>>>> memory
>>>>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by
>>>>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
>>>>>>> brains.

>>>>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>>>>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
>>>>>>> wired for print literacy.
>>>>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
>>>>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>>>>>>> activity of reading
>>>>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
>>>>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>>>>>>> illiterate former
>>>>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their
>>>>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares
>>>>>>> 20 adults
>>>>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
>>>>>>> not yet begun it. In
>>>>>>> M.R.I.
>>>>>>>  scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
>>>>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
>>>>>>> and more white
>>>>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>>>>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in
>>>>>>> dyslexics, and the study
>>>>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their
>>>>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.

>>>>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
>>>>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
>>>>>>> debate. In moving
>>>>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
>>>>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to
>>>>>>> avoid. In one of
>>>>>>> the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
>>>>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent,
>>>>>>> a teacher of
>>>>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t
>>>>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
>>>>>>> listening to their
>>>>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
>>>>>>> character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:

>>>>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
>>>>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
>>>>>>> his bed sleeping
>>>>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
>>>>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.

>>>>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
>>>>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>>>>>>> societies think differently
>>>>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the
>>>>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them —
>>>>>>> transformed the shape
>>>>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
>>>>>>> readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
>>>>>>> container, shaken
>>>>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The
>>>>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>>>>>>> emerging in the
>>>>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>>>>>>> concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized
>>>>>>> sequence and complex
>>>>>>> thought that we value in a literate society.”

>>>>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
>>>>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
>>>>>>> blind people makes
>>>>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>>>>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people would
>>>>>>> no longer be
>>>>>>> “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put it
>>>>>>> — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>>>>>>> moral dimension
>>>>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>>>>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
>>>>>>> culture seen as primitive
>>>>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>>>>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
>>>>>>> Britain, are now
>>>>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
>>>>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>>>>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>>>>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia,
>>>>>>> told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of
>>>>>>> being poor.”


>>>>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>>>>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>>>>>>> blindness that it has assumed
>>>>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
>>>>>>> try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
>>>>>>> from their
>>>>>>> faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
>>>>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
>>>>>>> for the blind.
>>>>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille
>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>> Abraham Lincoln
>>>>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>>>>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy”
>>>>>>> repeated everywhere,
>>>>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school
>>>>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>>>>>>> children who don’t
>>>>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily
>>>>>>> ever after” is made up of three separate words.

>>>>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
>>>>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner
>>>>>>> of the Rehabilitation
>>>>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
>>>>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>>>>>>> reading skills. “I
>>>>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I
>>>>>>> realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to
>>>>>>> lower something,”
>>>>>>> he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re
>>>>>>> not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit
>>>>>>> it.”

>>>>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>>>>>>> David A. Paterson
>>>>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help
>>>>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>>>>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
>>>>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
>>>>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every
>>>>>>> morning. (He
>>>>>>> calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was
>>>>>>> “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m
>>>>>>> not really supposed
>>>>>>> to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend
>>>>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
>>>>>>> blind person
>>>>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.

>>>>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>>>>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
>>>>>>> to be employed as
>>>>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>>>>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were
>>>>>>> sometimes made
>>>>>>> to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
>>>>>>> from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>>>>>>> text-to-speech
>>>>>>> software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world,
>>>>>>> then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”

>>>>>>> When deaf people began getting
>>>>>>> cochlear implants
>>>>>>>  in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
>>>>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as
>>>>>>> an identity
>>>>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities,
>>>>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is
>>>>>>> physically natural,
>>>>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle
>>>>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>>>>>>> since birth, told me that
>>>>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
>>>>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
>>>>>>> photographs of
>>>>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>>>>>>> vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”

>>>>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>>>>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you
>>>>>>> are viewed as ignorant
>>>>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your
>>>>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
>>>>>>> designed to function
>>>>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>>>>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
>>>>>>> once it has been digitized,
>>>>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>>>>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
>>>>>>> for many blind people
>>>>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>>>>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
>>>>>>> members recited to
>>>>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>>>>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.

>>>>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
>>>>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>>>>>>> Times.

>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org


>>>>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>>>>> before us;
>>>>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>>>>> past and future generations,
>>>>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>>>>> done, and
>>>>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama

>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com


>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
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>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
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>>>>> nabs-l:
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>>>> --
>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org


>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>> before us;
>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>> past and future generations,
>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>> done, and
>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama

>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40gmail.com

>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
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>> --
>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org


>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>> before us;
>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>> past and future generations,
>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>> done, and
>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama

>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40gmail.com

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From loneblindjedi at samobile.net  Thu Jan  7 03:28:04 2010
From: loneblindjedi at samobile.net (Jedi)
Date: Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:28:04 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Importance of Using Braille
Message-ID: <20100107032804.1431.99145@web3.serotek.com>

Chelsea,

That was beautiful. I must admit that I nearly cried. I love how you 
painted pictures of your imaginings: I could see you listening to the 
Louis Braille coin launch, I could imagine you reading Braille, and I 
could feel the energy that connected you to the mathematicians and 
physicists of old. I wish the best for you in your endeavor to reach the stars.

Respectfully,
Jed


Original message:
> I agree with Briley and Jedi on this matter.  I am not employed,
> but feel as though Braille has been the one secret, or key, to my
> success as a student.  I'm going to post below my signature a
> speech I delivered at the 2009 NFB of Virginia State Convention
> (sorry if I posted it before; can't remember.) Please comment; I
> welcome feedback.  I like the comment about the shoe fits and
> doing what you love no matter what.  Enjoy the speech.  As a
> final note: did anyone read the description of the tactile art in
> the January Braille Monitor? That also captures the essence of
> what I am about to say and has significant meaning for me.
> Thanks,
> Chelsea
> "I ask you to look both ways.  For the road to a knowledge of the
> stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom
> has been reached through the stars."
> Sir Arthur Eddington, British astrophysicist (1882-1944), Stars
> and Atoms (1928), Lecture 1

> Literacy and Opportunity:
> Learning Braille, Using Braille
> by Chelsea Cook

>   Believe it or not, there was a time when I didn't want to learn
> Braille.  I vaguely remember my mother sitting me down in front
> of small alphabet flash cards and forcing my fingers down upon
> those wretched dots which felt so strange.  I was probably not
> even four, and did not yet know the power this code brought: to
> me or to the rest of the blind.
>   Then I found it.  I don't know how and I don't know when, but
> somewhere along the way, Braille clicked.  It was the catalyst
> that set off all my other academic adventures.  Because of my
> early start and my parents' persistence, I developed a love of
> reading that holds true to this day.  I have pulled that trick
> many times over the years of staying up late into the night with
> a book under the covers, as many Braille readers out there can
> relate.  On a few such occasions, those books were textbooks:
> Noreen Greice's Touch the Stars, for example, or a few sacred
> volumes of our eighth-grade science book.  The school had
> switched the grade levels' books when I was in seventh, but I
> didn't care.  I was reading physics and chemistry a year ahead of
> the standard biology curriculum to satisfy what I now know was
> the beginning of an unquenchable thirst for knowledge that only
> understanding of the physical sciences could provide.  Even now,
> when I do college-level physics, I can visualize the mathematical
> relationships between quantities only by remembering their Nemeth
> symbols.  Last year, going through a period of no physics at all,
> my vision teacher Brailled out a twenty-one page formula sheet.
> The equations under my fingertips radiated a tangible energy; it
> was as though I were connecting with the very scientists who had
> developed them.  They held the secrets of the universe.  All I
> had to do was learn and follow.
>   I read extensively out of school as well.  By third grade, I
> had read all the Braille books in my elementary school's library.
> Bookshare and Web Braille were far-distant dreams then, and even
> now it still awes me how there are so many books being produced.
> The Harry Potter series has always been one of my favorites; I
> have bookcases filled with all seven.  The words of authors took
> me places.  Traveling through space and time with Robert Hineline
> and Madeline L'Engle, I discovered the wonder of science fiction
> and decided to write my own.  I compose novels and poetry so that
> one day, readers will read my work and I can spread the message
> of hope and literacy.  There is a special pleasure in reading
> poetry in Braille, a suspense as to what the next line will
> invoke.  As far as learning the "music" of the words, audio does
> not measure up.
>   I cannot imagine what it is like when other blind people tell
> me they don't know or have never learned Braille.  Braille has
> given me every opportunity in life: It allowed me to hold office
> in the NFB at the national level; it allowed me to return home
> from Colorado with my plane tickets properly labeled and
> identified; it brought amazement to my classmates when they found
> out I don't have to abbreviate my notes.  Earlier this year, Dr.
> Schroeder asked me if I was going into space with the Louis
> Braille coins.  I told him I wished I could, and someday intend
> to follow them to the final frontier.  As I was listening to the
> shuttle launch, I smiled at all the familiar radio calls as
> everything was reported to be nominal.  When they made it into
> orbit, I thought I was there with them, circling the globe at
> 17500 miles per hour, looking around at the stars and the small
> blue planet we call home, realizing my dream of being an
> astronaut.  The symbolism of knowledge gained by blind people and
> by astronomers studying the depths of the universe with the
> Hubble Space Telescope was not lost on me; it was amplified.
> Those coins being launched were my two worlds coming together,
> and they were just waiting for me to join them.
>   We must keep teaching Braille.  Those six dots unlock doors.
> Those six dots help solve the mysteries of the universe.  Those
> six dots give freedom.  Braille makes dreams reality.  While
> important, it is not rocket fuel, but Braille that will carry me
> to the stars.  Braille gives us words; words give us knowledge;
> knowledge gives us power.

> _______________________________________________
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From carrie.gilmer at gmail.com  Thu Jan  7 03:48:28 2010
From: carrie.gilmer at gmail.com (Carrie Gilmer)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 21:48:28 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
	intown?
In-Reply-To: <LNEJJKLNICEECFDGEDGLOEBLFOAA.mworkman.lists@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4b455992.5544f10a.3a80.ffffd2c3@mx.google.com>

Greetings,
A full year ago Rachel Aviv was recommended to come to me by a blind woman
who is also a parent who had convinced Ms. Aviv there was a literacy crisis
for blind children in America and a bigger story than the blind kids
competing at how fast they could bang out or read dots at the Braille
Challenge she was attending. I spent a fair amount of time with her and
directed her to, and supplied her with, many resources, data and studies.
How her final theme evolved is beyond me to fathom. 

I am surprised to say the least that you all have focused solely thus far on
the pure message of sound verses Braille. For she said much else in her
article and also of relevance, I believe, is what she failed to say. 

I am a professional reader. I work for a federal investigator (who is
totally blind and has always been essentially) within a federal agency. She
however can read, and read well. The medium for her for text is Braille. For
me it is print; I am sighted if you had not guessed it. I read all the case
files and though I must do some analysis I am directed by her. Sometimes my
skill in analysis and attention to detail are crucial because if I miss it
she very well might. She knows more about what the details mean, sometimes I
read something just because it is there and I have no knowledge of its
relevance but as soon as she hears it she knows how it fits with her
investigation. That is, she is the skilled interpreter. Sometimes she asks
me to read or look for something specific that she is looking for or to
change how it is formatted or ordered (say a spread sheet) to bring out a
different perspective on the evidence. She also listens to computerized
speech and screen readers much or her day. As part of her job she must write
letters and notices and subpoenas. She must take notes in live interviews of
witnesses, respondents and charging parties. She must write out questions
for interviews and sometimes they are on location away from her office. Much
of the data on cases that comes to her still comes in handwritten ink on
forms that are not well scanned. In the end though, she would not be able to
do her job if she could not read and write. Not many employers would pay for
a fulltime assistant just for the blind person, and that might be a
legitimate question on what are reasonable accommodations. I work 12 hours a
week reading.

It is true that a shocking amount of the sighted people who write in to the
agency with their "side" do so with horrific spelling, formatting, and
grammar. Even their thoughts are not well presented on paper, meaning they
are often terribly out of order. And while it is true that the agency does
everything possible to decipher barley intelligible texts and to negate its
influence by getting oral testimony and depositions it is the bottom line
that their cases are more difficult because they can not articulate as well.
Illiteracy is a factor in inhibiting their due process to some extent. It is
also true that the worse the writing nearly every time it correlates the
lower the job classification in prestige, power, income and working
environment and the more vulnerable they are to abuses and scams.

You want data? Get on Google and start searching literacy and levels of
education and their correlation to "success". The world is full of data on
it. Look at the educations and literacy rates globally and look at the
standard and quality of life in the respective countries. We have an
employment study by Dr. Ruby Ryles, you can search for it on the NFB site.
I can tell you right now there are many careers you can write off if you can
not read and write. All teaching positions, any journalism, any legal,
secretary, politics, medicine, and heck even a farmer needs an ag/business
degree these days. Unless of course you are filthy rich already and can
afford full-time live readers and transcribers for your dictation. Hey Bill
Gates dropped out of college! He did alright! Yeah go ahead and quit if you
are in it, it is not necessary to be successful.

Bottom line, if you are blind, Braille is the most efficient means of
reading and writing for the vast majority. Leaders are Readers. Braille or
Print. That is a fact. Reading and writing changed the world and still does.
Reading and writing are knowledge and power. As far as Ms. Sloate goes, I
find it ridiculous that someone who has no experience with Braille or
reading at all apparently can dismiss it for everyone else. I find it
shocking and offensive that the NY Times gave her the lead paragraph to say
so in her personal opinion of one with something she has no knowledge of.
She does not have any idea how different her day or life might be if she
could read; independently read and write. It would be ludicrous for the
Times to give such feature and credence to a sighted person who never
learned to read print to dismiss is as passé for the rest of the sighted
public. Why is Sloate's opinion on this even taken seriously? Apparently she
has no children...or does she hire a reader to read bedtime stories to them
too?

And dear Marc, I am quite sure a large factor in your not using Braille much
is that you don't use it much. 104 year old people have learned it. Children
can learn it. Jerry Whittle quote, "Read until you bleed." That is what it
takes. It takes an athletic or "Biggest Loser" type discipline and focus. If
you really tried and got good at it you don't know how much you might enjoy
being able to own what you read again and to hear it in your brain from your
own voice. Is your value as a human less if you don't? No. Are you more
likely to be happier than me? Maybe, maybe not. Successful? Maybe, maybe
not. But in all likelihood and by real overwhelming experience I can tell
you I am much more likely to have things and have a convenience at least and
you will not because I can read and write. If I had been born in Bangladesh
I might have a greater chance of being poor, but it is not guaranteed. One
could go round and round about it. Then there is some common sense and the
probabilities of majority experience.

Poor Mr. Brown felt that we pushed a Braille world on him at convention? Hey
Mr. Brown it is a text world. Me thinks you doth protest too much and are
pricked by your own feelings of inadequacy. I have been severely criticized
at times by parents who heard a seminar full of information for the first
time and saturated with guilt of their own making, they blamed ME for making
them feel bad because I had not said enough to "help them" and make them
feel good about not knowing the stuff before! Give me a break. I said I had
said NOT ENOUGH...when someone feels bad and carries a chip on the old
shoulder you can never give them enough to knock the chip off their
shoulder. I always say something, but for some it is never enough. Me thinks
Mr. Brown falls there. Are we to apologize or make qualification for those
who "don’t" every time we take the mic in defense of literacy and Braille or
white canes in case we might hurt someone's feelings? Really?

I take issue with Aviv's statement "Braille looms large in the mythology of
blindness" what the heck does that mean? Talismanic status? I imagine her in
the sixties going to a NAACP rally or a Freedom Rider training and perhaps
she would have surmised there as well, "Voting looms large in the mythology
of blackness to a near talismanic status." We don't frown upon people,
people! We frown upon illiteracy and ridiculous notions that "reading"
at 20 or 30 or 40 wpm for a child with eye and neck and back strain doubling
and quadrupling their time at homework, sitting and feeling stupid while
everyone else races ahead is anything less than abuse and robbery of their
right to an equal opportunity in education. Of course it is different for
the newly blind as adults and of course it is different for those who were
robbed so as children, good grief, we say that all the time. We hold hands
and pass out kleenexes, and offer training, and support, and encouragement,
and meanwhile also offer friendship and understanding and cheerleading and
scholarships (you don't HAVE to know Braille to get one! Ask the latest
winner)and help to find employment. 
 
Now how do you feel about his statement of hers? ..."because it is more
plausible for a blind person to find work doing intellectual rather than
manual labor" Now is that progress? Because in the olden days it was more
plausible that the blind could do manual labor than be educated, like in the
sheltered work shops and etc. etc.

Just a mean mom and please forgive the length, I really need to be done with
this now. Smile.
 
Carrie Gilmer, President
Minnesota Organization of Parents of Blind Children





From jsorozco at gmail.com  Thu Jan  7 03:53:50 2010
From: jsorozco at gmail.com (Joe Orozco)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 22:53:50 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
	town?
In-Reply-To: <20100106215321.GF63360@yumi.bluecherry.net>
Message-ID: <2FD8795E2A644CA9806128F6CB023612@Rufus>

Joseph,

Relax a little.  There's no need for scaring people into thinking that if
they never learn Braille, they have little hope of getting a good job.  I am
especially thinking about people who lose their sight later in life who find
the prospect of learning Braille a daunting task.

Technology is advancing at a rate where the printed word is giving way to
screens on mobile devices.  It's no wonder newspapers are pulling their hard
copies in acknowledgement of the Internet era.  Sighted people are becoming
more technologically inclined, and as Marc said, much as it pains me to
agree with him for the first time, terrible writing is just as prevalent in
sighted public forums as it can be on this list.

I do not discount the use of Braille.  Yet, I do not think anyone else has
either.  People have a problem with the superior attitude taken with those
who do not possess the skills.  Me, I say let them be and figure out for
themselves whether it is true that Braille opens more doors.  After all, we
do not have documented evidence that Braille means better employment, but
that is me speaking as an individual.  Falling down is a far better teacher
than guiding, and for people like Governor Paterson who rose to his
position, well, who really has the last laugh?

As an organization, I feel the NFB could find a better means of
communicating its message.  Braille Readers Are Leaders is, I am sure,
nothing more than a nifty little marketing slogan that happens to rhyme.
Like most of its marketing, it is rather silly, something on par with
calling the annual walk at the national convention a March for Independence.
Nevertheless, it is all merely words and taglines.

What matters is who is providing for their family and who is not.  There are
as many methods of earning money as there are occupations, but for an
organization that is working with a small community, it is not in our best
interest to piss people off over something as individual as how you digest
and reproduce words.  Traveling, cooking, computer literacy, home
economics...all very important for blind people, but you know the real
kicker?  Some sighted people are doing just fine and would never earn a gold
star in any of those areas.

Joe Orozco

"A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the
crowd."--Max Lucado 

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org 
[mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of T. Joseph Carter
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 4:53 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for 
only one in town?

Darian,

You can argue the maybes and possible futures.  TODAY, Braille is the 
difference between high employment and extremely low.

I'm going to be more harsh than even Jedi was and say that this list 
often demonstrates just how completely pathetic the language skills 
of those who communicate using primarily speech alone actually are.  
There are people on this list who cannot spell words at even the 
second grade level.  Some have no concept of even a sentence, let 
alone a paragraph.  As far as the world is concerned, they are 
illiterate.

Few indeed are the jobs for which complete illiteracy is not a 
factor.  Not only that, if you demonstrate the level of literacy 
sometimes evidenced on this list, you could be an absolute genius and 
the average ignorant sighted person is going to assume you're at the 
very least cognitively deficient.

At this time, we have a whole generation of blind people who have in 
large part grown up functionally illiterate.  They are suffering the 
consequences in that most are unemployed and beginning to come to the 
conclusion that they may in fact be unemployable.  The education 
system has completely failed these people, and it ought to inspire 
nothing short of rage at the notion that it should be allowed to 
continue.

Joseph

On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 10:07:31AM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>Joseph,
>
> With the advant of and advances in  digital technologies  would one
>not argue that people are  actually more likely to be employed because
>access to information is  better than it was even five years ago?
>  can it  be said that the blind who knnow braille are superior to the
>blind who arn't? if so, who makes this determination?
>  Respectfully,
>  Darian
>
>
>On 1/6/10, T. Joseph Carter <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Darian,
>>
>> What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
>> for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and teachers the
>> importance of Braille education.
>>
>> Joseph
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>>>I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate  focused
>>>upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
>>>   What does this  make those who arn't very good braille readers,
>>>don't want to know, or  don't know braille?
>>>
>>> Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  
non-braille readers?
>>>  respectfullly,
>>>  Darian
>>>
>>>On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Hi:
>>>>
>>>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.
>>>>
>>>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
>>>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader 
Stream, I really
>>>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker 
with a braille
>>>> display, so I could and probably should download more 
books and read
>>>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
>>>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading 
on a braille
>>>> display.
>>>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use 
braille as much
>>>> as I should.
>>>>
>>>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
>>>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
>>>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.
>>>>
>>>> Braille readers are leaders!
>>>>
>>>> Kerri+
>>>>
>>>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child 
and my vision
>>>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>>>>> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
>>>>> leaders, they say.
>>>>> Beth
>>>>>
>>>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> This
>>>>>> Listening to Braille
>>>>>>
>>>>>> By RACHEL AVIV
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Published: December 30, 2009
>>>>>>
>>>>>> AT 4 O'CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her 
daily reading.
>>>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in 
a synthetic
>>>>>> voice, and she
>>>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a 
minute, which is
>>>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an 
assistant reads The
>>>>>> Financial Times
>>>>>> to her while she uses her computer's text-to-speech 
system to play The
>>>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and 
the other to the
>>>>>> magazine.
>>>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment 
management firm,
>>>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she 
reads constantly,
>>>>>> poring over the
>>>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every 
morning, she
>>>>>> does not use Braille. "Knowledge goes from my ears to my 
brain, not
>>>>>> from my finger to
>>>>>> my brain," she says. As a child she learned how the 
letters of the
>>>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>>>>>> doesn't think of a
>>>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as "a stop 
on the way
>>>>>> before continuing." This, she says, is the future of 
reading for the
>>>>>> blind. "Literacy
>>>>>> evolves," she told me. "When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>>>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn't even have radio. 
At that time,
>>>>>> blindness
>>>>>>  was a disability. Now it's just a minor, minor impairment."
>>>>>>
>>>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>>>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of 
media eclipsed
>>>>>> the written word.
>>>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>>>>>> "tribal and oral pattern." But the decline of written 
language has
>>>>>> become a reality for
>>>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending 
more time
>>>>>> learning to spell in her youth - she writes by dictation 
- she says
>>>>>> she thinks that
>>>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her 
sighted peers.
>>>>>> "It's an arcane means of communication, which for the 
most part should
>>>>>> be abolished,"
>>>>>> she told me. "It's just not needed today."
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring 
reams of thick,
>>>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 
83-year-old publishing
>>>>>> house in Boston,
>>>>>> printed the
>>>>>> Harry Potter
>>>>>>  series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product 
was 56 volumes,
>>>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can 
cost more than
>>>>>> $1,000 and there's
>>>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, 
visually impaired
>>>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation 
of the Blind,
>>>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less 
than 10 percent
>>>>>> of the 1.3 million
>>>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>>>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that 
number is as
>>>>>> low as 1 in 10,
>>>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial 
because there
>>>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has 
"too much sight"
>>>>>> for Braille
>>>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over 
the decades - in
>>>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple 
disabilities, because
>>>>>> of premature
>>>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has 
been waning for
>>>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, 
and the report
>>>>>> has inspired
>>>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. 
"What we're
>>>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able - and
>>>>>> illiterate," Jim
>>>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the 
Association on
>>>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. "We stopped 
teaching our
>>>>>> nation's blind children
>>>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a 
computer, on their
>>>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They 
never got to
>>>>>> learn the
>>>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language."
>>>>>>
>>>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>>>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the 
words. Today,
>>>>>> visually impaired
>>>>>> children can be well versed in literature without 
knowing how to read;
>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down 
each word and
>>>>>> read the individual
>>>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to 
define, even for
>>>>>> educators.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> "If all you have in the world is what you hear people 
say, then your
>>>>>> mind is limited," Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>>>>>> Access Journal, told
>>>>>> me. "You need written symbols to organize your mind. If 
you can't feel
>>>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is 
gone." Like many
>>>>>> Braille readers,
>>>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single 
line of Braille
>>>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but 
these devices are
>>>>>> still extremely
>>>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the 
decline in Braille
>>>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: "This is 
like going
>>>>>> back to the 1400s,
>>>>>> before Gutenberg's printing press came on the scene," he 
said. "Only
>>>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And 
then there were
>>>>>> the illiterate
>>>>>> masses, the peasants."
>>>>>>
>>>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an 
oral culture.
>>>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed 
by wire or
>>>>>> outlined in felt
>>>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, 
Louis Braille, a
>>>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>>>>>> studying a cipher
>>>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a 
French Army
>>>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. 
Braille modified
>>>>>> the code so that
>>>>>> it could be read more efficiently - each letter or 
punctuation symbol
>>>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a 
matrix of three
>>>>>> rows and two
>>>>>> columns - and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>>>>>> "knowledge," "people" and "Lord." Endowed with a 
reliable method of
>>>>>> written communication
>>>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a 
significant rise in
>>>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind 
of liberator
>>>>>> and spiritual
>>>>>> savior. With his "godlike courage," Helen Keller wrote, 
Braille built
>>>>>> a "firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human 
beings to climb
>>>>>> from hopeless
>>>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal."
>>>>>>
>>>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the 
absence of sight but
>>>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>>>>>> innocent and malleable,
>>>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>>>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual 
experience. In
>>>>>> his 1933 book, "The
>>>>>> Blind in School and Society," the psychologist Thomas 
Cutsforth, who
>>>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were 
too rapidly
>>>>>> assimilated into
>>>>>> the sighted world would become lost in "verbal 
unreality." At some
>>>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that 
referenced color or
>>>>>> light because,
>>>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond 
sense. These
>>>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>>>>>> blind children as
>>>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between 
words like
>>>>>> "look," "touch" and "see." And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>>>>>> misguided in his argument
>>>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 
1990s, a series
>>>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>>>>>> blind are not
>>>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>>>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed 
intense activation
>>>>>> in the parts of
>>>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators 
as proof that
>>>>>> Braille is essential for blind children's cognitive 
development, as
>>>>>> the visual cortex
>>>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the 
brain's plasticity,
>>>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading -
>>>>>> whether the information
>>>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina - is inherently better than
>>>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The 
architecture
>>>>>> of the brain is
>>>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>>>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>>>>>> found that blind subjects
>>>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>>>>>> memory
>>>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors 
suggested, by
>>>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual 
regions of their
>>>>>> brains.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>>>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains 
are naturally
>>>>>> wired for print literacy.
>>>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years 
(and literacy
>>>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>>>>>> activity of reading
>>>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report 
released in 2009
>>>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel 
Carreiras studies
>>>>>> illiterate former
>>>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had 
abandoned their
>>>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. 
Carreiras compares
>>>>>> 20 adults
>>>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 
people who had
>>>>>> not yet begun it. In
>>>>>> M.R.I.
>>>>>>  scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects 
showed more gray
>>>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for 
language processing,
>>>>>> and more white
>>>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>>>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were 
previously observed in
>>>>>> dyslexics, and the study
>>>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren't the cause of their
>>>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, 
but how this
>>>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is 
still a matter of
>>>>>> debate. In moving
>>>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest 
consequences for blind
>>>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural - a loss much harder to
>>>>>> avoid. In one of
>>>>>> the few studies of blind people's prose, Doug Brent, a 
professor of
>>>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his 
wife, Diana Brent,
>>>>>> a teacher of
>>>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students 
who didn't
>>>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard 
and edited by
>>>>>> listening to their
>>>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional 
story about a
>>>>>> character named Mark who had "sleep bombs":
>>>>>>
>>>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his 
dad was walking
>>>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo 
and fell on
>>>>>> his bed sleeping
>>>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt 
his dad lept
>>>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell 
down asleep.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents 
invoked the
>>>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>>>>>> societies think differently
>>>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong 
said - the
>>>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them -
>>>>>> transformed the shape
>>>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many 
audio-only
>>>>>> readers as disorganized, "as if all of their ideas are 
crammed into a
>>>>>> container, shaken
>>>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto 
a table." The
>>>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>>>>>> emerging in the
>>>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>>>>>> concluded, "It just doesn't seem to reflect the 
qualities of organized
>>>>>> sequence and complex
>>>>>> thought that we value in a literate society."
>>>>>>
>>>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts 
as our tools
>>>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of 
literacy for
>>>>>> blind people makes
>>>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 
1820s, when
>>>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system - so that 
blind people would
>>>>>> no longer be
>>>>>> "despised or patronized by condescending sighted 
people," as he put it
>>>>>> - there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>>>>>> moral dimension
>>>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>>>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away 
from an oral
>>>>>> culture seen as primitive
>>>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>>>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like 
the U.S. and
>>>>>> Britain, are now
>>>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in 
developing ones,
>>>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>>>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>>>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company 
in Australia,
>>>>>> told me that he has heard this described as "one of the 
advantages of
>>>>>> being poor."
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>>>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>>>>>> blindness that it has assumed
>>>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual 
vision and still
>>>>>> try to read print - very slowly or by holding the page 
an inch or two
>>>>>> from their
>>>>>> faces - are generally frowned upon by the National 
Federation of the
>>>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil 
rights movement
>>>>>> for the blind.
>>>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares 
Louis Braille
>>>>>> to
>>>>>> Abraham Lincoln
>>>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>>>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra "listening is not 
literacy"
>>>>>> repeated everywhere,
>>>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among 
middle-school
>>>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>>>>>> children who don't
>>>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or 
that "happily
>>>>>> ever after" is made up of three separate words.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of 
passage. A vice
>>>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served 
as commissioner
>>>>>> of the Rehabilitation
>>>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and 
relies primarily
>>>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>>>>>> reading skills. "I
>>>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn't until two months 
ago that I
>>>>>> realized that 'dissent,' to disagree, is different than 
'descent,' to
>>>>>> lower something,"
>>>>>> he told me. "I'm functionally illiterate. People say, 
'Oh, no, you're
>>>>>> not.' Yes, I am. I'm sorry about it, but I'm not 
embarrassed to admit
>>>>>> it."
>>>>>>
>>>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>>>>>> David A. Paterson
>>>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve 
without the help
>>>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that 
many cannot
>>>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
>>>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members 
select pertinent
>>>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his 
voice mail every
>>>>>> morning. (He
>>>>>> calls himself "overassimilated" and told me that as a 
child he was
>>>>>> "mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the 
message that I'm
>>>>>> not really supposed
>>>>>> to be blind.") Among people with fewer resources, 
Braille-readers tend
>>>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more 
plausible for a
>>>>>> blind person
>>>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>>>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than 
twice as likely
>>>>>> to be employed as
>>>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was 
frequently
>>>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn't know 
Braille were
>>>>>> sometimes made
>>>>>> to feel like outsiders. "There is definitely a sense of 
peer pressure
>>>>>> from the older guard," James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>>>>>> text-to-speech
>>>>>> software, told me. "If we could live in our own little 
Braille world,
>>>>>> then that'd be perfect," he added. "But we live in a 
visual world."
>>>>>>
>>>>>> When deaf people began getting
>>>>>> cochlear implants
>>>>>>  in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt 
betrayed. The new
>>>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a 
new way - as
>>>>>> an identity
>>>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many 
disabilities,
>>>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people's sense 
of what is
>>>>>> physically natural,
>>>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until "fixed." Arielle
>>>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has 
been blind
>>>>>> since birth, told me that
>>>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure 
she would take
>>>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine 
that takes
>>>>>> photographs of
>>>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>>>>>> vision like that, as "just another piece of technology."
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>>>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability - the extent 
to which you
>>>>>> are viewed as ignorant
>>>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent - determined 
largely by your
>>>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, 
Braille books were
>>>>>> designed to function
>>>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>>>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because 
information,
>>>>>> once it has been digitized,
>>>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>>>>>> transition from print to digital text has been 
relatively subtle, but
>>>>>> for many blind people
>>>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>>>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, 
several federation
>>>>>> members recited to
>>>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>>>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes 
into air.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for 
mental-health journalism
>>>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>>>>>> Times.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> --
>>>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a 
nationwide teacher
>>>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and 
we need your
>>>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if 
you feel destiny
>>>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless 
possibility stretching
>>>>>> before us;
>>>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the 
debt we owe
>>>>>> past and future generations,
>>>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, 
and work with
>>>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work 
that needs to be
>>>>>> done, and
>>>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your 
account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> 
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isloose%40gmail.com
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
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>>>>> nabs-l:
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>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
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>>>
>>>
>>>--
>>>The National Federation of the Blind has launched a 
nationwide teacher
>>>recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>
>>>
>>>"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you 
feel destiny
>>>calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>before us;
>>>if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>past and future generations,
>>>then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and 
work with
>>>you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that 
needs to be
>>>done, and
>>>usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>
>>>_______________________________________________
>>>nabs-l mailing list
>>>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
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>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> 
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>>
>
>
>--
>The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>
>
>"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>before us;
>if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>past and future generations,
>then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>done, and
>usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>
>_______________________________________________
>nabs-l mailing list
>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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From brileyp at gmail.com  Thu Jan  7 03:59:24 2010
From: brileyp at gmail.com (Briley Pollard)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 22:59:24 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
	town?
In-Reply-To: <20100107031956.1432.63953@web3.serotek.com>
References: <20100107031956.1432.63953@web3.serotek.com>
Message-ID: <5E58C6EF-D06D-4D56-AC71-F88249C90E4F@gmail.com>

Again, excellent way of putting that Jedi. Everyone is different, and different skill sets will be useful for different people in their own situations. The sighted world has expectations of independence, and they are held accountable. Do they achieve it in different ways? Yes. The two things that are common though with people who are "successful" are that they travel independently, and they can read. Travel and literacy are the benchmarks of an independent life. People can approach them from different angles, but we should all be approaching that goal. We will never be standing really side by side with a sighted world until we hold ourselves to the same standards. Making excuses gets us nowhere.

 
On Jan 6, 2010, at 10:19 PM, Jedi wrote:

> Joseph,
> 
> Trust you of all people to outdo me on the harshness and cinicism scales. (grin) I think Mike freeman might have a competetor. In fact, I would pay to see a phorensic debate between you and freeman. Any bets? (Grins while shaking money bags)
> 
> In all seriousness, you do have a point that there are quite a few errors in posts made to this list. but I don't necessarily think that it's all a matter of whether or not someone reads Braille or not. I think that, in general, it can be said that some folks just don't care enough to spell check or reread/review what they've written. I'm guilty, and I suspect you are as well. That, unfortunately, is one common error in internet etiquette made by the blind, the sighted, the literate, and the illiterate.
> 
> I definitely must disagree with one of your points. You said that a generation of people (our generation) is beginning to see themselves as unemployable due to lacks in Braille education and overall lowered expectations. I think that blind people as a whole see themselves as employable. However, I think your point is valid in that our generation has become increasingly comfortable where it's at. For example, I have heard more people in our generation say that we should not judge others' levels of independence. I agree, but it's not a bad idea to really think and ask ourselves if we're really avoiding judgement or if we're allowing ourselves to stay comfortable with lowered expectations for ourselves. Am I making sense? I think these past discussions of whether or not to use a travel aid vs. human guide in a club and whether or not it's okay not to know Braille are good examples. I doubt I'm doing myself justice explaining this. Sorry. But it does seem to me that fewer people in our generation are really taking a hard look at themselves and figuring out where they could improve in favor of avoiding making judgements that seem exclusionary and dogmatic. While it's good to avoid dogma, going in the opposite direction isn't great, either.
> 
> Respectfully,
> Jedi
> Original message:
>> Darian,
> 
>> You can argue the maybes and possible futures.  TODAY, Braille is the
>> difference between high employment and extremely low.
> 
>> I'm going to be more harsh than even Jedi was and say that this list
>> often demonstrates just how completely pathetic the language skills
>> of those who communicate using primarily speech alone actually are.
>> There are people on this list who cannot spell words at even the
>> second grade level.  Some have no concept of even a sentence, let
>> alone a paragraph.  As far as the world is concerned, they are
>> illiterate.
> 
>> Few indeed are the jobs for which complete illiteracy is not a
>> factor.  Not only that, if you demonstrate the level of literacy
>> sometimes evidenced on this list, you could be an absolute genius and
>> the average ignorant sighted person is going to assume you're at the
>> very least cognitively deficient.
> 
>> At this time, we have a whole generation of blind people who have in
>> large part grown up functionally illiterate.  They are suffering the
>> consequences in that most are unemployed and beginning to come to the
>> conclusion that they may in fact be unemployable.  The education
>> system has completely failed these people, and it ought to inspire
>> nothing short of rage at the notion that it should be allowed to
>> continue.
> 
>> Joseph
> 
>> On Wed, Jan 06, 2010 at 10:07:31AM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>>> Joseph,
> 
>>> With the advant of and advances in  digital technologies  would one
>>> not argue that people are  actually more likely to be employed because
>>> access to information is  better than it was even five years ago?
>>> can it  be said that the blind who knnow braille are superior to the
>>> blind who arn't? if so, who makes this determination?
>>> Respectfully,
>>> Darian
> 
> 
>>> On 1/6/10, T. Joseph Carter <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Darian,
> 
>>>> What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
>>>> for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and teachers the
>>>> importance of Braille education.
> 
>>>> Joseph
> 
> 
>>>> On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>>>>> I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate  focused
>>>>> upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
>>>>>  What does this  make those who arn't very good braille readers,
>>>>> don't want to know, or  don't know braille?
> 
>>>>> Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille readers?
>>>>> respectfullly,
>>>>> Darian
> 
>>>>> On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> Hi:
> 
>>>>>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.
> 
>>>>>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
>>>>>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
>>>>>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
>>>>>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
>>>>>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
>>>>>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
>>>>>> display.
>>>>>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
>>>>>> as I should.
> 
>>>>>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
>>>>>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
>>>>>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.
> 
>>>>>> Braille readers are leaders!
> 
>>>>>> Kerri+
> 
>>>>>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
>>>>>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>>>>>>> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
>>>>>>> leaders, they say.
>>>>>>> Beth
> 
>>>>>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>> This
>>>>>>>> Listening to Braille
> 
>>>>>>>> By RACHEL AVIV
> 
>>>>>>>> Published: December 30, 2009
> 
>>>>>>>> AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
>>>>>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
>>>>>>>> voice, and she
>>>>>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>>>>>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
>>>>>>>> Financial Times
>>>>>>>> to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The
>>>>>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the
>>>>>>>> magazine.
>>>>>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>>>>>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
>>>>>>>> poring over the
>>>>>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>>>>>>>> does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
>>>>>>>> from my finger to
>>>>>>>> my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>>>>>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>>>>>>>> doesn’t think of a
>>>>>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way
>>>>>>>> before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the
>>>>>>>> blind. “Literacy
>>>>>>>> evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>>>>>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time,
>>>>>>>> blindness
>>>>>>>> was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”
> 
>>>>>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>>>>>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
>>>>>>>> the written word.
>>>>>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>>>>>>>> “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has
>>>>>>>> become a reality for
>>>>>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>>>>>>>> learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says
>>>>>>>> she thinks that
>>>>>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>>>>>>>> “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should
>>>>>>>> be abolished,”
>>>>>>>> she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”
> 
>>>>>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
>>>>>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
>>>>>>>> house in Boston,
>>>>>>>> printed the
>>>>>>>> Harry Potter
>>>>>>>> series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
>>>>>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
>>>>>>>> $1,000 and there’s
>>>>>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
>>>>>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>>>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software.
> 
>>>>>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
>>>>>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
>>>>>>>> of the 1.3 million
>>>>>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>>>>>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>>>>>>>> low as 1 in 10,
>>>>>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
>>>>>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight”
>>>>>>>> for Braille
>>>>>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in
>>>>>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
>>>>>>>> of premature
>>>>>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for
>>>>>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
>>>>>>>> has inspired
>>>>>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re
>>>>>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and
>>>>>>>> illiterate,” Jim
>>>>>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
>>>>>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our
>>>>>>>> nation’s blind children
>>>>>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their
>>>>>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
>>>>>>>> learn the
>>>>>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language.”
> 
>>>>>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>>>>>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
>>>>>>>> visually impaired
>>>>>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read;
>>>>>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
>>>>>>>> read the individual
>>>>>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>>>>>>>> educators.
> 
>>>>>>>> “If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
>>>>>>>> mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>>>>>>>> Access Journal, told
>>>>>>>> me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel
>>>>>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many
>>>>>>>> Braille readers,
>>>>>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
>>>>>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
>>>>>>>> still extremely
>>>>>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
>>>>>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going
>>>>>>>> back to the 1400s,
>>>>>>>> before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only
>>>>>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were
>>>>>>>> the illiterate
>>>>>>>> masses, the peasants.”
> 
>>>>>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture.
>>>>>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
>>>>>>>> outlined in felt
>>>>>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
>>>>>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>>>>>>>> studying a cipher
>>>>>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
>>>>>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
>>>>>>>> the code so that
>>>>>>>> it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol
>>>>>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
>>>>>>>> rows and two
>>>>>>>> columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>>>>>>>> “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of
>>>>>>>> written communication
>>>>>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
>>>>>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
>>>>>>>> and spiritual
>>>>>>>> savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
>>>>>>>> a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
>>>>>>>> from hopeless
>>>>>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal.”
> 
>>>>>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but
>>>>>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>>>>>>>> innocent and malleable,
>>>>>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>>>>>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
>>>>>>>> his 1933 book, “The
>>>>>>>> Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
>>>>>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
>>>>>>>> assimilated into
>>>>>>>> the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some
>>>>>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
>>>>>>>> light because,
>>>>>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>>>>>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>>>>>>>> blind children as
>>>>>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>>>>>>>> “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>>>>>>>> misguided in his argument
>>>>>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series
>>>>>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>>>>>>>> blind are not
>>>>>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>>>>>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>>>>>>>> in the parts of
>>>>>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
> 
>>>>>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
>>>>>>>> Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as
>>>>>>>> the visual cortex
>>>>>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity,
>>>>>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading —
>>>>>>>> whether the information
>>>>>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than
>>>>>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
>>>>>>>> of the brain is
>>>>>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>>>>>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>>>>>>>> found that blind subjects
>>>>>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>>>>>>>> memory
>>>>>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by
>>>>>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
>>>>>>>> brains.
> 
>>>>>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>>>>>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
>>>>>>>> wired for print literacy.
>>>>>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
>>>>>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>>>>>>>> activity of reading
>>>>>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
>>>>>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>>>>>>>> illiterate former
>>>>>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their
>>>>>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares
>>>>>>>> 20 adults
>>>>>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
>>>>>>>> not yet begun it. In
>>>>>>>> M.R.I.
>>>>>>>> scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
>>>>>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
>>>>>>>> and more white
>>>>>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>>>>>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in
>>>>>>>> dyslexics, and the study
>>>>>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their
>>>>>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
> 
>>>>>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
>>>>>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
>>>>>>>> debate. In moving
>>>>>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
>>>>>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to
>>>>>>>> avoid. In one of
>>>>>>>> the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
>>>>>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent,
>>>>>>>> a teacher of
>>>>>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t
>>>>>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
>>>>>>>> listening to their
>>>>>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
>>>>>>>> character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:
> 
>>>>>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
>>>>>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
>>>>>>>> his bed sleeping
>>>>>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
>>>>>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
> 
>>>>>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
>>>>>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>>>>>>>> societies think differently
>>>>>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the
>>>>>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them —
>>>>>>>> transformed the shape
>>>>>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
>>>>>>>> readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
>>>>>>>> container, shaken
>>>>>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The
>>>>>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>>>>>>>> emerging in the
>>>>>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>>>>>>>> concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized
>>>>>>>> sequence and complex
>>>>>>>> thought that we value in a literate society.”
> 
>>>>>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
>>>>>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
>>>>>>>> blind people makes
>>>>>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>>>>>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people would
>>>>>>>> no longer be
>>>>>>>> “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put it
>>>>>>>> — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>>>>>>>> moral dimension
>>>>>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>>>>>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
>>>>>>>> culture seen as primitive
>>>>>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>>>>>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
>>>>>>>> Britain, are now
>>>>>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
>>>>>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>>>>>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>>>>>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia,
>>>>>>>> told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of
>>>>>>>> being poor.”
> 
> 
>>>>>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>>>>>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>>>>>>>> blindness that it has assumed
>>>>>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
>>>>>>>> try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
>>>>>>>> from their
>>>>>>>> faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
>>>>>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
>>>>>>>> for the blind.
>>>>>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille
>>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>>> Abraham Lincoln
>>>>>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>>>>>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy”
>>>>>>>> repeated everywhere,
>>>>>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school
>>>>>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>>>>>>>> children who don’t
>>>>>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily
>>>>>>>> ever after” is made up of three separate words.
> 
>>>>>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
>>>>>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner
>>>>>>>> of the Rehabilitation
>>>>>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
>>>>>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>>>>>>>> reading skills. “I
>>>>>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I
>>>>>>>> realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to
>>>>>>>> lower something,”
>>>>>>>> he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re
>>>>>>>> not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit
>>>>>>>> it.”
> 
>>>>>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>>>>>>>> David A. Paterson
>>>>>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help
>>>>>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>>>>>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
>>>>>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
>>>>>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every
>>>>>>>> morning. (He
>>>>>>>> calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was
>>>>>>>> “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m
>>>>>>>> not really supposed
>>>>>>>> to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend
>>>>>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
>>>>>>>> blind person
>>>>>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
> 
>>>>>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>>>>>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
>>>>>>>> to be employed as
>>>>>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>>>>>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were
>>>>>>>> sometimes made
>>>>>>>> to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
>>>>>>>> from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>>>>>>>> text-to-speech
>>>>>>>> software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world,
>>>>>>>> then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”
> 
>>>>>>>> When deaf people began getting
>>>>>>>> cochlear implants
>>>>>>>> in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
>>>>>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as
>>>>>>>> an identity
>>>>>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities,
>>>>>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is
>>>>>>>> physically natural,
>>>>>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle
>>>>>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>>>>>>>> since birth, told me that
>>>>>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
>>>>>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
>>>>>>>> photographs of
>>>>>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>>>>>>>> vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”
> 
>>>>>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>>>>>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you
>>>>>>>> are viewed as ignorant
>>>>>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your
>>>>>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
>>>>>>>> designed to function
>>>>>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>>>>>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
>>>>>>>> once it has been digitized,
>>>>>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>>>>>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
>>>>>>>> for many blind people
>>>>>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>>>>>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
>>>>>>>> members recited to
>>>>>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>>>>>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
> 
>>>>>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
>>>>>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>>>>>>>> Times.
> 
>>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>>>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>>>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>>>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>>>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
> 
> 
>>>>>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>>>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>>>>>> before us;
>>>>>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>>>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>>>>>> past and future generations,
>>>>>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>>>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>>>>>> done, and
>>>>>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
> 
>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
> 
> 
>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
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> 
> 
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
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> 
> 
> 
>>>>> --
>>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
> 
> 
>>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>>> before us;
>>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>>> past and future generations,
>>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>>> done, and
>>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
> 
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40gmail.com
> 
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
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>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
> 
> 
> 
>>> --
>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
> 
> 
>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>> before us;
>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>> past and future generations,
>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>> done, and
>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40gmail.com
> 
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From raniaismail04 at gmail.com  Thu Jan  7 04:43:46 2010
From: raniaismail04 at gmail.com (Rania)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 23:43:46 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only
	oneintown?
References: <409c235c1001041459k20d160aeo96faa1d05e2241a1@mail.gmail.com><4383d01d1001041555w619b636en31f036e8b2380a4b@mail.gmail.com><e5a820711001041844h1c6bf4faw24b826f1777df07e@mail.gmail.com><409c235c1001041940q2102a13em21b90591f17093fb@mail.gmail.com><20100106103425.GB63360@yumi.bluecherry.net><409c235c1001061007r1e1f82abg8f18f8255532007f@mail.gmail.com>
	<01a001ca8f15$c0786000$6601a8c0@server>
Message-ID: <023d01ca8f54$008213b0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>

Yes I agree and think that is a good idea.
Rania,
"For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
See you at the finish line."
~Christopher Reeve

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dennis Clark" <dennisgclark at sbcglobal.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 4:18 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only 
oneintown?


It would be helpful for me and I think most readers if those discussing
Braille could talk a little about what they do for a living and how Braille
is an integral part of their job.  The woman discussed in the article is the
head of a New York Stock Brokerage firm and as such is earning several
million dollars per year and therefore does not need my advice about Braille
or anything else.  Her accomplishments greatly exceed mine by quite a lot
and for me to advise or criticize her would require an almost unimaginable
level of arrogance.  My advice to all those earning seven figure salaries is
keep on doing what your doing because it is working great! For the rest of
us earning 4 or 5 digit salaries, it would be interesting to hear what you
do for a living and how you use Braille in your work, and what you would not
be able to do in your job without Braille.
Warmest regards,
Dennis


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Darian Smith" <dsmithnfb at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 10:07 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
intown?


Joseph,

 With the advant of and advances in  digital technologies  would one
not argue that people are  actually more likely to be employed because
access to information is  better than it was even five years ago?
  can it  be said that the blind who knnow braille are superior to the
blind who arn't? if so, who makes this determination?
  Respectfully,
  Darian


On 1/6/10, T. Joseph Carter <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
> Darian,
>
> What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
> for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and teachers the
> importance of Braille education.
>
> Joseph
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>>I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate  focused
>>upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
>>   What does this  make those who arn't very good braille readers,
>>don't want to know, or  don't know braille?
>>
>> Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille readers?
>>  respectfullly,
>>  Darian
>>
>>On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi:
>>>
>>> Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.
>>>
>>> I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
>>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
>>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
>>> display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
>>> them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
>>> much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
>>> display.
>>> So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
>>> as I should.
>>>
>>> I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
>>> notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
>>> it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.
>>>
>>> Braille readers are leaders!
>>>
>>> Kerri+
>>>
>>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
>>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>>>> today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
>>>> leaders, they say.
>>>> Beth
>>>>
>>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> This
>>>>> Listening to Braille
>>>>>
>>>>> By RACHEL AVIV
>>>>>
>>>>> Published: December 30, 2009
>>>>>
>>>>> AT 4 O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading.
>>>>> She calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic
>>>>> voice, and she
>>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
>>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
>>>>> Financial Times
>>>>> to her while she uses her computer’s text-to-speech system to play The
>>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the
>>>>> magazine.
>>>>> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm,
>>>>> Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly,
>>>>> poring over the
>>>>> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she
>>>>> does not use Braille. “Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not
>>>>> from my finger to
>>>>> my brain,” she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the
>>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She
>>>>> doesn’t think of a
>>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as “a stop on the way
>>>>> before continuing.” This, she says, is the future of reading for the
>>>>> blind. “Literacy
>>>>> evolves,” she told me. “When Braille was invented, in the 19th
>>>>> century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time,
>>>>> blindness
>>>>>  was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”
>>>>>
>>>>> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age
>>>>> would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed
>>>>> the written word.
>>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the
>>>>> “tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline of written language has
>>>>> become a reality for
>>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time
>>>>> learning to spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — she says
>>>>> she thinks that
>>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers.
>>>>> “It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should
>>>>> be abolished,”
>>>>> she told me. “It’s just not needed today.”
>>>>>
>>>>> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
>>>>> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing
>>>>> house in Boston,
>>>>> printed the
>>>>> Harry Potter
>>>>>  series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes,
>>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than
>>>>> $1,000 and there’s
>>>>> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired
>>>>> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and
>>>>> computer-screen-reading software.
>>>>>
>>>>> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind,
>>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent
>>>>> of the 1.3 million
>>>>> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all
>>>>> blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>>>>> low as 1 in 10,
>>>>> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there
>>>>> is debate about when a child with residual vision has “too much sight”
>>>>> for Braille
>>>>> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades — in
>>>>> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because
>>>>> of premature
>>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for
>>>>> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report
>>>>> has inspired
>>>>> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re
>>>>> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and
>>>>> illiterate,” Jim
>>>>> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on
>>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped teaching our
>>>>> nation’s blind children
>>>>> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their
>>>>> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to
>>>>> learn the
>>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language.”
>>>>>
>>>>> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
>>>>> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
>>>>> visually impaired
>>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read;
>>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and
>>>>> read the individual
>>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for
>>>>> educators.
>>>>>
>>>>> “If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your
>>>>> mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind
>>>>> Access Journal, told
>>>>> me. “You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel
>>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.” Like many
>>>>> Braille readers,
>>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille
>>>>> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are
>>>>> still extremely
>>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille
>>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: “This is like going
>>>>> back to the 1400s,
>>>>> before Gutenberg’s printing press came on the scene,” he said. “Only
>>>>> the scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were
>>>>> the illiterate
>>>>> masses, the peasants.”
>>>>>
>>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture.
>>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or
>>>>> outlined in felt
>>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
>>>>> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began
>>>>> studying a cipher
>>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
>>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified
>>>>> the code so that
>>>>> it could be read more efficiently — each letter or punctuation symbol
>>>>> is represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three
>>>>> rows and two
>>>>> columns — and added abbreviations for commonly used words like
>>>>> “knowledge,” “people” and “Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method of
>>>>> written communication
>>>>> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in
>>>>> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator
>>>>> and spiritual
>>>>> savior. With his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, Braille built
>>>>> a “firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb
>>>>> from hopeless
>>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal.”
>>>>>
>>>>> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but
>>>>> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more
>>>>> innocent and malleable,
>>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a
>>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In
>>>>> his 1933 book, “The
>>>>> Blind in School and Society,” the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who
>>>>> lost his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly
>>>>> assimilated into
>>>>> the sighted world would become lost in “verbal unreality.” At some
>>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or
>>>>> light because,
>>>>> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These
>>>>> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that
>>>>> blind children as
>>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like
>>>>> “look,” “touch” and “see.” And yet Cutsforth was not entirely
>>>>> misguided in his argument
>>>>> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series
>>>>> of brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the
>>>>> blind are not
>>>>> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept
>>>>> their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>>>>> in the parts of
>>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
>>>>>
>>>>> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that
>>>>> Braille is essential for blind children’s cognitive development, as
>>>>> the visual cortex
>>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain’s plasticity,
>>>>> it is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading —
>>>>> whether the information
>>>>> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina — is inherently better than
>>>>> another, at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture
>>>>> of the brain is
>>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can
>>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience
>>>>> found that blind subjects
>>>>> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
>>>>> memory
>>>>> , and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by
>>>>> the extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their
>>>>> brains.
>>>>>
>>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>>>>> development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally
>>>>> wired for print literacy.
>>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy
>>>>> has been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The
>>>>> activity of reading
>>>>> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009
>>>>> in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies
>>>>> illiterate former
>>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their
>>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares
>>>>> 20 adults
>>>>> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had
>>>>> not yet begun it. In
>>>>> M.R.I.
>>>>>  scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray
>>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
>>>>> and more white
>>>>> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
>>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in
>>>>> dyslexics, and the study
>>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren’t the cause of their
>>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result.
>>>>>
>>>>> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this
>>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of
>>>>> debate. In moving
>>>>> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind
>>>>> people may not be cognitive but cultural — a loss much harder to
>>>>> avoid. In one of
>>>>> the few studies of blind people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor of
>>>>> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent,
>>>>> a teacher of
>>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn’t
>>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by
>>>>> listening to their
>>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a
>>>>> character named Mark who had “sleep bombs”:
>>>>>
>>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking
>>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on
>>>>> his bed sleeping
>>>>> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept
>>>>> up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
>>>>>
>>>>> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the
>>>>> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate
>>>>> societies think differently
>>>>> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the
>>>>> ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them —
>>>>> transformed the shape
>>>>> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only
>>>>> readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a
>>>>> container, shaken
>>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The
>>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought
>>>>> emerging in the
>>>>> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors
>>>>> concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized
>>>>> sequence and complex
>>>>> thought that we value in a literate society.”
>>>>>
>>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools
>>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for
>>>>> blind people makes
>>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when
>>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system — so that blind people would
>>>>> no longer be
>>>>> “despised or patronized by condescending sighted people,” as he put it
>>>>> — there has always been, among blind people, a political and even
>>>>> moral dimension
>>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of
>>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral
>>>>> culture seen as primitive
>>>>> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been
>>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and
>>>>> Britain, are now
>>>>> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones,
>>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
>>>>> Braille. Tim Connell,
>>>>> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia,
>>>>> told me that he has heard this described as “one of the advantages of
>>>>> being poor.”
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
>>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of
>>>>> blindness that it has assumed
>>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still
>>>>> try to read print — very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two
>>>>> from their
>>>>> faces — are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the
>>>>> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement
>>>>> for the blind.
>>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille
>>>>> to
>>>>> Abraham Lincoln
>>>>> . At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit
>>>>> Marriott last July, I heard the mantra “listening is not literacy”
>>>>> repeated everywhere,
>>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school
>>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured
>>>>> children who don’t
>>>>> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that “happily
>>>>> ever after” is made up of three separate words.
>>>>>
>>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
>>>>> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner
>>>>> of the Rehabilitation
>>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily
>>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of
>>>>> reading skills. “I
>>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I
>>>>> realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to
>>>>> lower something,”
>>>>> he told me. “I’m functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re
>>>>> not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not embarrassed to admit
>>>>> it.”
>>>>>
>>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
>>>>> David A. Paterson
>>>>> , who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help
>>>>> of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
>>>>> afford. Like Sloate,
>>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent
>>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every
>>>>> morning. (He
>>>>> calls himself “overassimilated” and told me that as a child he was
>>>>> “mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I’m
>>>>> not really supposed
>>>>> to be blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend
>>>>> to form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a
>>>>> blind person
>>>>> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
>>>>>
>>>>> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults,
>>>>> those who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely
>>>>> to be employed as
>>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently
>>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn’t know Braille were
>>>>> sometimes made
>>>>> to feel like outsiders. “There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
>>>>> from the older guard,” James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
>>>>> text-to-speech
>>>>> software, told me. “If we could live in our own little Braille world,
>>>>> then that’d be perfect,” he added. “But we live in a visual world.”
>>>>>
>>>>> When deaf people began getting
>>>>> cochlear implants
>>>>>  in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new
>>>>> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way — as
>>>>> an identity
>>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities,
>>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense of what is
>>>>> physically natural,
>>>>> because bodies can so often be tweaked until “fixed.” Arielle
>>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has been blind
>>>>> since birth, told me that
>>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take
>>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes
>>>>> photographs of
>>>>> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of
>>>>> vision like that, as “just another piece of technology.”
>>>>>
>>>>> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of
>>>>> reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you
>>>>> are viewed as ignorant
>>>>> or civilized, helpless or independent — determined largely by your
>>>>> ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
>>>>> designed to function
>>>>> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has
>>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, because information,
>>>>> once it has been digitized,
>>>>> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the
>>>>> transition from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but
>>>>> for many blind people
>>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted
>>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several federation
>>>>> members recited to
>>>>> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba
>>>>> volant: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
>>>>>
>>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism
>>>>> with the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The
>>>>> Times.
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>>>> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>>>> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>>>> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>>>> before us;
>>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>>>> past and future generations,
>>>>> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>>>> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>>>> done, and
>>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
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>>>
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>>
>>
>>--
>>The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
>>recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
>>individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
>>help!   To Get Involved  go to:
>>www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>>
>>
>>"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
>>calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
>>before us;
>>if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
>>slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
>>past and future generations,
>>then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
>>you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
>>done, and
>>usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>nabs-l mailing list
>>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40gmail.com
>
> _______________________________________________
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> nabs-l:
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>


-- 
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
before us;
if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
past and future generations,
then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
done, and
usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama

_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dennisgclark%40sbcglobal.net


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To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
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From smwhalenpsp at gmail.com  Thu Jan  7 04:52:19 2010
From: smwhalenpsp at gmail.com (Sean Whalen)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 23:52:19 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
	town?
In-Reply-To: <mailman.6486.1262824817.20284.nabs-l_nfbnet.org@nfbnet.org>
References: <mailman.6486.1262824817.20284.nabs-l_nfbnet.org@nfbnet.org>
Message-ID: <5B1419965DAD4433966CF5F3293024BD@VALUED04C3B21F>

Let me first acknowledge the truth of what Mark has pointed out in terms of
the anecdotal nature of much of the evidence proffered in support of Braille
literacy increasing employment opportunities for the blind. I also admit
freely that I have never dug into the numbers we so often bandy about in
relation to literacy rates among the blind, literacy rates among the
employed blind and the unemployment rate for blind individuals and do not
know how carefully designed or well executed any of the studies from which
we glean these numbers actually were.

All this being said, I absolutely believe that Braille, for persons who are
unable and have never learned to read print, is a necessity and not simply a
tool in a toolbox. I qualify this because Marc was once again, I think,
correct in drawing the distinction between those who learn to read print and
go blind later in life and those who are blind from a young age and never
learn to read via any medium. For somebody who read print and achieved
literacy, Braille is an incredibly useful tool that can make some tasks
easier and more efficient and allow one to recapture the pleasure of reading
to oneself, but for those who never learned to read print, Braille is the
only path to literacy. So, barring any complicating factors such as
additional disabilities, I firmly believe that all blind children and all
non-print-reading blind adults must be expected to learn to read Braille.
Accepting anything less is to give the stamp of approval to lower
expectations of the blind among the general public. When Joe Sighted is
illiterate at age 25, we all recognize this as a big problem. It is no
different for the blind, it's a big problem.

I also agree with Joe, to a degree, that it is not a simple as Braille
literate equals employed. But I think that it is beyond dispute that being
able to read is a crucial skill for nearly any job seeker to have. Braille
is not "the difference", but all else being equal, it certainly puts
somebody who can read it at a great advantage over somebody else similarly
situated who cannot. Just assume for a moment that the numbers we so often
cite are close to accurate. 30 in 100 blind people are employed. Of those
30, 24 of them are able to read Braille. WE don't really know what the
literacy rate among the working age blind is, but if it is under 50%, which
it almost certainly is, you can do the math and see that there is something
going on here.

I myself have been blind all my life. In elementary school attempts were
made to teach me to read print with the severely limited vision that I had.
I did not learn to read. What I was doing was more akin to decoding;
agonizing over each letter to discern what it was and then piecing it
together to make a word. At age 25 I learned to read Braille. Braille has
proved useful in finding employment not only because of the specific tasks
it makes easier on the job, but more so because of the fact that it has made
me literate. Literacy means knowing how things are spelled and how
punctuation is used. Literacy means being able to express yourself in
writing in a manner that accurately reflects your level of intelligence.
Sure, it is nice to use a Braille display to access and take notes in
meetings where speech output would be distracting. Yes, it is great to be
able to use an outline or notes when addressing people publicly. However,
these are simply instances where Braille is a tool, and in my opinion the
best one, to get the job done. There are other ways to perform these tasks.
Where there is no substitution for being literate is in communicating your
ideas in writing. In college, I would hand in work of supposed high academic
quality with the most egregious spelling and punctuation errors in it. Who
can take that seriously? Yes there is spell-check and you can arrow through
character by character to find out how words are spelled and things are
punctuated, but this approach means you only learn when you know you don't
know. When you read, you pick things up naturally along the way and
assimilate them.

Of course it is true that some illiterate blind people like Laura Sloate and
the Governor of New York have achieved the pinnacles of financial and
professional success. More power to them. I could point you toward people
who have become very successful without completing a high school education
let alone a college degree. Will anybody stand up and argue based on this
fact that bachelor's and advanced degrees don't lead to more and better
employment prospects for those who hold them?

Literacy is absolutely essential for professional opportunities and Braille
is the only means by which to achieve it if one does not read print. Blind
people who don't know Braille are certainly not inferior people, but they
are absolutely working with an inferior set of skills, and if Laura Sloate
would like to debate the point, I would gladly do so, regardless of how much
money she makes.



From raniaismail04 at gmail.com  Thu Jan  7 04:55:14 2010
From: raniaismail04 at gmail.com (Rania)
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 23:55:14 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Importance of Using Braille
References: <4b453330.0604c00a.66be.3774@mx.google.com>
	<003601ca8f3f$7f089160$0201a8c0@Serene>
Message-ID: <025901ca8f55$9b01d0a0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>

I like it!
Rania,
"For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
See you at the finish line."
~Christopher Reeve

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Serena" <serenacucco at verizon.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 9:17 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Importance of Using Braille


> Great speech!
>
> Serena
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Chelsea Cook" <astrochem119 at gmail.com>
> To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 8:10 PM
> Subject: [nabs-l] Importance of Using Braille
>
>
>>I agree with Briley and Jedi on this matter.  I am not employed, but feel 
>>as though Braille has been the one secret, or key, to my success as a 
>>student.  I'm going to post below my signature a speech I delivered at the 
>>2009 NFB of Virginia State Convention (sorry if I posted it before; can't 
>>remember.) Please comment; I welcome feedback.  I like the comment about 
>>the shoe fits and doing what you love no matter what.  Enjoy the speech. 
>>As a final note: did anyone read the description of the tactile art in the 
>>January Braille Monitor? That also captures the essence of what I am about 
>>to say and has significant meaning for me.
>> Thanks,
>> Chelsea
>> "I ask you to look both ways.  For the road to a knowledge of the stars 
>> leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been 
>> reached through the stars."
>> Sir Arthur Eddington, British astrophysicist (1882-1944), Stars and Atoms 
>> (1928), Lecture 1
>>
>> Literacy and Opportunity:
>> Learning Braille, Using Braille
>> by Chelsea Cook
>>
>>  Believe it or not, there was a time when I didn't want to learn Braille. 
>> I vaguely remember my mother sitting me down in front of small alphabet 
>> flash cards and forcing my fingers down upon those wretched dots which 
>> felt so strange.  I was probably not even four, and did not yet know the 
>> power this code brought: to me or to the rest of the blind.
>>  Then I found it.  I don't know how and I don't know when, but somewhere 
>> along the way, Braille clicked.  It was the catalyst that set off all my 
>> other academic adventures.  Because of my early start and my parents' 
>> persistence, I developed a love of reading that holds true to this day. 
>> I have pulled that trick many times over the years of staying up late 
>> into the night with a book under the covers, as many Braille readers out 
>> there can relate.  On a few such occasions, those books were textbooks: 
>> Noreen Greice's Touch the Stars, for example, or a few sacred volumes of 
>> our eighth-grade science book.  The school had switched the grade levels' 
>> books when I was in seventh, but I didn't care.  I was reading physics 
>> and chemistry a year ahead of the standard biology curriculum to satisfy 
>> what I now know was the beginning of an unquenchable thirst for knowledge 
>> that only understanding of the physical sciences could provide.  Even 
>> now, when I do college-level physics, I can visualize the mathematical 
>> relationships between quantities only by remembering their Nemeth 
>> symbols.  Last year, going through a period of no physics at all, my 
>> vision teacher Brailled out a twenty-one page formula sheet.  The 
>> equations under my fingertips radiated a tangible energy; it was as 
>> though I were connecting with the very scientists who had developed them. 
>> They held the secrets of the universe.  All I had to do was learn and 
>> follow.
>>  I read extensively out of school as well.  By third grade, I had read 
>> all the Braille books in my elementary school's library.  Bookshare and 
>> Web Braille were far-distant dreams then, and even now it still awes me 
>> how there are so many books being produced.  The Harry Potter series has 
>> always been one of my favorites; I have bookcases filled with all seven. 
>> The words of authors took me places.  Traveling through space and time 
>> with Robert Hineline and Madeline L'Engle, I discovered the wonder of 
>> science fiction and decided to write my own.  I compose novels and poetry 
>> so that one day, readers will read my work and I can spread the message 
>> of hope and literacy.  There is a special pleasure in reading poetry in 
>> Braille, a suspense as to what the next line will invoke.  As far as 
>> learning the "music" of the words, audio does not measure up.
>>  I cannot imagine what it is like when other blind people tell me they 
>> don't know or have never learned Braille.  Braille has given me every 
>> opportunity in life: It allowed me to hold office in the NFB at the 
>> national level; it allowed me to return home from Colorado with my plane 
>> tickets properly labeled and identified; it brought amazement to my 
>> classmates when they found out I don't have to abbreviate my notes. 
>> Earlier this year, Dr.  Schroeder asked me if I was going into space with 
>> the Louis Braille coins.  I told him I wished I could, and someday intend 
>> to follow them to the final frontier.  As I was listening to the shuttle 
>> launch, I smiled at all the familiar radio calls as everything was 
>> reported to be nominal.  When they made it into orbit, I thought I was 
>> there with them, circling the globe at 17500 miles per hour, looking 
>> around at the stars and the small blue planet we call home, realizing my 
>> dream of being an astronaut.  The symbolism of knowledge gained by blind 
>> people and by astronomers studying the depths of the universe with the 
>> Hubble Space Telescope was not lost on me; it was amplified.  Those coins 
>> being launched were my two worlds coming together, and they were just 
>> waiting for me to join them.
>>  We must keep teaching Braille.  Those six dots unlock doors.  Those six 
>> dots help solve the mysteries of the universe.  Those six dots give 
>> freedom.  Braille makes dreams reality.  While important, it is not 
>> rocket fuel, but Braille that will carry me to the stars.  Braille gives 
>> us words; words give us knowledge; knowledge gives us power.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>
>
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> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaismail04%40gmail.com
> 



From matthew.janusauskas at humanware.com  Thu Jan  7 10:39:48 2010
From: matthew.janusauskas at humanware.com (Matthew Janusauskas)
Date: Thu, 07 Jan 2010 04:39:48 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] A software update is now available for the BrailleNote Apex
Message-ID: <auto-000133944273@mailfront2.g2host.com>


The following announcement was sent via the BrailleNote NewsWire earlier
today.  Subscribing to the BrailleNote NewsWire will ensure that you
receive the latest information pertaining to the BrailleNote family of
products.  If you have not yet subscribed to the BrailleNote NewsWire
you may do so at the following page on the HumanWare web site:

http://www.humanware.com/en-usa/products/blindness/braillenotes/braillen
ote_newswire

Please note there was an error in the announcement and the latest
version of KeySoft for the BrailleNote Apex is version 9.0.0 Build 534.
Products shipped within the past two weeks or so will already have this
version installed and there is no need to install the software update.


Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 15:05
Subject: A software update is now available for the BrailleNote Apex

A software update is now available for the BrailleNote Apex that
addresses a number of reported issues including a missing index to the
onboard User Guide, DAISY navigation improvements and a number of other
corrections to reported issues.

The software update can be found on the support area of the HumanWare
web site, and in addition to KeySoft version 9.0.0 Build 534, the
release notes and installation procedure are also available.  The
following direct link is also included here for your convenience.

http://www.humanware.com/en-usa/support/braillenote_apex/software/keysof
t_90_upgrade

The HumanWare Team

support at humanware.com


_______________________________________________
BNannounce mailing list
BNannounce at list.humanware.com
http://list.humanware.com/mailman/listinfo/bnannounce



From MRiccobono at nfb.org  Thu Jan  7 11:15:30 2010
From: MRiccobono at nfb.org (Riccobono,
	Mark)
Date: Thu, 07 Jan 2010 05:15:30 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Goddard Space Center Looking for Disabled Interns
Message-ID: <auto-000133945462@mailfront2.g2host.com>


From: "Silberman, Kenneth A. (GSFC-1300)" 
<<mailto:kenneth.a.silberman at nasa.gov>kenneth.a.silberman at nasa.gov>
To: "Silberman, Kenneth A. (GSFC-1300)" 
<<mailto:kenneth.a.silberman at nasa.gov>kenneth.a.silberman at nasa.gov>
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 13:17:32 -0600
Subject: Looking for Disabled Interns for Summer 2010 Goddard Projects


Greetings from Goddard as we prepare for the Martin Luther King Holiday:

We are looking for disabled interns for Summer 2010.  The list of 
2010 GSFC projects has been entered by our mentors.  There is an 
abundance of projects to review at 
<http://education.gsfc.nasa.gov/opportunities/>http://education.gsfc.nasa.gov/opportunities/ 
.  Just click on the "Browse Available Opportunities" link to see 
what is available and apply to the internship of interest.  (There is 
a link for every project and an "Apply Now" button with every 
internship description.)  The deadline for students to apply is 7 
February 2010.

In addition, I encourage you to send me resumes of students you feel 
fit into the category of "highly qualified" based on academic merit 
and experience. See the Goddard organization lists in the attached 
PowerPoint file; and if you know of a student well suited and 
interested in one of these Branches, by all means send me their 
resume, their Branch of interest, and I will personally check with 
that group and get back with you.

Again, we would like to see many more students with disabilities 
placed at Goddard next Summer. Your help in achieving this goal is 
greatly appreciated.  I look forward to receiving your 
recommendations and hopefully together we can brighten a deserving 
students space-career!

Very Truly Yours,

  Ken

Col. Kenneth A. Silberman, Esq.
U.S. Supreme Court, Maryland, & Patent Bars
B.A., M.Eng., J.D.
NASA Engineer & Registered Patent Attorney
Education Office Code 130.3
NASA/GSFC Mailstop 130.3
Bldg. 28 Rm. N165
Greenbelt, MD  20771, USA
Voice:  (301) 286-9281
Fax:  (301) 286-1655
E-mail:  <mailto:kenneth.a.silberman at nasa.gov>kenneth.a.silberman at nasa.gov
Office Location:                 Building 28 Room W151

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From dennisgclark at sbcglobal.net  Thu Jan  7 15:25:00 2010
From: dennisgclark at sbcglobal.net (Dennis Clark)
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 07:25:00 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
	intown?
References: <mailman.6486.1262824817.20284.nabs-l_nfbnet.org@nfbnet.org>
	<5B1419965DAD4433966CF5F3293024BD@VALUED04C3B21F>
Message-ID: <01e801ca8fad$93ff80b0$6601a8c0@server>

I cannot imagine calling clearly accomplished people such as the governor of 
New York or the woman in the article "illiterate" as you did.  It is mean 
spirited, self indulgent, and most importantly indicates a misunderstanding 
of the meaning of the word illiterate.  The American Heritage dictionary 
defines illiterate as follows:



1. illiterate. adjective.

Unable to read and write.

Having little or no formal education.

2. Marked by inferiority to an expected standard of familiarity with 
language and literature.

Violating prescribed standards of speech or writing.

3. Ignorant of the fundamentals of a given art or branch of knowledge: 
musically illiterate. See Usage Note at literate.


It saddens me that it does not seem possible for us as blind people to 
discuss blindness without personal attacks.  As long as we can be induced to 
continue attacking one another we are doing the work of those who would like 
to see us excluded from all aspects of society.  All they need do is sit on 
the sidelines and watch the feathers fly.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Sean Whalen" <smwhalenpsp at gmail.com>
To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 8:52 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one 
intown?


> Let me first acknowledge the truth of what Mark has pointed out in terms 
> of
> the anecdotal nature of much of the evidence proffered in support of 
> Braille
> literacy increasing employment opportunities for the blind. I also admit
> freely that I have never dug into the numbers we so often bandy about in
> relation to literacy rates among the blind, literacy rates among the
> employed blind and the unemployment rate for blind individuals and do not
> know how carefully designed or well executed any of the studies from which
> we glean these numbers actually were.
>
> All this being said, I absolutely believe that Braille, for persons who 
> are
> unable and have never learned to read print, is a necessity and not simply 
> a
> tool in a toolbox. I qualify this because Marc was once again, I think,
> correct in drawing the distinction between those who learn to read print 
> and
> go blind later in life and those who are blind from a young age and never
> learn to read via any medium. For somebody who read print and achieved
> literacy, Braille is an incredibly useful tool that can make some tasks
> easier and more efficient and allow one to recapture the pleasure of 
> reading
> to oneself, but for those who never learned to read print, Braille is the
> only path to literacy. So, barring any complicating factors such as
> additional disabilities, I firmly believe that all blind children and all
> non-print-reading blind adults must be expected to learn to read Braille.
> Accepting anything less is to give the stamp of approval to lower
> expectations of the blind among the general public. When Joe Sighted is
> illiterate at age 25, we all recognize this as a big problem. It is no
> different for the blind, it's a big problem.
>
> I also agree with Joe, to a degree, that it is not a simple as Braille
> literate equals employed. But I think that it is beyond dispute that being
> able to read is a crucial skill for nearly any job seeker to have. Braille
> is not "the difference", but all else being equal, it certainly puts
> somebody who can read it at a great advantage over somebody else similarly
> situated who cannot. Just assume for a moment that the numbers we so often
> cite are close to accurate. 30 in 100 blind people are employed. Of those
> 30, 24 of them are able to read Braille. WE don't really know what the
> literacy rate among the working age blind is, but if it is under 50%, 
> which
> it almost certainly is, you can do the math and see that there is 
> something
> going on here.
>
> I myself have been blind all my life. In elementary school attempts were
> made to teach me to read print with the severely limited vision that I 
> had.
> I did not learn to read. What I was doing was more akin to decoding;
> agonizing over each letter to discern what it was and then piecing it
> together to make a word. At age 25 I learned to read Braille. Braille has
> proved useful in finding employment not only because of the specific tasks
> it makes easier on the job, but more so because of the fact that it has 
> made
> me literate. Literacy means knowing how things are spelled and how
> punctuation is used. Literacy means being able to express yourself in
> writing in a manner that accurately reflects your level of intelligence.
> Sure, it is nice to use a Braille display to access and take notes in
> meetings where speech output would be distracting. Yes, it is great to be
> able to use an outline or notes when addressing people publicly. However,
> these are simply instances where Braille is a tool, and in my opinion the
> best one, to get the job done. There are other ways to perform these 
> tasks.
> Where there is no substitution for being literate is in communicating your
> ideas in writing. In college, I would hand in work of supposed high 
> academic
> quality with the most egregious spelling and punctuation errors in it. Who
> can take that seriously? Yes there is spell-check and you can arrow 
> through
> character by character to find out how words are spelled and things are
> punctuated, but this approach means you only learn when you know you don't
> know. When you read, you pick things up naturally along the way and
> assimilate them.
>
> Of course it is true that some illiterate blind people like Laura Sloate 
> and
> the Governor of New York have achieved the pinnacles of financial and
> professional success. More power to them. I could point you toward people
> who have become very successful without completing a high school education
> let alone a college degree. Will anybody stand up and argue based on this
> fact that bachelor's and advanced degrees don't lead to more and better
> employment prospects for those who hold them?
>
> Literacy is absolutely essential for professional opportunities and 
> Braille
> is the only means by which to achieve it if one does not read print. Blind
> people who don't know Braille are certainly not inferior people, but they
> are absolutely working with an inferior set of skills, and if Laura Sloate
> would like to debate the point, I would gladly do so, regardless of how 
> much
> money she makes.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dennisgclark%40sbcglobal.net 



From mrsmigs at migliorelli.org  Thu Jan  7 17:50:33 2010
From: mrsmigs at migliorelli.org (Maryann Migliorelli)
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 10:50:33 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
	intown?
References: <LNEJJKLNICEECFDGEDGLOEBLFOAA.mworkman.lists@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <67B2FE3CA54948F6B95372789E8911A6@PAULLAPTOP>

Hi, This is Maryann Migliorelli.  Someone asked for examples of Braille 
users who have jobs and of how we use it in our work.
I have been in the Business Enterprise Program in one way or another for 
over seventeen years.  I have used Braille along with other technologies 
during the entire time for daily record keeping, inventory tracking and 
placement, public presentations, and many of my other duties.
My Husband, Paul Migliorelli, is the Chief Control Room Operator and 
Engineer at the Audio Information Network of Colorado.  He uses his Braille 
along with technologies to do everything it takes to keep there programs on 
the air.
I hope this information helps.

One other thing I would like to add to this discussion is:  I have always 
been amazed at the number of blind people at professional conferences and 
conventions who don't take notes in any format, but especially not in 
Braille.  It has always been my experience that accessing information in a 
public setting is more difficult while relying exclusively on audio.
I count myself blessed that I have Braille as one of my every day tools for 
life.  Most sighted people use print without even a thought along with there 
alternative technology, and we who can should be doing the same with our 
Braille.

Respectfully,
Maryann Migliorelli




From jsorozco at gmail.com  Thu Jan  7 18:17:42 2010
From: jsorozco at gmail.com (Joe Orozco)
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 13:17:42 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
	intown?
In-Reply-To: <5B1419965DAD4433966CF5F3293024BD@VALUED04C3B21F>
Message-ID: <E485AC4C2FCB431F86137CC2AECD9DB5@Rufus>

Hello,

Before anything else, let me give my own examples of where Braille comes in
handy.  I use Braille to take notes during meetings if for no other reason
than Braille is a shorthand method that allows for quicker data capture.  I
also use Braille to deliver speeches.  It makes better sense to allow my
fingers to process my talking points and devote the balance of my attention
to gauge the mood of the audience.  On my spare time I use Braille to play
D&D.  My group moves at a fairly good clip, and for me it makes sense to be
able to quickly scan a character sheet than to have to search and retrieve
an electronic file while trying to keep track of everyone else's moves.
When it comes to nonfiction I also prefer Braille because I like to make
sure I retain the data and fully process the spelling of complex words,
perhaps the reason I choose Braille for standardized exams.  Braille comes
in handy when learning a new computer language, because the success of a
compilation can sometimes hang on the presence or absence of a single
quotation mark.  This all can be done electronically, but in my own personal
case, I find Braille to make things somehow more solid.

Two things:

First, the Braille I now use primarily comes from my own production.  I am
grateful for Web Braille for the books I can access on my notetaker, but
high school was the last time I had routine access to Braille resources.  It
is expensive to have things reproduced in Braille, and Braille books
themselves are bulky and cumbersome to carry around.  Notetakers are
ridiculously expensive.  If you are not a client of a rehabilitation agency
you have to rely on your income, but your own income may not necessarily be
enough to front the cost of a six thousand dollar unit.  You could invest in
a netbook and purchase a Braille display, but Braille displays are also sold
at a small fortune.

Second, it is difficult to make a case for Braille beyond high school
because there are alternatives.  People can record meetings and later use
software to convert the speech to text.  The mobile phone is slowly moving
into the center of our daily interactions.  Did anyone ten years ago suspect
we would be able to snap a picture of a printed page and read that document
using speech?  Mobile technology is becoming so pervasive that we have to
threaten to sue universities for using the currently inaccessible Kindle in
their classrooms to transmit instructional materials.  In other words, there
may have been a time when Braille was absolutely crucial, but that is the
question today, isn't it?  Crucial versus efficient, and how can you
possibly convince someone who does not see the benefits of Braille to use a
system they deem inefficient when compared to their mobile device?

But, fine, let us assume that I am completely wrong, that at the end of the
day I absolutely have to pick one side over another, and let us further
assume that the side I pick is Braille.  It was the ACB who successfully got
the Social Security Administration to provide their materials in Braille.
What are we as the NFB going to do to build off this momentum?  Should we
perhaps lead a national campaign to ensure that all restaurants have Braille
menus?  That cup lids be Brailed as McDonald's has been doing?  That all
doctor offices provide medical records in Braille?  That the manuals that
accompany every product I purchase be embossed?  Add to this the advantage
of Braille receipts, concert tickets, transit fare cards, ATM screens,
airport terminal monitors...  Of course you sense my sarcasm, but we cannot
completely seal the case for Braille until we improve the environment where
Braille would exist, because right or wrong, right now the bulk of Braille
is dominated by what the blind request versus what the public automatically
provides.  What is the overwhelming incentive for someone to learn Braille?

It is sad, I think, that the use of Braille may eventually come down to
something as commonplace as choosing between using the cane versus using a
dog to get around.  Yet, until we do something more compelling, or until we
take a different tone, people are going to weigh Braille with technology and
ultimately choose the most convenient of the two.  I do not think people who
do not read Braille should be offended by those of us who choose to use
Braille in our lives.  If they're offended, perhaps it is guilt, but on this
item I am strongly against a "take no prisoners" approach.  I also do not
take a literal interpretation of literacy, because as far as literacy is
concerned, you need to be able to read and write in a certain language, and
when people type they are using their understanding of letters and
punctuation of a language to convey a message.  It is not as though they are
talking into a microphone and allowing a program to string their sentences
for them, at least not in most cases.

So, in the meantime, I think perhaps our best approach might be to tell
people in a nicer way that there are benefits of Braille.  There is much to
be gained and nothing to lose from taking the time to learn a new method of
writing.  Let's get a pen pal thing going to help beginners appreciate the
benefits of Braille in an interactive manner.  I am not at all amused by
this harsh reality nonsense people are trotting out, because reality says
technology is the sweeter of the two choices.

Joe Orozco

"A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the
crowd."--Max Lucado 

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org 
[mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Sean Whalen
Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 11:52 PM
To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for 
only one intown?

Let me first acknowledge the truth of what Mark has pointed out 
in terms of
the anecdotal nature of much of the evidence proffered in 
support of Braille
literacy increasing employment opportunities for the blind. I also admit
freely that I have never dug into the numbers we so often bandy about in
relation to literacy rates among the blind, literacy rates among the
employed blind and the unemployment rate for blind individuals 
and do not
know how carefully designed or well executed any of the studies 
from which
we glean these numbers actually were.

All this being said, I absolutely believe that Braille, for 
persons who are
unable and have never learned to read print, is a necessity and 
not simply a
tool in a toolbox. I qualify this because Marc was once again, I think,
correct in drawing the distinction between those who learn to 
read print and
go blind later in life and those who are blind from a young age 
and never
learn to read via any medium. For somebody who read print and achieved
literacy, Braille is an incredibly useful tool that can make some tasks
easier and more efficient and allow one to recapture the 
pleasure of reading
to oneself, but for those who never learned to read print, 
Braille is the
only path to literacy. So, barring any complicating factors such as
additional disabilities, I firmly believe that all blind 
children and all
non-print-reading blind adults must be expected to learn to 
read Braille.
Accepting anything less is to give the stamp of approval to lower
expectations of the blind among the general public. When Joe Sighted is
illiterate at age 25, we all recognize this as a big problem. It is no
different for the blind, it's a big problem.

I also agree with Joe, to a degree, that it is not a simple as Braille
literate equals employed. But I think that it is beyond dispute 
that being
able to read is a crucial skill for nearly any job seeker to 
have. Braille
is not "the difference", but all else being equal, it certainly puts
somebody who can read it at a great advantage over somebody 
else similarly
situated who cannot. Just assume for a moment that the numbers 
we so often
cite are close to accurate. 30 in 100 blind people are 
employed. Of those
30, 24 of them are able to read Braille. WE don't really know what the
literacy rate among the working age blind is, but if it is 
under 50%, which
it almost certainly is, you can do the math and see that there 
is something
going on here.

I myself have been blind all my life. In elementary school attempts were
made to teach me to read print with the severely limited vision 
that I had.
I did not learn to read. What I was doing was more akin to decoding;
agonizing over each letter to discern what it was and then piecing it
together to make a word. At age 25 I learned to read Braille. 
Braille has
proved useful in finding employment not only because of the 
specific tasks
it makes easier on the job, but more so because of the fact 
that it has made
me literate. Literacy means knowing how things are spelled and how
punctuation is used. Literacy means being able to express yourself in
writing in a manner that accurately reflects your level of intelligence.
Sure, it is nice to use a Braille display to access and take notes in
meetings where speech output would be distracting. Yes, it is 
great to be
able to use an outline or notes when addressing people 
publicly. However,
these are simply instances where Braille is a tool, and in my 
opinion the
best one, to get the job done. There are other ways to perform 
these tasks.
Where there is no substitution for being literate is in 
communicating your
ideas in writing. In college, I would hand in work of supposed 
high academic
quality with the most egregious spelling and punctuation errors 
in it. Who
can take that seriously? Yes there is spell-check and you can 
arrow through
character by character to find out how words are spelled and things are
punctuated, but this approach means you only learn when you 
know you don't
know. When you read, you pick things up naturally along the way and
assimilate them.

Of course it is true that some illiterate blind people like 
Laura Sloate and
the Governor of New York have achieved the pinnacles of financial and
professional success. More power to them. I could point you 
toward people
who have become very successful without completing a high 
school education
let alone a college degree. Will anybody stand up and argue 
based on this
fact that bachelor's and advanced degrees don't lead to more and better
employment prospects for those who hold them?

Literacy is absolutely essential for professional opportunities 
and Braille
is the only means by which to achieve it if one does not read 
print. Blind
people who don't know Braille are certainly not inferior 
people, but they
are absolutely working with an inferior set of skills, and if 
Laura Sloate
would like to debate the point, I would gladly do so, 
regardless of how much
money she makes.


_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account 
info for nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jsorozco
%40gmail.com
 

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From brileyp at gmail.com  Thu Jan  7 19:08:28 2010
From: brileyp at gmail.com (Briley Pollard)
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 14:08:28 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
	intown?
In-Reply-To: <01e801ca8fad$93ff80b0$6601a8c0@server>
References: <mailman.6486.1262824817.20284.nabs-l_nfbnet.org@nfbnet.org>
	<5B1419965DAD4433966CF5F3293024BD@VALUED04C3B21F>
	<01e801ca8fad$93ff80b0$6601a8c0@server>
Message-ID: <E90107A1-C3EE-4350-8461-F2498B13F34F@gmail.com>

I wasn't attacking anyone on a personal level at all, so please don't accuse me of doing so. I never said anything in a mean spirited way. Not being able to read is the definition of illiterate. I didn't call them unintelligent. I don't know them or their life circumstances. We were discussing this issue, and I think that even people who have been successful without the use of braille could only improve their lives and careers by learning it. That doesn't make me a mean spirited person. 
On Jan 7, 2010, at 10:25 AM, Dennis Clark wrote:

> I cannot imagine calling clearly accomplished people such as the governor of New York or the woman in the article "illiterate" as you did.  It is mean spirited, self indulgent, and most importantly indicates a misunderstanding of the meaning of the word illiterate.  The American Heritage dictionary defines illiterate as follows:
> 
> 
> 
> 1. illiterate. adjective.
> 
> Unable to read and write.
> 
> Having little or no formal education.
> 
> 2. Marked by inferiority to an expected standard of familiarity with language and literature.
> 
> Violating prescribed standards of speech or writing.
> 
> 3. Ignorant of the fundamentals of a given art or branch of knowledge: musically illiterate. See Usage Note at literate.
> 
> 
> It saddens me that it does not seem possible for us as blind people to discuss blindness without personal attacks.  As long as we can be induced to continue attacking one another we are doing the work of those who would like to see us excluded from all aspects of society.  All they need do is sit on the sidelines and watch the feathers fly.
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sean Whalen" <smwhalenpsp at gmail.com>
> To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 8:52 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one intown?
> 
> 
>> Let me first acknowledge the truth of what Mark has pointed out in terms of
>> the anecdotal nature of much of the evidence proffered in support of Braille
>> literacy increasing employment opportunities for the blind. I also admit
>> freely that I have never dug into the numbers we so often bandy about in
>> relation to literacy rates among the blind, literacy rates among the
>> employed blind and the unemployment rate for blind individuals and do not
>> know how carefully designed or well executed any of the studies from which
>> we glean these numbers actually were.
>> 
>> All this being said, I absolutely believe that Braille, for persons who are
>> unable and have never learned to read print, is a necessity and not simply a
>> tool in a toolbox. I qualify this because Marc was once again, I think,
>> correct in drawing the distinction between those who learn to read print and
>> go blind later in life and those who are blind from a young age and never
>> learn to read via any medium. For somebody who read print and achieved
>> literacy, Braille is an incredibly useful tool that can make some tasks
>> easier and more efficient and allow one to recapture the pleasure of reading
>> to oneself, but for those who never learned to read print, Braille is the
>> only path to literacy. So, barring any complicating factors such as
>> additional disabilities, I firmly believe that all blind children and all
>> non-print-reading blind adults must be expected to learn to read Braille.
>> Accepting anything less is to give the stamp of approval to lower
>> expectations of the blind among the general public. When Joe Sighted is
>> illiterate at age 25, we all recognize this as a big problem. It is no
>> different for the blind, it's a big problem.
>> 
>> I also agree with Joe, to a degree, that it is not a simple as Braille
>> literate equals employed. But I think that it is beyond dispute that being
>> able to read is a crucial skill for nearly any job seeker to have. Braille
>> is not "the difference", but all else being equal, it certainly puts
>> somebody who can read it at a great advantage over somebody else similarly
>> situated who cannot. Just assume for a moment that the numbers we so often
>> cite are close to accurate. 30 in 100 blind people are employed. Of those
>> 30, 24 of them are able to read Braille. WE don't really know what the
>> literacy rate among the working age blind is, but if it is under 50%, which
>> it almost certainly is, you can do the math and see that there is something
>> going on here.
>> 
>> I myself have been blind all my life. In elementary school attempts were
>> made to teach me to read print with the severely limited vision that I had.
>> I did not learn to read. What I was doing was more akin to decoding;
>> agonizing over each letter to discern what it was and then piecing it
>> together to make a word. At age 25 I learned to read Braille. Braille has
>> proved useful in finding employment not only because of the specific tasks
>> it makes easier on the job, but more so because of the fact that it has made
>> me literate. Literacy means knowing how things are spelled and how
>> punctuation is used. Literacy means being able to express yourself in
>> writing in a manner that accurately reflects your level of intelligence.
>> Sure, it is nice to use a Braille display to access and take notes in
>> meetings where speech output would be distracting. Yes, it is great to be
>> able to use an outline or notes when addressing people publicly. However,
>> these are simply instances where Braille is a tool, and in my opinion the
>> best one, to get the job done. There are other ways to perform these tasks.
>> Where there is no substitution for being literate is in communicating your
>> ideas in writing. In college, I would hand in work of supposed high academic
>> quality with the most egregious spelling and punctuation errors in it. Who
>> can take that seriously? Yes there is spell-check and you can arrow through
>> character by character to find out how words are spelled and things are
>> punctuated, but this approach means you only learn when you know you don't
>> know. When you read, you pick things up naturally along the way and
>> assimilate them.
>> 
>> Of course it is true that some illiterate blind people like Laura Sloate and
>> the Governor of New York have achieved the pinnacles of financial and
>> professional success. More power to them. I could point you toward people
>> who have become very successful without completing a high school education
>> let alone a college degree. Will anybody stand up and argue based on this
>> fact that bachelor's and advanced degrees don't lead to more and better
>> employment prospects for those who hold them?
>> 
>> Literacy is absolutely essential for professional opportunities and Braille
>> is the only means by which to achieve it if one does not read print. Blind
>> people who don't know Braille are certainly not inferior people, but they
>> are absolutely working with an inferior set of skills, and if Laura Sloate
>> would like to debate the point, I would gladly do so, regardless of how much
>> money she makes.
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dennisgclark%40sbcglobal.net 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
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From loneblindjedi at samobile.net  Thu Jan  7 19:49:47 2010
From: loneblindjedi at samobile.net (Jedi)
Date: Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:49:47 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only
	one	intown?
Message-ID: <20100107194947.22844.40412@web3.serotek.com>

No offense mate, but they are unable to read and write. If you give 
them something in writing, they can't read it, can they? I don't 
honestly know if they can write. As one person has observed, it's 
possible to be well read and also be illiterate. No one is trying to 
put anyone down. Instead, people are trying to get at the idea that to 
physically read (take symbols, process them, and make meaning out of 
them), Braille is the best method for the blind. If we're talking about 
assimilating information, either Braille or audio will work. Most seem 
to agree that both skills are important. Where people are especially 
taking issue is when blind people aren't even given the opportunity to 
learn braille even though sighted people are given the opportunity to 
learn print.

I have a question for you. Do you read Braille? It wouldn't matter 
except to say that your reaction to our discussion is quite violent and 
I wonder if you yourself are feeling attacked.

Respectfully,
Jedi


Original message:
> I cannot imagine calling clearly accomplished people such as the governor of
> New York or the woman in the article "illiterate" as you did.  It is mean
> spirited, self indulgent, and most importantly indicates a misunderstanding
> of the meaning of the word illiterate.  The American Heritage dictionary
> defines illiterate as follows:



> 1. illiterate. adjective.

> Unable to read and write.

> Having little or no formal education.

> 2. Marked by inferiority to an expected standard of familiarity with
> language and literature.

> Violating prescribed standards of speech or writing.

> 3. Ignorant of the fundamentals of a given art or branch of knowledge:
> musically illiterate. See Usage Note at literate.


> It saddens me that it does not seem possible for us as blind people to
> discuss blindness without personal attacks.  As long as we can be induced to
> continue attacking one another we are doing the work of those who would like
> to see us excluded from all aspects of society.  All they need do is sit on
> the sidelines and watch the feathers fly.

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Sean Whalen" <smwhalenpsp at gmail.com>
> To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 8:52 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
> intown?


>> Let me first acknowledge the truth of what Mark has pointed out in terms
>> of
>> the anecdotal nature of much of the evidence proffered in support of
>> Braille
>> literacy increasing employment opportunities for the blind. I also admit
>> freely that I have never dug into the numbers we so often bandy about in
>> relation to literacy rates among the blind, literacy rates among the
>> employed blind and the unemployment rate for blind individuals and do not
>> know how carefully designed or well executed any of the studies from which
>> we glean these numbers actually were.

>> All this being said, I absolutely believe that Braille, for persons who
>> are
>> unable and have never learned to read print, is a necessity and not simply
>> a
>> tool in a toolbox. I qualify this because Marc was once again, I think,
>> correct in drawing the distinction between those who learn to read print
>> and
>> go blind later in life and those who are blind from a young age and never
>> learn to read via any medium. For somebody who read print and achieved
>> literacy, Braille is an incredibly useful tool that can make some tasks
>> easier and more efficient and allow one to recapture the pleasure of
>> reading
>> to oneself, but for those who never learned to read print, Braille is the
>> only path to literacy. So, barring any complicating factors such as
>> additional disabilities, I firmly believe that all blind children and all
>> non-print-reading blind adults must be expected to learn to read Braille.
>> Accepting anything less is to give the stamp of approval to lower
>> expectations of the blind among the general public. When Joe Sighted is
>> illiterate at age 25, we all recognize this as a big problem. It is no
>> different for the blind, it's a big problem.

>> I also agree with Joe, to a degree, that it is not a simple as Braille
>> literate equals employed. But I think that it is beyond dispute that being
>> able to read is a crucial skill for nearly any job seeker to have. Braille
>> is not "the difference", but all else being equal, it certainly puts
>> somebody who can read it at a great advantage over somebody else similarly
>> situated who cannot. Just assume for a moment that the numbers we so often
>> cite are close to accurate. 30 in 100 blind people are employed. Of those
>> 30, 24 of them are able to read Braille. WE don't really know what the
>> literacy rate among the working age blind is, but if it is under 50%,
>> which
>> it almost certainly is, you can do the math and see that there is
>> something
>> going on here.

>> I myself have been blind all my life. In elementary school attempts were
>> made to teach me to read print with the severely limited vision that I
>> had.
>> I did not learn to read. What I was doing was more akin to decoding;
>> agonizing over each letter to discern what it was and then piecing it
>> together to make a word. At age 25 I learned to read Braille. Braille has
>> proved useful in finding employment not only because of the specific tasks
>> it makes easier on the job, but more so because of the fact that it has
>> made
>> me literate. Literacy means knowing how things are spelled and how
>> punctuation is used. Literacy means being able to express yourself in
>> writing in a manner that accurately reflects your level of intelligence.
>> Sure, it is nice to use a Braille display to access and take notes in
>> meetings where speech output would be distracting. Yes, it is great to be
>> able to use an outline or notes when addressing people publicly. However,
>> these are simply instances where Braille is a tool, and in my opinion the
>> best one, to get the job done. There are other ways to perform these
>> tasks.
>> Where there is no substitution for being literate is in communicating your
>> ideas in writing. In college, I would hand in work of supposed high
>> academic
>> quality with the most egregious spelling and punctuation errors in it. Who
>> can take that seriously? Yes there is spell-check and you can arrow
>> through
>> character by character to find out how words are spelled and things are
>> punctuated, but this approach means you only learn when you know you don't
>> know. When you read, you pick things up naturally along the way and
>> assimilate them.

>> Of course it is true that some illiterate blind people like Laura Sloate
>> and
>> the Governor of New York have achieved the pinnacles of financial and
>> professional success. More power to them. I could point you toward people
>> who have become very successful without completing a high school education
>> let alone a college degree. Will anybody stand up and argue based on this
>> fact that bachelor's and advanced degrees don't lead to more and better
>> employment prospects for those who hold them?

>> Literacy is absolutely essential for professional opportunities and
>> Braille
>> is the only means by which to achieve it if one does not read print. Blind
>> people who don't know Braille are certainly not inferior people, but they
>> are absolutely working with an inferior set of skills, and if Laura Sloate
>> would like to debate the point, I would gladly do so, regardless of how
>> much
>> money she makes.


>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dennisgclark%40sbcglobal.net


> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net

-- 
Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit 
www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.


From smwhalenpsp at gmail.com  Thu Jan  7 20:09:46 2010
From: smwhalenpsp at gmail.com (Sean Whalen)
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 15:09:46 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one	in town?
In-Reply-To: <mailman.17.1262887202.23706.nabs-l_nfbnet.org@nfbnet.org>
References: <mailman.17.1262887202.23706.nabs-l_nfbnet.org@nfbnet.org>
Message-ID: <6A86362881AE4745A4A42B0DCCDF8CD6@VALUED04C3B21F>

Definition #1 pretty much sums it up. Listening is not reading. This does
not mean it is not effective in many circumstances or an incredibly valuable
tool, or that people that don't read Braille are stupid or bad people. There
is no personal attack involved. 



From brileyp at gmail.com  Thu Jan  7 20:13:43 2010
From: brileyp at gmail.com (Briley Pollard)
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 15:13:43 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
	intown?
In-Reply-To: <E485AC4C2FCB431F86137CC2AECD9DB5@Rufus>
References: <E485AC4C2FCB431F86137CC2AECD9DB5@Rufus>
Message-ID: <A41DF3E0-9295-45E6-A4BC-15C240675204@gmail.com>

Another question I would pose to these excellent points is that why do blind people have to be auditory learners? I feel like I'm expected to be sometimes because I'm blind, but I am not. I always do better and wouldn't have done as well as I have without braille. I cannot process things as well via any other medium, and I know I can't be the only person like that.
On Jan 7, 2010, at 1:17 PM, Joe Orozco wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> Before anything else, let me give my own examples of where Braille comes in
> handy.  I use Braille to take notes during meetings if for no other reason
> than Braille is a shorthand method that allows for quicker data capture.  I
> also use Braille to deliver speeches.  It makes better sense to allow my
> fingers to process my talking points and devote the balance of my attention
> to gauge the mood of the audience.  On my spare time I use Braille to play
> D&D.  My group moves at a fairly good clip, and for me it makes sense to be
> able to quickly scan a character sheet than to have to search and retrieve
> an electronic file while trying to keep track of everyone else's moves.
> When it comes to nonfiction I also prefer Braille because I like to make
> sure I retain the data and fully process the spelling of complex words,
> perhaps the reason I choose Braille for standardized exams.  Braille comes
> in handy when learning a new computer language, because the success of a
> compilation can sometimes hang on the presence or absence of a single
> quotation mark.  This all can be done electronically, but in my own personal
> case, I find Braille to make things somehow more solid.
> 
> Two things:
> 
> First, the Braille I now use primarily comes from my own production.  I am
> grateful for Web Braille for the books I can access on my notetaker, but
> high school was the last time I had routine access to Braille resources.  It
> is expensive to have things reproduced in Braille, and Braille books
> themselves are bulky and cumbersome to carry around.  Notetakers are
> ridiculously expensive.  If you are not a client of a rehabilitation agency
> you have to rely on your income, but your own income may not necessarily be
> enough to front the cost of a six thousand dollar unit.  You could invest in
> a netbook and purchase a Braille display, but Braille displays are also sold
> at a small fortune.
> 
> Second, it is difficult to make a case for Braille beyond high school
> because there are alternatives.  People can record meetings and later use
> software to convert the speech to text.  The mobile phone is slowly moving
> into the center of our daily interactions.  Did anyone ten years ago suspect
> we would be able to snap a picture of a printed page and read that document
> using speech?  Mobile technology is becoming so pervasive that we have to
> threaten to sue universities for using the currently inaccessible Kindle in
> their classrooms to transmit instructional materials.  In other words, there
> may have been a time when Braille was absolutely crucial, but that is the
> question today, isn't it?  Crucial versus efficient, and how can you
> possibly convince someone who does not see the benefits of Braille to use a
> system they deem inefficient when compared to their mobile device?
> 
> But, fine, let us assume that I am completely wrong, that at the end of the
> day I absolutely have to pick one side over another, and let us further
> assume that the side I pick is Braille.  It was the ACB who successfully got
> the Social Security Administration to provide their materials in Braille.
> What are we as the NFB going to do to build off this momentum?  Should we
> perhaps lead a national campaign to ensure that all restaurants have Braille
> menus?  That cup lids be Brailed as McDonald's has been doing?  That all
> doctor offices provide medical records in Braille?  That the manuals that
> accompany every product I purchase be embossed?  Add to this the advantage
> of Braille receipts, concert tickets, transit fare cards, ATM screens,
> airport terminal monitors...  Of course you sense my sarcasm, but we cannot
> completely seal the case for Braille until we improve the environment where
> Braille would exist, because right or wrong, right now the bulk of Braille
> is dominated by what the blind request versus what the public automatically
> provides.  What is the overwhelming incentive for someone to learn Braille?
> 
> It is sad, I think, that the use of Braille may eventually come down to
> something as commonplace as choosing between using the cane versus using a
> dog to get around.  Yet, until we do something more compelling, or until we
> take a different tone, people are going to weigh Braille with technology and
> ultimately choose the most convenient of the two.  I do not think people who
> do not read Braille should be offended by those of us who choose to use
> Braille in our lives.  If they're offended, perhaps it is guilt, but on this
> item I am strongly against a "take no prisoners" approach.  I also do not
> take a literal interpretation of literacy, because as far as literacy is
> concerned, you need to be able to read and write in a certain language, and
> when people type they are using their understanding of letters and
> punctuation of a language to convey a message.  It is not as though they are
> talking into a microphone and allowing a program to string their sentences
> for them, at least not in most cases.
> 
> So, in the meantime, I think perhaps our best approach might be to tell
> people in a nicer way that there are benefits of Braille.  There is much to
> be gained and nothing to lose from taking the time to learn a new method of
> writing.  Let's get a pen pal thing going to help beginners appreciate the
> benefits of Braille in an interactive manner.  I am not at all amused by
> this harsh reality nonsense people are trotting out, because reality says
> technology is the sweeter of the two choices.
> 
> Joe Orozco
> 
> "A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the
> crowd."--Max Lucado 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org 
> [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Sean Whalen
> Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 11:52 PM
> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for 
> only one intown?
> 
> Let me first acknowledge the truth of what Mark has pointed out 
> in terms of
> the anecdotal nature of much of the evidence proffered in 
> support of Braille
> literacy increasing employment opportunities for the blind. I also admit
> freely that I have never dug into the numbers we so often bandy about in
> relation to literacy rates among the blind, literacy rates among the
> employed blind and the unemployment rate for blind individuals 
> and do not
> know how carefully designed or well executed any of the studies 
> from which
> we glean these numbers actually were.
> 
> All this being said, I absolutely believe that Braille, for 
> persons who are
> unable and have never learned to read print, is a necessity and 
> not simply a
> tool in a toolbox. I qualify this because Marc was once again, I think,
> correct in drawing the distinction between those who learn to 
> read print and
> go blind later in life and those who are blind from a young age 
> and never
> learn to read via any medium. For somebody who read print and achieved
> literacy, Braille is an incredibly useful tool that can make some tasks
> easier and more efficient and allow one to recapture the 
> pleasure of reading
> to oneself, but for those who never learned to read print, 
> Braille is the
> only path to literacy. So, barring any complicating factors such as
> additional disabilities, I firmly believe that all blind 
> children and all
> non-print-reading blind adults must be expected to learn to 
> read Braille.
> Accepting anything less is to give the stamp of approval to lower
> expectations of the blind among the general public. When Joe Sighted is
> illiterate at age 25, we all recognize this as a big problem. It is no
> different for the blind, it's a big problem.
> 
> I also agree with Joe, to a degree, that it is not a simple as Braille
> literate equals employed. But I think that it is beyond dispute 
> that being
> able to read is a crucial skill for nearly any job seeker to 
> have. Braille
> is not "the difference", but all else being equal, it certainly puts
> somebody who can read it at a great advantage over somebody 
> else similarly
> situated who cannot. Just assume for a moment that the numbers 
> we so often
> cite are close to accurate. 30 in 100 blind people are 
> employed. Of those
> 30, 24 of them are able to read Braille. WE don't really know what the
> literacy rate among the working age blind is, but if it is 
> under 50%, which
> it almost certainly is, you can do the math and see that there 
> is something
> going on here.
> 
> I myself have been blind all my life. In elementary school attempts were
> made to teach me to read print with the severely limited vision 
> that I had.
> I did not learn to read. What I was doing was more akin to decoding;
> agonizing over each letter to discern what it was and then piecing it
> together to make a word. At age 25 I learned to read Braille. 
> Braille has
> proved useful in finding employment not only because of the 
> specific tasks
> it makes easier on the job, but more so because of the fact 
> that it has made
> me literate. Literacy means knowing how things are spelled and how
> punctuation is used. Literacy means being able to express yourself in
> writing in a manner that accurately reflects your level of intelligence.
> Sure, it is nice to use a Braille display to access and take notes in
> meetings where speech output would be distracting. Yes, it is 
> great to be
> able to use an outline or notes when addressing people 
> publicly. However,
> these are simply instances where Braille is a tool, and in my 
> opinion the
> best one, to get the job done. There are other ways to perform 
> these tasks.
> Where there is no substitution for being literate is in 
> communicating your
> ideas in writing. In college, I would hand in work of supposed 
> high academic
> quality with the most egregious spelling and punctuation errors 
> in it. Who
> can take that seriously? Yes there is spell-check and you can 
> arrow through
> character by character to find out how words are spelled and things are
> punctuated, but this approach means you only learn when you 
> know you don't
> know. When you read, you pick things up naturally along the way and
> assimilate them.
> 
> Of course it is true that some illiterate blind people like 
> Laura Sloate and
> the Governor of New York have achieved the pinnacles of financial and
> professional success. More power to them. I could point you 
> toward people
> who have become very successful without completing a high 
> school education
> let alone a college degree. Will anybody stand up and argue 
> based on this
> fact that bachelor's and advanced degrees don't lead to more and better
> employment prospects for those who hold them?
> 
> Literacy is absolutely essential for professional opportunities 
> and Braille
> is the only means by which to achieve it if one does not read 
> print. Blind
> people who don't know Braille are certainly not inferior 
> people, but they
> are absolutely working with an inferior set of skills, and if 
> Laura Sloate
> would like to debate the point, I would gladly do so, 
> regardless of how much
> money she makes.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account 
> info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jsorozco
> %40gmail.com
> 
> 
> __________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of 
> virus signature database 4749 (20100106) __________
> 
> The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.
> 
> http://www.eset.com
> 
> 
> 
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> 
> The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.
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> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com



From william.odonnell1 at yahoo.com  Thu Jan  7 20:37:43 2010
From: william.odonnell1 at yahoo.com (William ODonnell)
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 12:37:43 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [nabs-l] Argosy University
Message-ID: <844746.54995.qm@web30903.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

Does anyone on this list have any information on the online programs offered at this university from an accessibility standpoint for one who is a Jaws user.  Thanks.



      


From dwebster125 at gmail.com  Thu Jan  7 20:45:14 2010
From: dwebster125 at gmail.com (Dave Webster)
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 14:45:14 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille versus technology.
Message-ID: <5732591042D24CAFB4C4B4FFDFDD1791@DavidPC>

Hello listers.  I found the article listening to braille quite interesting.  One of the things that was and is talked about quite frequently is blind people using speech rather than braille.  Before I went to the louisiana center I mostly relied on my braille 'n speak to do my school work.  This was while I was in high school and at the time was a very inovative piece of technology.  I knew braille and read it when I needed to, but I also used speech more than I used braille.  that changed at the center.  I learned there that some times technology can go down and it is not good to depend on technology because sometimes it breaks and then braille is the only thing left that we have.  In learning that I'm happy to say that I now read braille at about 100 words a minute.  I think blind people should use what ever is available to them.  If they have the opportunity  to learn braille then it should be learned but they also should be able to use technology as well.  My roommate uses all three when braille isn't available he uses the old method of looking at the screen.  When speech is available he uses that.  So I think blind folks should know all three methods.  Braille, large print if they've got some vision  and  modern technology such as jaws or windoweyes as well.

From dwebster125 at gmail.com  Thu Jan  7 21:04:32 2010
From: dwebster125 at gmail.com (Dave Webster)
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 15:04:32 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only
	oneintown?
In-Reply-To: <E90107A1-C3EE-4350-8461-F2498B13F34F@gmail.com>
References: <mailman.6486.1262824817.20284.nabs-l_nfbnet.org@nfbnet.org><5B1419965DAD4433966CF5F3293024BD@VALUED04C3B21F><01e801ca8fad$93ff80b0$6601a8c0@server>
	<E90107A1-C3EE-4350-8461-F2498B13F34F@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <C95B6C9649894463BE0739FDCF8ECAC9@DavidPC>

I think a better word for inferior is limmited.  these techniques are 
limitted not inferior.

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Briley Pollard" <brileyp at gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, January 07, 2010 1:08 PM
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only 
oneintown?

> I wasn't attacking anyone on a personal level at all, so please don't 
> accuse me of doing so. I never said anything in a mean spirited way. Not 
> being able to read is the definition of illiterate. I didn't call them 
> unintelligent. I don't know them or their life circumstances. We were 
> discussing this issue, and I think that even people who have been 
> successful without the use of braille could only improve their lives and 
> careers by learning it. That doesn't make me a mean spirited person.
> On Jan 7, 2010, at 10:25 AM, Dennis Clark wrote:
>
>> I cannot imagine calling clearly accomplished people such as the governor 
>> of New York or the woman in the article "illiterate" as you did.  It is 
>> mean spirited, self indulgent, and most importantly indicates a 
>> misunderstanding of the meaning of the word illiterate.  The American 
>> Heritage dictionary defines illiterate as follows:
>>
>>
>>
>> 1. illiterate. adjective.
>>
>> Unable to read and write.
>>
>> Having little or no formal education.
>>
>> 2. Marked by inferiority to an expected standard of familiarity with 
>> language and literature.
>>
>> Violating prescribed standards of speech or writing.
>>
>> 3. Ignorant of the fundamentals of a given art or branch of knowledge: 
>> musically illiterate. See Usage Note at literate.
>>
>>
>> It saddens me that it does not seem possible for us as blind people to 
>> discuss blindness without personal attacks.  As long as we can be induced 
>> to continue attacking one another we are doing the work of those who 
>> would like to see us excluded from all aspects of society.  All they need 
>> do is sit on the sidelines and watch the feathers fly.
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sean Whalen" <smwhalenpsp at gmail.com>
>> To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 8:52 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one 
>> intown?
>>
>>
>>> Let me first acknowledge the truth of what Mark has pointed out in terms 
>>> of
>>> the anecdotal nature of much of the evidence proffered in support of 
>>> Braille
>>> literacy increasing employment opportunities for the blind. I also admit
>>> freely that I have never dug into the numbers we so often bandy about in
>>> relation to literacy rates among the blind, literacy rates among the
>>> employed blind and the unemployment rate for blind individuals and do 
>>> not
>>> know how carefully designed or well executed any of the studies from 
>>> which
>>> we glean these numbers actually were.
>>>
>>> All this being said, I absolutely believe that Braille, for persons who 
>>> are
>>> unable and have never learned to read print, is a necessity and not 
>>> simply a
>>> tool in a toolbox. I qualify this because Marc was once again, I think,
>>> correct in drawing the distinction between those who learn to read print 
>>> and
>>> go blind later in life and those who are blind from a young age and 
>>> never
>>> learn to read via any medium. For somebody who read print and achieved
>>> literacy, Braille is an incredibly useful tool that can make some tasks
>>> easier and more efficient and allow one to recapture the pleasure of 
>>> reading
>>> to oneself, but for those who never learned to read print, Braille is 
>>> the
>>> only path to literacy. So, barring any complicating factors such as
>>> additional disabilities, I firmly believe that all blind children and 
>>> all
>>> non-print-reading blind adults must be expected to learn to read 
>>> Braille.
>>> Accepting anything less is to give the stamp of approval to lower
>>> expectations of the blind among the general public. When Joe Sighted is
>>> illiterate at age 25, we all recognize this as a big problem. It is no
>>> different for the blind, it's a big problem.
>>>
>>> I also agree with Joe, to a degree, that it is not a simple as Braille
>>> literate equals employed. But I think that it is beyond dispute that 
>>> being
>>> able to read is a crucial skill for nearly any job seeker to have. 
>>> Braille
>>> is not "the difference", but all else being equal, it certainly puts
>>> somebody who can read it at a great advantage over somebody else 
>>> similarly
>>> situated who cannot. Just assume for a moment that the numbers we so 
>>> often
>>> cite are close to accurate. 30 in 100 blind people are employed. Of 
>>> those
>>> 30, 24 of them are able to read Braille. WE don't really know what the
>>> literacy rate among the working age blind is, but if it is under 50%, 
>>> which
>>> it almost certainly is, you can do the math and see that there is 
>>> something
>>> going on here.
>>>
>>> I myself have been blind all my life. In elementary school attempts were
>>> made to teach me to read print with the severely limited vision that I 
>>> had.
>>> I did not learn to read. What I was doing was more akin to decoding;
>>> agonizing over each letter to discern what it was and then piecing it
>>> together to make a word. At age 25 I learned to read Braille. Braille 
>>> has
>>> proved useful in finding employment not only because of the specific 
>>> tasks
>>> it makes easier on the job, but more so because of the fact that it has 
>>> made
>>> me literate. Literacy means knowing how things are spelled and how
>>> punctuation is used. Literacy means being able to express yourself in
>>> writing in a manner that accurately reflects your level of intelligence.
>>> Sure, it is nice to use a Braille display to access and take notes in
>>> meetings where speech output would be distracting. Yes, it is great to 
>>> be
>>> able to use an outline or notes when addressing people publicly. 
>>> However,
>>> these are simply instances where Braille is a tool, and in my opinion 
>>> the
>>> best one, to get the job done. There are other ways to perform these 
>>> tasks.
>>> Where there is no substitution for being literate is in communicating 
>>> your
>>> ideas in writing. In college, I would hand in work of supposed high 
>>> academic
>>> quality with the most egregious spelling and punctuation errors in it. 
>>> Who
>>> can take that seriously? Yes there is spell-check and you can arrow 
>>> through
>>> character by character to find out how words are spelled and things are
>>> punctuated, but this approach means you only learn when you know you 
>>> don't
>>> know. When you read, you pick things up naturally along the way and
>>> assimilate them.
>>>
>>> Of course it is true that some illiterate blind people like Laura Sloate 
>>> and
>>> the Governor of New York have achieved the pinnacles of financial and
>>> professional success. More power to them. I could point you toward 
>>> people
>>> who have become very successful without completing a high school 
>>> education
>>> let alone a college degree. Will anybody stand up and argue based on 
>>> this
>>> fact that bachelor's and advanced degrees don't lead to more and better
>>> employment prospects for those who hold them?
>>>
>>> Literacy is absolutely essential for professional opportunities and 
>>> Braille
>>> is the only means by which to achieve it if one does not read print. 
>>> Blind
>>> people who don't know Braille are certainly not inferior people, but 
>>> they
>>> are absolutely working with an inferior set of skills, and if Laura 
>>> Sloate
>>> would like to debate the point, I would gladly do so, regardless of how 
>>> much
>>> money she makes.
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dennisgclark%40sbcglobal.net
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
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> 


From kevin at kevinlarose.net  Thu Jan  7 21:46:41 2010
From: kevin at kevinlarose.net (Kevin LaRose)
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 13:46:41 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only
	oneintown?
References: <LNEJJKLNICEECFDGEDGLOEBLFOAA.mworkman.lists@gmail.com>
	<67B2FE3CA54948F6B95372789E8911A6@PAULLAPTOP>
Message-ID: <71FAA89B663B44148BE2A01392CCAF85@acer6e40e97492>

For what it's worth, I have seen no personal attacks here. Many people, 
myself included, simply have a very strong opinion on this matter. I'm going 
to try and frame this in a different way. I have a six-year-old daughter, 
who is sighted. If the school she attended decided that, because of other 
technological options available, she didn't have to learn to read...well, it 
isn't just ridiculous, it's preposterous, because it would never happen. I 
was born in 1964, so I'm probably in the last generation of folks who grew 
up blind for whom speech technology and audio weren't second nature. The 
Braille n Speak didn't arrive on the scene until the year after I graduated 
from college. It is beyond question that speech technology has 
revolutionized my life. I have access to a whole world of information that I 
could barely even comprehend growing up, and at speeds I could have never 
imagined possible. But that revolution has built on the strong foundation 
that Braille already gave me. I don't think there would  have been any way I 
could have learned to write proficiently without it. My dad was an English 
teacher, so that was a must in my family. As I write anything, I have a 
Braille picture in my mind of what it should look like. I don't think 
anybody will ever convince me that Braille isn't a crucial part of learning.
Kevin L. 


I'm protected by SpamBrave
http://www.spambrave.com/



From mworkman.lists at gmail.com  Thu Jan  7 22:05:13 2010
From: mworkman.lists at gmail.com (Marc Workman)
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 15:05:13 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for
	onlyone	intown?
In-Reply-To: <20100107194947.22844.40412@web3.serotek.com>
Message-ID: <LNEJJKLNICEECFDGEDGLKEDJFOAA.mworkman.lists@gmail.com>

Jedi,

I think your comments reflect a sort of black and white understanding of
literacy.  First off, Patterson, as I recall, can read print if it is
magnified and he uses his good eye.  Since he can read, it stands to reason
that he can write.  I'm not sure about the woman, but I would be very
surprised if she were unable to write at all.

The problem is that people are throwing around a very loaded word,
illiterate/illiteracy, in a casual manner without offering any sort of
definition.  If illiteracy means the inability to read or write, then anyone
who can write is not illiterate, since they would not lack the ability to
read *and* write.  If this understanding of illiteracy is correct, then far
fewer blind people are actually illiterate than cannot read Braille (i.e.,
the number of blind people who are illiterate is much smaller than the
number of blind people who cannot read print or Braille).  This is because
many people are able to write without being able to read Braille.

Secondly, I don't know how you are defining reading.  Clearly, it is not how
most sighted people define reading (the visual processing of symbols into
associated meanings) since this would exclude Braille.  Now you could expand
this definition to say that reading is the visual or tactile processing of
symbols into associated meanings, but this really strikes me as a bit ad
hoc.  Why is it that only these two senses can be used for reading?

Your definition of reading seems to be the following: take symbols, process
them, and make meaning out of them.  Well, give me a printed book, an OCR
program, and screen-reading software, and I can do just that.  My guess is
that you too, as a Braille reader, would have to convert a printed book into
an alternative format if it were handed to you, so conversion into an
alternative format doesn't make the process any less legitimate.

Here's the research that I would like to see.  Let's assume that reading
activates a certain portion of the brain, and let's also assume that reading
Braille activates the same portion.  What I would like to know is whether
reading using a screen reader activates that same portion.  Don't be so
quick to dismiss the idea.  I can tell you that when I use a screen reader,
I imagine the words that I used to see when I read print.  This doesn't
happen when I listen to a human voice.  Reading using a screen reader and
listening to a human voice are not the same experience for me personally,
and I suspect that the part of my brain that used to be activated when I
read print is now being activated when I use a screen reader.  If this is
true, and I know there are a lot of assumptions here, would this not
demonstrate that one can read using ones sense of hearing? And I say why
not; why would reading be limited to the senses of vision and touch.
Remember that up until tactile forms of reading were invented only a few
hundred years ago, the idea of reading using any sense other than vision
would have been ludicrous.

I think it might help to recognize that a process as complicated as reading
cannot be easily reduced to either Braille or print.  Anyone who has read
Crashing Through, the book about Mike May, or anyone who knows someone with
a severe learning disability will know that reading is a very complicated
process that requires more than the ability to see printed letters.  It is a
process that no one really fully understands, and it seems entirely
reasonable to me that reading using screen readers is possible, particularly
for someone like me who read print until adulthood.

I suppose my main point here is that the label illiterate has been applied
far too liberally in this discussion, and an inability to read print or
Braille does not necessarily make one illiterate.

Best,

Marc



-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org]On
Behalf Of Jedi
Sent: Thursday, January 07, 2010 12:50 PM
To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for onlyone
intown?


No offense mate, but they are unable to read and write. If you give
them something in writing, they can't read it, can they? I don't
honestly know if they can write. As one person has observed, it's
possible to be well read and also be illiterate. No one is trying to
put anyone down. Instead, people are trying to get at the idea that to
physically read (take symbols, process them, and make meaning out of
them), Braille is the best method for the blind. If we're talking about
assimilating information, either Braille or audio will work. Most seem
to agree that both skills are important. Where people are especially
taking issue is when blind people aren't even given the opportunity to
learn braille even though sighted people are given the opportunity to
learn print.

I have a question for you. Do you read Braille? It wouldn't matter
except to say that your reaction to our discussion is quite violent and
I wonder if you yourself are feeling attacked.

Respectfully,
Jedi


Original message:
> I cannot imagine calling clearly accomplished people such as the governor
of
> New York or the woman in the article "illiterate" as you did.  It is mean
> spirited, self indulgent, and most importantly indicates a
misunderstanding
> of the meaning of the word illiterate.  The American Heritage dictionary
> defines illiterate as follows:



> 1. illiterate. adjective.

> Unable to read and write.

> Having little or no formal education.

> 2. Marked by inferiority to an expected standard of familiarity with
> language and literature.

> Violating prescribed standards of speech or writing.

> 3. Ignorant of the fundamentals of a given art or branch of knowledge:
> musically illiterate. See Usage Note at literate.


> It saddens me that it does not seem possible for us as blind people to
> discuss blindness without personal attacks.  As long as we can be induced
to
> continue attacking one another we are doing the work of those who would
like
> to see us excluded from all aspects of society.  All they need do is sit
on
> the sidelines and watch the feathers fly.

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Sean Whalen" <smwhalenpsp at gmail.com>
> To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 8:52 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
> intown?


>> Let me first acknowledge the truth of what Mark has pointed out in terms
>> of
>> the anecdotal nature of much of the evidence proffered in support of
>> Braille
>> literacy increasing employment opportunities for the blind. I also admit
>> freely that I have never dug into the numbers we so often bandy about in
>> relation to literacy rates among the blind, literacy rates among the
>> employed blind and the unemployment rate for blind individuals and do not
>> know how carefully designed or well executed any of the studies from
which
>> we glean these numbers actually were.

>> All this being said, I absolutely believe that Braille, for persons who
>> are
>> unable and have never learned to read print, is a necessity and not
simply
>> a
>> tool in a toolbox. I qualify this because Marc was once again, I think,
>> correct in drawing the distinction between those who learn to read print
>> and
>> go blind later in life and those who are blind from a young age and never
>> learn to read via any medium. For somebody who read print and achieved
>> literacy, Braille is an incredibly useful tool that can make some tasks
>> easier and more efficient and allow one to recapture the pleasure of
>> reading
>> to oneself, but for those who never learned to read print, Braille is the
>> only path to literacy. So, barring any complicating factors such as
>> additional disabilities, I firmly believe that all blind children and all
>> non-print-reading blind adults must be expected to learn to read Braille.
>> Accepting anything less is to give the stamp of approval to lower
>> expectations of the blind among the general public. When Joe Sighted is
>> illiterate at age 25, we all recognize this as a big problem. It is no
>> different for the blind, it's a big problem.

>> I also agree with Joe, to a degree, that it is not a simple as Braille
>> literate equals employed. But I think that it is beyond dispute that
being
>> able to read is a crucial skill for nearly any job seeker to have.
Braille
>> is not "the difference", but all else being equal, it certainly puts
>> somebody who can read it at a great advantage over somebody else
similarly
>> situated who cannot. Just assume for a moment that the numbers we so
often
>> cite are close to accurate. 30 in 100 blind people are employed. Of those
>> 30, 24 of them are able to read Braille. WE don't really know what the
>> literacy rate among the working age blind is, but if it is under 50%,
>> which
>> it almost certainly is, you can do the math and see that there is
>> something
>> going on here.

>> I myself have been blind all my life. In elementary school attempts were
>> made to teach me to read print with the severely limited vision that I
>> had.
>> I did not learn to read. What I was doing was more akin to decoding;
>> agonizing over each letter to discern what it was and then piecing it
>> together to make a word. At age 25 I learned to read Braille. Braille has
>> proved useful in finding employment not only because of the specific
tasks
>> it makes easier on the job, but more so because of the fact that it has
>> made
>> me literate. Literacy means knowing how things are spelled and how
>> punctuation is used. Literacy means being able to express yourself in
>> writing in a manner that accurately reflects your level of intelligence.
>> Sure, it is nice to use a Braille display to access and take notes in
>> meetings where speech output would be distracting. Yes, it is great to be
>> able to use an outline or notes when addressing people publicly. However,
>> these are simply instances where Braille is a tool, and in my opinion the
>> best one, to get the job done. There are other ways to perform these
>> tasks.
>> Where there is no substitution for being literate is in communicating
your
>> ideas in writing. In college, I would hand in work of supposed high
>> academic
>> quality with the most egregious spelling and punctuation errors in it.
Who
>> can take that seriously? Yes there is spell-check and you can arrow
>> through
>> character by character to find out how words are spelled and things are
>> punctuated, but this approach means you only learn when you know you
don't
>> know. When you read, you pick things up naturally along the way and
>> assimilate them.

>> Of course it is true that some illiterate blind people like Laura Sloate
>> and
>> the Governor of New York have achieved the pinnacles of financial and
>> professional success. More power to them. I could point you toward people
>> who have become very successful without completing a high school
education
>> let alone a college degree. Will anybody stand up and argue based on this
>> fact that bachelor's and advanced degrees don't lead to more and better
>> employment prospects for those who hold them?

>> Literacy is absolutely essential for professional opportunities and
>> Braille
>> is the only means by which to achieve it if one does not read print.
Blind
>> people who don't know Braille are certainly not inferior people, but they
>> are absolutely working with an inferior set of skills, and if Laura
Sloate
>> would like to debate the point, I would gladly do so, regardless of how
>> much
>> money she makes.


>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dennisgclark%40sbcgl
obal.net


> _______________________________________________
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> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
>
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bile.net

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From brileyp at gmail.com  Thu Jan  7 22:23:32 2010
From: brileyp at gmail.com (Briley Pollard)
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 17:23:32 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only
	oneintown?
In-Reply-To: <71FAA89B663B44148BE2A01392CCAF85@acer6e40e97492>
References: <LNEJJKLNICEECFDGEDGLOEBLFOAA.mworkman.lists@gmail.com>
	<67B2FE3CA54948F6B95372789E8911A6@PAULLAPTOP>
	<71FAA89B663B44148BE2A01392CCAF85@acer6e40e97492>
Message-ID: <1A58F0ED-D6B2-4AA2-A97D-58C0E7F51E7B@gmail.com>

Well said, Kevin. Thank you for your input.
On Jan 7, 2010, at 4:46 PM, Kevin LaRose wrote:

> For what it's worth, I have seen no personal attacks here. Many people, myself included, simply have a very strong opinion on this matter. I'm going to try and frame this in a different way. I have a six-year-old daughter, who is sighted. If the school she attended decided that, because of other technological options available, she didn't have to learn to read...well, it isn't just ridiculous, it's preposterous, because it would never happen. I was born in 1964, so I'm probably in the last generation of folks who grew up blind for whom speech technology and audio weren't second nature. The Braille n Speak didn't arrive on the scene until the year after I graduated from college. It is beyond question that speech technology has revolutionized my life. I have access to a whole world of information that I could barely even comprehend growing up, and at speeds I could have never imagined possible. But that revolution has built on the strong foundation that Braille already gave me. I don't think there would  have been any way I could have learned to write proficiently without it. My dad was an English teacher, so that was a must in my family. As I write anything, I have a Braille picture in my mind of what it should look like. I don't think anybody will ever convince me that Braille isn't a crucial part of learning.
> Kevin L. 
> 
> I'm protected by SpamBrave
> http://www.spambrave.com/
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com



From spangler.robert at gmail.com  Thu Jan  7 23:06:00 2010
From: spangler.robert at gmail.com (Robert Spangler)
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 18:06:00 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
	intown?
In-Reply-To: <20100107194947.22844.40412@web3.serotek.com>
References: <20100107194947.22844.40412@web3.serotek.com>
Message-ID: <19ccaa051001071506j10964fa3i87cb1b0f51b82a7b@mail.gmail.com>

I think that both should be used simultaneously.  I don't think that
one should frown on someone for not learning Braille.  Just let them
do whatever they feel helps them the most and will permit them to be
successful.  It is certainly true that someone who reads Braille has
many more opportunities for work; however, if someone doesn't know
Braille or refuses to learn it, we can only attempt to educate them of
the facts.  Personally, I am a Braille reader but listen to a lot of
books.  I use Braille where it is useful, for me, in my daily life.
This usually includes studying foreign languages, labeling things, and
reading signs such as on elevators and bathrooms.  In conclusion, it
is important for us to educate and for the educated to determine how
best to use their Braille and auditory skills in their daily lives.

-Robert

On 1/7/10, Jedi <loneblindjedi at samobile.net> wrote:
> No offense mate, but they are unable to read and write. If you give
> them something in writing, they can't read it, can they? I don't
> honestly know if they can write. As one person has observed, it's
> possible to be well read and also be illiterate. No one is trying to
> put anyone down. Instead, people are trying to get at the idea that to
> physically read (take symbols, process them, and make meaning out of
> them), Braille is the best method for the blind. If we're talking about
> assimilating information, either Braille or audio will work. Most seem
> to agree that both skills are important. Where people are especially
> taking issue is when blind people aren't even given the opportunity to
> learn braille even though sighted people are given the opportunity to
> learn print.
>
> I have a question for you. Do you read Braille? It wouldn't matter
> except to say that your reaction to our discussion is quite violent and
> I wonder if you yourself are feeling attacked.
>
> Respectfully,
> Jedi
>
>
> Original message:
>> I cannot imagine calling clearly accomplished people such as the governor
>> of
>> New York or the woman in the article "illiterate" as you did.  It is mean
>> spirited, self indulgent, and most importantly indicates a
>> misunderstanding
>> of the meaning of the word illiterate.  The American Heritage dictionary
>> defines illiterate as follows:
>
>
>
>> 1. illiterate. adjective.
>
>> Unable to read and write.
>
>> Having little or no formal education.
>
>> 2. Marked by inferiority to an expected standard of familiarity with
>> language and literature.
>
>> Violating prescribed standards of speech or writing.
>
>> 3. Ignorant of the fundamentals of a given art or branch of knowledge:
>> musically illiterate. See Usage Note at literate.
>
>
>> It saddens me that it does not seem possible for us as blind people to
>> discuss blindness without personal attacks.  As long as we can be induced
>> to
>> continue attacking one another we are doing the work of those who would
>> like
>> to see us excluded from all aspects of society.  All they need do is sit
>> on
>> the sidelines and watch the feathers fly.
>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Sean Whalen" <smwhalenpsp at gmail.com>
>> To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 8:52 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
>> intown?
>
>
>>> Let me first acknowledge the truth of what Mark has pointed out in terms
>>> of
>>> the anecdotal nature of much of the evidence proffered in support of
>>> Braille
>>> literacy increasing employment opportunities for the blind. I also admit
>>> freely that I have never dug into the numbers we so often bandy about in
>>> relation to literacy rates among the blind, literacy rates among the
>>> employed blind and the unemployment rate for blind individuals and do not
>>> know how carefully designed or well executed any of the studies from
>>> which
>>> we glean these numbers actually were.
>
>>> All this being said, I absolutely believe that Braille, for persons who
>>> are
>>> unable and have never learned to read print, is a necessity and not
>>> simply
>>> a
>>> tool in a toolbox. I qualify this because Marc was once again, I think,
>>> correct in drawing the distinction between those who learn to read print
>>> and
>>> go blind later in life and those who are blind from a young age and never
>>> learn to read via any medium. For somebody who read print and achieved
>>> literacy, Braille is an incredibly useful tool that can make some tasks
>>> easier and more efficient and allow one to recapture the pleasure of
>>> reading
>>> to oneself, but for those who never learned to read print, Braille is the
>>> only path to literacy. So, barring any complicating factors such as
>>> additional disabilities, I firmly believe that all blind children and all
>>> non-print-reading blind adults must be expected to learn to read Braille.
>>> Accepting anything less is to give the stamp of approval to lower
>>> expectations of the blind among the general public. When Joe Sighted is
>>> illiterate at age 25, we all recognize this as a big problem. It is no
>>> different for the blind, it's a big problem.
>
>>> I also agree with Joe, to a degree, that it is not a simple as Braille
>>> literate equals employed. But I think that it is beyond dispute that
>>> being
>>> able to read is a crucial skill for nearly any job seeker to have.
>>> Braille
>>> is not "the difference", but all else being equal, it certainly puts
>>> somebody who can read it at a great advantage over somebody else
>>> similarly
>>> situated who cannot. Just assume for a moment that the numbers we so
>>> often
>>> cite are close to accurate. 30 in 100 blind people are employed. Of those
>>> 30, 24 of them are able to read Braille. WE don't really know what the
>>> literacy rate among the working age blind is, but if it is under 50%,
>>> which
>>> it almost certainly is, you can do the math and see that there is
>>> something
>>> going on here.
>
>>> I myself have been blind all my life. In elementary school attempts were
>>> made to teach me to read print with the severely limited vision that I
>>> had.
>>> I did not learn to read. What I was doing was more akin to decoding;
>>> agonizing over each letter to discern what it was and then piecing it
>>> together to make a word. At age 25 I learned to read Braille. Braille has
>>> proved useful in finding employment not only because of the specific
>>> tasks
>>> it makes easier on the job, but more so because of the fact that it has
>>> made
>>> me literate. Literacy means knowing how things are spelled and how
>>> punctuation is used. Literacy means being able to express yourself in
>>> writing in a manner that accurately reflects your level of intelligence.
>>> Sure, it is nice to use a Braille display to access and take notes in
>>> meetings where speech output would be distracting. Yes, it is great to be
>>> able to use an outline or notes when addressing people publicly. However,
>>> these are simply instances where Braille is a tool, and in my opinion the
>>> best one, to get the job done. There are other ways to perform these
>>> tasks.
>>> Where there is no substitution for being literate is in communicating
>>> your
>>> ideas in writing. In college, I would hand in work of supposed high
>>> academic
>>> quality with the most egregious spelling and punctuation errors in it.
>>> Who
>>> can take that seriously? Yes there is spell-check and you can arrow
>>> through
>>> character by character to find out how words are spelled and things are
>>> punctuated, but this approach means you only learn when you know you
>>> don't
>>> know. When you read, you pick things up naturally along the way and
>>> assimilate them.
>
>>> Of course it is true that some illiterate blind people like Laura Sloate
>>> and
>>> the Governor of New York have achieved the pinnacles of financial and
>>> professional success. More power to them. I could point you toward people
>>> who have become very successful without completing a high school
>>> education
>>> let alone a college degree. Will anybody stand up and argue based on this
>>> fact that bachelor's and advanced degrees don't lead to more and better
>>> employment prospects for those who hold them?
>
>>> Literacy is absolutely essential for professional opportunities and
>>> Braille
>>> is the only means by which to achieve it if one does not read print.
>>> Blind
>>> people who don't know Braille are certainly not inferior people, but they
>>> are absolutely working with an inferior set of skills, and if Laura
>>> Sloate
>>> would like to debate the point, I would gladly do so, regardless of how
>>> much
>>> money she makes.
>
>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dennisgclark%40sbcglobal.net
>
>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
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>
> --
> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit
> www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.
>
> _______________________________________________
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> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
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-- 
Robert Spangler
The University of Toledo
Student Senator - Administrative Affairs Committee Chair, College of
Arts and Sciences


From tealbloodworth at gmail.com  Fri Jan  8 02:07:06 2010
From: tealbloodworth at gmail.com (Teal Bloodworth)
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 20:07:06 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room foronlyone	intown?
References: <LNEJJKLNICEECFDGEDGLKEDJFOAA.mworkman.lists@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <E492DF27034C48FEB7E6045E4D84A17E@teal6e6857f643>

Mark

i really like the way you handled that. I also read print until early 
adulthood and was not ever able to pick up the full braille code after grade 
1. I use my screen reader as a study buddy saying things back to me and my 
bvictor stream for my books. I have been told that in math classes braille 
makes things much simpler and i am not sure how i need to go about a foreign 
language but its not as if we go into a grocery store and all the packages 
are labled to identify it or even how to use it and the experation date. 
Also someone made the comment that braille books are so bulky and in a small 
college dorm room you dont really have a way to store textbooks in braille.

In a way braille seems to be outdated just like print. Everywhere you go 
things are electronic and technology is advancing everyday.

            -Teal
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Marc Workman" <mworkman.lists at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 07, 2010 4:05 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room foronlyone 
intown?


> Jedi,
>
> I think your comments reflect a sort of black and white understanding of
> literacy.  First off, Patterson, as I recall, can read print if it is
> magnified and he uses his good eye.  Since he can read, it stands to 
> reason
> that he can write.  I'm not sure about the woman, but I would be very
> surprised if she were unable to write at all.
>
> The problem is that people are throwing around a very loaded word,
> illiterate/illiteracy, in a casual manner without offering any sort of
> definition.  If illiteracy means the inability to read or write, then 
> anyone
> who can write is not illiterate, since they would not lack the ability to
> read *and* write.  If this understanding of illiteracy is correct, then 
> far
> fewer blind people are actually illiterate than cannot read Braille (i.e.,
> the number of blind people who are illiterate is much smaller than the
> number of blind people who cannot read print or Braille).  This is because
> many people are able to write without being able to read Braille.
>
> Secondly, I don't know how you are defining reading.  Clearly, it is not 
> how
> most sighted people define reading (the visual processing of symbols into
> associated meanings) since this would exclude Braille.  Now you could 
> expand
> this definition to say that reading is the visual or tactile processing of
> symbols into associated meanings, but this really strikes me as a bit ad
> hoc.  Why is it that only these two senses can be used for reading?
>
> Your definition of reading seems to be the following: take symbols, 
> process
> them, and make meaning out of them.  Well, give me a printed book, an OCR
> program, and screen-reading software, and I can do just that.  My guess is
> that you too, as a Braille reader, would have to convert a printed book 
> into
> an alternative format if it were handed to you, so conversion into an
> alternative format doesn't make the process any less legitimate.
>
> Here's the research that I would like to see.  Let's assume that reading
> activates a certain portion of the brain, and let's also assume that 
> reading
> Braille activates the same portion.  What I would like to know is whether
> reading using a screen reader activates that same portion.  Don't be so
> quick to dismiss the idea.  I can tell you that when I use a screen 
> reader,
> I imagine the words that I used to see when I read print.  This doesn't
> happen when I listen to a human voice.  Reading using a screen reader and
> listening to a human voice are not the same experience for me personally,
> and I suspect that the part of my brain that used to be activated when I
> read print is now being activated when I use a screen reader.  If this is
> true, and I know there are a lot of assumptions here, would this not
> demonstrate that one can read using ones sense of hearing? And I say why
> not; why would reading be limited to the senses of vision and touch.
> Remember that up until tactile forms of reading were invented only a few
> hundred years ago, the idea of reading using any sense other than vision
> would have been ludicrous.
>
> I think it might help to recognize that a process as complicated as 
> reading
> cannot be easily reduced to either Braille or print.  Anyone who has read
> Crashing Through, the book about Mike May, or anyone who knows someone 
> with
> a severe learning disability will know that reading is a very complicated
> process that requires more than the ability to see printed letters.  It is 
> a
> process that no one really fully understands, and it seems entirely
> reasonable to me that reading using screen readers is possible, 
> particularly
> for someone like me who read print until adulthood.
>
> I suppose my main point here is that the label illiterate has been applied
> far too liberally in this discussion, and an inability to read print or
> Braille does not necessarily make one illiterate.
>
> Best,
>
> Marc
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org]On
> Behalf Of Jedi
> Sent: Thursday, January 07, 2010 12:50 PM
> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for onlyone
> intown?
>
>
> No offense mate, but they are unable to read and write. If you give
> them something in writing, they can't read it, can they? I don't
> honestly know if they can write. As one person has observed, it's
> possible to be well read and also be illiterate. No one is trying to
> put anyone down. Instead, people are trying to get at the idea that to
> physically read (take symbols, process them, and make meaning out of
> them), Braille is the best method for the blind. If we're talking about
> assimilating information, either Braille or audio will work. Most seem
> to agree that both skills are important. Where people are especially
> taking issue is when blind people aren't even given the opportunity to
> learn braille even though sighted people are given the opportunity to
> learn print.
>
> I have a question for you. Do you read Braille? It wouldn't matter
> except to say that your reaction to our discussion is quite violent and
> I wonder if you yourself are feeling attacked.
>
> Respectfully,
> Jedi
>
>
> Original message:
>> I cannot imagine calling clearly accomplished people such as the governor
> of
>> New York or the woman in the article "illiterate" as you did.  It is mean
>> spirited, self indulgent, and most importantly indicates a
> misunderstanding
>> of the meaning of the word illiterate.  The American Heritage dictionary
>> defines illiterate as follows:
>
>
>
>> 1. illiterate. adjective.
>
>> Unable to read and write.
>
>> Having little or no formal education.
>
>> 2. Marked by inferiority to an expected standard of familiarity with
>> language and literature.
>
>> Violating prescribed standards of speech or writing.
>
>> 3. Ignorant of the fundamentals of a given art or branch of knowledge:
>> musically illiterate. See Usage Note at literate.
>
>
>> It saddens me that it does not seem possible for us as blind people to
>> discuss blindness without personal attacks.  As long as we can be induced
> to
>> continue attacking one another we are doing the work of those who would
> like
>> to see us excluded from all aspects of society.  All they need do is sit
> on
>> the sidelines and watch the feathers fly.
>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Sean Whalen" <smwhalenpsp at gmail.com>
>> To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 8:52 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
>> intown?
>
>
>>> Let me first acknowledge the truth of what Mark has pointed out in terms
>>> of
>>> the anecdotal nature of much of the evidence proffered in support of
>>> Braille
>>> literacy increasing employment opportunities for the blind. I also admit
>>> freely that I have never dug into the numbers we so often bandy about in
>>> relation to literacy rates among the blind, literacy rates among the
>>> employed blind and the unemployment rate for blind individuals and do 
>>> not
>>> know how carefully designed or well executed any of the studies from
> which
>>> we glean these numbers actually were.
>
>>> All this being said, I absolutely believe that Braille, for persons who
>>> are
>>> unable and have never learned to read print, is a necessity and not
> simply
>>> a
>>> tool in a toolbox. I qualify this because Marc was once again, I think,
>>> correct in drawing the distinction between those who learn to read print
>>> and
>>> go blind later in life and those who are blind from a young age and 
>>> never
>>> learn to read via any medium. For somebody who read print and achieved
>>> literacy, Braille is an incredibly useful tool that can make some tasks
>>> easier and more efficient and allow one to recapture the pleasure of
>>> reading
>>> to oneself, but for those who never learned to read print, Braille is 
>>> the
>>> only path to literacy. So, barring any complicating factors such as
>>> additional disabilities, I firmly believe that all blind children and 
>>> all
>>> non-print-reading blind adults must be expected to learn to read 
>>> Braille.
>>> Accepting anything less is to give the stamp of approval to lower
>>> expectations of the blind among the general public. When Joe Sighted is
>>> illiterate at age 25, we all recognize this as a big problem. It is no
>>> different for the blind, it's a big problem.
>
>>> I also agree with Joe, to a degree, that it is not a simple as Braille
>>> literate equals employed. But I think that it is beyond dispute that
> being
>>> able to read is a crucial skill for nearly any job seeker to have.
> Braille
>>> is not "the difference", but all else being equal, it certainly puts
>>> somebody who can read it at a great advantage over somebody else
> similarly
>>> situated who cannot. Just assume for a moment that the numbers we so
> often
>>> cite are close to accurate. 30 in 100 blind people are employed. Of 
>>> those
>>> 30, 24 of them are able to read Braille. WE don't really know what the
>>> literacy rate among the working age blind is, but if it is under 50%,
>>> which
>>> it almost certainly is, you can do the math and see that there is
>>> something
>>> going on here.
>
>>> I myself have been blind all my life. In elementary school attempts were
>>> made to teach me to read print with the severely limited vision that I
>>> had.
>>> I did not learn to read. What I was doing was more akin to decoding;
>>> agonizing over each letter to discern what it was and then piecing it
>>> together to make a word. At age 25 I learned to read Braille. Braille 
>>> has
>>> proved useful in finding employment not only because of the specific
> tasks
>>> it makes easier on the job, but more so because of the fact that it has
>>> made
>>> me literate. Literacy means knowing how things are spelled and how
>>> punctuation is used. Literacy means being able to express yourself in
>>> writing in a manner that accurately reflects your level of intelligence.
>>> Sure, it is nice to use a Braille display to access and take notes in
>>> meetings where speech output would be distracting. Yes, it is great to 
>>> be
>>> able to use an outline or notes when addressing people publicly. 
>>> However,
>>> these are simply instances where Braille is a tool, and in my opinion 
>>> the
>>> best one, to get the job done. There are other ways to perform these
>>> tasks.
>>> Where there is no substitution for being literate is in communicating
> your
>>> ideas in writing. In college, I would hand in work of supposed high
>>> academic
>>> quality with the most egregious spelling and punctuation errors in it.
> Who
>>> can take that seriously? Yes there is spell-check and you can arrow
>>> through
>>> character by character to find out how words are spelled and things are
>>> punctuated, but this approach means you only learn when you know you
> don't
>>> know. When you read, you pick things up naturally along the way and
>>> assimilate them.
>
>>> Of course it is true that some illiterate blind people like Laura Sloate
>>> and
>>> the Governor of New York have achieved the pinnacles of financial and
>>> professional success. More power to them. I could point you toward 
>>> people
>>> who have become very successful without completing a high school
> education
>>> let alone a college degree. Will anybody stand up and argue based on 
>>> this
>>> fact that bachelor's and advanced degrees don't lead to more and better
>>> employment prospects for those who hold them?
>
>>> Literacy is absolutely essential for professional opportunities and
>>> Braille
>>> is the only means by which to achieve it if one does not read print.
> Blind
>>> people who don't know Braille are certainly not inferior people, but 
>>> they
>>> are absolutely working with an inferior set of skills, and if Laura
> Sloate
>>> would like to debate the point, I would gladly do so, regardless of how
>>> much
>>> money she makes.
>
>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dennisgclark%40sbcgl
> obal.net
>
>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
>>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samo
> bile.net
>
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> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit
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> _______________________________________________
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> 



From dandrews at visi.com  Thu Jan  7 11:26:16 2010
From: dandrews at visi.com (David Andrews)
Date: Thu, 07 Jan 2010 05:26:16 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
 town?
In-Reply-To: <20100106163121.2032.34938@web2.serotek.com>
References: <20100106163121.2032.34938@web2.serotek.com>
Message-ID: <auto-000134106869@mailfront2.g2host.com>

For one I thought the New York Times article 
about Braille was quite good.  On the whole, it 
was balanced, even though we might not always 
like what it said.  In our zeal to promote 
Braille, in the NFB, I do think we sometimes make 
people feel like they are on the outside.  The 
one thing the article, and people generally don't 
do is talk about how Braille is one tool we have, 
so is audio, so are computers etc.  People tend 
to paint very black and white pictures, then 
declare those who don't match those pictures as 
losers.  It is a grey world out there.  There 
isn't just one answer or solution.  I use Braille 
all the time, and it is a part of my success.  I 
also use computers, love my Stream, use human 
readers, OCR, the KNFB Reader etc.  There isn't just one answer.

Dave

At 10:31 AM 1/6/2010, you wrote:
>What I'm about to say may sound harsh, but here 
>it goes. Literacy matters, and those who have 
>the capacity for literacy need to be able to 
>read the written word for success. that does not 
>mean that those who are, by means of some 
>disability, unable to read won't be successful. 
>Quite the contrary. But reading definitely makes 
>a difference in the lives of those who can do 
>it. For the sighted, reading means print. For 
>the blind, reading means Braille. That does not 
>mean that either group shouldn't make use of 
>audio materials or other technologies to access 
>the printed word. However, these new 
>technologies should not be an excuse not to 
>learn to read. Those who feel disenfranchised or 
>chastized by certain members of the federation 
>because they don't use Braille even though they 
>could ought to give Braille a second thought 
>rather than complain that support for Braille is 
>unyielding to the point of exclusion. Yes, 
>learning to read is painstaking and challenging, 
>but that doesn't mean that it can't or shouldn't 
>be done. granted, if there is a disability that 
>really does prevent written literacy, then the 
>circumstances are totally different. But for 
>most blind people, that simply isn't the case. 
>Does that mean that non-readers should blame 
>themselves for not reading Braille? No. There 
>may be a number of reasons why Braille isn't a 
>part of their lives. However, there are 
>sufficient resources available to individuals 
>wanting to learn that there really is no excuse 
>not to. Respectfully, Jedi Original message: > 
>Darian, > What it makes them is statistically 
>far less likely to be employed, > for one 
>thing.  That alone should convince parents and 
>teachers the > importance of Braille 
>education. > Joseph > On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 
>07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote: >> I hope 
>individuals don't mind my playing devil's 
>advocate  focused >> upon the statement "braille 
>readers are leaders". >>   What does this  make 
>those who arn't very good braille readers, >> 
>don't want to know, or  don't know braille? >> 
>Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns 
>upon  non-braille 
>readers? >>  respectfullly, >>  Darian >> On 
>1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> 
>wrote: >>> Hi: >>> Just thought I'd share my 
>opinions for what it's worth. >>> I was taught 
>braille, and am very good at reading it. >>> 
>However, I admit with devices like the Victor 
>Reader Stream, I really >>> don't read in 
>braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a 
>braille >>> display, so I could and probably 
>should download more books and read >>> them 
>digitally, but just listening to a book on the 
>tiny stream is >>> much easier than lugging 
>around a note taker and reading on a braille >>> 
>display. >>> So, I admit even as a great braille 
>reader I don't use braille as much >>> as I 
>should. >>> I do use it at my work though, for 
>when I write previews I take my >>> notes in 
>braille and that helps tremendously...so it 
>definitely has >>> it's uses and children should 
>definitely be taught it. >>> Braille readers are 
>leaders! >>> Kerri+ >>> On 1/4/10, Beth 
><thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote: >>>> Wow.  I 
>admit to having been taught Braille as a child 
>and my vision >>>> teacher was wonderful, but it 
>doesn't surprise me that a lot of >>>> today's 
>children are not taught that way.  Braille 
>readers are >>>> leaders, they say. >>>> 
>Beth >>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith 
><dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote: >>>>> This >>>>> 
>Listening to Braille >>>>> By RACHEL AVIV >>>>> 
>Published: December 30, 2009 >>>>> AT 4 
>O’CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins 
>her daily reading. >>>>> She calls a phone 
>service that reads newspapers aloud in a 
>synthetic >>>>> voice, and she >>>>> listens to 
>The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, 
>which is >>>>> nearly twice the average pace of 
>speech. Later, an assistant reads The >>>>> 
>Financial Times >>>>> to her while she uses her 
>computer’s text-to-speech system to play 
>The >>>>> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear 
>to the paper and the other to the >>>>> 
>magazine. >>>>> The managing director of a Wall 
>Street investment management firm, >>>>> Sloate 
>has been blind since age 6, and although she 
>reads constantly, >>>>> poring over the >>>>> 
>news and the economic reports for several hours 
>every morning, she >>>>> does not use Braille. 
>“Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, 
>not >>>>> from my finger to >>>>> my brain,” 
>she says. As a child she learned how the letters 
>of the >>>>> alphabet sounded, not how they 
>appeared or felt on the page. She >>>>> 
>doesn’t think of a >>>>> comma in terms of its 
>written form but rather as “a stop on the 
>way >>>>> before continuing.” This, she says, 
>is the future of reading for the >>>>> blind. 
>“Literacy >>>>> evolves,” she told me. 
>“When Braille was invented, in the 19th >>>>> 
>century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even 
>have radio. At that time, >>>>> 
>blindness >>>>>  was a disability. Now it’s 
>just a minor, minor impairment.” >>>>> A few 
>decades ago, commentators predicted that the 
>electronic age >>>>> would create a postliterate 
>generation as new forms of media eclipsed >>>>> 
>the written word. >>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed 
>that Western culture would return to the >>>>> 
>“tribal and oral pattern.” But the decline 
>of written language has >>>>> become a reality 
>for >>>>> only the blind. Although Sloate does 
>regret not spending more time >>>>> learning to 
>spell in her youth — she writes by dictation — 
>she says >s >>>>> she thinks that >>>>> using 
>Braille would have only isolated her from her 
>sighted peers. >>>>> “It’s an arcane means 
>of communication, which for the most part 
>should >>>>> be abolished,” >>>>> she told me. 
>“It’s just not needed today.” >>>>> 
>Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, 
>requiring reams of thick, >>>>> oversize paper. 
>The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old 
>publishing >>>>> house in Boston, >>>>> printed 
>the >>>>> Harry Potter >>>>>  series on its 
>Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 
>volumes, >>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because 
>a single textbook can cost more than >>>>> 
>$1,000 and there’s >>>>> a shortage of Braille 
>teachers in public schools, visually 
>impaired >>>>> students often read using MP3 
>players, audiobooks and >>>>> 
>computer-screen-reading software. >>>>> A report 
>released last year by the National Federation of 
>the Blind, >>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 
>members, said that less than 10 percent >>>>> of 
>the 1.3 million >>>>> legally blind Americans 
>read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all >>>>> 
>blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, 
>today that number is as >>>>> low as 1 in 
>10, >>>>> according to the report. The figures 
>are controversial because there >>>>> is debate 
>about when a child with residual vision has 
>“too much sight” >>>>> for Braille >>>>> and 
>because the causes of blindness have changed 
>over the decades — in >>>>> rrecent years more 
>blind children have multiple disabilities, 
>because >>>>> of premature >>>>> births. It is 
>clear, though, that Braille literacy has been 
>waning for >>>>> some time, even among the most 
>intellectually capable, and the report >>>>> has 
>inspired >>>>> a fervent movement to change the 
>way blind people read. “What we’re >>>>> 
>finding are students who are very smart, very 
>verbally able — and >>>>> illiterate,” 
>Jim >>>>> Marks, a boardd member for the past 
>five years of the Association on >>>>> Higher 
>Education and Disability, told me. “We stopped 
>teaching our >>>>> nation’s blind 
>children >>>>> how to read and write. We put a 
>tape player, then a computer, on their >>>>> 
>desks. Now their writing is phonetic and 
>butchered. They never got to >>>>> learn 
>the >>>>> beauty and shape and structure of 
>language.” >>>>> For much of the past century, 
>blind children attended residential >>>>> 
>institutions where they learned to read by 
>touching the words. Today, >>>>> visually 
>impaired >>>>> children can be well versed in 
>literature without knowing how to read; >>>>> 
>computer-screen-reading software will even break 
>down each word and >>>>> read the 
>individual >>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has 
>become much harder to define, even for >>>>> 
>educators. >>>>> “If all you have in the world 
>is what you hear people say, then your >>>>> 
>mind is limited,” Darrell Shandrow, who runs a 
>blog called Blind >>>>> Access Journal, 
>told >>>>> me. “You need written symbols to 
>organize your mind. If you can’t feel >>>>> or 
>see the word, what does it mean? The substance 
>is gone.” Like many >>>>> Braille 
>readers, >>>>> Shandrow says that new computers, 
>which form a single line of Braille >>>>> cells 
>at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but 
>these devices are >>>>> still extremely >>>>> 
>costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views 
>the decline in Braille >>>>> literacy as a sign 
>of regression, not progress: “This is like 
>going >>>>> back to the 1400s, >>>>> before 
>Gutenberg’s printing press came on the 
>scene,” he said. “Only >>>>> the scholars 
>and monks knew how to read and write. And then 
>there were >>>>> the illiterate >>>>> masses, 
>the peasants.” >>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, 
>blind people were confined to an oral 
>culture. >>>>> Some tried to read letters carved 
>in wood or wax, formed by wire or >>>>> outlined 
>in felt >>>>> with pins. Dissatisfied with such 
>makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a >>>>> 
>student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth 
>in Paris, began >>>>> studying a cipher >>>>> 
>language of bumps, called night writing, 
>developed by a French Army >>>>> officer so 
>soldiers could send messages in the dark. 
>Braille modified >>>>> the code so that >>>>> it 
>could be read more efficiently — each letter or 
>punctuation symbool >>>>> is represented by a 
>pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of 
>three >>>>> rows and two >>>>> columns — aand 
>added abbreviations for commonly used words 
>like >>>>> “knowledge,” “people” and 
>“Lord.” Endowed with a reliable method 
>of >>>>> written communication >>>>> for the 
>first time in history, blind people had a 
>significant rise in >>>>> social status, and 
>Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of 
>liberator >>>>> and spiritual >>>>> savior. With 
>his “godlike courage,” Helen Keller wrote, 
>Braille built >>>>> a “firm stairway for 
>millions of sense-crippled human beings to 
>climb >>>>> from hopeless >>>>> darkness to the 
>Mind Eternal.” >>>>> At the time, blindness 
>was viewed not just as the absence of sight 
>but >>>>> also as a condition that created a 
>separate kind of species, more >>>>> innocent 
>and malleable, >>>>> not fully formed. Some 
>scholars said that blind people spoke a >>>>> 
>different sort of language, disconnected from 
>visual experience. In >>>>> his 1933 book, 
>“The >>>>> Blind in School and Society,” the 
>psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who >>>>> lost 
>his sight at age 11, warned that students who 
>were too rapidly >>>>> assimilated into >>>>> 
>the sighted world would become lost in “verbal 
>unreality.” At some >>>>> residential schools, 
>teachers avoided words that referenced color 
>or >>>>> light because, >>>>> they said, 
>students might stretch the meanings beyond 
>sense. These >>>>> theories have since been 
>discredited, and studies have shown that >>>>> 
>blind children as >>>>> young as 4 understand 
>the difference in meaning between words 
>like >>>>> “look,” “touch” and 
>“see.” And yet Cutsforth was not 
>entirely >>>>> misguided in his argument >>>>> 
>that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. 
>In the 1990s, a series >>>>> of brain-imaging 
>studies revealed that the visual cortices of 
>the >>>>> blind are not >>>>> rendered useless, 
>as previously assumed. When test subjects 
>swept >>>>> their fingers over a line of 
>Braille, they showed intense activation >>>>> in 
>the parts of >>>>> the brain that typically 
>process visual input. >>>>> These imaging 
>studies have been cited by some educators as 
>proof that >>>>> Braille is essential for blind 
>children’s cognitive development, as >>>>> the 
>visual cortex >>>>> takes more than 20 percent 
>of the brain. Given the brain’s 
>plasticity, >>>>> it is difficult to make the 
>argument that one kind of reading — >>>>> 
>whetheer the information >>>>> is absorbed by 
>ear, finger or retina — is inherently better 
>than >>>>> another, at leastt with regard to 
>cognitive function. The architecture >>>>> of 
>the brain is >>>>> not fixed, and without images 
>to process, the visual cortex can >>>>> 
>reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in 
>Nature Neuroscience >>>>> found that blind 
>subjects >>>>> consistently surpassed sighted 
>ones on tests of verbal >>>>> memory >>>>> , and 
>their superior performance was caused, the 
>authors suggested, by >>>>> the extra processing 
>that took place in the visual regions of 
>their >>>>> brains. >>>>> Learning to read is so 
>entwined in the normal course of child >>>>> 
>development that it is easy to assume that our 
>brains are naturally >>>>> wired for print 
>literacy. >>>>> But humans have been reading for 
>fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy >>>>> has 
>been widespread for no more than a century and a 
>half). The >>>>> activity of reading >>>>> 
>itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a 
>report released in 2009 >>>>> in the journal 
>Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras 
>studies >>>>> illiterate former >>>>> guerrillas 
>in Colombia who, after years of combat, had 
>abandoned their >>>>> weapons, left the jungle 
>and rejoined civilization. Carreiras 
>compares >>>>> 20 adults >>>>> who had recently 
>completed a literacy program with 22 people who 
>had >>>>> not yet begun it. In >>>>> 
>M.R.I. >>>>>  scans of their brains, the newly 
>literate subjects showed more gray >>>>> matter 
>in their angular gyri, an area crucial for 
>language processing, >>>>> and more white >>>>> 
>matter in part of the corpus callosum, which 
>links the two >>>>> hemispheres. Deficiencies in 
>these regions were previously observed in >>>>> 
>dyslexics, and the study >>>>> suggests that 
>those brain patterns weren’t the cause of 
>their >>>>> illiteracy, as had been 
>hypothesized, but a result. >>>>> There is no 
>doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but 
>how this >>>>> reorganization affects our 
>capacity for language is still a matter of >>>>> 
>debate. In moving >>>>> from written to spoken 
>language, the greatest consequences for 
>blind >>>>> people may not be cognitive but 
>cultural — a loss much harder to >>>>> avoid. In 
>onne of >>>>> the few studies of blind 
>people’s prose, Doug Brent, a professor 
>of >>>>> communication at the University of 
>Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent, >>>>> a 
>teacher of >>>>> visually impaired students, 
>analyzed stories by students who didn’t >>>>> 
>use Braille but rather composed on a regular 
>keyboard and edited by >>>>> listening to 
>their >>>>> words played aloud. One 16-year-old 
>wrote a fictional story about a >>>>> character 
>named Mark who had “sleep bombs”: >>>>> He 
>looked in the house windo that was his da windo 
>his dad was walking >>>>> around with a mask on 
>he took it off he opend the windo and fell 
>on >>>>> his bed sleeping >>>>> mark took two 
>bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his 
>dad lept >>>>> up but before he could grab the 
>mask it explodedhe fell down asleep. >>>>> In 
>describing this story and others like it, the 
>Brents invoked the >>>>> literary scholar Walter 
>Ong, who argued that members of literate >>>>> 
>societies think differently >>>>> than members 
>of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said 
>— the >>>>> ability to revissit your ideas and, 
>in the process, refine them — >>>>>  transformed 
>the shape >>>>> of thought. The Brents 
>characterized the writing of many 
>audio-only >>>>> readers as disorganized, “as 
>if all of their ideas are crammed into a >>>>> 
>container, shaken >>>>> and thrown randomly onto 
>a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” 
>The >>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences 
>seem arbitrary, one thought >>>>> emerging in 
>the >>>>> midst of another with a kind of 
>breathless energy. The authors >>>>> concluded, 
>“It just doesn’t seem to reflect the 
>qualities of organized >>>>> sequence and 
>complex >>>>> thought that we value in a 
>literate society.” >>>>> OUR DEFINITION of a 
>literate society inevitably shifts as our 
>tools >>>>> for reading and writing evolve, but 
>the brief history of literacy for >>>>> blind 
>people makes >>>>> the prospect of change 
>particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, 
>when >>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing 
>system — so that bliind people would >>>>> no 
>longer be >>>>> “despised or patronized by 
>condescending sighted people,” as he put 
>it >>>>> — there has always been, among blind 
>people, a  political and even >>>>> moral 
>dimension >>>>> to learning to read. Braille is 
>viewed by many as a mark of >>>>> independence, 
>a sign that blind people have moved away from an 
>oral >>>>> culture seen as primitive >>>>> and 
>isolating. In recent years, however, this 
>narrative has been >>>>> complicated. 
>Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the 
>U.S. and >>>>> Britain, are now >>>>> thought to 
>have lower Braille literacy than those in 
>developing ones, >>>>> like Indonesia and 
>Botswana, where there are few alternatives 
>to >>>>> Braille. Tim Connell, >>>>> the 
>managing director of an assistive-technology 
>company in Australia, >>>>> told me that he has 
>heard this described as “one of the advantages 
>of >>>>> being poor.” >>>>> Braille readers do 
>not deny that new reading technology has 
>been >>>>> transformative, but Braille looms so 
>large in the mythology of >>>>> blindness that 
>it has assumed >>>>> a kind of talismanic 
>status. Those who have residual vision and 
>still >>>>> try to read print — very slowlly or 
>by holding the page an inch or two >>>>> from 
>their >>>>> faces — are generally frowned upon 
>by the Nationaal Federation of the >>>>> Blind, 
>which fashions itself as the leader of a civil 
>rights movement >>>>> for the blind. >>>>> Its 
>president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, 
>compares Louis Braille to >>>>> Abraham 
>Lincoln >>>>> . At the annual convention for the 
>federation, held at a Detroit >>>>> Marriott 
>last July, I heard the mantra “listening is 
>not literacy” >>>>> repeated everywhere, >>>>> 
>from panels on the Braille crisis to 
>conversations among middle-school >>>>> girls. 
>Horror stories circulating around the convention 
>featured >>>>> children who don’t >>>>> know 
>what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters 
>or that “happily >>>>> ever after” is made 
>up of three separate words. >>>>> Declaring your 
>own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A 
>vice >>>>> president of the federation, Fredric 
>Schroeder, served as commissioner >>>>> of the 
>Rehabilitation >>>>> Services Administration 
>under President Clinton and relies 
>primarily >>>>> on audio technologies. He was 
>openly repentant about his lack of >>>>> reading 
>skills. “I >>>>> am now over 50 years old, and 
>it wasn’t until two months ago that I >>>>> 
>realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is 
>different than ‘descent,’ to >>>>> lower 
>something,” >>>>> he told me. “I’m 
>functionally illiterate. People say, ‘Oh, no, 
>you’re >>>>> not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry 
>about it, but I’m not embarrassed to 
>admit >>>>> it.” >>>>> While people like Laura 
>Sloate or the governor of New York, >>>>> David 
>A. Paterson >>>>> , who also reads by listening, 
>may be able to achieve without the help >>>>> of 
>Braille, their success requires accommodations 
>that many cannot >>>>> afford. Like 
>Sloate, >>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and 
>his staff members select pertinent >>>>> 
>newspaper articles for him and read them aloud 
>on his voice mail every >>>>> morning. (He >>>>> 
>calls himself “overassimilated” and told me 
>that as a child he was >>>>> “mainstreamed so 
>much that I psychologically got the message that 
>I’m >>>>> not really supposed >>>>> to be 
>blind.”) Among people with fewer resources, 
>Braille-readers tend >>>>> to form the blind 
>elite, in part because it is more plausible for 
>a >>>>> blind person >>>>> to find work doing 
>intellectual rather than manual labor. >>>>> A 
>1996 study showed that of a sample of visually 
>impaired adults, >>>>> those who learned Braille 
>as children were more than twice as likely >>>>> 
>to be employed as >>>>> those who had not. At 
>the convention this statistic was 
>frequently >>>>> cited with pride, so much so 
>that those who didn’t know Braille were >>>>> 
>sometimes made >>>>> to feel like outsiders. 
>“There is definitely a sense of peer 
>pressure >>>>> from the older guard,” James 
>Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using >>>>> 
>text-to-speech >>>>> software, told me. “If we 
>could live in our own little Braille 
>world, >>>>> then that’d be perfect,” he 
>added. “But we live in a visual 
>world.” >>>>> When deaf people began 
>getting >>>>> cochlear implants >>>>>  in the 
>late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt 
>betrayed. The new >>>>> technology pushed people 
>to think of the disability in a new way — 
>as >>>>> an identity >>>>>> and a culture. 
>Technology has changed the nature of many 
>disabilities, >>>>> lifting the burdens but also 
>complicating people’s sense of what is >>>>> 
>physically natural, >>>>> because bodies can so 
>often be tweaked until “fixed.” 
>Arielle >>>>> Silverman, a graduate student at 
>the convention who has been blind >>>>> since 
>birth, told me that >>>>> if she had the choice 
>to have vision, she was not sure she would 
>take >>>>> it. Recently she purchased a 
>pocket-size reading machine that takes >>>>> 
>photographs of >>>>> text and then reads the 
>words aloud, and she said she thought of >>>>> 
>vision like that, as “just another piece of 
>technology.” >>>>> The modern history of blind 
>people is in many ways a history of >>>>> 
>reading, with the scope of the disability — the 
>extent tto which you >>>>> are viewed as 
>ignorant >>>>> or civilized, helpless or 
>independent — determined largely by youur >>>>> 
>ability to access the printed word. For 150 
>years, Braille books were >>>>> designed to 
>function >>>>> as much as possible like print 
>books. But now the computer has >>>>> 
>essentially done away with the limits of form, 
>because information, >>>>> once it has been 
>digitized, >>>>> can be conveyed through sound 
>or touch. For sighted people, the >>>>> 
>transition from print to digital text has been 
>relatively subtle, but >>>>> for many blind 
>people >>>>> the shift to computerized speech is 
>an unwelcome and uncharted >>>>> experiment. In 
>grappling with what has been lost, several 
>federation >>>>> members recited to >>>>> me 
>various takes on the classic expression Scripta 
>manent, verba >>>>> volant: What is written 
>remains, what is spoken vanishes into air. >>>>> 
>Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for 
>mental-health journalism >>>>> with the Carter 
>Center and writes frequently on education for 
>The >>>>> Times. >>>>> -- >>>>> The National 
>Federation of the Blind has launched a 
>nationwide teacher >>>>> recruitment campaign to 
>help attract energetic and passionate >>>>> 
>individuals into the field of blindness 
>education, and we need your >>>>> help!   To Get 
>Involved  go to: >>>>> 
>www.TeachBlindStudents.org >>>>> "And if you 
>will join me in this improbable quest, if you 
>feel destiny >>>>> calling, and see as I see, a 
>future of endless possibility stretching >>>>> 
>before us; >>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that 
>the time is now to shake off our >>>>> slumber, 
>and slough off our fear, and make good on the 
>debt we owe >>>>> past and future 
>generations, >>>>> then I'm ready to take up the 
>cause, and march with you, and work with >>>>> 
>you. Together, starting today, let us finish the 
>work that needs to be >>>>> done, and >>>>> 
>usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."-



From cdrobles693 at gmail.com  Thu Jan  7 11:17:36 2010
From: cdrobles693 at gmail.com (Chela Robles)
Date: Thu, 07 Jan 2010 05:17:36 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] SSA Will Provide Accessible Media Of Your choice, not Email
Message-ID: <auto-000134106866@mailfront2.g2host.com>

Due to a settlement with the American Council of the Blind, the 
Social Security Administration now offers new ways to receive 
communications from them. Options include Braille, Microsoft Word on 
a CD-ROM, or regular print with a follow-up phone call to read the 
information. The braille and CD options start on April 15. Email is 
not an included option, but you can call a phone number to request a 
format not listed.
Please visit this link for more information on how to change from 
printed mail to another method.
<http://www.socialsecurity.gov/notices/>http://www.socialsecurity.gov/notices/

There is a link toward the bottom of the page called Request For 
Special Notice Option and as of now it is not available, so when I 
clicked the link, it said:

We are sorry for the inconvenience, but we cannot process your 
request at this time.

This service is available during the following hours (Eastern Time):

Monday through Friday: 3:00 AM - 2:00 AM
Saturday: 5:00 AM - 11:00 PM
Sunday: 7:00 AM - 11: PM
Holidays: 3:00 AM - 2:00 AM

If you need immediate assistance,

you may call us Monday through Friday: 7:00 AM - 7:00 PM at:
1-800-772-1213

If you are deaf or hard-of-hearing, call our toll-free TTY number:
1-800-325-0778
If you need to visit your local Social Security office you can get 
directions and a map to your local Social Security office by visiting 
link on the page I directed you to, labeled Field Office Locator.
----------------
"If you go without playing the trumpet for one day, no one knows, two 
days, only you know, and more than three days without practicing, 
girl you better look out, because everyone will know!"
----------------
Chela Robles
E-Mail: <mailto:cdrobles693 at gmail.com>cdrobles693 at gmail.com
MSNWindowsLive Messenger: 
<mailto:cdrobles693 at hotmail.com>cdrobles693 at hotmail.com
Skype: jazzytrumpet

From loneblindjedi at samobile.net  Fri Jan  8 03:35:25 2010
From: loneblindjedi at samobile.net (Jedi)
Date: Thu, 07 Jan 2010 22:35:25 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room
	for	onlyone	intown?
Message-ID: <20100108033525.30589.92162@web2.serotek.com>

Marc,

Maybe it's just me, but I think there are a few more issues at work 
here than just a discussion on literacy. So far, I've noticed several 
themes in the discussion including the definition of literacy, the 
definition of independence, attitudes about blindness, the advantages 
and drawbacks of different techniques for gathering information, 
expectations of the blind versus expectations of the sighted, whether 
or not the Federation is a dogmatic organization, and some 
defensiveness on the part of non-Braille readers. I'm not saying that 
any of these aren't worthy topics for discussion, but I suspect that 
our literacy discussion has been convoluted by all these other 
intertwined issues such that we may have a really hard time actually 
defining literacy. I also suspect that this issue of literacy is an 
emotionally charged topic in our community. In that case, whatever 
definition I propose will be utterly useless to you unless we take all 
of the other issues into account. does that make sense?

For me, literacy is the ability to take written symbols, process them, 
and make meaning from them. That doesn't mean that aural reading is bad 
or inferior and that those who rely on auditory methods are inferior 
and unsuccessful. I do believe that knowing how to process written 
symbols is important and that everyone should be able to do so at any 
time. The exceptions, of course, are disabilities that alter one's 
ability to do so and/or if one lives in a society where oral traditions 
are favored over written traditions for transmitting most kinds of 
information. I believe that knowing how to read and listen to books and 
the like is extremely important and quite necessary. I am, as are many 
Federationists, dismayed that we even have to have this discussion in 
the first place. If sighted folks are given the opportunity and 
encouragement to utilize their full range of abilities and methods for 
gathering information, so should we. And unfortunately, that's not 
happening for reasons ranging from blindness attitudes to myths about 
braille and from the actual history of Braille use to the power 
conflicts that dominate our community. That's what the Braille Readers 
are Leaders campaign is all about regardless of how you analyze the rhetoric.

Respectfully,
Jedi



Original message:
> Jedi,

> I think your comments reflect a sort of black and white understanding of
> literacy.  First off, Patterson, as I recall, can read print if it is
> magnified and he uses his good eye.  Since he can read, it stands to reason
> that he can write.  I'm not sure about the woman, but I would be very
> surprised if she were unable to write at all.

> The problem is that people are throwing around a very loaded word,
> illiterate/illiteracy, in a casual manner without offering any sort of
> definition.  If illiteracy means the inability to read or write, then anyone
> who can write is not illiterate, since they would not lack the ability to
> read *and* write.  If this understanding of illiteracy is correct, then far
> fewer blind people are actually illiterate than cannot read Braille (i.e.,
> the number of blind people who are illiterate is much smaller than the
> number of blind people who cannot read print or Braille).  This is because
> many people are able to write without being able to read Braille.

> Secondly, I don't know how you are defining reading.  Clearly, it is not how
> most sighted people define reading (the visual processing of symbols into
> associated meanings) since this would exclude Braille.  Now you could expand
> this definition to say that reading is the visual or tactile processing of
> symbols into associated meanings, but this really strikes me as a bit ad
> hoc.  Why is it that only these two senses can be used for reading?

> Your definition of reading seems to be the following: take symbols, process
> them, and make meaning out of them.  Well, give me a printed book, an OCR
> program, and screen-reading software, and I can do just that.  My guess is
> that you too, as a Braille reader, would have to convert a printed book into
> an alternative format if it were handed to you, so conversion into an
> alternative format doesn't make the process any less legitimate.

> Here's the research that I would like to see.  Let's assume that reading
> activates a certain portion of the brain, and let's also assume that reading
> Braille activates the same portion.  What I would like to know is whether
> reading using a screen reader activates that same portion.  Don't be so
> quick to dismiss the idea.  I can tell you that when I use a screen reader,
> I imagine the words that I used to see when I read print.  This doesn't
> happen when I listen to a human voice.  Reading using a screen reader and
> listening to a human voice are not the same experience for me personally,
> and I suspect that the part of my brain that used to be activated when I
> read print is now being activated when I use a screen reader.  If this is
> true, and I know there are a lot of assumptions here, would this not
> demonstrate that one can read using ones sense of hearing? And I say why
> not; why would reading be limited to the senses of vision and touch.
> Remember that up until tactile forms of reading were invented only a few
> hundred years ago, the idea of reading using any sense other than vision
> would have been ludicrous.

> I think it might help to recognize that a process as complicated as reading
> cannot be easily reduced to either Braille or print.  Anyone who has read
> Crashing Through, the book about Mike May, or anyone who knows someone with
> a severe learning disability will know that reading is a very complicated
> process that requires more than the ability to see printed letters.  It is a
> process that no one really fully understands, and it seems entirely
> reasonable to me that reading using screen readers is possible, particularly
> for someone like me who read print until adulthood.

> I suppose my main point here is that the label illiterate has been applied
> far too liberally in this discussion, and an inability to read print or
> Braille does not necessarily make one illiterate.

> Best,

> Marc



> -----Original Message-----
> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org]On
> Behalf Of Jedi
> Sent: Thursday, January 07, 2010 12:50 PM
> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for onlyone
> intown?


> No offense mate, but they are unable to read and write. If you give
> them something in writing, they can't read it, can they? I don't
> honestly know if they can write. As one person has observed, it's
> possible to be well read and also be illiterate. No one is trying to
> put anyone down. Instead, people are trying to get at the idea that to
> physically read (take symbols, process them, and make meaning out of
> them), Braille is the best method for the blind. If we're talking about
> assimilating information, either Braille or audio will work. Most seem
> to agree that both skills are important. Where people are especially
> taking issue is when blind people aren't even given the opportunity to
> learn braille even though sighted people are given the opportunity to
> learn print.

> I have a question for you. Do you read Braille? It wouldn't matter
> except to say that your reaction to our discussion is quite violent and
> I wonder if you yourself are feeling attacked.

> Respectfully,
> Jedi


> Original message:
>> I cannot imagine calling clearly accomplished people such as the governor
> of
>> New York or the woman in the article "illiterate" as you did.  It is mean
>> spirited, self indulgent, and most importantly indicates a
> misunderstanding
>> of the meaning of the word illiterate.  The American Heritage dictionary
>> defines illiterate as follows:



>> 1. illiterate. adjective.

>> Unable to read and write.

>> Having little or no formal education.

>> 2. Marked by inferiority to an expected standard of familiarity with
>> language and literature.

>> Violating prescribed standards of speech or writing.

>> 3. Ignorant of the fundamentals of a given art or branch of knowledge:
>> musically illiterate. See Usage Note at literate.


>> It saddens me that it does not seem possible for us as blind people to
>> discuss blindness without personal attacks.  As long as we can be induced
> to
>> continue attacking one another we are doing the work of those who would
> like
>> to see us excluded from all aspects of society.  All they need do is sit
> on
>> the sidelines and watch the feathers fly.

>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Sean Whalen" <smwhalenpsp at gmail.com>
>> To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 8:52 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
>> intown?


>>> Let me first acknowledge the truth of what Mark has pointed out in terms
>>> of
>>> the anecdotal nature of much of the evidence proffered in support of
>>> Braille
>>> literacy increasing employment opportunities for the blind. I also admit
>>> freely that I have never dug into the numbers we so often bandy about in
>>> relation to literacy rates among the blind, literacy rates among the
>>> employed blind and the unemployment rate for blind individuals and do not
>>> know how carefully designed or well executed any of the studies from
> which
>>> we glean these numbers actually were.

>>> All this being said, I absolutely believe that Braille, for persons who
>>> are
>>> unable and have never learned to read print, is a necessity and not
> simply
>>> a
>>> tool in a toolbox. I qualify this because Marc was once again, I think,
>>> correct in drawing the distinction between those who learn to read print
>>> and
>>> go blind later in life and those who are blind from a young age and never
>>> learn to read via any medium. For somebody who read print and achieved
>>> literacy, Braille is an incredibly useful tool that can make some tasks
>>> easier and more efficient and allow one to recapture the pleasure of
>>> reading
>>> to oneself, but for those who never learned to read print, Braille is the
>>> only path to literacy. So, barring any complicating factors such as
>>> additional disabilities, I firmly believe that all blind children and all
>>> non-print-reading blind adults must be expected to learn to read Braille.
>>> Accepting anything less is to give the stamp of approval to lower
>>> expectations of the blind among the general public. When Joe Sighted is
>>> illiterate at age 25, we all recognize this as a big problem. It is no
>>> different for the blind, it's a big problem.

>>> I also agree with Joe, to a degree, that it is not a simple as Braille
>>> literate equals employed. But I think that it is beyond dispute that
> being
>>> able to read is a crucial skill for nearly any job seeker to have.
> Braille
>>> is not "the difference", but all else being equal, it certainly puts
>>> somebody who can read it at a great advantage over somebody else
> similarly
>>> situated who cannot. Just assume for a moment that the numbers we so
> often
>>> cite are close to accurate. 30 in 100 blind people are employed. Of those
>>> 30, 24 of them are able to read Braille. WE don't really know what the
>>> literacy rate among the working age blind is, but if it is under 50%,
>>> which
>>> it almost certainly is, you can do the math and see that there is
>>> something
>>> going on here.

>>> I myself have been blind all my life. In elementary school attempts were
>>> made to teach me to read print with the severely limited vision that I
>>> had.
>>> I did not learn to read. What I was doing was more akin to decoding;
>>> agonizing over each letter to discern what it was and then piecing it
>>> together to make a word. At age 25 I learned to read Braille. Braille has
>>> proved useful in finding employment not only because of the specific
> tasks
>>> it makes easier on the job, but more so because of the fact that it has
>>> made
>>> me literate. Literacy means knowing how things are spelled and how
>>> punctuation is used. Literacy means being able to express yourself in
>>> writing in a manner that accurately reflects your level of intelligence.
>>> Sure, it is nice to use a Braille display to access and take notes in
>>> meetings where speech output would be distracting. Yes, it is great to be
>>> able to use an outline or notes when addressing people publicly. However,
>>> these are simply instances where Braille is a tool, and in my opinion the
>>> best one, to get the job done. There are other ways to perform these
>>> tasks.
>>> Where there is no substitution for being literate is in communicating
> your
>>> ideas in writing. In college, I would hand in work of supposed high
>>> academic
>>> quality with the most egregious spelling and punctuation errors in it.
> Who
>>> can take that seriously? Yes there is spell-check and you can arrow
>>> through
>>> character by character to find out how words are spelled and things are
>>> punctuated, but this approach means you only learn when you know you
> don't
>>> know. When you read, you pick things up naturally along the way and
>>> assimilate them.

>>> Of course it is true that some illiterate blind people like Laura Sloate
>>> and
>>> the Governor of New York have achieved the pinnacles of financial and
>>> professional success. More power to them. I could point you toward people
>>> who have become very successful without completing a high school
> education
>>> let alone a college degree. Will anybody stand up and argue based on this
>>> fact that bachelor's and advanced degrees don't lead to more and better
>>> employment prospects for those who hold them?

>>> Literacy is absolutely essential for professional opportunities and
>>> Braille
>>> is the only means by which to achieve it if one does not read print.
> Blind
>>> people who don't know Braille are certainly not inferior people, but they
>>> are absolutely working with an inferior set of skills, and if Laura
> Sloate
>>> would like to debate the point, I would gladly do so, regardless of how
>>> much
>>> money she makes.


>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:

> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dennisgclark%40sbcgl
> obal.net


>> _______________________________________________
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>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:

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From brileyp at gmail.com  Fri Jan  8 03:41:46 2010
From: brileyp at gmail.com (Briley Pollard)
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 22:41:46 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room foronlyone	intown?
In-Reply-To: <E492DF27034C48FEB7E6045E4D84A17E@teal6e6857f643>
References: <LNEJJKLNICEECFDGEDGLKEDJFOAA.mworkman.lists@gmail.com>
	<E492DF27034C48FEB7E6045E4D84A17E@teal6e6857f643>
Message-ID: <A7DB824E-0D8F-4A01-834C-A39F12D18A90@gmail.com>

No one said the braille had to be hard copy. Hard copy braille is obsolete to a certain extent, but when sighted people use technology they are LOOKING at the print...braille displays are expensive and that is an issue in itself. However, braille does make things like math and foreign language, (as well as a million other tasks), easier.

On Jan 7, 2010, at 9:07 PM, Teal Bloodworth wrote:

> Mark
> 
> i really like the way you handled that. I also read print until early adulthood and was not ever able to pick up the full braille code after grade 1. I use my screen reader as a study buddy saying things back to me and my bvictor stream for my books. I have been told that in math classes braille makes things much simpler and i am not sure how i need to go about a foreign language but its not as if we go into a grocery store and all the packages are labled to identify it or even how to use it and the experation date. Also someone made the comment that braille books are so bulky and in a small college dorm room you dont really have a way to store textbooks in braille.
> 
> In a way braille seems to be outdated just like print. Everywhere you go things are electronic and technology is advancing everyday.
> 
>           -Teal
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Marc Workman" <mworkman.lists at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Thursday, January 07, 2010 4:05 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room foronlyone intown?
> 
> 
>> Jedi,
>> 
>> I think your comments reflect a sort of black and white understanding of
>> literacy.  First off, Patterson, as I recall, can read print if it is
>> magnified and he uses his good eye.  Since he can read, it stands to reason
>> that he can write.  I'm not sure about the woman, but I would be very
>> surprised if she were unable to write at all.
>> 
>> The problem is that people are throwing around a very loaded word,
>> illiterate/illiteracy, in a casual manner without offering any sort of
>> definition.  If illiteracy means the inability to read or write, then anyone
>> who can write is not illiterate, since they would not lack the ability to
>> read *and* write.  If this understanding of illiteracy is correct, then far
>> fewer blind people are actually illiterate than cannot read Braille (i.e.,
>> the number of blind people who are illiterate is much smaller than the
>> number of blind people who cannot read print or Braille).  This is because
>> many people are able to write without being able to read Braille.
>> 
>> Secondly, I don't know how you are defining reading.  Clearly, it is not how
>> most sighted people define reading (the visual processing of symbols into
>> associated meanings) since this would exclude Braille.  Now you could expand
>> this definition to say that reading is the visual or tactile processing of
>> symbols into associated meanings, but this really strikes me as a bit ad
>> hoc.  Why is it that only these two senses can be used for reading?
>> 
>> Your definition of reading seems to be the following: take symbols, process
>> them, and make meaning out of them.  Well, give me a printed book, an OCR
>> program, and screen-reading software, and I can do just that.  My guess is
>> that you too, as a Braille reader, would have to convert a printed book into
>> an alternative format if it were handed to you, so conversion into an
>> alternative format doesn't make the process any less legitimate.
>> 
>> Here's the research that I would like to see.  Let's assume that reading
>> activates a certain portion of the brain, and let's also assume that reading
>> Braille activates the same portion.  What I would like to know is whether
>> reading using a screen reader activates that same portion.  Don't be so
>> quick to dismiss the idea.  I can tell you that when I use a screen reader,
>> I imagine the words that I used to see when I read print.  This doesn't
>> happen when I listen to a human voice.  Reading using a screen reader and
>> listening to a human voice are not the same experience for me personally,
>> and I suspect that the part of my brain that used to be activated when I
>> read print is now being activated when I use a screen reader.  If this is
>> true, and I know there are a lot of assumptions here, would this not
>> demonstrate that one can read using ones sense of hearing? And I say why
>> not; why would reading be limited to the senses of vision and touch.
>> Remember that up until tactile forms of reading were invented only a few
>> hundred years ago, the idea of reading using any sense other than vision
>> would have been ludicrous.
>> 
>> I think it might help to recognize that a process as complicated as reading
>> cannot be easily reduced to either Braille or print.  Anyone who has read
>> Crashing Through, the book about Mike May, or anyone who knows someone with
>> a severe learning disability will know that reading is a very complicated
>> process that requires more than the ability to see printed letters.  It is a
>> process that no one really fully understands, and it seems entirely
>> reasonable to me that reading using screen readers is possible, particularly
>> for someone like me who read print until adulthood.
>> 
>> I suppose my main point here is that the label illiterate has been applied
>> far too liberally in this discussion, and an inability to read print or
>> Braille does not necessarily make one illiterate.
>> 
>> Best,
>> 
>> Marc
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org]On
>> Behalf Of Jedi
>> Sent: Thursday, January 07, 2010 12:50 PM
>> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for onlyone
>> intown?
>> 
>> 
>> No offense mate, but they are unable to read and write. If you give
>> them something in writing, they can't read it, can they? I don't
>> honestly know if they can write. As one person has observed, it's
>> possible to be well read and also be illiterate. No one is trying to
>> put anyone down. Instead, people are trying to get at the idea that to
>> physically read (take symbols, process them, and make meaning out of
>> them), Braille is the best method for the blind. If we're talking about
>> assimilating information, either Braille or audio will work. Most seem
>> to agree that both skills are important. Where people are especially
>> taking issue is when blind people aren't even given the opportunity to
>> learn braille even though sighted people are given the opportunity to
>> learn print.
>> 
>> I have a question for you. Do you read Braille? It wouldn't matter
>> except to say that your reaction to our discussion is quite violent and
>> I wonder if you yourself are feeling attacked.
>> 
>> Respectfully,
>> Jedi
>> 
>> 
>> Original message:
>>> I cannot imagine calling clearly accomplished people such as the governor
>> of
>>> New York or the woman in the article "illiterate" as you did.  It is mean
>>> spirited, self indulgent, and most importantly indicates a
>> misunderstanding
>>> of the meaning of the word illiterate.  The American Heritage dictionary
>>> defines illiterate as follows:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> 1. illiterate. adjective.
>> 
>>> Unable to read and write.
>> 
>>> Having little or no formal education.
>> 
>>> 2. Marked by inferiority to an expected standard of familiarity with
>>> language and literature.
>> 
>>> Violating prescribed standards of speech or writing.
>> 
>>> 3. Ignorant of the fundamentals of a given art or branch of knowledge:
>>> musically illiterate. See Usage Note at literate.
>> 
>> 
>>> It saddens me that it does not seem possible for us as blind people to
>>> discuss blindness without personal attacks.  As long as we can be induced
>> to
>>> continue attacking one another we are doing the work of those who would
>> like
>>> to see us excluded from all aspects of society.  All they need do is sit
>> on
>>> the sidelines and watch the feathers fly.
>> 
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Sean Whalen" <smwhalenpsp at gmail.com>
>>> To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2010 8:52 PM
>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
>>> intown?
>> 
>> 
>>>> Let me first acknowledge the truth of what Mark has pointed out in terms
>>>> of
>>>> the anecdotal nature of much of the evidence proffered in support of
>>>> Braille
>>>> literacy increasing employment opportunities for the blind. I also admit
>>>> freely that I have never dug into the numbers we so often bandy about in
>>>> relation to literacy rates among the blind, literacy rates among the
>>>> employed blind and the unemployment rate for blind individuals and do not
>>>> know how carefully designed or well executed any of the studies from
>> which
>>>> we glean these numbers actually were.
>> 
>>>> All this being said, I absolutely believe that Braille, for persons who
>>>> are
>>>> unable and have never learned to read print, is a necessity and not
>> simply
>>>> a
>>>> tool in a toolbox. I qualify this because Marc was once again, I think,
>>>> correct in drawing the distinction between those who learn to read print
>>>> and
>>>> go blind later in life and those who are blind from a young age and never
>>>> learn to read via any medium. For somebody who read print and achieved
>>>> literacy, Braille is an incredibly useful tool that can make some tasks
>>>> easier and more efficient and allow one to recapture the pleasure of
>>>> reading
>>>> to oneself, but for those who never learned to read print, Braille is the
>>>> only path to literacy. So, barring any complicating factors such as
>>>> additional disabilities, I firmly believe that all blind children and all
>>>> non-print-reading blind adults must be expected to learn to read Braille.
>>>> Accepting anything less is to give the stamp of approval to lower
>>>> expectations of the blind among the general public. When Joe Sighted is
>>>> illiterate at age 25, we all recognize this as a big problem. It is no
>>>> different for the blind, it's a big problem.
>> 
>>>> I also agree with Joe, to a degree, that it is not a simple as Braille
>>>> literate equals employed. But I think that it is beyond dispute that
>> being
>>>> able to read is a crucial skill for nearly any job seeker to have.
>> Braille
>>>> is not "the difference", but all else being equal, it certainly puts
>>>> somebody who can read it at a great advantage over somebody else
>> similarly
>>>> situated who cannot. Just assume for a moment that the numbers we so
>> often
>>>> cite are close to accurate. 30 in 100 blind people are employed. Of those
>>>> 30, 24 of them are able to read Braille. WE don't really know what the
>>>> literacy rate among the working age blind is, but if it is under 50%,
>>>> which
>>>> it almost certainly is, you can do the math and see that there is
>>>> something
>>>> going on here.
>> 
>>>> I myself have been blind all my life. In elementary school attempts were
>>>> made to teach me to read print with the severely limited vision that I
>>>> had.
>>>> I did not learn to read. What I was doing was more akin to decoding;
>>>> agonizing over each letter to discern what it was and then piecing it
>>>> together to make a word. At age 25 I learned to read Braille. Braille has
>>>> proved useful in finding employment not only because of the specific
>> tasks
>>>> it makes easier on the job, but more so because of the fact that it has
>>>> made
>>>> me literate. Literacy means knowing how things are spelled and how
>>>> punctuation is used. Literacy means being able to express yourself in
>>>> writing in a manner that accurately reflects your level of intelligence.
>>>> Sure, it is nice to use a Braille display to access and take notes in
>>>> meetings where speech output would be distracting. Yes, it is great to be
>>>> able to use an outline or notes when addressing people publicly. However,
>>>> these are simply instances where Braille is a tool, and in my opinion the
>>>> best one, to get the job done. There are other ways to perform these
>>>> tasks.
>>>> Where there is no substitution for being literate is in communicating
>> your
>>>> ideas in writing. In college, I would hand in work of supposed high
>>>> academic
>>>> quality with the most egregious spelling and punctuation errors in it.
>> Who
>>>> can take that seriously? Yes there is spell-check and you can arrow
>>>> through
>>>> character by character to find out how words are spelled and things are
>>>> punctuated, but this approach means you only learn when you know you
>> don't
>>>> know. When you read, you pick things up naturally along the way and
>>>> assimilate them.
>> 
>>>> Of course it is true that some illiterate blind people like Laura Sloate
>>>> and
>>>> the Governor of New York have achieved the pinnacles of financial and
>>>> professional success. More power to them. I could point you toward people
>>>> who have become very successful without completing a high school
>> education
>>>> let alone a college degree. Will anybody stand up and argue based on this
>>>> fact that bachelor's and advanced degrees don't lead to more and better
>>>> employment prospects for those who hold them?
>> 
>>>> Literacy is absolutely essential for professional opportunities and
>>>> Braille
>>>> is the only means by which to achieve it if one does not read print.
>> Blind
>>>> people who don't know Braille are certainly not inferior people, but they
>>>> are absolutely working with an inferior set of skills, and if Laura
>> Sloate
>>>> would like to debate the point, I would gladly do so, regardless of how
>>>> much
>>>> money she makes.
>> 
>> 
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> 
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dennisgclark%40sbcgl
>> obal.net
>> 
>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>> 
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samo
>> bile.net
>> 
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>> Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit
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>> 
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> 
> 
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From dwebster125 at gmail.com  Fri Jan  8 04:48:26 2010
From: dwebster125 at gmail.com (Dave Webster)
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 22:48:26 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in
	town?
In-Reply-To: <auto-000134106869@mailfront2.g2host.com>
References: <20100106163121.2032.34938@web2.serotek.com>
	<auto-000134106869@mailfront2.g2host.com>
Message-ID: <02F952B7088E4F9F8F2ABF0E9ACA56B5@DavidPC>

Exactly.  Just remember what Dr. Jernigan taught us in the Nature of 
Independence that we shouldn't be dogmatic and that braille, computers. live 
readers and all sorts of tools are tools not ends.  they are a means and 
they are ways in which we get things done.

--------------------------------------------------
From: "David Andrews" <dandrews at visi.com>
Sent: Thursday, January 07, 2010 5:26 AM
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in 
town?

> For one I thought the New York Times article about Braille was quite good. 
> On the whole, it was balanced, even though we might not always like what 
> it said.  In our zeal to promote Braille, in the NFB, I do think we 
> sometimes make people feel like they are on the outside.  The one thing 
> the article, and people generally don't do is talk about how Braille is 
> one tool we have, so is audio, so are computers etc.  People tend to paint 
> very black and white pictures, then declare those who don't match those 
> pictures as losers.  It is a grey world out there.  There isn't just one 
> answer or solution.  I use Braille all the time, and it is a part of my 
> success.  I also use computers, love my Stream, use human readers, OCR, 
> the KNFB Reader etc.  There isn't just one answer.
>
> Dave
>
> At 10:31 AM 1/6/2010, you wrote:
>>What I'm about to say may sound harsh, but here it goes. Literacy matters, 
>>and those who have the capacity for literacy need to be able to read the 
>>written word for success. that does not mean that those who are, by means 
>>of some disability, unable to read won't be successful. Quite the 
>>contrary. But reading definitely makes a difference in the lives of those 
>>who can do it. For the sighted, reading means print. For the blind, 
>>reading means Braille. That does not mean that either group shouldn't make 
>>use of audio materials or other technologies to access the printed word. 
>>However, these new technologies should not be an excuse not to learn to 
>>read. Those who feel disenfranchised or chastized by certain members of 
>>the federation because they don't use Braille even though they could ought 
>>to give Braille a second thought rather than complain that support for 
>>Braille is unyielding to the point of exclusion. Yes, learning to read is 
>>painstaking and challenging, but that doesn't mean that it can't or 
>>shouldn't be done. granted, if there is a disability that really does 
>>prevent written literacy, then the circumstances are totally different. 
>>But for most blind people, that simply isn't the case. Does that mean that 
>>non-readers should blame themselves for not reading Braille? No. There may 
>>be a number of reasons why Braille isn't a part of their lives. However, 
>>there are sufficient resources available to individuals wanting to learn 
>>that there really is no excuse not to. Respectfully, Jedi Original 
>>message: > Darian, > What it makes them is statistically far less likely 
>>to be employed, > for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and 
>>teachers the > importance of Braille education. > Joseph > On Mon, Jan 04, 
>>2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote: >> I hope individuals don't 
>>mind my playing devil's advocate  focused >> upon the statement "braille 
>>readers are leaders". >>   What does this  make those who arn't very good 
>>braille readers, >> don't want to know, or  don't know braille? >> Do you 
>>feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille readers? >> 
>>respectfullly, >>  Darian >> On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten 
>><kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote: >>> Hi: >>> Just thought I'd share my 
>>opinions for what it's worth. >>> I was taught braille, and am very good 
>>at reading it. >>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader 
>>Stream, I really >>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate 
>>notetaker with a braille >>> display, so I could and probably should 
>>download more books and read >>> them digitally, but just listening to a 
>>book on the tiny stream is >>> much easier than lugging around a note 
>>taker and reading on a braille >>> display. >>> So, I admit even as a 
>>great braille reader I don't use braille as much >>> as I should. >>> I do 
>>use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my >>> notes in 
>>braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has >>> it's uses 
>>and children should definitely be taught it. >>> Braille readers are 
>>leaders! >>> Kerri+ >>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote: 
>> >>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision 
>> >>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of >>>> 
>>today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are >>>> 
>>leaders, they say. >>>> Beth >>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith 
>><dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote: >>>>> This >>>>> Listening to Braille >>>>> 
>>By RACHEL AVIV >>>>> Published: December 30, 2009 >>>>> AT 4 Oâ?TCLOCK 
>>each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading. >>>>> She calls a 
>>phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic >>>>> voice, and 
>>she >>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which 
>>is >>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant 
>>reads The >>>>> Financial Times >>>>> to her while she uses her 
>>computerâ?Ts text-to-speech system to play The >>>>> Economist aloud. She 
>>devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the >>>>> magazine. >>>>> 
>>The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm, >>>>> 
>>Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly, 
>> >>>>> poring over the >>>>> news and the economic reports for several 
>>hours every morning, she >>>>> does not use Braille. â?oKnowledge goes 
>>from my ears to my brain, not >>>>> from my finger to >>>>> my brain,� 
>>she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the >>>>> alphabet 
>>sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She >>>>> doesnâ?Tt 
>>think of a >>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as â?oa 
>>stop on the way >>>>> before continuing.� This, she says, is the future 
>>of reading for the >>>>> blind. â?oLiteracy >>>>> evolves,â? she told me. 
>>â?oWhen Braille was invented, in the 19th >>>>> century, we had nothing 
>>else. We didnâ?Tt even have radio. At that time, >>>>> blindness >>>>> 
>>was a disability. Now itâ?Ts just a minor, minor impairment.â? >>>>> A 
>>few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age >>>>> 
>>would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed 
>> >>>>> the written word. >>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western 
>>culture would return to the >>>>> â?otribal and oral pattern.â? But the 
>>decline of written language has >>>>> become a reality for >>>>> only the 
>>blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time >>>>> learning 
>>to spell in her youth - she writes by dictation - she says >s >>>>> she 
>>thinks that >>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her 
>>sighted peers. >>>>> â?oItâ?Ts an arcane means of communication, which for 
>>the most part should >>>>> be abolished,â? >>>>> she told me. â?oItâ?Ts 
>>just not needed today.� >>>>> Braille books are expensive and 
>>cumbersome, requiring reams of thick, >>>>> oversize paper. The National 
>>Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing >>>>> house in Boston, >>>>> 
>>printed the >>>>> Harry Potter >>>>>  series on its Heidelberg cylinder; 
>>the final product was 56 volumes, >>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a 
>>single textbook can cost more than >>>>> $1,000 and thereâ?Ts >>>>> a 
>>shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired >>>>> 
>>students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and >>>>> 
>>computer-screen-reading software. >>>>> A report released last year by the 
>>National Federation of the Blind, >>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 
>>members, said that less than 10 percent >>>>> of the 1.3 million >>>>> 
>>legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all >>>>> 
>>blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as >>>>> 
>>low as 1 in 10, >>>>> according to the report. The figures are 
>>controversial because there >>>>> is debate about when a child with 
>>residual vision has â?otoo much sightâ? >>>>> for Braille >>>>> and 
>>because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades - in >>>>> 
>>rrecent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because 
>> >>>>> of premature >>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille 
>>literacy has been waning for >>>>> some time, even among the most 
>>intellectually capable, and the report >>>>> has inspired >>>>> a fervent 
>>movement to change the way blind people read. â?oWhat weâ?Tre >>>>> 
>>finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able - and >>>>> 
>>illiterate,� Jim >>>>> Marks, a boardd member for the past five years of 
>>the Association on >>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. â?oWe 
>>stopped teaching our >>>>> nationâ?Ts blind children >>>>> how to read and 
>>write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their >>>>> desks. Now 
>>their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to >>>>> learn the 
>> >>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language.� >>>>> For much of the 
>>past century, blind children attended residential >>>>> institutions where 
>>they learned to read by touching the words. Today, >>>>> visually impaired 
>> >>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to 
>>read; >>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each 
>>word and >>>>> read the individual >>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has 
>>become much harder to define, even for >>>>> educators. >>>>> â?oIf all 
>>you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your >>>>> mind is 
>>limited,� Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind >>>>> Access 
>>Journal, told >>>>> me. â?oYou need written symbols to organize your mind. 
>>If you canâ?Tt feel >>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The 
>>substance is gone.� Like many >>>>> Braille readers, >>>>> Shandrow says 
>>that new computers, which form a single line of Braille >>>>> cells at a 
>>time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are >>>>> still 
>>extremely >>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline 
>>in Braille >>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: â?oThis 
>>is like going >>>>> back to the 1400s, >>>>> before Gutenbergâ?Ts printing 
>>press came on the scene,â? he said. â?oOnly >>>>> the scholars and monks 
>>knew how to read and write. And then there were >>>>> the illiterate >>>>> 
>>masses, the peasants.� >>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were 
>>confined to an oral culture. >>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in 
>>wood or wax, formed by wire or >>>>> outlined in felt >>>>> with pins. 
>>Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a >>>>> student 
>>at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began >>>>> studying a 
>>cipher >>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a 
>>French Army >>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. 
>>Braille modified >>>>> the code so that >>>>> it could be read more 
>>efficiently - each letter or punctuation symbool >>>>> is represented by a 
>>pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three >>>>> rows and two >>>>> 
>>columns - aand added abbreviations for commonly used words like >>>>> 
>>â?oknowledge,â? â?opeopleâ? and â?oLord.â? Endowed with a reliable 
>>method of >>>>> written communication >>>>> for the first time in history, 
>>blind people had a significant rise in >>>>> social status, and Louis 
>>Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator >>>>> and spiritual >>>>> 
>>savior. With his â?ogodlike courage,â? Helen Keller wrote, Braille built 
>> >>>>> a â?ofirm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to 
>>climb >>>>> from hopeless >>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal.� >>>>> At 
>>the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but >>>>> 
>>also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more >>>>> 
>>innocent and malleable, >>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that 
>>blind people spoke a >>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from 
>>visual experience. In >>>>> his 1933 book, â?oThe >>>>> Blind in School 
>>and Society,� the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who >>>>> lost his 
>>sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly >>>>> 
>>assimilated into >>>>> the sighted world would become lost in â?overbal 
>>unreality.� At some >>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words 
>>that referenced color or >>>>> light because, >>>>> they said, students 
>>might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These >>>>> theories have since 
>>been discredited, and studies have shown that >>>>> blind children as 
>> >>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like 
>> >>>>> â?olook,â? â?otouchâ? and â?osee.â? And yet Cutsforth was not 
>>entirely >>>>> misguided in his argument >>>>> that sensory deprivation 
>>restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series >>>>> of brain-imaging 
>>studies revealed that the visual cortices of the >>>>> blind are not >>>>> 
>>rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept >>>>> 
>>their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation >>>>> 
>>in the parts of >>>>> the brain that typically process visual input. >>>>> 
>>These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that 
>> >>>>> Braille is essential for blind childrenâ?Ts cognitive development, 
>>as >>>>> the visual cortex >>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. 
>>Given the brainâ?Ts plasticity, >>>>> it is difficult to make the argument 
>>that one kind of reading - >>>>> whetheer the information >>>>> is 
>>absorbed by ear, finger or retina - is inherently better than >>>>> 
>>another, at leastt with regard to cognitive function. The architecture 
>> >>>>> of the brain is >>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the 
>>visual cortex can >>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in 
>>Nature Neuroscience >>>>> found that blind subjects >>>>> consistently 
>>surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal >>>>> memory >>>>> , and their 
>>superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by >>>>> the extra 
>>processing that took place in the visual regions of their >>>>> brains. 
>> >>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child >>>>> 
>>development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally >>>>> 
>>wired for print literacy. >>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer 
>>than 6,000 years (and literacy >>>>> has been widespread for no more than 
>>a century and a half). The >>>>> activity of reading >>>>> itself alters 
>>the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009 >>>>> in the 
>>journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies >>>>> 
>>illiterate former >>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, 
>>had abandoned their >>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined 
>>civilization. Carreiras compares >>>>> 20 adults >>>>> who had recently 
>>completed a literacy program with 22 people who had >>>>> not yet begun 
>>it. In >>>>> M.R.I. >>>>>  scans of their brains, the newly literate 
>>subjects showed more gray >>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area 
>>crucial for language processing, >>>>> and more white >>>>> matter in part 
>>of the corpus callosum, which links the two >>>>> hemispheres. 
>>Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in >>>>> dyslexics, 
>>and the study >>>>> suggests that those brain patterns werenâ?Tt the cause 
>>of their >>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result. >>>>> 
>>There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this 
>> >>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter 
>>of >>>>> debate. In moving >>>>> from written to spoken language, the 
>>greatest consequences for blind >>>>> people may not be cognitive but 
>>cultural - a loss much harder to >>>>> avoid. In onne of >>>>> the few 
>>studies of blind peopleâ?Ts prose, Doug Brent, a professor of >>>>> 
>>communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent, 
>> >>>>> a teacher of >>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by 
>>students who didnâ?Tt >>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular 
>>keyboard and edited by >>>>> listening to their >>>>> words played aloud. 
>>One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a >>>>> character named Mark 
>>who had â?osleep bombsâ?: >>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his 
>>da windo his dad was walking >>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he 
>>opend the windo and fell on >>>>> his bed sleeping >>>>> mark took two 
>>bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept >>>>> up but 
>>before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep. >>>>> In 
>>describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the >>>>> 
>>literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate >>>>> 
>>societies think differently >>>>> than members of oral societies. The act 
>>of writing, Ong said - the >>>>> ability to revissit your ideas and, in 
>>the process, refine them - >>>>>  transformed the shape >>>>> of thought. 
>>The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only >>>>> readers as 
>>disorganized, â?oas if all of their ideas are crammed into a >>>>> 
>>container, shaken >>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like 
>>dice onto a table.� The >>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem 
>>arbitrary, one thought >>>>> emerging in the >>>>> midst of another with a 
>>kind of breathless energy. The authors >>>>> concluded, â?oIt just 
>>doesnâ?Tt seem to reflect the qualities of organized >>>>> sequence and 
>>complex >>>>> thought that we value in a literate society.� >>>>> OUR 
>>DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools >>>>> for 
>>reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for >>>>> 
>>blind people makes >>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. 
>>Since the 1820s, when >>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system - so 
>>that bliind people would >>>>> no longer be >>>>> â?odespised or 
>>patronized by condescending sighted people,� as he put it >>>>> - there 
>>has always been, among blind people, a  political and even >>>>> moral 
>>dimension >>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark 
>>of >>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an 
>>oral >>>>> culture seen as primitive >>>>> and isolating. In recent years, 
>>however, this narrative has been >>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in 
>>developed countries, like the U.S. and >>>>> Britain, are now >>>>> 
>>thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones, 
>> >>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to 
>> >>>>> Braille. Tim Connell, >>>>> the managing director of an 
>>assistive-technology company in Australia, >>>>> told me that he has heard 
>>this described as â?oone of the advantages of >>>>> being poor.â? >>>>> 
>>Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been >>>>> 
>>transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of >>>>> 
>>blindness that it has assumed >>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who 
>>have residual vision and still >>>>> try to read print - very slowlly or 
>>by holding the page an inch or two >>>>> from their >>>>> faces - are 
>>generally frowned upon by the Nationaal Federation of the >>>>> Blind, 
>>which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement >>>>> for 
>>the blind. >>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares 
>>Louis Braille to >>>>> Abraham Lincoln >>>>> . At the annual convention 
>>for the federation, held at a Detroit >>>>> Marriott last July, I heard 
>>the mantra â?olistening is not literacyâ? >>>>> repeated everywhere, 
>> >>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among 
>>middle-school >>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the 
>>convention featured >>>>> children who donâ?Tt >>>>> know what a paragraph 
>>is or why we capitalize letters or that â?ohappily >>>>> ever afterâ? is 
>>made up of three separate words. >>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy 
>>seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice >>>>> president of the federation, 
>>Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner >>>>> of the Rehabilitation 
>> >>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily 
>> >>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of 
>> >>>>> reading skills. â?oI >>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasnâ?Tt 
>>until two months ago that I >>>>> realized that â?~dissent,â?T to 
>>disagree, is different than â?~descent,â?T to >>>>> lower something,â? 
>> >>>>> he told me. â?oIâ?Tm functionally illiterate. People say, â?~Oh, no, 
>>youâ?Tre >>>>> not.â?T Yes, I am. Iâ?Tm sorry about it, but Iâ?Tm not 
>>embarrassed to admit >>>>> it.� >>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or 
>>the governor of New York, >>>>> David A. Paterson >>>>> , who also reads 
>>by listening, may be able to achieve without the help >>>>> of Braille, 
>>their success requires accommodations that many cannot >>>>> afford. Like 
>>Sloate, >>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select 
>>pertinent >>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his 
>>voice mail every >>>>> morning. (He >>>>> calls himself 
>>â?ooverassimilatedâ? and told me that as a child he was >>>>> 
>>â?omainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that Iâ?Tm 
>> >>>>> not really supposed >>>>> to be blind.�) Among people with fewer 
>>resources, Braille-readers tend >>>>> to form the blind elite, in part 
>>because it is more plausible for a >>>>> blind person >>>>> to find work 
>>doing intellectual rather than manual labor. >>>>> A 1996 study showed 
>>that of a sample of visually impaired adults, >>>>> those who learned 
>>Braille as children were more than twice as likely >>>>> to be employed as 
>> >>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently 
>> >>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didnâ?Tt know Braille 
>>were >>>>> sometimes made >>>>> to feel like outsiders. â?oThere is 
>>definitely a sense of peer pressure >>>>> from the older guard,� James 
>>Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using >>>>> text-to-speech >>>>> software, 
>>told me. â?oIf we could live in our own little Braille world, >>>>> then 
>>thatâ?Td be perfect,â? he added. â?oBut we live in a visual world.â? 
>> >>>>> When deaf people began getting >>>>> cochlear implants >>>>>  in the 
>>late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new >>>>> 
>>technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way - as 
>> >>>>> an identity >>>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature 
>>of many disabilities, >>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating 
>>peopleâ?Ts sense of what is >>>>> physically natural, >>>>> because bodies 
>>can so often be tweaked until â?ofixed.â? Arielle >>>>> Silverman, a 
>>graduate student at the convention who has been blind >>>>> since birth, 
>>told me that >>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure 
>>she would take >>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading 
>>machine that takes >>>>> photographs of >>>>> text and then reads the 
>>words aloud, and she said she thought of >>>>> vision like that, as 
>>â?ojust another piece of technology.â? >>>>> The modern history of blind 
>>people is in many ways a history of >>>>> reading, with the scope of the 
>>disability - the extent tto which you >>>>> are viewed as ignorant >>>>> 
>>or civilized, helpless or independent - determined largely by youur >>>>> 
>>ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were 
>> >>>>> designed to function >>>>> as much as possible like print books. But 
>>now the computer has >>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, 
>>because information, >>>>> once it has been digitized, >>>>> can be 
>>conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the >>>>> transition 
>>from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but >>>>> for many 
>>blind people >>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and 
>>uncharted >>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several 
>>federation >>>>> members recited to >>>>> me various takes on the classic 
>>expression Scripta manent, verba >>>>> volant: What is written remains, 
>>what is spoken vanishes into air. >>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter 
>>fellow for mental-health journalism >>>>> with the Carter Center and 
>>writes frequently on education for The >>>>> Times. >>>>> -- >>>>> The 
>>National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher >>>>> 
>>recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate >>>>> 
>>individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your >>>>> 
>>help!   To Get Involved  go to: >>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org >>>>> 
>>"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny 
>> >>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility 
>>stretching >>>>> before us; >>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time 
>>is now to shake off our >>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make 
>>good on the debt we owe >>>>> past and future generations, >>>>> then I'm 
>>ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with >>>>> you. 
>>Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be >>>>> 
>>done, and >>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."-
>
>
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From cumbiambera2005 at gmail.com  Fri Jan  8 05:54:30 2010
From: cumbiambera2005 at gmail.com (Ashley)
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 23:54:30 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Problem Setting Braille Note Alarm--Please Help!
Message-ID: <4804d1141001072154redb8308xabec6d5e4d3055aa@mail.gmail.com>

This may be a bit off topic, but my Braille Note is not shoing the
alarm option in the planner when i am scheduling appointments. When i
go through the appointment scheduling menu, it only gives me options
regarding the appointment itself, but it doesn't ask me whether or not
I want to set an alarm. I tried resetting it, but that doesn't seem to
change anything, and my battery is still in good charge. i also tried
going back into the appointment after it is scheduled, and through the
planner, and nothing. I am using a Braille Note M-Power. This is the
only alarm that wakes me up, so i really need to fix this ASAP. Any
help would be greatly appreciated!
Ashley


From hope.paulos at maine.edu  Fri Jan  8 13:55:42 2010
From: hope.paulos at maine.edu (Hope Paulos)
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 2010 08:55:42 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Problem Setting Braille Note Alarm--Please Help!
References: <4804d1141001072154redb8308xabec6d5e4d3055aa@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <C8553F1846924D6E9A112ECBEEE3A8C3@Hope>

How about performing maintainance to the planner? Go into the planner menu 
and go to perform planner maintanance or somethinglike that. My BN's at Hw, 
otherwise I'd give you exact insructions.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ashley" <cumbiambera2005 at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 08, 2010 12:54 AM
Subject: [nabs-l] Problem Setting Braille Note Alarm--Please Help!


> This may be a bit off topic, but my Braille Note is not shoing the
> alarm option in the planner when i am scheduling appointments. When i
> go through the appointment scheduling menu, it only gives me options
> regarding the appointment itself, but it doesn't ask me whether or not
> I want to set an alarm. I tried resetting it, but that doesn't seem to
> change anything, and my battery is still in good charge. i also tried
> going back into the appointment after it is scheduled, and through the
> planner, and nothing. I am using a Braille Note M-Power. This is the
> only alarm that wakes me up, so i really need to fix this ASAP. Any
> help would be greatly appreciated!
> Ashley
>
> _______________________________________________
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> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/hope.paulos%40maine.edu 



From carrie.gilmer at gmail.com  Fri Jan  8 22:35:07 2010
From: carrie.gilmer at gmail.com (Carrie Gilmer)
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 2010 16:35:07 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room foronlyone	intown?
In-Reply-To: <LNEJJKLNICEECFDGEDGLKEDJFOAA.mworkman.lists@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4b47b31e.5544f10a.2751.574f@mx.google.com>

It may be that Patterson can read and write but print is terribly
inefficient for him to read as much as he needs to. Patterson has himself
described his difficulties fairly often as the whole "over assimilation"
(his term) meaning his parents went so far as to make him feel he "should
not" be blind. That is another story. The definition of success is often
fuzzy and subjective.

Ms. Sloate said in the article that when she "writes" she gives dictation.
If one can not read at all it is very difficult to imagine how they would
write. It made me wonder about alot. How does she do email? I thought about
privacy too. And just because she may earn a fortune I don't think that
equates to everything in her life being as great as one might imagine. I
still think her opinion on Braille and also reading in general is not
credible as she has no experience with it. 

It is asked why only the two senses could be considered reading. Maybe you
have something~maybe in the future we will find that all touch screens and
audio and buttons and digitized is superior. Ray Kurzweil thinks we will
just have computer chips in our brains and it will be interconnected to
knowledge and product labels etc ad-infinitum. But I really doubt it, and if
so we are a long way off from a complete change over. Then I wonder if all
the written history will be forgotten if humans get to a place where no one
remembers what symbols mean as far as language goes.

In all of human history most cultures strove to write down messages,
histories, religion, knowledge. Why, if oral was sufficient? Were we
devolving going from oral to written? Braille is written, it is just
embossed or raised; it is the same. Now tho oral can be "saved" and played
again later or played back this is true. But it comes in someone else's
voice and cadence. Editing is a challenge. It is interesting that Braille,
when first developing the code, was frustrated and nearly failed to adapt
the system he had found because it was based on sound. Once he let go of
that it came to him and all fell together.

Marc you can not be a test case or example because you already know how to
read and knew it well. You are a reader and you can never go back and not be
one, even if you can not see the print anymore. You may lose some of what
you don't use in skill if you never pick it up again but you can never get
to a place from childhood where you never learned to read. Your experience
is not the same for comparison with someone who has only learned language
orally. I have never met someone who knew how to read, either print or
Braille who wished they hadn't. There was a study done and presented in the
article on those who only knew reading by sound. Their ability to present
thoughts in writing was severely harmed.

My son often did his calculus while reading the Braille/Nemeth text with his
left hand and writing in pen/pencil with his right. Sometimes he did math on
the computer. But like Chelsea's experience he could conceive better and
things made more sense when he could get his hands on the thing. This
combination in math was the most efficient for him. He "combo's" all the
time. We fought hard to get him Braille and for him to become proficient and
he is glad for it and uses it all the time. It is only a usable tool because
he learned how to use it. In 11th grade a reading specialist evaluated him.
She turned her back so she did not know what he was reading. Print (large)
or Braille. In print he had many errors and his cadence was slow halting and
repetitive. In Braille he was smooth and flowing. Finally in 11th grade the
school admitted he should be a Braille reader. Why throw away or ignore a
perfectly usable and frequently desirable tool?

I heard a discussion this morning on public radio between brain specialists.
One thing they mentioned was Dyslexia. They had learned that dyslexics use a
different part of the brain and that is why reading is so hard. But they
also learned that they can be re-trained and when they do they use both
sides of the brain and are able to read "normally" eventually if they
practice. 

In my opinion when reading text in print or Braille there is a convenience
and pleasure and perhaps even an aid to comprehension and ownership of the
material as one is getting it in one's complete control. That is I often
wait on a word or phrase or go back over it or stall out and ponder, that is
difficult to do orally. It is also in our culture and society a cornerstone
in making one overwhelmingly more likely to be employed. Many Braille
readers here and elsewhere state that while they love their technology it
has not totally replaced either the need or pleasure of reading
professionally and privately.

And finally I disagree that Dr. Jernigan would be yielding about reading and
writing not being literacy. He was a prolific reader and writer. To say his
sometime use of sighted guide is a comparison is incorrect. He could travel
independently with a cane. His view of someone who only chose to ever go on
the arm of someone I think might be very different. He himself started the
revolution in training and rehabilitation centers including training the
newly blind. Braille and reading "again" has been a core component of the
recipe. I think he might have some dogma here. 

And because Sloate has such a unique total circumstance I think she is a
very poor example of everyone can do just fine being solely auditory/oral
without negative employment or other life impacts. 

Carrie Gilmer




From steve.jacobson at visi.com  Fri Jan  8 22:46:41 2010
From: steve.jacobson at visi.com (Steve Jacobson)
Date: Fri, 08 Jan 2010 16:46:41 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
	in	town?
In-Reply-To: <02F952B7088E4F9F8F2ABF0E9ACA56B5@DavidPC>
Message-ID: <auto-000020874046@mailback1.g2host.com>

Where I have a little trouble saying braille is just one of our tools is with kids in school.  As long as sighted kids learn print and print is not an option, I think blind kids 
need to have access to braille because that comes the closest to conveying multiple levels of information at once, punctuation, spelling, and some elements of 
formatting as does print.  Of course I recognize that not all of the formatting is represented in braille, but awareness of paragraphs and some other elements are.  
Certainly kids who truly cannot learn braille for some reason deserve an education, and with other tools do have a chance to succeed, but I think we are right to not 
accept that braille should be optional or one of the tools that a blind child may or may not learn.  DAISY books are helpful because we get access to some of these 
elements, but in general, one gets a sense of various text elements through braille without having to request them as do sighted kids through print.  

Best regards,

Steve Jacobson

On Thu, 7 Jan 2010 22:48:26 -0600, Dave Webster wrote:

>Exactly.  Just remember what Dr. Jernigan taught us in the Nature of 
>Independence that we shouldn't be dogmatic and that braille, computers. live 
>readers and all sorts of tools are tools not ends.  they are a means and 
>they are ways in which we get things done.

>--------------------------------------------------
>From: "David Andrews" <dandrews at visi.com>
>Sent: Thursday, January 07, 2010 5:26 AM
>To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
><nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in 
>town?

>> For one I thought the New York Times article about Braille was quite good. 
>> On the whole, it was balanced, even though we might not always like what 
>> it said.  In our zeal to promote Braille, in the NFB, I do think we 
>> sometimes make people feel like they are on the outside.  The one thing 
>> the article, and people generally don't do is talk about how Braille is 
>> one tool we have, so is audio, so are computers etc.  People tend to paint 
>> very black and white pictures, then declare those who don't match those 
>> pictures as losers.  It is a grey world out there.  There isn't just one 
>> answer or solution.  I use Braille all the time, and it is a part of my 
>> success.  I also use computers, love my Stream, use human readers, OCR, 
>> the KNFB Reader etc.  There isn't just one answer.
>>
>> Dave
>>
>> At 10:31 AM 1/6/2010, you wrote:
>>>What I'm about to say may sound harsh, but here it goes. Literacy matters, 
>>>and those who have the capacity for literacy need to be able to read the 
>>>written word for success. that does not mean that those who are, by means 
>>>of some disability, unable to read won't be successful. Quite the 
>>>contrary. But reading definitely makes a difference in the lives of those 
>>>who can do it. For the sighted, reading means print. For the blind, 
>>>reading means Braille. That does not mean that either group shouldn't make 
>>>use of audio materials or other technologies to access the printed word. 
>>>However, these new technologies should not be an excuse not to learn to 
>>>read. Those who feel disenfranchised or chastized by certain members of 
>>>the federation because they don't use Braille even though they could ought 
>>>to give Braille a second thought rather than complain that support for 
>>>Braille is unyielding to the point of exclusion. Yes, learning to read is 
>>>painstaking and challenging, but that doesn't mean that it can't or 
>>>shouldn't be done. granted, if there is a disability that really does 
>>>prevent written literacy, then the circumstances are totally different. 
>>>But for most blind people, that simply isn't the case. Does that mean that 
>>>non-readers should blame themselves for not reading Braille? No. There may 
>>>be a number of reasons why Braille isn't a part of their lives. However, 
>>>there are sufficient resources available to individuals wanting to learn 
>>>that there really is no excuse not to. Respectfully, Jedi Original 
>>>message: > Darian, > What it makes them is statistically far less likely 
>>>to be employed, > for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and 
>>>teachers the > importance of Braille education. > Joseph > On Mon, Jan 04, 
>>>2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote: >> I hope individuals don't 
>>>mind my playing devil's advocate  focused >> upon the statement "braille 
>>>readers are leaders". >>   What does this  make those who arn't very good 
>>>braille readers, >> don't want to know, or  don't know braille? >> Do you 
>>>feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille readers? >> 
>>>respectfullly, >>  Darian >> On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten 
>>><kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote: >>> Hi: >>> Just thought I'd share my 
>>>opinions for what it's worth. >>> I was taught braille, and am very good 
>>>at reading it. >>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader 
>>>Stream, I really >>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate 
>>>notetaker with a braille >>> display, so I could and probably should 
>>>download more books and read >>> them digitally, but just listening to a 
>>>book on the tiny stream is >>> much easier than lugging around a note 
>>>taker and reading on a braille >>> display. >>> So, I admit even as a 
>>>great braille reader I don't use braille as much >>> as I should. >>> I do 
>>>use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my >>> notes in 
>>>braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has >>> it's uses 
>>>and children should definitely be taught it. >>> Braille readers are 
>>>leaders! >>> Kerri+ >>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote: 
>>> >>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision 
>>> >>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of >>>> 
>>>today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are >>>> 
>>>leaders, they say. >>>> Beth >>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith 
>>><dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote: >>>>> This >>>>> Listening to Braille >>>>> 
>>>By RACHEL AVIV >>>>> Published: December 30, 2009 >>>>> AT 4 O�?TCLOCK 
>>>each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading. >>>>> She calls a 
>>>phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic >>>>> voice, and 
>>>she >>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which 
>>>is >>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant 
>>>reads The >>>>> Financial Times >>>>> to her while she uses her 
>>>computer�?Ts text-to-speech system to play The >>>>> Economist aloud. She 
>>>devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the >>>>> magazine. >>>>> 
>>>The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm, >>>>> 
>>>Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly, 
>>> >>>>> poring over the >>>>> news and the economic reports for several 
>>>hours every morning, she >>>>> does not use Braille. �?oKnowledge goes 
>>>from my ears to my brain, not >>>>> from my finger to >>>>> my brain,�?_ 
>>>she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the >>>>> alphabet 
>>>sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She >>>>> doesn�?Tt 
>>>think of a >>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as �?oa 
>>>stop on the way >>>>> before continuing.�?_ This, she says, is the future 
>>>of reading for the >>>>> blind. �?oLiteracy >>>>> evolves,�?_ she told me. 
>>>�?oWhen Braille was invented, in the 19th >>>>> century, we had nothing 
>>>else. We didn�?Tt even have radio. At that time, >>>>> blindness >>>>> 
>>>was a disability. Now it�?Ts just a minor, minor impairment.�?_ >>>>> A 
>>>few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age >>>>> 
>>>would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed 
>>> >>>>> the written word. >>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western 
>>>culture would return to the >>>>> �?otribal and oral pattern.�?_ But the 
>>>decline of written language has >>>>> become a reality for >>>>> only the 
>>>blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time >>>>> learning 
>>>to spell in her youth - she writes by dictation - she says >s >>>>> she 
>>>thinks that >>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her 
>>>sighted peers. >>>>> �?oIt�?Ts an arcane means of communication, which for 
>>>the most part should >>>>> be abolished,�?_ >>>>> she told me. �?oIt�?Ts 
>>>just not needed today.�?_ >>>>> Braille books are expensive and 
>>>cumbersome, requiring reams of thick, >>>>> oversize paper. The National 
>>>Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing >>>>> house in Boston, >>>>> 
>>>printed the >>>>> Harry Potter >>>>>  series on its Heidelberg cylinder; 
>>>the final product was 56 volumes, >>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because a 
>>>single textbook can cost more than >>>>> $1,000 and there�?Ts >>>>> a 
>>>shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired >>>>> 
>>>students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and >>>>> 
>>>computer-screen-reading software. >>>>> A report released last year by the 
>>>National Federation of the Blind, >>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 
>>>members, said that less than 10 percent >>>>> of the 1.3 million >>>>> 
>>>legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all >>>>> 
>>>blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as >>>>> 
>>>low as 1 in 10, >>>>> according to the report. The figures are 
>>>controversial because there >>>>> is debate about when a child with 
>>>residual vision has �?otoo much sight�?_ >>>>> for Braille >>>>> and 
>>>because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades - in >>>>> 
>>>rrecent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because 
>>> >>>>> of premature >>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille 
>>>literacy has been waning for >>>>> some time, even among the most 
>>>intellectually capable, and the report >>>>> has inspired >>>>> a fervent 
>>>movement to change the way blind people read. �?oWhat we�?Tre >>>>> 
>>>finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able - and >>>>> 
>>>illiterate,�?_ Jim >>>>> Marks, a boardd member for the past five years of 
>>>the Association on >>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. �?oWe 
>>>stopped teaching our >>>>> nation�?Ts blind children >>>>> how to read and 
>>>write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their >>>>> desks. Now 
>>>their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to >>>>> learn the 
>>> >>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language.�?_ >>>>> For much of the 
>>>past century, blind children attended residential >>>>> institutions where 
>>>they learned to read by touching the words. Today, >>>>> visually impaired 
>>> >>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to 
>>>read; >>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each 
>>>word and >>>>> read the individual >>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has 
>>>become much harder to define, even for >>>>> educators. >>>>> �?oIf all 
>>>you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your >>>>> mind is 
>>>limited,�?_ Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind >>>>> Access 
>>>Journal, told >>>>> me. �?oYou need written symbols to organize your mind. 
>>>If you can�?Tt feel >>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The 
>>>substance is gone.�?_ Like many >>>>> Braille readers, >>>>> Shandrow says 
>>>that new computers, which form a single line of Braille >>>>> cells at a 
>>>time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are >>>>> still 
>>>extremely >>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline 
>>>in Braille >>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: �?oThis 
>>>is like going >>>>> back to the 1400s, >>>>> before Gutenberg�?Ts printing 
>>>press came on the scene,�?_ he said. �?oOnly >>>>> the scholars and monks 
>>>knew how to read and write. And then there were >>>>> the illiterate >>>>> 
>>>masses, the peasants.�?_ >>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were 
>>>confined to an oral culture. >>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in 
>>>wood or wax, formed by wire or >>>>> outlined in felt >>>>> with pins. 
>>>Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a >>>>> student 
>>>at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began >>>>> studying a 
>>>cipher >>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a 
>>>French Army >>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. 
>>>Braille modified >>>>> the code so that >>>>> it could be read more 
>>>efficiently - each letter or punctuation symbool >>>>> is represented by a 
>>>pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three >>>>> rows and two >>>>> 
>>>columns - aand added abbreviations for commonly used words like >>>>> 
>>>�?oknowledge,�?_ �?opeople�?_ and �?oLord.�?_ Endowed with a reliable 
>>>method of >>>>> written communication >>>>> for the first time in history, 
>>>blind people had a significant rise in >>>>> social status, and Louis 
>>>Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator >>>>> and spiritual >>>>> 
>>>savior. With his �?ogodlike courage,�?_ Helen Keller wrote, Braille built 
>>> >>>>> a �?ofirm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to 
>>>climb >>>>> from hopeless >>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal.�?_ >>>>> At 
>>>the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but >>>>> 
>>>also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more >>>>> 
>>>innocent and malleable, >>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that 
>>>blind people spoke a >>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from 
>>>visual experience. In >>>>> his 1933 book, �?oThe >>>>> Blind in School 
>>>and Society,�?_ the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who >>>>> lost his 
>>>sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly >>>>> 
>>>assimilated into >>>>> the sighted world would become lost in �?overbal 
>>>unreality.�?_ At some >>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words 
>>>that referenced color or >>>>> light because, >>>>> they said, students 
>>>might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These >>>>> theories have since 
>>>been discredited, and studies have shown that >>>>> blind children as 
>>> >>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like 
>>> >>>>> �?olook,�?_ �?otouch�?_ and �?osee.�?_ And yet Cutsforth was not 
>>>entirely >>>>> misguided in his argument >>>>> that sensory deprivation 
>>>restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series >>>>> of brain-imaging 
>>>studies revealed that the visual cortices of the >>>>> blind are not >>>>> 
>>>rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept >>>>> 
>>>their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation >>>>> 
>>>in the parts of >>>>> the brain that typically process visual input. >>>>> 
>>>These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that 
>>> >>>>> Braille is essential for blind children�?Ts cognitive development, 
>>>as >>>>> the visual cortex >>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. 
>>>Given the brain�?Ts plasticity, >>>>> it is difficult to make the argument 
>>>that one kind of reading - >>>>> whetheer the information >>>>> is 
>>>absorbed by ear, finger or retina - is inherently better than >>>>> 
>>>another, at leastt with regard to cognitive function. The architecture 
>>> >>>>> of the brain is >>>>> not fixed, and without images to process, the 
>>>visual cortex can >>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in 
>>>Nature Neuroscience >>>>> found that blind subjects >>>>> consistently 
>>>surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal >>>>> memory >>>>> , and their 
>>>superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by >>>>> the extra 
>>>processing that took place in the visual regions of their >>>>> brains. 
>>> >>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child >>>>> 
>>>development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally >>>>> 
>>>wired for print literacy. >>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer 
>>>than 6,000 years (and literacy >>>>> has been widespread for no more than 
>>>a century and a half). The >>>>> activity of reading >>>>> itself alters 
>>>the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009 >>>>> in the 
>>>journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies >>>>> 
>>>illiterate former >>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, 
>>>had abandoned their >>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined 
>>>civilization. Carreiras compares >>>>> 20 adults >>>>> who had recently 
>>>completed a literacy program with 22 people who had >>>>> not yet begun 
>>>it. In >>>>> M.R.I. >>>>>  scans of their brains, the newly literate 
>>>subjects showed more gray >>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area 
>>>crucial for language processing, >>>>> and more white >>>>> matter in part 
>>>of the corpus callosum, which links the two >>>>> hemispheres. 
>>>Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in >>>>> dyslexics, 
>>>and the study >>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren�?Tt the cause 
>>>of their >>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result. >>>>> 
>>>There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this 
>>> >>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter 
>>>of >>>>> debate. In moving >>>>> from written to spoken language, the 
>>>greatest consequences for blind >>>>> people may not be cognitive but 
>>>cultural - a loss much harder to >>>>> avoid. In onne of >>>>> the few 
>>>studies of blind people�?Ts prose, Doug Brent, a professor of >>>>> 
>>>communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent, 
>>> >>>>> a teacher of >>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by 
>>>students who didn�?Tt >>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular 
>>>keyboard and edited by >>>>> listening to their >>>>> words played aloud. 
>>>One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a >>>>> character named Mark 
>>>who had �?osleep bombs�?_: >>>>> He looked in the house windo that was his 
>>>da windo his dad was walking >>>>> around with a mask on he took it off he 
>>>opend the windo and fell on >>>>> his bed sleeping >>>>> mark took two 
>>>bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept >>>>> up but 
>>>before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep. >>>>> In 
>>>describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the >>>>> 
>>>literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate >>>>> 
>>>societies think differently >>>>> than members of oral societies. The act 
>>>of writing, Ong said - the >>>>> ability to revissit your ideas and, in 
>>>the process, refine them - >>>>>  transformed the shape >>>>> of thought. 
>>>The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only >>>>> readers as 
>>>disorganized, �?oas if all of their ideas are crammed into a >>>>> 
>>>container, shaken >>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like 
>>>dice onto a table.�?_ The >>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem 
>>>arbitrary, one thought >>>>> emerging in the >>>>> midst of another with a 
>>>kind of breathless energy. The authors >>>>> concluded, �?oIt just 
>>>doesn�?Tt seem to reflect the qualities of organized >>>>> sequence and 
>>>complex >>>>> thought that we value in a literate society.�?_ >>>>> OUR 
>>>DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools >>>>> for 
>>>reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for >>>>> 
>>>blind people makes >>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. 
>>>Since the 1820s, when >>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system - so 
>>>that bliind people would >>>>> no longer be >>>>> �?odespised or 
>>>patronized by condescending sighted people,�?_ as he put it >>>>> - there 
>>>has always been, among blind people, a  political and even >>>>> moral 
>>>dimension >>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark 
>>>of >>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an 
>>>oral >>>>> culture seen as primitive >>>>> and isolating. In recent years, 
>>>however, this narrative has been >>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in 
>>>developed countries, like the U.S. and >>>>> Britain, are now >>>>> 
>>>thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones, 
>>> >>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to 
>>> >>>>> Braille. Tim Connell, >>>>> the managing director of an 
>>>assistive-technology company in Australia, >>>>> told me that he has heard 
>>>this described as �?oone of the advantages of >>>>> being poor.�?_ >>>>> 
>>>Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been >>>>> 
>>>transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of >>>>> 
>>>blindness that it has assumed >>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those who 
>>>have residual vision and still >>>>> try to read print - very slowlly or 
>>>by holding the page an inch or two >>>>> from their >>>>> faces - are 
>>>generally frowned upon by the Nationaal Federation of the >>>>> Blind, 
>>>which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement >>>>> for 
>>>the blind. >>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares 
>>>Louis Braille to >>>>> Abraham Lincoln >>>>> . At the annual convention 
>>>for the federation, held at a Detroit >>>>> Marriott last July, I heard 
>>>the mantra �?olistening is not literacy�?_ >>>>> repeated everywhere, 
>>> >>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among 
>>>middle-school >>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the 
>>>convention featured >>>>> children who don�?Tt >>>>> know what a paragraph 
>>>is or why we capitalize letters or that �?ohappily >>>>> ever after�?_ is 
>>>made up of three separate words. >>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy 
>>>seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice >>>>> president of the federation, 
>>>Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner >>>>> of the Rehabilitation 
>>> >>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily 
>>> >>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of 
>>> >>>>> reading skills. �?oI >>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn�?Tt 
>>>until two months ago that I >>>>> realized that �?~dissent,�?T to 
>>>disagree, is different than �?~descent,�?T to >>>>> lower something,�?_ 
>>> >>>>> he told me. �?oI�?Tm functionally illiterate. People say, �?~Oh, no, 
>>>you�?Tre >>>>> not.�?T Yes, I am. I�?Tm sorry about it, but I�?Tm not 
>>>embarrassed to admit >>>>> it.�?_ >>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or 
>>>the governor of New York, >>>>> David A. Paterson >>>>> , who also reads 
>>>by listening, may be able to achieve without the help >>>>> of Braille, 
>>>their success requires accommodations that many cannot >>>>> afford. Like 
>>>Sloate, >>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select 
>>>pertinent >>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his 
>>>voice mail every >>>>> morning. (He >>>>> calls himself 
>>>�?ooverassimilated�?_ and told me that as a child he was >>>>> 
>>>�?omainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I�?Tm 
>>> >>>>> not really supposed >>>>> to be blind.�?_) Among people with fewer 
>>>resources, Braille-readers tend >>>>> to form the blind elite, in part 
>>>because it is more plausible for a >>>>> blind person >>>>> to find work 
>>>doing intellectual rather than manual labor. >>>>> A 1996 study showed 
>>>that of a sample of visually impaired adults, >>>>> those who learned 
>>>Braille as children were more than twice as likely >>>>> to be employed as 
>>> >>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently 
>>> >>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn�?Tt know Braille 
>>>were >>>>> sometimes made >>>>> to feel like outsiders. �?oThere is 
>>>definitely a sense of peer pressure >>>>> from the older guard,�?_ James 
>>>Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using >>>>> text-to-speech >>>>> software, 
>>>told me. �?oIf we could live in our own little Braille world, >>>>> then 
>>>that�?Td be perfect,�?_ he added. �?oBut we live in a visual world.�?_ 
>>> >>>>> When deaf people began getting >>>>> cochlear implants >>>>>  in the 
>>>late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new >>>>> 
>>>technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way - as 
>>> >>>>> an identity >>>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature 
>>>of many disabilities, >>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating 
>>>people�?Ts sense of what is >>>>> physically natural, >>>>> because bodies 
>>>can so often be tweaked until �?ofixed.�?_ Arielle >>>>> Silverman, a 
>>>graduate student at the convention who has been blind >>>>> since birth, 
>>>told me that >>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure 
>>>she would take >>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading 
>>>machine that takes >>>>> photographs of >>>>> text and then reads the 
>>>words aloud, and she said she thought of >>>>> vision like that, as 
>>>�?ojust another piece of technology.�?_ >>>>> The modern history of blind 
>>>people is in many ways a history of >>>>> reading, with the scope of the 
>>>disability - the extent tto which you >>>>> are viewed as ignorant >>>>> 
>>>or civilized, helpless or independent - determined largely by youur >>>>> 
>>>ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were 
>>> >>>>> designed to function >>>>> as much as possible like print books. But 
>>>now the computer has >>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form, 
>>>because information, >>>>> once it has been digitized, >>>>> can be 
>>>conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the >>>>> transition 
>>>from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but >>>>> for many 
>>>blind people >>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and 
>>>uncharted >>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several 
>>>federation >>>>> members recited to >>>>> me various takes on the classic 
>>>expression Scripta manent, verba >>>>> volant: What is written remains, 
>>>what is spoken vanishes into air. >>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter 
>>>fellow for mental-health journalism >>>>> with the Carter Center and 
>>>writes frequently on education for The >>>>> Times. >>>>> -- >>>>> The 
>>>National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher >>>>> 
>>>recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate >>>>> 
>>>individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your >>>>> 
>>>help!   To Get Involved  go to: >>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org >>>>> 
>>>"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny 
>>> >>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility 
>>>stretching >>>>> before us; >>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time 
>>>is now to shake off our >>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make 
>>>good on the debt we owe >>>>> past and future generations, >>>>> then I'm 
>>>ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with >>>>> you. 
>>>Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be >>>>> 
>>>done, and >>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."-
>>
>>
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From carrie.gilmer at gmail.com  Sat Jan  9 00:04:50 2010
From: carrie.gilmer at gmail.com (Carrie Gilmer)
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 2010 18:04:50 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only
	onein	town?
In-Reply-To: <auto-000020874046@mailback1.g2host.com>
Message-ID: <4b47c824.5544f10a.2751.5c22@mx.google.com>

Very Good clarification Steve and I agree. Although I meant it a tool for
Jordan in a different way as in pen or pencil or slate or print~they are
"tools" for reading and writing in a sense. I guess I too much had to say
"all the tools in the box" and "you can't use a tool if you don't know how
it works" for over a decade like a mantra in order for some of his teachers
of blind students to even allow Braille. Sad but true. On the other hand I
have advocated a pen and print for totally blind children as a tool
necessary to familiarize with in learning print and cursive as well, in
learning to write, for the sighted world's expectations they live in expects
some things as signatures and well you know what I mean I think. In the way
you put it strictly I do not disagree and welcome that point.

A friend recently reminded me our zeal has been neccesary for even the
survival of Braille from the beginning:). I also think there is much more to
reading and writing than format and spelling as well.  
 
Carrie 
-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Steve Jacobson
Sent: Friday, January 08, 2010 4:47 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only onein
town?

Where I have a little trouble saying braille is just one of our tools is
with kids in school.  As long as sighted kids learn print and print is not
an option, I think blind kids 
need to have access to braille because that comes the closest to conveying
multiple levels of information at once, punctuation, spelling, and some
elements of 
formatting as does print.  Of course I recognize that not all of the
formatting is represented in braille, but awareness of paragraphs and some
other elements are.  
Certainly kids who truly cannot learn braille for some reason deserve an
education, and with other tools do have a chance to succeed, but I think we
are right to not 
accept that braille should be optional or one of the tools that a blind
child may or may not learn.  DAISY books are helpful because we get access
to some of these 
elements, but in general, one gets a sense of various text elements through
braille without having to request them as do sighted kids through print.  

Best regards,

Steve Jacobson

On Thu, 7 Jan 2010 22:48:26 -0600, Dave Webster wrote:

>Exactly.  Just remember what Dr. Jernigan taught us in the Nature of 
>Independence that we shouldn't be dogmatic and that braille, computers.
live 
>readers and all sorts of tools are tools not ends.  they are a means and 
>they are ways in which we get things done.

>--------------------------------------------------
>From: "David Andrews" <dandrews at visi.com>
>Sent: Thursday, January 07, 2010 5:26 AM
>To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
><nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in 
>town?

>> For one I thought the New York Times article about Braille was quite
good. 
>> On the whole, it was balanced, even though we might not always like what 
>> it said.  In our zeal to promote Braille, in the NFB, I do think we 
>> sometimes make people feel like they are on the outside.  The one thing 
>> the article, and people generally don't do is talk about how Braille is 
>> one tool we have, so is audio, so are computers etc.  People tend to
paint 
>> very black and white pictures, then declare those who don't match those 
>> pictures as losers.  It is a grey world out there.  There isn't just one 
>> answer or solution.  I use Braille all the time, and it is a part of my 
>> success.  I also use computers, love my Stream, use human readers, OCR, 
>> the KNFB Reader etc.  There isn't just one answer.
>>
>> Dave
>>
>> At 10:31 AM 1/6/2010, you wrote:
>>>What I'm about to say may sound harsh, but here it goes. Literacy
matters, 
>>>and those who have the capacity for literacy need to be able to read the 
>>>written word for success. that does not mean that those who are, by means

>>>of some disability, unable to read won't be successful. Quite the 
>>>contrary. But reading definitely makes a difference in the lives of those

>>>who can do it. For the sighted, reading means print. For the blind, 
>>>reading means Braille. That does not mean that either group shouldn't
make 
>>>use of audio materials or other technologies to access the printed word. 
>>>However, these new technologies should not be an excuse not to learn to 
>>>read. Those who feel disenfranchised or chastized by certain members of 
>>>the federation because they don't use Braille even though they could
ought 
>>>to give Braille a second thought rather than complain that support for 
>>>Braille is unyielding to the point of exclusion. Yes, learning to read is

>>>painstaking and challenging, but that doesn't mean that it can't or 
>>>shouldn't be done. granted, if there is a disability that really does 
>>>prevent written literacy, then the circumstances are totally different. 
>>>But for most blind people, that simply isn't the case. Does that mean
that 
>>>non-readers should blame themselves for not reading Braille? No. There
may 
>>>be a number of reasons why Braille isn't a part of their lives. However, 
>>>there are sufficient resources available to individuals wanting to learn 
>>>that there really is no excuse not to. Respectfully, Jedi Original 
>>>message: > Darian, > What it makes them is statistically far less likely 
>>>to be employed, > for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and 
>>>teachers the > importance of Braille education. > Joseph > On Mon, Jan
04, 
>>>2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote: >> I hope individuals don't

>>>mind my playing devil's advocate  focused >> upon the statement "braille 
>>>readers are leaders". >>   What does this  make those who arn't very good

>>>braille readers, >> don't want to know, or  don't know braille? >> Do you

>>>feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille readers? >> 
>>>respectfullly, >>  Darian >> On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten 
>>><kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote: >>> Hi: >>> Just thought I'd share my 
>>>opinions for what it's worth. >>> I was taught braille, and am very good 
>>>at reading it. >>> However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader 
>>>Stream, I really >>> don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate 
>>>notetaker with a braille >>> display, so I could and probably should 
>>>download more books and read >>> them digitally, but just listening to a 
>>>book on the tiny stream is >>> much easier than lugging around a note 
>>>taker and reading on a braille >>> display. >>> So, I admit even as a 
>>>great braille reader I don't use braille as much >>> as I should. >>> I
do 
>>>use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my >>> notes
in 
>>>braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has >>> it's uses 
>>>and children should definitely be taught it. >>> Braille readers are 
>>>leaders! >>> Kerri+ >>> On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
wrote: 
>>> >>>> Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my
vision 
>>> >>>> teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
>>>> 
>>>today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are >>>> 
>>>leaders, they say. >>>> Beth >>>> On 1/4/10, Darian Smith 
>>><dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote: >>>>> This >>>>> Listening to Braille >>>>> 
>>>By RACHEL AVIV >>>>> Published: December 30, 2009 >>>>> AT 4 O?TCLOCK 
>>>each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading. >>>>> She calls a

>>>phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic >>>>> voice, and

>>>she >>>>> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which

>>>is >>>>> nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant 
>>>reads The >>>>> Financial Times >>>>> to her while she uses her 
>>>computer?Ts text-to-speech system to play The >>>>> Economist aloud. She

>>>devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the >>>>> magazine. >>>>> 
>>>The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm, >>>>> 
>>>Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly, 
>>> >>>>> poring over the >>>>> news and the economic reports for several 
>>>hours every morning, she >>>>> does not use Braille. ?oKnowledge goes 
>>>from my ears to my brain, not >>>>> from my finger to >>>>> my brain,?_ 
>>>she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the >>>>> alphabet 
>>>sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She >>>>> doesn?Tt 
>>>think of a >>>>> comma in terms of its written form but rather as ?oa 
>>>stop on the way >>>>> before continuing.?_ This, she says, is the future

>>>of reading for the >>>>> blind. ?oLiteracy >>>>> evolves,?_ she told
me. 
>>>?oWhen Braille was invented, in the 19th >>>>> century, we had nothing 
>>>else. We didn?Tt even have radio. At that time, >>>>> blindness >>>>> 
>>>was a disability. Now it?Ts just a minor, minor impairment.?_ >>>>> A 
>>>few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age >>>>> 
>>>would create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed 
>>> >>>>> the written word. >>>>> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western 
>>>culture would return to the >>>>> ?otribal and oral pattern.?_ But the 
>>>decline of written language has >>>>> become a reality for >>>>> only the

>>>blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time >>>>> learning 
>>>to spell in her youth - she writes by dictation - she says >s >>>>> she 
>>>thinks that >>>>> using Braille would have only isolated her from her 
>>>sighted peers. >>>>> ?oIt?Ts an arcane means of communication, which
for 
>>>the most part should >>>>> be abolished,?_ >>>>> she told me. ?oIt?Ts 
>>>just not needed today.?_ >>>>> Braille books are expensive and 
>>>cumbersome, requiring reams of thick, >>>>> oversize paper. The National 
>>>Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing >>>>> house in Boston, >>>>> 
>>>printed the >>>>> Harry Potter >>>>>  series on its Heidelberg cylinder; 
>>>the final product was 56 volumes, >>>>> each nearly a foot tall. Because
a 
>>>single textbook can cost more than >>>>> $1,000 and there?Ts >>>>> a 
>>>shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired >>>>> 
>>>students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and >>>>> 
>>>computer-screen-reading software. >>>>> A report released last year by
the 
>>>National Federation of the Blind, >>>>> an advocacy group with 50,000 
>>>members, said that less than 10 percent >>>>> of the 1.3 million >>>>> 
>>>legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all >>>>> 
>>>blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as
>>>>> 
>>>low as 1 in 10, >>>>> according to the report. The figures are 
>>>controversial because there >>>>> is debate about when a child with 
>>>residual vision has ?otoo much sight?_ >>>>> for Braille >>>>> and 
>>>because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades - in >>>>> 
>>>rrecent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because 
>>> >>>>> of premature >>>>> births. It is clear, though, that Braille 
>>>literacy has been waning for >>>>> some time, even among the most 
>>>intellectually capable, and the report >>>>> has inspired >>>>> a fervent

>>>movement to change the way blind people read. ?oWhat we?Tre >>>>> 
>>>finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able - and >>>>> 
>>>illiterate,?_ Jim >>>>> Marks, a boardd member for the past five years
of 
>>>the Association on >>>>> Higher Education and Disability, told me. ?oWe 
>>>stopped teaching our >>>>> nation?Ts blind children >>>>> how to read
and 
>>>write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their >>>>> desks. Now 
>>>their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to >>>>> learn
the 
>>> >>>>> beauty and shape and structure of language.?_ >>>>> For much of
the 
>>>past century, blind children attended residential >>>>> institutions
where 
>>>they learned to read by touching the words. Today, >>>>> visually
impaired 
>>> >>>>> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to 
>>>read; >>>>> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each 
>>>word and >>>>> read the individual >>>>> letters aloud. Literacy has 
>>>become much harder to define, even for >>>>> educators. >>>>> ?oIf all 
>>>you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your >>>>> mind
is 
>>>limited,?_ Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind >>>>> Access 
>>>Journal, told >>>>> me. ?oYou need written symbols to organize your
mind. 
>>>If you can?Tt feel >>>>> or see the word, what does it mean? The 
>>>substance is gone.?_ Like many >>>>> Braille readers, >>>>> Shandrow
says 
>>>that new computers, which form a single line of Braille >>>>> cells at a 
>>>time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are >>>>> still 
>>>extremely >>>>> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the
decline 
>>>in Braille >>>>> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: ?oThis 
>>>is like going >>>>> back to the 1400s, >>>>> before Gutenberg?Ts
printing 
>>>press came on the scene,?_ he said. ?oOnly >>>>> the scholars and monks

>>>knew how to read and write. And then there were >>>>> the illiterate
>>>>> 
>>>masses, the peasants.?_ >>>>> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were 
>>>confined to an oral culture. >>>>> Some tried to read letters carved in 
>>>wood or wax, formed by wire or >>>>> outlined in felt >>>>> with pins. 
>>>Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a >>>>> student 
>>>at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began >>>>> studying a 
>>>cipher >>>>> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a 
>>>French Army >>>>> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. 
>>>Braille modified >>>>> the code so that >>>>> it could be read more 
>>>efficiently - each letter or punctuation symbool >>>>> is represented by
a 
>>>pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three >>>>> rows and two >>>>> 
>>>columns - aand added abbreviations for commonly used words like >>>>> 
>>>?oknowledge,?_ ?opeople?_ and ?oLord.?_ Endowed with a reliable 
>>>method of >>>>> written communication >>>>> for the first time in
history, 
>>>blind people had a significant rise in >>>>> social status, and Louis 
>>>Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator >>>>> and spiritual >>>>> 
>>>savior. With his ?ogodlike courage,?_ Helen Keller wrote, Braille built

>>> >>>>> a ?ofirm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to 
>>>climb >>>>> from hopeless >>>>> darkness to the Mind Eternal.?_ >>>>> At

>>>the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but >>>>>

>>>also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more >>>>> 
>>>innocent and malleable, >>>>> not fully formed. Some scholars said that 
>>>blind people spoke a >>>>> different sort of language, disconnected from 
>>>visual experience. In >>>>> his 1933 book, ?oThe >>>>> Blind in School 
>>>and Society,?_ the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who >>>>> lost his 
>>>sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly >>>>> 
>>>assimilated into >>>>> the sighted world would become lost in ?overbal 
>>>unreality.?_ At some >>>>> residential schools, teachers avoided words 
>>>that referenced color or >>>>> light because, >>>>> they said, students 
>>>might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These >>>>> theories have since 
>>>been discredited, and studies have shown that >>>>> blind children as 
>>> >>>>> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like

>>> >>>>> ?olook,?_ ?otouch?_ and ?osee.?_ And yet Cutsforth was not 
>>>entirely >>>>> misguided in his argument >>>>> that sensory deprivation 
>>>restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series >>>>> of brain-imaging 
>>>studies revealed that the visual cortices of the >>>>> blind are not
>>>>> 
>>>rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept >>>>> 
>>>their fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation
>>>>> 
>>>in the parts of >>>>> the brain that typically process visual input.
>>>>> 
>>>These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that 
>>> >>>>> Braille is essential for blind children?Ts cognitive development,

>>>as >>>>> the visual cortex >>>>> takes more than 20 percent of the brain.

>>>Given the brain?Ts plasticity, >>>>> it is difficult to make the
argument 
>>>that one kind of reading - >>>>> whetheer the information >>>>> is 
>>>absorbed by ear, finger or retina - is inherently better than >>>>> 
>>>another, at leastt with regard to cognitive function. The architecture 
>>> >>>>> of the brain is >>>>> not fixed, and without images to process,
the 
>>>visual cortex can >>>>> reorganize for new functions. A 2003 study in 
>>>Nature Neuroscience >>>>> found that blind subjects >>>>> consistently 
>>>surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal >>>>> memory >>>>> , and their 
>>>superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by >>>>> the
extra 
>>>processing that took place in the visual regions of their >>>>> brains. 
>>> >>>>> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child
>>>>> 
>>>development that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally >>>>>

>>>wired for print literacy. >>>>> But humans have been reading for fewer 
>>>than 6,000 years (and literacy >>>>> has been widespread for no more than

>>>a century and a half). The >>>>> activity of reading >>>>> itself alters 
>>>the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009 >>>>> in the 
>>>journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies >>>>> 
>>>illiterate former >>>>> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of
combat, 
>>>had abandoned their >>>>> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined 
>>>civilization. Carreiras compares >>>>> 20 adults >>>>> who had recently 
>>>completed a literacy program with 22 people who had >>>>> not yet begun 
>>>it. In >>>>> M.R.I. >>>>>  scans of their brains, the newly literate 
>>>subjects showed more gray >>>>> matter in their angular gyri, an area 
>>>crucial for language processing, >>>>> and more white >>>>> matter in
part 
>>>of the corpus callosum, which links the two >>>>> hemispheres. 
>>>Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in >>>>>
dyslexics, 
>>>and the study >>>>> suggests that those brain patterns weren?Tt the
cause 
>>>of their >>>>> illiteracy, as had been hypothesized, but a result. >>>>> 
>>>There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this 
>>> >>>>> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter

>>>of >>>>> debate. In moving >>>>> from written to spoken language, the 
>>>greatest consequences for blind >>>>> people may not be cognitive but 
>>>cultural - a loss much harder to >>>>> avoid. In onne of >>>>> the few 
>>>studies of blind people?Ts prose, Doug Brent, a professor of >>>>> 
>>>communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent, 
>>> >>>>> a teacher of >>>>> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by

>>>students who didn?Tt >>>>> use Braille but rather composed on a regular 
>>>keyboard and edited by >>>>> listening to their >>>>> words played aloud.

>>>One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a >>>>> character named
Mark 
>>>who had ?osleep bombs?_: >>>>> He looked in the house windo that was
his 
>>>da windo his dad was walking >>>>> around with a mask on he took it off
he 
>>>opend the windo and fell on >>>>> his bed sleeping >>>>> mark took two 
>>>bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept >>>>> up but 
>>>before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep. >>>>> In 
>>>describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the >>>>> 
>>>literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate >>>>> 
>>>societies think differently >>>>> than members of oral societies. The act

>>>of writing, Ong said - the >>>>> ability to revissit your ideas and, in 
>>>the process, refine them - >>>>>  transformed the shape >>>>> of thought.

>>>The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only >>>>> readers as 
>>>disorganized, ?oas if all of their ideas are crammed into a >>>>> 
>>>container, shaken >>>>> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like 
>>>dice onto a table.?_ The >>>>> beginnings and endings of sentences seem 
>>>arbitrary, one thought >>>>> emerging in the >>>>> midst of another with
a 
>>>kind of breathless energy. The authors >>>>> concluded, ?oIt just 
>>>doesn?Tt seem to reflect the qualities of organized >>>>> sequence and 
>>>complex >>>>> thought that we value in a literate society.?_ >>>>> OUR 
>>>DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools >>>>> for

>>>reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for >>>>> 
>>>blind people makes >>>>> the prospect of change particularly fraught. 
>>>Since the 1820s, when >>>>> Louis Braille invented his writing system -
so 
>>>that bliind people would >>>>> no longer be >>>>> ?odespised or 
>>>patronized by condescending sighted people,?_ as he put it >>>>> - there

>>>has always been, among blind people, a  political and even >>>>> moral 
>>>dimension >>>>> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark 
>>>of >>>>> independence, a sign that blind people have moved away from an 
>>>oral >>>>> culture seen as primitive >>>>> and isolating. In recent
years, 
>>>however, this narrative has been >>>>> complicated. Schoolchildren in 
>>>developed countries, like the U.S. and >>>>> Britain, are now >>>>> 
>>>thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones, 
>>> >>>>> like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to 
>>> >>>>> Braille. Tim Connell, >>>>> the managing director of an 
>>>assistive-technology company in Australia, >>>>> told me that he has
heard 
>>>this described as ?oone of the advantages of >>>>> being poor.?_ >>>>> 
>>>Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been >>>>> 
>>>transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of >>>>> 
>>>blindness that it has assumed >>>>> a kind of talismanic status. Those
who 
>>>have residual vision and still >>>>> try to read print - very slowlly or 
>>>by holding the page an inch or two >>>>> from their >>>>> faces - are 
>>>generally frowned upon by the Nationaal Federation of the >>>>> Blind, 
>>>which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement >>>>> for 
>>>the blind. >>>>> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares

>>>Louis Braille to >>>>> Abraham Lincoln >>>>> . At the annual convention 
>>>for the federation, held at a Detroit >>>>> Marriott last July, I heard 
>>>the mantra ?olistening is not literacy?_ >>>>> repeated everywhere, 
>>> >>>>> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among 
>>>middle-school >>>>> girls. Horror stories circulating around the 
>>>convention featured >>>>> children who don?Tt >>>>> know what a
paragraph 
>>>is or why we capitalize letters or that ?ohappily >>>>> ever after?_ is

>>>made up of three separate words. >>>>> Declaring your own illiteracy 
>>>seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice >>>>> president of the federation,

>>>Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner >>>>> of the Rehabilitation 
>>> >>>>> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies
primarily 
>>> >>>>> on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of 
>>> >>>>> reading skills. ?oI >>>>> am now over 50 years old, and it
wasn?Tt 
>>>until two months ago that I >>>>> realized that ?~dissent,?T to 
>>>disagree, is different than ?~descent,?T to >>>>> lower something,?_ 
>>> >>>>> he told me. ?oI?Tm functionally illiterate. People say, ?~Oh,
no, 
>>>you?Tre >>>>> not.?T Yes, I am. I?Tm sorry about it, but I?Tm not 
>>>embarrassed to admit >>>>> it.?_ >>>>> While people like Laura Sloate or

>>>the governor of New York, >>>>> David A. Paterson >>>>> , who also reads 
>>>by listening, may be able to achieve without the help >>>>> of Braille, 
>>>their success requires accommodations that many cannot >>>>> afford. Like

>>>Sloate, >>>>> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select 
>>>pertinent >>>>> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his 
>>>voice mail every >>>>> morning. (He >>>>> calls himself 
>>>?ooverassimilated?_ and told me that as a child he was >>>>> 
>>>?omainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I?Tm

>>> >>>>> not really supposed >>>>> to be blind.?_) Among people with fewer

>>>resources, Braille-readers tend >>>>> to form the blind elite, in part 
>>>because it is more plausible for a >>>>> blind person >>>>> to find work 
>>>doing intellectual rather than manual labor. >>>>> A 1996 study showed 
>>>that of a sample of visually impaired adults, >>>>> those who learned 
>>>Braille as children were more than twice as likely >>>>> to be employed
as 
>>> >>>>> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently

>>> >>>>> cited with pride, so much so that those who didn?Tt know Braille 
>>>were >>>>> sometimes made >>>>> to feel like outsiders. ?oThere is 
>>>definitely a sense of peer pressure >>>>> from the older guard,?_ James 
>>>Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using >>>>> text-to-speech >>>>> software,

>>>told me. ?oIf we could live in our own little Braille world, >>>>> then 
>>>that?Td be perfect,?_ he added. ?oBut we live in a visual world.?_ 
>>> >>>>> When deaf people began getting >>>>> cochlear implants >>>>>  in
the 
>>>late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new >>>>> 
>>>technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way - as 
>>> >>>>> an identity >>>>>> and a culture. Technology has changed the
nature 
>>>of many disabilities, >>>>> lifting the burdens but also complicating 
>>>people?Ts sense of what is >>>>> physically natural, >>>>> because
bodies 
>>>can so often be tweaked until ?ofixed.?_ Arielle >>>>> Silverman, a 
>>>graduate student at the convention who has been blind >>>>> since birth, 
>>>told me that >>>>> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure

>>>she would take >>>>> it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading 
>>>machine that takes >>>>> photographs of >>>>> text and then reads the 
>>>words aloud, and she said she thought of >>>>> vision like that, as 
>>>?ojust another piece of technology.?_ >>>>> The modern history of blind

>>>people is in many ways a history of >>>>> reading, with the scope of the 
>>>disability - the extent tto which you >>>>> are viewed as ignorant >>>>> 
>>>or civilized, helpless or independent - determined largely by youur >>>>>

>>>ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were 
>>> >>>>> designed to function >>>>> as much as possible like print books.
But 
>>>now the computer has >>>>> essentially done away with the limits of form,

>>>because information, >>>>> once it has been digitized, >>>>> can be 
>>>conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the >>>>> transition

>>>from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but >>>>> for many

>>>blind people >>>>> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and 
>>>uncharted >>>>> experiment. In grappling with what has been lost, several

>>>federation >>>>> members recited to >>>>> me various takes on the classic

>>>expression Scripta manent, verba >>>>> volant: What is written remains, 
>>>what is spoken vanishes into air. >>>>> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter 
>>>fellow for mental-health journalism >>>>> with the Carter Center and 
>>>writes frequently on education for The >>>>> Times. >>>>> -- >>>>> The 
>>>National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher >>>>> 
>>>recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate >>>>> 
>>>individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your >>>>>

>>>help!   To Get Involved  go to: >>>>> www.TeachBlindStudents.org >>>>> 
>>>"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny 
>>> >>>>> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility 
>>>stretching >>>>> before us; >>>>> if you sense, as I sense, that the time

>>>is now to shake off our >>>>> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make 
>>>good on the debt we owe >>>>> past and future generations, >>>>> then I'm

>>>ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with >>>>> you. 
>>>Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be >>>>> 
>>>done, and >>>>> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."-
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>>
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From serenacucco at verizon.net  Sat Jan  9 21:19:04 2010
From: serenacucco at verizon.net (Serena)
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 16:19:04 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
Message-ID: <000801ca9171$5f6e3330$0201a8c0@Serene>

Hi nabsters,

It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or, at least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any graphics or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them only useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to the link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things one can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many links and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy functions like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to see those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is write one message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol and don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we could change to make reading the site any easier?

Very frustrated,
Serena

From clb5590 at gmail.com  Sat Jan  9 21:51:08 2010
From: clb5590 at gmail.com (Cindy Bennett)
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 16:51:08 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
In-Reply-To: <000801ca9171$5f6e3330$0201a8c0@Serene>
References: <000801ca9171$5f6e3330$0201a8c0@Serene>
Message-ID: <3fea3c411001091351p37d04795y765d3f28a6e574b5@mail.gmail.com>

Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
it, so taht is just a thought.

I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
users as it has, it can be.

A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
on on the site.

The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
mobile site.

One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
to the point where i have to close the window and open another.

Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
definitely be excited when voiceover improves.

Cindy

On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
> Hi nabsters,
>
> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or, at
> least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any graphics
> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them only
> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to the
> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things one
> can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many links
> and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy functions
> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to see
> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is write one
> message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol and
> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we could
> change to make reading the site any easier?
>
> Very frustrated,
> Serena
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>


From blackbyrdfly at gmail.com  Sat Jan  9 22:15:16 2010
From: blackbyrdfly at gmail.com (Jamie Principato)
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 17:15:16 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
In-Reply-To: <3fea3c411001091351p37d04795y765d3f28a6e574b5@mail.gmail.com>
References: <000801ca9171$5f6e3330$0201a8c0@Serene>
	<3fea3c411001091351p37d04795y765d3f28a6e574b5@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <63af025c1001091415n3b5d0712x12fb43255ce98441@mail.gmail.com>

Do any of you use Qwitter? If not, check out Qwitter-client.net (that's
Qwitter with a Q W, not a Q U). It's an accessible twitter client, and one
of the best, I think. You can tweet from anywhere on your computer with just
a few very simple keystrokes, and you never have to mess around with the
website.

I'm really close with the Qwitter inventor and head of the development team
(and by close, I mean I live with him, lol). This isn't out in the open just
yet, but Qwitter will soon have facebook support, so you'll be able to do
everything on facebook from the same convenient, accessible interface you
tweet from if you already use Qwitter. So if you've had it up to hear with
Facebook, just hang in there a bit longer and @Mongoose_Q will have an
answer for you.

On Sat, Jan 9, 2010 at 4:51 PM, Cindy Bennett <clb5590 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
> actiDovating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
> it, so taht is just a thought.
>
> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
> users as it has, it can be.
>
> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
> on on the site.
>
> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
> mobile site.
>
> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
>
> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
>
> Cindy
>
> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
> > Hi nabsters,
> >
> > It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or, at
> > least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
> > facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any
> graphics
> > or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them
> only
> > useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to
> the
> > link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
> > regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things one
> > can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many
> links
> > and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy functions
> > like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to see
> > those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is write
> one
> > message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol
> and
> > don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we could
> > change to make reading the site any easier?
> >
> > Very frustrated,
> > Serena
> > _______________________________________________
> > nabs-l mailing list
> > nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> > To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> > nabs-l:
> >
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/blackbyrdfly%40gmail.com
>

From ginisd at sbcglobal.net  Sat Jan  9 23:07:06 2010
From: ginisd at sbcglobal.net (V Nork)
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 15:07:06 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Fw: Accessible World presents Friday Night at the Movies,
	January 22, 2010
Message-ID: <3E433F68B098435AADDDDCC07D16F00A@windows4c0ed96>


----- Original Message ----- 
From: News Wire 
To: ginisd at sbcglobal.net 
Sent: Friday, January 08, 2010 11:23 PM
Subject: Accessible World presents Friday Night at the Movies, January 22, 2010



News Wire:
 
The cheerful fifties TV sitcom "Pleasantville" is revived in the nineties for a loyal cable audience. One devoted fan is shy suburban teen David Wagner, who has an almost obsessive interest in the series. Living with his divorced mother, David sometimes has disputes with his ultra-hip twin sister Jennifer. She wants to watch @MTV just when a Pleasantville marathon is about to begin. They struggle over the remote control, and it breaks.
 
A strange TV repairman supplies their new remote, a potent high-tech device which zaps David and Jennifer inside Pleasantville, where their new sitcom parents are businessman George Parker and wife Betty.

As "Bud" and "Mary Sue," the teens take up residence in a black-and-white suburbia where sex does not exist and the temperature is always 72 degrees. Life is always pleasant, books have no words, bathrooms have no toilets, married couples sleep in twin beds, the high school basketball team always wins, and nobody ever questions "The Good Life." David revels in Pleasantville's Prozac-styled peacefulness. He fits right in, but Jennifer's 1990s attitude upsets the blandness balance, painting parts of Pleasantville in "living color." Repressed desires surface, cracks appear in the fifties lifestyles, and the Pleasantville populace finds their lives changing in strange, wonderful ways. It's liberating, but there's also a darker side.

Pleasantville: Described. Audio only, mp3 format.
Genre: Comedy
Tagline: Nothing Is As Simple As Black And White.
Starring: Tobey Maguire, Jeff Daniels, Joan Allen
Director: Gary Ross
Year: 1998
Rating: PG-13

Thank you,

Nancy Lynn, Group Facilitator
Email: Freespirit52 at charter.net

Date: Friday, January 22, 2010

Time: 6:00 PM PST, 7:00 PM MST, 8:00 PM CST, 9:00 PM EST
         and elsewhere in the world Saturday 2:00 GMT. 


Approximately 15 minutes prior to the event start time; go to the Accessible World Auditorium at:

http://conference321.com/masteradmin/room.asp?id=rs5affc3cfa191

Or, alternatively, 

Select the Accessible World Auditorium at: www.accessibleworld.org
Enter your first and last names on the sign up screen.


If you are a first-time user of the Talking Communities online conferencing software, there is a small, safe software program that you need to download and then run. A link to the software is available on every entry screen to the Accessible World rooms.

All online interactive programs require no password, are free of charge, and open to anyone worldwide having an Internet connection, a computer, speakers, and a sound card. Those with microphones can interact audibly with the presenters and others in the virtual audience. To speak to us, hold down the control key and let up to listen. If no microphone is available, you may text chat with the attendees.

Accessible World uses News Wires, like this one, to inform people of the topic and times for the many Discussion Groups on Accessible World. The lists are announce only to keep the traffic to a minimum. You can join the Accessible World Announce List, the Tek Talk Announce List or the Sports Talk Announce List by completing the form at: www.accessibleworld.org/mailinglists

Accessible World Contacts:

Robert Acosta, Chair
Accessible World
818-998-0044
Email: boacosta at pacbell.net 
Web:   www.helpinghands4theblind.org

Joann Becker, Events Coordinator 
Accessible World 
617-487-8795 
Email: joannbecker at pcomcast.net

George Buys, CEO.
Talking Communities
Email: buys at talkingcommunities.com

The Accessible World, a division of Helping Hands For The Blind, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, seeks to educate the general public, the disabled community and the professionals who serve them by providing highly relevant information about new products, services, and training opportunities designed specifically to eliminate geographic and access barriers that adversely affect them









--
If you no longer wish to receive any more announcements from the Accessible World announce list service, you may unsubscribe, edit your preferences or forward this email by using one of the links below.

Unsubscribe:
this link

Update your preferences or unsubscribe:
this link
Forward a Message to Someone:
this link



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From thebluesisloose at gmail.com  Sat Jan  9 23:24:56 2010
From: thebluesisloose at gmail.com (Beth)
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 18:24:56 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
In-Reply-To: <63af025c1001091415n3b5d0712x12fb43255ce98441@mail.gmail.com>
References: <000801ca9171$5f6e3330$0201a8c0@Serene>
	<3fea3c411001091351p37d04795y765d3f28a6e574b5@mail.gmail.com>
	<63af025c1001091415n3b5d0712x12fb43255ce98441@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4383d01d1001091524p69605e49ma10eb03f7d7ed5aa@mail.gmail.com>

I'm also friends with @Mongoose_Q, the inventor of Qwitter, the
accessible Twitter client.  It will eventually have Facebook support
and other things as well.  Jamie introduced me to the wonderful
software that is Qwitter and I absolutely love it!
Beth

On 1/9/10, Jamie Principato <blackbyrdfly at gmail.com> wrote:
> Do any of you use Qwitter? If not, check out Qwitter-client.net (that's
> Qwitter with a Q W, not a Q U). It's an accessible twitter client, and one
> of the best, I think. You can tweet from anywhere on your computer with just
> a few very simple keystrokes, and you never have to mess around with the
> website.
>
> I'm really close with the Qwitter inventor and head of the development team
> (and by close, I mean I live with him, lol). This isn't out in the open just
> yet, but Qwitter will soon have facebook support, so you'll be able to do
> everything on facebook from the same convenient, accessible interface you
> tweet from if you already use Qwitter. So if you've had it up to hear with
> Facebook, just hang in there a bit longer and @Mongoose_Q will have an
> answer for you.
>
> On Sat, Jan 9, 2010 at 4:51 PM, Cindy Bennett <clb5590 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
>> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
>> actiDovating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
>> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
>> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
>> it, so taht is just a thought.
>>
>> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
>> users as it has, it can be.
>>
>> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
>> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
>> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
>> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
>> on on the site.
>>
>> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
>> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
>> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
>> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
>> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
>> mobile site.
>>
>> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
>> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
>> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
>>
>> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
>> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
>> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
>> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
>> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
>> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
>>
>> Cindy
>>
>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>> > Hi nabsters,
>> >
>> > It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or,
>> > at
>> > least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
>> > facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any
>> graphics
>> > or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them
>> only
>> > useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to
>> the
>> > link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
>> > regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things
>> > one
>> > can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many
>> links
>> > and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy
>> > functions
>> > like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to see
>> > those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is write
>> one
>> > message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol
>> and
>> > don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we
>> > could
>> > change to make reading the site any easier?
>> >
>> > Very frustrated,
>> > Serena
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > nabs-l mailing list
>> > nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> > To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> > nabs-l:
>> >
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>> >
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/blackbyrdfly%40gmail.com
>>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>


From Rachel at BeckerConsultants.com  Sat Jan  9 23:41:10 2010
From: Rachel at BeckerConsultants.com (Rachel Becker)
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 18:41:10 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
In-Reply-To: <3fea3c411001091351p37d04795y765d3f28a6e574b5@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <FHENLGICKACMNOHLGEFJOEIFCKAA.Rachel@BeckerConsultants.com>

I haven't been able to use the mobile site for the last few weeks and I have
been having some problems with the regular site. One problem is that when I
click the link to send a friend request nothing happens.
Rachel

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org]On
Behalf Of Cindy Bennett
Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 4:51 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!


Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
it, so taht is just a thought.

I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
users as it has, it can be.

A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
on on the site.

The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
mobile site.

One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
to the point where i have to close the window and open another.

Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
definitely be excited when voiceover improves.

Cindy

On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
> Hi nabsters,
>
> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or, at
> least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any
graphics
> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them only
> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to the
> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things one
> can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many
links
> and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy functions
> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to see
> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is write
one
> message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol and
> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we could
> change to make reading the site any easier?
>
> Very frustrated,
> Serena
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>

_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/rachel%40beckerconsu
ltants.com



From MisterAlexanderScottKaiser10301990 at gmx.com  Sat Jan  9 08:27:17 2010
From: MisterAlexanderScottKaiser10301990 at gmx.com (Mr. Alexander Scott Kaiser)
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 03:27:17 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] petition
Message-ID: <007301ca9105$8e79a040$0301a8c0@alexdesktopcph8e6hjk>

check read and sign
      http://www.petition2congress.com/2/2768/rewriting-us-rehabilitation-act-1973/  
      Quick  

From qmsingleton at comcast.net  Sun Jan 10 01:32:29 2010
From: qmsingleton at comcast.net (Quintina M. Singleton)
Date: Sat, 09 Jan 2010 19:32:29 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Ask the President with Joe Ruffalo
Message-ID: <auto-000134608626@mailfront1.g2host.com>




Due to technical difficulties, the Thruoureyes with Joe Ruffalo 
internet radio program had to cancel the very special "Ask the 
President" interview on Dec. 2, but is pleased to announce the show 
has been  rescheduled for this coming Wednesday January 13

  at

<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = 
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />8:00 PM EST.

The evening's guest will be National Federation of the Blind's 
president, Dr. Marc

Maurer.

  To listen to the program via telephone, please call

  1-605-475-6333, access code:

833520.

To access the show online visit www.thruoureyes.org/jaws.html

The call in number for anyone

interested in asking a question is 1-888-572-0141.

The theme for this program is Ask the President.

We encourage as many listeners to call in to Ask Dr. Maurer whatever 
question he

or she finds to be of importance.



From dennisgclark at sbcglobal.net  Sun Jan 10 01:37:50 2010
From: dennisgclark at sbcglobal.net (Dennis Clark)
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 17:37:50 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] petition
References: <007301ca9105$8e79a040$0301a8c0@alexdesktopcph8e6hjk>
Message-ID: <00e501ca9195$857fa490$6601a8c0@server>

What is this you want us to sign.  Clicking on an unknown link in an email 
is a great way to infect ones computer with a virus.  Your seeming 
sneakiness is suspicious.
Dennis

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mr. Alexander Scott Kaiser" 
<MisterAlexanderScottKaiser10301990 at gmx.com>
To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 12:27 AM
Subject: [nabs-l] petition


> check read and sign
> 
> http://www.petition2congress.com/2/2768/rewriting-us-rehabilitation-act-1973/
>      Quick
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dennisgclark%40sbcglobal.net 



From kerrik2006 at gmail.com  Sun Jan 10 02:11:15 2010
From: kerrik2006 at gmail.com (Kerri Kosten)
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 21:11:15 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
In-Reply-To: <FHENLGICKACMNOHLGEFJOEIFCKAA.Rachel@BeckerConsultants.com>
References: <3fea3c411001091351p37d04795y765d3f28a6e574b5@mail.gmail.com>
	<FHENLGICKACMNOHLGEFJOEIFCKAA.Rachel@BeckerConsultants.com>
Message-ID: <e5a820711001091811l2ebcab8ai32ae710b2d53b548@mail.gmail.com>

Hi All:

I haven't had any of these problems.
I never go onh the regular site anymore, just use
m.facebook.com
It works great for me.
It's really clean....and I can do everything I would normally do on
the regular site including editing my profile.
Works great!

Kerri

On 1/9/10, Rachel Becker <Rachel at beckerconsultants.com> wrote:
> I haven't been able to use the mobile site for the last few weeks and I have
> been having some problems with the regular site. One problem is that when I
> click the link to send a friend request nothing happens.
> Rachel
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org]On
> Behalf Of Cindy Bennett
> Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 4:51 PM
> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
>
>
> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
> activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
> it, so taht is just a thought.
>
> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
> users as it has, it can be.
>
> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
> on on the site.
>
> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
> mobile site.
>
> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
>
> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
>
> Cindy
>
> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>> Hi nabsters,
>>
>> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or, at
>> least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
>> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any
> graphics
>> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them only
>> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to the
>> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
>> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things one
>> can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many
> links
>> and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy functions
>> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to see
>> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is write
> one
>> message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol and
>> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we could
>> change to make reading the site any easier?
>>
>> Very frustrated,
>> Serena
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/rachel%40beckerconsu
> ltants.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>


From brownbears at mchsi.com  Sun Jan 10 02:17:48 2010
From: brownbears at mchsi.com (Miranda brown)
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 20:17:48 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Jaws and Netbooks
Message-ID: <7F94B6205DB945BBB0123D713A96F7C6@MIRANDA>

I just purchased a netbook, and I was wondering how to put JAWS on it?

From bunnykatie6 at gmail.com  Sun Jan 10 03:14:09 2010
From: bunnykatie6 at gmail.com (Katie Wang)
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 22:14:09 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
In-Reply-To: <e5a820711001091811l2ebcab8ai32ae710b2d53b548@mail.gmail.com>
References: <3fea3c411001091351p37d04795y765d3f28a6e574b5@mail.gmail.com>
	<FHENLGICKACMNOHLGEFJOEIFCKAA.Rachel@BeckerConsultants.com>
	<e5a820711001091811l2ebcab8ai32ae710b2d53b548@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <5096b4731001091914s5445f02ege64405184b94d57a@mail.gmail.com>

Hi, all,
  I primarily use the mobile site at m.facebook.com, and it has worked
great for me. I do have to switch to the regular site when doing
things such as creating an event or modifying my profile, but for the
day-to-day tasks of status updates,writing wall posts, and sending
messages to friends, the mobile site has never given me any problems.
One issue I have encountered is that JAWS wouldn't read the email
addresses listed under the Contact Information section of my friends'
profiles. Has this happened to anyone?
   Katie


On 1/9/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All:
>
> I haven't had any of these problems.
> I never go onh the regular site anymore, just use
> m.facebook.com
> It works great for me.
> It's really clean....and I can do everything I would normally do on
> the regular site including editing my profile.
> Works great!
>
> Kerri
>
> On 1/9/10, Rachel Becker <Rachel at beckerconsultants.com> wrote:
>> I haven't been able to use the mobile site for the last few weeks and I
>> have
>> been having some problems with the regular site. One problem is that when
>> I
>> click the link to send a friend request nothing happens.
>> Rachel
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org]On
>> Behalf Of Cindy Bennett
>> Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 4:51 PM
>> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
>>
>>
>> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
>> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
>> activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
>> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
>> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
>> it, so taht is just a thought.
>>
>> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
>> users as it has, it can be.
>>
>> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
>> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
>> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
>> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
>> on on the site.
>>
>> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
>> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
>> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
>> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
>> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
>> mobile site.
>>
>> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
>> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
>> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
>>
>> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
>> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
>> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
>> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
>> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
>> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
>>
>> Cindy
>>
>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>> Hi nabsters,
>>>
>>> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or, at
>>> least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
>>> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any
>> graphics
>>> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them
>>> only
>>> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to
>>> the
>>> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
>>> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things one
>>> can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many
>> links
>>> and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy functions
>>> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to see
>>> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is write
>> one
>>> message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol
>>> and
>>> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we could
>>> change to make reading the site any easier?
>>>
>>> Very frustrated,
>>> Serena
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>>
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/rachel%40beckerconsu
>> ltants.com
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bunnykatie6%40gmail.com
>


From serenacucco at verizon.net  Sun Jan 10 03:19:46 2010
From: serenacucco at verizon.net (Serena)
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 22:19:46 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
References: <000801ca9171$5f6e3330$0201a8c0@Serene>
	<3fea3c411001091351p37d04795y765d3f28a6e574b5@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <004b01ca91a3$c2d0efd0$0201a8c0@Serene>

m.facebook.com doesn't really exist anymore for people who only use 
computers, not cell phones.  I already tried that.  Thanks anyway.

Serena


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Cindy Bennett" <clb5590 at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 4:51 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!


> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
> activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
> it, so taht is just a thought.
>
> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
> users as it has, it can be.
>
> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
> on on the site.
>
> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
> mobile site.
>
> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
>
> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
>
> Cindy
>
> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>> Hi nabsters,
>>
>> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or, at
>> least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
>> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any 
>> graphics
>> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them 
>> only
>> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to 
>> the
>> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
>> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things one
>> can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many 
>> links
>> and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy functions
>> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to see
>> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is write 
>> one
>> message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol 
>> and
>> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we could
>> change to make reading the site any easier?
>>
>> Very frustrated,
>> Serena
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net 



From serenacucco at verizon.net  Sun Jan 10 03:23:28 2010
From: serenacucco at verizon.net (Serena)
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 22:23:28 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
References: <3fea3c411001091351p37d04795y765d3f28a6e574b5@mail.gmail.com><FHENLGICKACMNOHLGEFJOEIFCKAA.Rachel@BeckerConsultants.com>
	<e5a820711001091811l2ebcab8ai32ae710b2d53b548@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <006f01ca91a4$46fd4d30$0201a8c0@Serene>

Carie,

When you go on that site, do you use your cell phone or your computer?  That 
makes a difference.

Serena


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kerri Kosten" <kerrik2006 at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 9:11 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!


> Hi All:
>
> I haven't had any of these problems.
> I never go onh the regular site anymore, just use
> m.facebook.com
> It works great for me.
> It's really clean....and I can do everything I would normally do on
> the regular site including editing my profile.
> Works great!
>
> Kerri
>
> On 1/9/10, Rachel Becker <Rachel at beckerconsultants.com> wrote:
>> I haven't been able to use the mobile site for the last few weeks and I 
>> have
>> been having some problems with the regular site. One problem is that when 
>> I
>> click the link to send a friend request nothing happens.
>> Rachel
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org]On
>> Behalf Of Cindy Bennett
>> Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 4:51 PM
>> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
>>
>>
>> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
>> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
>> activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
>> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
>> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
>> it, so taht is just a thought.
>>
>> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
>> users as it has, it can be.
>>
>> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
>> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
>> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
>> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
>> on on the site.
>>
>> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
>> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
>> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
>> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
>> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
>> mobile site.
>>
>> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
>> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
>> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
>>
>> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
>> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
>> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
>> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
>> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
>> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
>>
>> Cindy
>>
>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>> Hi nabsters,
>>>
>>> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or, 
>>> at
>>> least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
>>> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any
>> graphics
>>> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them 
>>> only
>>> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to 
>>> the
>>> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
>>> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things 
>>> one
>>> can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many
>> links
>>> and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy 
>>> functions
>>> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to see
>>> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is write
>> one
>>> message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol 
>>> and
>>> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we 
>>> could
>>> change to make reading the site any easier?
>>>
>>> Very frustrated,
>>> Serena
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>>
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/rachel%40beckerconsu
>> ltants.com
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net 



From raniaismail04 at gmail.com  Sun Jan 10 03:23:44 2010
From: raniaismail04 at gmail.com (Rania)
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 22:23:44 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
References: <000801ca9171$5f6e3330$0201a8c0@Serene><3fea3c411001091351p37d04795y765d3f28a6e574b5@mail.gmail.com>
	<004b01ca91a3$c2d0efd0$0201a8c0@Serene>
Message-ID: <001d01ca91a4$5153c930$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>

m.facebook.com works fine for me too!
Rania,
"For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
See you at the finish line."
~Christopher Reeve

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Serena" <serenacucco at verizon.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 10:19 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!


> m.facebook.com doesn't really exist anymore for people who only use 
> computers, not cell phones.  I already tried that.  Thanks anyway.
>
> Serena
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Cindy Bennett" <clb5590 at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 4:51 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
>
>
>> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
>> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
>> activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
>> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
>> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
>> it, so taht is just a thought.
>>
>> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
>> users as it has, it can be.
>>
>> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
>> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
>> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
>> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
>> on on the site.
>>
>> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
>> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
>> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
>> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
>> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
>> mobile site.
>>
>> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
>> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
>> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
>>
>> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
>> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
>> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
>> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
>> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
>> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
>>
>> Cindy
>>
>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>> Hi nabsters,
>>>
>>> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or, 
>>> at
>>> least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
>>> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any 
>>> graphics
>>> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them 
>>> only
>>> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to 
>>> the
>>> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
>>> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things 
>>> one
>>> can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many 
>>> links
>>> and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy 
>>> functions
>>> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to see
>>> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is write 
>>> one
>>> message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol 
>>> and
>>> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we 
>>> could
>>> change to make reading the site any easier?
>>>
>>> Very frustrated,
>>> Serena
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaismail04%40gmail.com 



From kerrik2006 at gmail.com  Sun Jan 10 03:26:58 2010
From: kerrik2006 at gmail.com (Kerri Kosten)
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 22:26:58 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Jaws and Netbooks
In-Reply-To: <7F94B6205DB945BBB0123D713A96F7C6@MIRANDA>
References: <7F94B6205DB945BBB0123D713A96F7C6@MIRANDA>
Message-ID: <e5a820711001091926r78a8f251r6ae1813f0222da46@mail.gmail.com>

Hi:
The best way to do that is to just go to the freedom scientific
website and click on downloads, then jaws, then ddownload the file,
click save, save it to a location like the desktop or somewhere like
that, then go to that location, click the file, click run, then follow
the prompts to install it.
Note that you will have to have your Jaws authorization number and
serial number to activate it.

Hope that helps!
Kerri

On 1/9/10, Miranda brown <brownbears at mchsi.com> wrote:
> I just purchased a netbook, and I was wondering how to put JAWS on it?
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>


From brileyp at gmail.com  Sun Jan 10 03:33:32 2010
From: brileyp at gmail.com (Briley Pollard)
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 22:33:32 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
In-Reply-To: <5096b4731001091914s5445f02ege64405184b94d57a@mail.gmail.com>
References: <3fea3c411001091351p37d04795y765d3f28a6e574b5@mail.gmail.com>
	<FHENLGICKACMNOHLGEFJOEIFCKAA.Rachel@BeckerConsultants.com>
	<e5a820711001091811l2ebcab8ai32ae710b2d53b548@mail.gmail.com>
	<5096b4731001091914s5445f02ege64405184b94d57a@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <AA362D87-8C61-43AB-AE2D-044FDE4B37BF@gmail.com>

Yeah I can't read people's EMail addresses either. I haven't tried with the Mac, but it never did with the PC. I quite frankly just don't have the patience for Facebook. Twitter is much better for me.

-Briley
On Jan 9, 2010, at 10:14 PM, Katie Wang wrote:

> Hi, all,
>  I primarily use the mobile site at m.facebook.com, and it has worked
> great for me. I do have to switch to the regular site when doing
> things such as creating an event or modifying my profile, but for the
> day-to-day tasks of status updates,writing wall posts, and sending
> messages to friends, the mobile site has never given me any problems.
> One issue I have encountered is that JAWS wouldn't read the email
> addresses listed under the Contact Information section of my friends'
> profiles. Has this happened to anyone?
>   Katie
> 
> 
> On 1/9/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi All:
>> 
>> I haven't had any of these problems.
>> I never go onh the regular site anymore, just use
>> m.facebook.com
>> It works great for me.
>> It's really clean....and I can do everything I would normally do on
>> the regular site including editing my profile.
>> Works great!
>> 
>> Kerri
>> 
>> On 1/9/10, Rachel Becker <Rachel at beckerconsultants.com> wrote:
>>> I haven't been able to use the mobile site for the last few weeks and I
>>> have
>>> been having some problems with the regular site. One problem is that when
>>> I
>>> click the link to send a friend request nothing happens.
>>> Rachel
>>> 
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org]On
>>> Behalf Of Cindy Bennett
>>> Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 4:51 PM
>>> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
>>> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
>>> activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
>>> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
>>> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
>>> it, so taht is just a thought.
>>> 
>>> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
>>> users as it has, it can be.
>>> 
>>> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
>>> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
>>> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
>>> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
>>> on on the site.
>>> 
>>> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
>>> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
>>> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
>>> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
>>> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
>>> mobile site.
>>> 
>>> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
>>> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
>>> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
>>> 
>>> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
>>> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
>>> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
>>> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
>>> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
>>> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
>>> 
>>> Cindy
>>> 
>>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>>> Hi nabsters,
>>>> 
>>>> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or, at
>>>> least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
>>>> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any
>>> graphics
>>>> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them
>>>> only
>>>> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to
>>>> the
>>>> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
>>>> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things one
>>>> can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many
>>> links
>>>> and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy functions
>>>> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to see
>>>> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is write
>>> one
>>>> message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol
>>>> and
>>>> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we could
>>>> change to make reading the site any easier?
>>>> 
>>>> Very frustrated,
>>>> Serena
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> 
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/rachel%40beckerconsu
>>> ltants.com
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bunnykatie6%40gmail.com
>> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com



From brice.smith319 at gmail.com  Sun Jan 10 03:50:15 2010
From: brice.smith319 at gmail.com (Brice Smith)
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 22:50:15 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
In-Reply-To: <5096b4731001091914s5445f02ege64405184b94d57a@mail.gmail.com>
References: <3fea3c411001091351p37d04795y765d3f28a6e574b5@mail.gmail.com>
	<FHENLGICKACMNOHLGEFJOEIFCKAA.Rachel@BeckerConsultants.com>
	<e5a820711001091811l2ebcab8ai32ae710b2d53b548@mail.gmail.com>
	<5096b4731001091914s5445f02ege64405184b94d57a@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <679a273c1001091950r34b3e7cbq5170d333a215a91f@mail.gmail.com>

I've heard that the email address is hidden in some type of fancy
graphic to prevent spammers, so a screen reader won't read it.

Lately I have been unable to watch any videos on Facebook. The play
and stop buttons no longer show up on the page, though the video
comments and other options are listed. It's as If the controls for
watching a video have disappeared, and I do have the latest version of
flash. I've never used the mobile version of Facebook until tonight,
and the mobile version does not support viewing videos. Other than
that, I really haven't experienced many problems with Facebook.

Brice
On 1/9/10, Katie Wang <bunnykatie6 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, all,
>   I primarily use the mobile site at m.facebook.com, and it has worked
> great for me. I do have to switch to the regular site when doing
> things such as creating an event or modifying my profile, but for the
> day-to-day tasks of status updates,writing wall posts, and sending
> messages to friends, the mobile site has never given me any problems.
> One issue I have encountered is that JAWS wouldn't read the email
> addresses listed under the Contact Information section of my friends'
> profiles. Has this happened to anyone?
>    Katie
>
>
> On 1/9/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi All:
>>
>> I haven't had any of these problems.
>> I never go onh the regular site anymore, just use
>> m.facebook.com
>> It works great for me.
>> It's really clean....and I can do everything I would normally do on
>> the regular site including editing my profile.
>> Works great!
>>
>> Kerri
>>
>> On 1/9/10, Rachel Becker <Rachel at beckerconsultants.com> wrote:
>>> I haven't been able to use the mobile site for the last few weeks and I
>>> have
>>> been having some problems with the regular site. One problem is that when
>>> I
>>> click the link to send a friend request nothing happens.
>>> Rachel
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org]On
>>> Behalf Of Cindy Bennett
>>> Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 4:51 PM
>>> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
>>>
>>>
>>> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
>>> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
>>> activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
>>> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
>>> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
>>> it, so taht is just a thought.
>>>
>>> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
>>> users as it has, it can be.
>>>
>>> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
>>> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
>>> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
>>> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
>>> on on the site.
>>>
>>> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
>>> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
>>> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
>>> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
>>> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
>>> mobile site.
>>>
>>> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
>>> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
>>> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
>>>
>>> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
>>> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
>>> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
>>> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
>>> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
>>> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
>>>
>>> Cindy
>>>
>>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>>> Hi nabsters,
>>>>
>>>> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or,
>>>> at
>>>> least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
>>>> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any
>>> graphics
>>>> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them
>>>> only
>>>> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to
>>>> the
>>>> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
>>>> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things
>>>> one
>>>> can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many
>>> links
>>>> and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy
>>>> functions
>>>> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to see
>>>> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is write
>>> one
>>>> message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol
>>>> and
>>>> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we
>>>> could
>>>> change to make reading the site any easier?
>>>>
>>>> Very frustrated,
>>>> Serena
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/rachel%40beckerconsu
>>> ltants.com
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bunnykatie6%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com
>


From mworkman.lists at gmail.com  Sun Jan 10 03:53:49 2010
From: mworkman.lists at gmail.com (Marc Workman)
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 20:53:49 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
In-Reply-To: <004b01ca91a3$c2d0efd0$0201a8c0@Serene>
Message-ID: <LNEJJKLNICEECFDGEDGLAEHFFOAA.mworkman.lists@gmail.com>

Serena,

Like Cindy suggested, you have to actually go to the mobile site by opening
the site
m.facebook.com

In other words, do not go to the regular site and click on mobile.  You may
have been able to do this before, but now you have to point your browser to
m.facebook.com

I've just confirmed that going to m.facebook.com and clicking on the mobile
link of the regular site do not take you to the same place.  Try actually
going to m.facebook.com, and it should work fine.

HTH

Marc

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org]On
Behalf Of Serena
Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 8:20 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!


m.facebook.com doesn't really exist anymore for people who only use
computers, not cell phones.  I already tried that.  Thanks anyway.

Serena


----- Original Message -----
From: "Cindy Bennett" <clb5590 at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 4:51 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!


> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
> activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
> it, so taht is just a thought.
>
> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
> users as it has, it can be.
>
> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
> on on the site.
>
> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
> mobile site.
>
> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
>
> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
>
> Cindy
>
> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>> Hi nabsters,
>>
>> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or, at
>> least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
>> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any
>> graphics
>> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them
>> only
>> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to
>> the
>> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
>> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things one
>> can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many
>> links
>> and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy functions
>> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to see
>> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is write
>> one
>> message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol
>> and
>> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we could
>> change to make reading the site any easier?
>>
>> Very frustrated,
>> Serena
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizo
n.net


_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/mworkman.lists%40gma
il.com



From raniaismail04 at gmail.com  Sun Jan 10 04:12:44 2010
From: raniaismail04 at gmail.com (Rania)
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 23:12:44 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
References: <3fea3c411001091351p37d04795y765d3f28a6e574b5@mail.gmail.com><FHENLGICKACMNOHLGEFJOEIFCKAA.Rachel@BeckerConsultants.com><e5a820711001091811l2ebcab8ai32ae710b2d53b548@mail.gmail.com><5096b4731001091914s5445f02ege64405184b94d57a@mail.gmail.com>
	<AA362D87-8C61-43AB-AE2D-044FDE4B37BF@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <002301ca91ab$297d67c0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>

jaws will not read the email for me as well.
I think it has to do something with the way it shows up in the person's 
profile.
Rania,
"For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
See you at the finish line."
~Christopher Reeve

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Briley Pollard" <brileyp at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 10:33 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!


> Yeah I can't read people's EMail addresses either. I haven't tried with 
> the Mac, but it never did with the PC. I quite frankly just don't have the 
> patience for Facebook. Twitter is much better for me.
>
> -Briley
> On Jan 9, 2010, at 10:14 PM, Katie Wang wrote:
>
>> Hi, all,
>>  I primarily use the mobile site at m.facebook.com, and it has worked
>> great for me. I do have to switch to the regular site when doing
>> things such as creating an event or modifying my profile, but for the
>> day-to-day tasks of status updates,writing wall posts, and sending
>> messages to friends, the mobile site has never given me any problems.
>> One issue I have encountered is that JAWS wouldn't read the email
>> addresses listed under the Contact Information section of my friends'
>> profiles. Has this happened to anyone?
>>   Katie
>>
>>
>> On 1/9/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi All:
>>>
>>> I haven't had any of these problems.
>>> I never go onh the regular site anymore, just use
>>> m.facebook.com
>>> It works great for me.
>>> It's really clean....and I can do everything I would normally do on
>>> the regular site including editing my profile.
>>> Works great!
>>>
>>> Kerri
>>>
>>> On 1/9/10, Rachel Becker <Rachel at beckerconsultants.com> wrote:
>>>> I haven't been able to use the mobile site for the last few weeks and I
>>>> have
>>>> been having some problems with the regular site. One problem is that 
>>>> when
>>>> I
>>>> click the link to send a friend request nothing happens.
>>>> Rachel
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org]On
>>>> Behalf Of Cindy Bennett
>>>> Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 4:51 PM
>>>> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
>>>> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
>>>> activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
>>>> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
>>>> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
>>>> it, so taht is just a thought.
>>>>
>>>> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
>>>> users as it has, it can be.
>>>>
>>>> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
>>>> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
>>>> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
>>>> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
>>>> on on the site.
>>>>
>>>> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
>>>> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
>>>> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
>>>> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
>>>> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
>>>> mobile site.
>>>>
>>>> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
>>>> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
>>>> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
>>>>
>>>> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
>>>> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
>>>> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
>>>> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
>>>> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
>>>> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
>>>>
>>>> Cindy
>>>>
>>>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>>>> Hi nabsters,
>>>>>
>>>>> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or, 
>>>>> at
>>>>> least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
>>>>> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any
>>>> graphics
>>>>> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them
>>>>> only
>>>>> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to
>>>>> the
>>>>> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
>>>>> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things 
>>>>> one
>>>>> can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many
>>>> links
>>>>> and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy 
>>>>> functions
>>>>> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to 
>>>>> see
>>>>> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is 
>>>>> write
>>>> one
>>>>> message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol
>>>>> and
>>>>> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we 
>>>>> could
>>>>> change to make reading the site any easier?
>>>>>
>>>>> Very frustrated,
>>>>> Serena
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/rachel%40beckerconsu
>>>> ltants.com
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bunnykatie6%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaismail04%40gmail.com 



From myangelblessings at hotmail.com  Sun Jan 10 04:52:46 2010
From: myangelblessings at hotmail.com (Ben Peters)
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 20:52:46 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
In-Reply-To: <001d01ca91a4$5153c930$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>
References: <000801ca9171$5f6e3330$0201a8c0@Serene><3fea3c411001091351p37d04795y765d3f28a6e574b5@mail.gmail.com>,
	<004b01ca91a3$c2d0efd0$0201a8c0@Serene>,
	<001d01ca91a4$5153c930$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>
Message-ID: <BLU141-W333770BC60625746193E6DC26E0@phx.gbl>


I also have no problems using m.facebook.com. It gets done what I need for the basic, and its what I use the majority of the time. I only use the regular site when I need to do something the mobile doesn't provide like posting a link. -Ben



 



 
> From: raniaismail04 at gmail.com
> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 22:23:44 -0500
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
> 
> m.facebook.com works fine for me too!
> Rania,
> "For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
> For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
> For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
> See you at the finish line."
> ~Christopher Reeve
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Serena" <serenacucco at verizon.net>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 10:19 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
> 
> 
> > m.facebook.com doesn't really exist anymore for people who only use 
> > computers, not cell phones. I already tried that. Thanks anyway.
> >
> > Serena
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message ----- 
> > From: "Cindy Bennett" <clb5590 at gmail.com>
> > To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> > <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> > Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 4:51 PM
> > Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
> >
> >
> >> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
> >> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
> >> activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
> >> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
> >> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
> >> it, so taht is just a thought.
> >>
> >> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
> >> users as it has, it can be.
> >>
> >> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
> >> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
> >> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
> >> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
> >> on on the site.
> >>
> >> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
> >> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
> >> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
> >> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
> >> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
> >> mobile site.
> >>
> >> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
> >> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
> >> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
> >>
> >> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
> >> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
> >> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
> >> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
> >> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
> >> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
> >>
> >> Cindy
> >>
> >> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
> >>> Hi nabsters,
> >>>
> >>> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or, 
> >>> at
> >>> least, more cumbersome to use. It seems that all the features on the
> >>> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any 
> >>> graphics
> >>> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them 
> >>> only
> >>> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones. When I go to 
> >>> the
> >>> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
> >>> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things 
> >>> one
> >>> can do with facebook on their cell phones. There are simply too many 
> >>> links
> >>> and features on every page! Ok, it's great to know about fancy 
> >>> functions
> >>> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to see
> >>> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is write 
> >>> one
> >>> message to someone? For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol 
> >>> and
> >>> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we 
> >>> could
> >>> change to make reading the site any easier?
> >>>
> >>> Very frustrated,
> >>> Serena
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> nabs-l mailing list
> >>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> >>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> >>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> >>> nabs-l:
> >>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
> >>>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> nabs-l mailing list
> >> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> >> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> >> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> >> nabs-l:
> >> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > nabs-l mailing list
> > nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> > To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> > nabs-l:
> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaismail04%40gmail.com 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/myangelblessings%40hotmail.com
 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail: Free, trusted and rich email service.
http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390708/direct/01/

From kerrik2006 at gmail.com  Sun Jan 10 04:55:42 2010
From: kerrik2006 at gmail.com (Kerri Kosten)
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 23:55:42 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
In-Reply-To: <AA362D87-8C61-43AB-AE2D-044FDE4B37BF@gmail.com>
References: <3fea3c411001091351p37d04795y765d3f28a6e574b5@mail.gmail.com>
	<FHENLGICKACMNOHLGEFJOEIFCKAA.Rachel@BeckerConsultants.com>
	<e5a820711001091811l2ebcab8ai32ae710b2d53b548@mail.gmail.com>
	<5096b4731001091914s5445f02ege64405184b94d57a@mail.gmail.com>
	<AA362D87-8C61-43AB-AE2D-044FDE4B37BF@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <e5a820711001092055i7895e4aaq67f7e3998e756b53@mail.gmail.com>

Hi:

You can go on it from either your cell or the computer.
I use the computer with it minaly....I have the Iphone so when I am on
my Iphone I use the Facebook app....so the only time I use the mobile
site is from the computer.
You can use it fine from the computer though....you don't have to just
use it from your cell phone....the site works the same from either.

Kerri

On 1/9/10, Briley Pollard <brileyp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yeah I can't read people's EMail addresses either. I haven't tried with the
> Mac, but it never did with the PC. I quite frankly just don't have the
> patience for Facebook. Twitter is much better for me.
>
> -Briley
> On Jan 9, 2010, at 10:14 PM, Katie Wang wrote:
>
>> Hi, all,
>>  I primarily use the mobile site at m.facebook.com, and it has worked
>> great for me. I do have to switch to the regular site when doing
>> things such as creating an event or modifying my profile, but for the
>> day-to-day tasks of status updates,writing wall posts, and sending
>> messages to friends, the mobile site has never given me any problems.
>> One issue I have encountered is that JAWS wouldn't read the email
>> addresses listed under the Contact Information section of my friends'
>> profiles. Has this happened to anyone?
>>   Katie
>>
>>
>> On 1/9/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi All:
>>>
>>> I haven't had any of these problems.
>>> I never go onh the regular site anymore, just use
>>> m.facebook.com
>>> It works great for me.
>>> It's really clean....and I can do everything I would normally do on
>>> the regular site including editing my profile.
>>> Works great!
>>>
>>> Kerri
>>>
>>> On 1/9/10, Rachel Becker <Rachel at beckerconsultants.com> wrote:
>>>> I haven't been able to use the mobile site for the last few weeks and I
>>>> have
>>>> been having some problems with the regular site. One problem is that
>>>> when
>>>> I
>>>> click the link to send a friend request nothing happens.
>>>> Rachel
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org]On
>>>> Behalf Of Cindy Bennett
>>>> Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 4:51 PM
>>>> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
>>>> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
>>>> activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
>>>> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
>>>> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
>>>> it, so taht is just a thought.
>>>>
>>>> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
>>>> users as it has, it can be.
>>>>
>>>> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
>>>> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
>>>> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
>>>> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
>>>> on on the site.
>>>>
>>>> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
>>>> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
>>>> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
>>>> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
>>>> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
>>>> mobile site.
>>>>
>>>> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
>>>> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
>>>> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
>>>>
>>>> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
>>>> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
>>>> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
>>>> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
>>>> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
>>>> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
>>>>
>>>> Cindy
>>>>
>>>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>>>> Hi nabsters,
>>>>>
>>>>> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or,
>>>>> at
>>>>> least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
>>>>> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any
>>>> graphics
>>>>> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them
>>>>> only
>>>>> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to
>>>>> the
>>>>> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
>>>>> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things
>>>>> one
>>>>> can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many
>>>> links
>>>>> and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy
>>>>> functions
>>>>> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to see
>>>>> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is
>>>>> write
>>>> one
>>>>> message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol
>>>>> and
>>>>> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we
>>>>> could
>>>>> change to make reading the site any easier?
>>>>>
>>>>> Very frustrated,
>>>>> Serena
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/rachel%40beckerconsu
>>>> ltants.com
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bunnykatie6%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>


From kerrik2006 at gmail.com  Sun Jan 10 05:10:53 2010
From: kerrik2006 at gmail.com (Kerri Kosten)
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 00:10:53 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
In-Reply-To: <004b01ca91a3$c2d0efd0$0201a8c0@Serene>
References: <000801ca9171$5f6e3330$0201a8c0@Serene>
	<3fea3c411001091351p37d04795y765d3f28a6e574b5@mail.gmail.com>
	<004b01ca91a3$c2d0efd0$0201a8c0@Serene>
Message-ID: <e5a820711001092110i5fd0c0c5g7913de1b143e413d@mail.gmail.com>

Hey:

Hmm, that's odd. I go to it all the time and it comes up as a
site....I mean it's not the same as the regular one....it's a mobile
version of the site....but it works and I can do things on it...and
it's a lot cleaner than the regular site i find.

What happens when you try it?
Does any type of page come up?

Kerri

On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
> m.facebook.com doesn't really exist anymore for people who only use
> computers, not cell phones.  I already tried that.  Thanks anyway.
>
> Serena
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Cindy Bennett" <clb5590 at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 4:51 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
>
>
>> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
>> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
>> activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
>> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
>> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
>> it, so taht is just a thought.
>>
>> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
>> users as it has, it can be.
>>
>> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
>> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
>> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
>> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
>> on on the site.
>>
>> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
>> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
>> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
>> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
>> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
>> mobile site.
>>
>> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
>> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
>> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
>>
>> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
>> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
>> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
>> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
>> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
>> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
>>
>> Cindy
>>
>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>> Hi nabsters,
>>>
>>> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or, at
>>> least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
>>> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any
>>> graphics
>>> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them
>>> only
>>> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to
>>> the
>>> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
>>> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things one
>>> can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many
>>> links
>>> and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy functions
>>> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to see
>>> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is write
>>> one
>>> message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol
>>> and
>>> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we could
>>> change to make reading the site any easier?
>>>
>>> Very frustrated,
>>> Serena
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>


From kramc11 at gmail.com  Sun Jan 10 05:26:31 2010
From: kramc11 at gmail.com (Mark J. Cadigan)
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 00:26:31 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
In-Reply-To: <679a273c1001091950r34b3e7cbq5170d333a215a91f@mail.gmail.com>
References: <3fea3c411001091351p37d04795y765d3f28a6e574b5@mail.gmail.com><FHENLGICKACMNOHLGEFJOEIFCKAA.Rachel@BeckerConsultants.com><e5a820711001091811l2ebcab8ai32ae710b2d53b548@mail.gmail.com><5096b4731001091914s5445f02ege64405184b94d57a@mail.gmail.com>
	<679a273c1001091950r34b3e7cbq5170d333a215a91f@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <41302DC76F194A17A59E2A824C9AE26B@SonyPC>

I found a website called facebook lite. I like it. The address is 
http://lite.facebook.com/

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Brice Smith" <brice.smith319 at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 10:50 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!


> I've heard that the email address is hidden in some type of fancy
> graphic to prevent spammers, so a screen reader won't read it.
>
> Lately I have been unable to watch any videos on Facebook. The play
> and stop buttons no longer show up on the page, though the video
> comments and other options are listed. It's as If the controls for
> watching a video have disappeared, and I do have the latest version of
> flash. I've never used the mobile version of Facebook until tonight,
> and the mobile version does not support viewing videos. Other than
> that, I really haven't experienced many problems with Facebook.
>
> Brice
> On 1/9/10, Katie Wang <bunnykatie6 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi, all,
>>   I primarily use the mobile site at m.facebook.com, and it has worked
>> great for me. I do have to switch to the regular site when doing
>> things such as creating an event or modifying my profile, but for the
>> day-to-day tasks of status updates,writing wall posts, and sending
>> messages to friends, the mobile site has never given me any problems.
>> One issue I have encountered is that JAWS wouldn't read the email
>> addresses listed under the Contact Information section of my friends'
>> profiles. Has this happened to anyone?
>>    Katie
>>
>>
>> On 1/9/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi All:
>>>
>>> I haven't had any of these problems.
>>> I never go onh the regular site anymore, just use
>>> m.facebook.com
>>> It works great for me.
>>> It's really clean....and I can do everything I would normally do on
>>> the regular site including editing my profile.
>>> Works great!
>>>
>>> Kerri
>>>
>>> On 1/9/10, Rachel Becker <Rachel at beckerconsultants.com> wrote:
>>>> I haven't been able to use the mobile site for the last few weeks and I
>>>> have
>>>> been having some problems with the regular site. One problem is that 
>>>> when
>>>> I
>>>> click the link to send a friend request nothing happens.
>>>> Rachel
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org]On
>>>> Behalf Of Cindy Bennett
>>>> Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 4:51 PM
>>>> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
>>>> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
>>>> activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
>>>> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
>>>> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
>>>> it, so taht is just a thought.
>>>>
>>>> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
>>>> users as it has, it can be.
>>>>
>>>> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
>>>> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
>>>> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
>>>> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
>>>> on on the site.
>>>>
>>>> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
>>>> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
>>>> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
>>>> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
>>>> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
>>>> mobile site.
>>>>
>>>> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
>>>> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
>>>> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
>>>>
>>>> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
>>>> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
>>>> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
>>>> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
>>>> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
>>>> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
>>>>
>>>> Cindy
>>>>
>>>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>>>> Hi nabsters,
>>>>>
>>>>> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or,
>>>>> at
>>>>> least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
>>>>> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any
>>>> graphics
>>>>> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them
>>>>> only
>>>>> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to
>>>>> the
>>>>> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
>>>>> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things
>>>>> one
>>>>> can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many
>>>> links
>>>>> and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy
>>>>> functions
>>>>> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to 
>>>>> see
>>>>> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is 
>>>>> write
>>>> one
>>>>> message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol
>>>>> and
>>>>> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we
>>>>> could
>>>>> change to make reading the site any easier?
>>>>>
>>>>> Very frustrated,
>>>>> Serena
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/rachel%40beckerconsu
>>>> ltants.com
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bunnykatie6%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kramc11%40gmail.com
> 



From steve.jacobson at visi.com  Sun Jan 10 06:07:37 2010
From: steve.jacobson at visi.com (Steve Jacobson)
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 00:07:37 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
In-Reply-To: <006f01ca91a4$46fd4d30$0201a8c0@Serene>
Message-ID: <auto-000134333542@mailfront2.g2host.com>

You can use either a computer or a cellphone on the m.facebook.com site.  In particular, a computer works fine 
although there has been some problems in the past with older web browsers.

Best regards,

Steve

On Sat, 9 Jan 2010 22:23:28 -0500, Serena wrote:

>Carie,

>When you go on that site, do you use your cell phone or your computer?  That 
>makes a difference.

>Serena


>----- Original Message ----- 
>From: "Kerri Kosten" <kerrik2006 at gmail.com>
>To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
><nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 9:11 PM
>Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!


>> Hi All:
>>
>> I haven't had any of these problems.
>> I never go onh the regular site anymore, just use
>> m.facebook.com
>> It works great for me.
>> It's really clean....and I can do everything I would normally do on
>> the regular site including editing my profile.
>> Works great!
>>
>> Kerri
>>
>> On 1/9/10, Rachel Becker <Rachel at beckerconsultants.com> wrote:
>>> I haven't been able to use the mobile site for the last few weeks and I 
>>> have
>>> been having some problems with the regular site. One problem is that when 
>>> I
>>> click the link to send a friend request nothing happens.
>>> Rachel
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org]On
>>> Behalf Of Cindy Bennett
>>> Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 4:51 PM
>>> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
>>>
>>>
>>> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
>>> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
>>> activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
>>> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
>>> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
>>> it, so taht is just a thought.
>>>
>>> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
>>> users as it has, it can be.
>>>
>>> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
>>> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
>>> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
>>> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
>>> on on the site.
>>>
>>> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
>>> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
>>> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
>>> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
>>> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
>>> mobile site.
>>>
>>> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
>>> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
>>> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
>>>
>>> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
>>> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
>>> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
>>> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
>>> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
>>> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
>>>
>>> Cindy
>>>
>>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>>> Hi nabsters,
>>>>
>>>> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or, 
>>>> at
>>>> least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
>>>> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any
>>> graphics
>>>> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them 
>>>> only
>>>> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to 
>>>> the
>>>> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
>>>> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things 
>>>> one
>>>> can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many
>>> links
>>>> and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy 
>>>> functions
>>>> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to see
>>>> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is write
>>> one
>>>> message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol 
>>>> and
>>>> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we 
>>>> could
>>>> change to make reading the site any easier?
>>>>
>>>> Very frustrated,
>>>> Serena
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/rachel%40beckerconsu
>>> ltants.com
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net 


>_______________________________________________
>nabs-l mailing list
>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/steve.jacobson%40visi.com






From carter.tjoseph at gmail.com  Sun Jan 10 06:09:09 2010
From: carter.tjoseph at gmail.com (T. Joseph Carter)
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 22:09:09 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] petition
In-Reply-To: <00e501ca9195$857fa490$6601a8c0@server>
References: <007301ca9105$8e79a040$0301a8c0@alexdesktopcph8e6hjk>
	<00e501ca9195$857fa490$6601a8c0@server>
Message-ID: <20100110060909.GE41900@yumi.bluecherry.net>

It's a petition to ask Congress to add in their next reauthorization 
of the Rehab Act explicit language requiring that clients be allowed 
to choose to attend NFB training centers and allowing for penalties 
if this is denied.

This is superfluous, they already must permit you to do so.  Yes, I 
am quite aware that in fact they often do not, but the law already 
requires that they do so.

What is needed is enforcement.

Joseph

On Sat, Jan 09, 2010 at 05:37:50PM -0800, Dennis Clark wrote:
>What is this you want us to sign.  Clicking on an unknown link in an 
>email is a great way to infect ones computer with a virus.  Your 
>seeming sneakiness is suspicious.
>Dennis
>
>----- Original Message ----- From: "Mr. Alexander Scott Kaiser" 
><MisterAlexanderScottKaiser10301990 at gmx.com>
>To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 12:27 AM
>Subject: [nabs-l] petition
>
>
>>check read and sign
>>
>>http://www.petition2congress.com/2/2768/rewriting-us-rehabilitation-act-1973/
>>     Quick
>>_______________________________________________
>>nabs-l mailing list
>>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info 
>>for nabs-l:
>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dennisgclark%40sbcglobal.net
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>nabs-l mailing list
>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40gmail.com


From freespirit328 at gmail.com  Sun Jan 10 06:15:07 2010
From: freespirit328 at gmail.com (Jennifer Aberdeen)
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 01:15:07 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
References: <3fea3c411001091351p37d04795y765d3f28a6e574b5@mail.gmail.com><FHENLGICKACMNOHLGEFJOEIFCKAA.Rachel@BeckerConsultants.com><e5a820711001091811l2ebcab8ai32ae710b2d53b548@mail.gmail.com><5096b4731001091914s5445f02ege64405184b94d57a@mail.gmail.com>
	<AA362D87-8C61-43AB-AE2D-044FDE4B37BF@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <0FC9F96A8DF6425090AE60BA55D9ED87@Gateway>

Not sure if it's because I updated Fire Fox or not, but Jaws does read email 
addresses in my friends' profiles.


_____________________________________

Jennifer Aberdeen, AVON Independent Sales E-Representative
401-644-5607

Shop AVON at home or office. Personal delivery
and a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee.

www.youravon.com/jaberdeen
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Briley Pollard" <brileyp at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 10:33 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!


> Yeah I can't read people's EMail addresses either. I haven't tried with 
> the Mac, but it never did with the PC. I quite frankly just don't have the 
> patience for Facebook. Twitter is much better for me.
>
> -Briley
> On Jan 9, 2010, at 10:14 PM, Katie Wang wrote:
>
>> Hi, all,
>>  I primarily use the mobile site at m.facebook.com, and it has worked
>> great for me. I do have to switch to the regular site when doing
>> things such as creating an event or modifying my profile, but for the
>> day-to-day tasks of status updates,writing wall posts, and sending
>> messages to friends, the mobile site has never given me any problems.
>> One issue I have encountered is that JAWS wouldn't read the email
>> addresses listed under the Contact Information section of my friends'
>> profiles. Has this happened to anyone?
>>   Katie
>>
>>
>> On 1/9/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi All:
>>>
>>> I haven't had any of these problems.
>>> I never go onh the regular site anymore, just use
>>> m.facebook.com
>>> It works great for me.
>>> It's really clean....and I can do everything I would normally do on
>>> the regular site including editing my profile.
>>> Works great!
>>>
>>> Kerri
>>>
>>> On 1/9/10, Rachel Becker <Rachel at beckerconsultants.com> wrote:
>>>> I haven't been able to use the mobile site for the last few weeks and I
>>>> have
>>>> been having some problems with the regular site. One problem is that 
>>>> when
>>>> I
>>>> click the link to send a friend request nothing happens.
>>>> Rachel
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org]On
>>>> Behalf Of Cindy Bennett
>>>> Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 4:51 PM
>>>> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
>>>> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
>>>> activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
>>>> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
>>>> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
>>>> it, so taht is just a thought.
>>>>
>>>> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
>>>> users as it has, it can be.
>>>>
>>>> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
>>>> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
>>>> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
>>>> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
>>>> on on the site.
>>>>
>>>> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
>>>> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
>>>> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
>>>> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
>>>> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
>>>> mobile site.
>>>>
>>>> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
>>>> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
>>>> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
>>>>
>>>> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
>>>> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
>>>> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
>>>> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
>>>> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
>>>> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
>>>>
>>>> Cindy
>>>>
>>>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>>>> Hi nabsters,
>>>>>
>>>>> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or, 
>>>>> at
>>>>> least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
>>>>> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any
>>>> graphics
>>>>> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them
>>>>> only
>>>>> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to
>>>>> the
>>>>> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
>>>>> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things 
>>>>> one
>>>>> can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many
>>>> links
>>>>> and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy 
>>>>> functions
>>>>> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to 
>>>>> see
>>>>> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is 
>>>>> write
>>>> one
>>>>> message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol
>>>>> and
>>>>> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we 
>>>>> could
>>>>> change to make reading the site any easier?
>>>>>
>>>>> Very frustrated,
>>>>> Serena
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/rachel%40beckerconsu
>>>> ltants.com
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bunnykatie6%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/freespirit328%40gmail.com 



From lawnmower84 at hotmail.com  Sun Jan 10 07:47:11 2010
From: lawnmower84 at hotmail.com (Jacob Struiksma)
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2010 23:47:11 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Jaws and Netbooks
In-Reply-To: <7F94B6205DB945BBB0123D713A96F7C6@MIRANDA>
References: <7F94B6205DB945BBB0123D713A96F7C6@MIRANDA>
Message-ID: <COL107-DS15F65BC2AFCD6E99B367F0B56E0@phx.gbl>

You can download jaws from the internet, put cd of jaws into other computer
that has cd drive then transfer the jaws setup files to a USB thumb drive or
USB hard drive then plug the thumb drive or USB hard drive into the net book
and then run the setup of jaws
From
Jacob Struiksma


-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Miranda brown
Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 6:18 PM
To: 'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'
Subject: [nabs-l] Jaws and Netbooks

I just purchased a netbook, and I was wondering how to put JAWS on it?
_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/lawnmower84%40hotmai
l.com



From serenacucco at verizon.net  Sun Jan 10 15:48:26 2010
From: serenacucco at verizon.net (Serena)
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 10:48:26 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
References: <000801ca9171$5f6e3330$0201a8c0@Serene><3fea3c411001091351p37d04795y765d3f28a6e574b5@mail.gmail.com><004b01ca91a3$c2d0efd0$0201a8c0@Serene>
	<e5a820711001092110i5fd0c0c5g7913de1b143e413d@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <007301ca920c$59023460$0201a8c0@Serene>

When I try going to m.facebook.com, Jaws says something about not being able 
to download a file.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kerri Kosten" <kerrik2006 at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 10, 2010 12:10 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!


> Hey:
>
> Hmm, that's odd. I go to it all the time and it comes up as a
> site....I mean it's not the same as the regular one....it's a mobile
> version of the site....but it works and I can do things on it...and
> it's a lot cleaner than the regular site i find.
>
> What happens when you try it?
> Does any type of page come up?
>
> Kerri
>
> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>> m.facebook.com doesn't really exist anymore for people who only use
>> computers, not cell phones.  I already tried that.  Thanks anyway.
>>
>> Serena
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Cindy Bennett" <clb5590 at gmail.com>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 4:51 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
>>
>>
>>> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
>>> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
>>> activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
>>> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
>>> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
>>> it, so taht is just a thought.
>>>
>>> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
>>> users as it has, it can be.
>>>
>>> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
>>> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
>>> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
>>> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
>>> on on the site.
>>>
>>> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
>>> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
>>> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
>>> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
>>> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
>>> mobile site.
>>>
>>> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
>>> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
>>> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
>>>
>>> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
>>> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
>>> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
>>> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
>>> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
>>> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
>>>
>>> Cindy
>>>
>>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>>> Hi nabsters,
>>>>
>>>> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or, 
>>>> at
>>>> least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
>>>> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any
>>>> graphics
>>>> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them
>>>> only
>>>> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to
>>>> the
>>>> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
>>>> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things 
>>>> one
>>>> can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many
>>>> links
>>>> and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy 
>>>> functions
>>>> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to see
>>>> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is 
>>>> write
>>>> one
>>>> message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol
>>>> and
>>>> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we 
>>>> could
>>>> change to make reading the site any easier?
>>>>
>>>> Very frustrated,
>>>> Serena
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net
>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net 



From dennisgclark at sbcglobal.net  Sun Jan 10 16:14:03 2010
From: dennisgclark at sbcglobal.net (Dennis Clark)
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 08:14:03 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] petition
References: <007301ca9105$8e79a040$0301a8c0@alexdesktopcph8e6hjk><00e501ca9195$857fa490$6601a8c0@server>
	<20100110060909.GE41900@yumi.bluecherry.net>
Message-ID: <000b01ca920f$eda022a0$6601a8c0@server>

Hi Joseph,'
Thanks for letting us know what this is all about.  It would be a good 
practice for anyone asking people to click on a link in an email to explain 
why.  Clicking on an unknown link in an email is a risky practice because it 
is an excellent way to introduce a virus or Trojan into ones computer.
Best,
Dennis

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "T. Joseph Carter" <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 10:09 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] petition


> It's a petition to ask Congress to add in their next reauthorization of 
> the Rehab Act explicit language requiring that clients be allowed to 
> choose to attend NFB training centers and allowing for penalties if this 
> is denied.
>
> This is superfluous, they already must permit you to do so.  Yes, I am 
> quite aware that in fact they often do not, but the law already requires 
> that they do so.
>
> What is needed is enforcement.
>
> Joseph
>
> On Sat, Jan 09, 2010 at 05:37:50PM -0800, Dennis Clark wrote:
>>What is this you want us to sign.  Clicking on an unknown link in an email 
>>is a great way to infect ones computer with a virus.  Your seeming 
>>sneakiness is suspicious.
>>Dennis
>>
>>----- Original Message ----- From: "Mr. Alexander Scott Kaiser" 
>><MisterAlexanderScottKaiser10301990 at gmx.com>
>>To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 12:27 AM
>>Subject: [nabs-l] petition
>>
>>
>>>check read and sign
>>>
>>>http://www.petition2congress.com/2/2768/rewriting-us-rehabilitation-act-1973/
>>>     Quick
>>>_______________________________________________
>>>nabs-l mailing list
>>>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>>>nabs-l:
>>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dennisgclark%40sbcglobal.net
>>
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>nabs-l mailing list
>>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>>nabs-l:
>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40gmail.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dennisgclark%40sbcglobal.net 



From kramc11 at gmail.com  Sun Jan 10 16:36:21 2010
From: kramc11 at gmail.com (Mark J. Cadigan)
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 11:36:21 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
In-Reply-To: <007301ca920c$59023460$0201a8c0@Serene>
References: <000801ca9171$5f6e3330$0201a8c0@Serene><3fea3c411001091351p37d04795y765d3f28a6e574b5@mail.gmail.com><004b01ca91a3$c2d0efd0$0201a8c0@Serene><e5a820711001092110i5fd0c0c5g7913de1b143e413d@mail.gmail.com>
	<007301ca920c$59023460$0201a8c0@Serene>
Message-ID: <CC02F73488D54D5289DD3FFFE3007077@SonyPC>

I found a website called facebook lite. I like it. The address is 
http://lite.facebook.com/ It solved all those problems for me.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Serena" <serenacucco at verizon.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 10, 2010 10:48 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!


> When I try going to m.facebook.com, Jaws says something about not being 
> able to download a file.
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Kerri Kosten" <kerrik2006 at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Sunday, January 10, 2010 12:10 AM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
>
>
>> Hey:
>>
>> Hmm, that's odd. I go to it all the time and it comes up as a
>> site....I mean it's not the same as the regular one....it's a mobile
>> version of the site....but it works and I can do things on it...and
>> it's a lot cleaner than the regular site i find.
>>
>> What happens when you try it?
>> Does any type of page come up?
>>
>> Kerri
>>
>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>> m.facebook.com doesn't really exist anymore for people who only use
>>> computers, not cell phones.  I already tried that.  Thanks anyway.
>>>
>>> Serena
>>>
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Cindy Bennett" <clb5590 at gmail.com>
>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 4:51 PM
>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
>>>
>>>
>>>> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
>>>> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
>>>> activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
>>>> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
>>>> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
>>>> it, so taht is just a thought.
>>>>
>>>> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
>>>> users as it has, it can be.
>>>>
>>>> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
>>>> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
>>>> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
>>>> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
>>>> on on the site.
>>>>
>>>> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
>>>> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
>>>> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
>>>> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
>>>> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
>>>> mobile site.
>>>>
>>>> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
>>>> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
>>>> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
>>>>
>>>> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
>>>> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
>>>> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
>>>> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
>>>> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
>>>> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
>>>>
>>>> Cindy
>>>>
>>>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>>>> Hi nabsters,
>>>>>
>>>>> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or, 
>>>>> at
>>>>> least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
>>>>> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any
>>>>> graphics
>>>>> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them
>>>>> only
>>>>> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to
>>>>> the
>>>>> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
>>>>> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things 
>>>>> one
>>>>> can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many
>>>>> links
>>>>> and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy 
>>>>> functions
>>>>> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to 
>>>>> see
>>>>> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is 
>>>>> write
>>>>> one
>>>>> message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol
>>>>> and
>>>>> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we 
>>>>> could
>>>>> change to make reading the site any easier?
>>>>>
>>>>> Very frustrated,
>>>>> Serena
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kramc11%40gmail.com 



From djdrocks4ever at gmail.com  Sun Jan 10 17:04:42 2010
From: djdrocks4ever at gmail.com (David Dunphy)
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 12:04:42 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Meet Some Blind Musicians From New York City On Tonight's
	Djd Invasion
Message-ID: <5DB17A18B79C4C52B435B505845AF13D@radio360usa>

Hi!
With all of us being blind on this list, I thought you'd like to know that Dennis, Performing Arts Division Of The National Federation Of The Blind president, and I will be hosting tonight's Djd Invasion starting at 7 PM eastern, and during the show, we'll be meeting Los Ciegos Del Barrio, a group of blind musicians from the New York City area. We'll be interviewing them, allowing for people to call in and ask questions, and more!
This group was also on the performing arts division's Sound And Sight Volume 1 album.
Call in information will be provided during the show.
The program starts at 7 PM eastern for anyone interested, so at that time, go to
http://www.radio360.us/players/playerselection.shtml
to tune in.
Best regards,
David Dunphy


__________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 4758 (20100110) __________

The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.

http://www.eset.com


From freespirit328 at gmail.com  Sun Jan 10 17:15:52 2010
From: freespirit328 at gmail.com (Jennifer Aberdeen)
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 12:15:52 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
References: <000801ca9171$5f6e3330$0201a8c0@Serene><3fea3c411001091351p37d04795y765d3f28a6e574b5@mail.gmail.com><004b01ca91a3$c2d0efd0$0201a8c0@Serene><e5a820711001092110i5fd0c0c5g7913de1b143e413d@mail.gmail.com>
	<007301ca920c$59023460$0201a8c0@Serene>
Message-ID: <4DCE421C7AA84500B9F3F297DFBEE1E4@Gateway>

I get the same thing all the time. Use Fire Fox if you can; it works fine 
there.

Jen
_____________________________________

Jennifer Aberdeen, AVON Independent Sales E-Representative
401-644-5607

Shop AVON at home or office. Personal delivery
and a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee.

www.youravon.com/jaberdeen
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Serena" <serenacucco at verizon.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 10, 2010 10:48 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!


> When I try going to m.facebook.com, Jaws says something about not being 
> able to download a file.
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Kerri Kosten" <kerrik2006 at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Sunday, January 10, 2010 12:10 AM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
>
>
>> Hey:
>>
>> Hmm, that's odd. I go to it all the time and it comes up as a
>> site....I mean it's not the same as the regular one....it's a mobile
>> version of the site....but it works and I can do things on it...and
>> it's a lot cleaner than the regular site i find.
>>
>> What happens when you try it?
>> Does any type of page come up?
>>
>> Kerri
>>
>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>> m.facebook.com doesn't really exist anymore for people who only use
>>> computers, not cell phones.  I already tried that.  Thanks anyway.
>>>
>>> Serena
>>>
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Cindy Bennett" <clb5590 at gmail.com>
>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 4:51 PM
>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
>>>
>>>
>>>> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
>>>> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
>>>> activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
>>>> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
>>>> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
>>>> it, so taht is just a thought.
>>>>
>>>> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
>>>> users as it has, it can be.
>>>>
>>>> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
>>>> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
>>>> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
>>>> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
>>>> on on the site.
>>>>
>>>> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
>>>> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
>>>> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
>>>> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
>>>> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
>>>> mobile site.
>>>>
>>>> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
>>>> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
>>>> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
>>>>
>>>> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
>>>> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
>>>> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
>>>> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
>>>> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
>>>> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
>>>>
>>>> Cindy
>>>>
>>>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>>>> Hi nabsters,
>>>>>
>>>>> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or, 
>>>>> at
>>>>> least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
>>>>> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any
>>>>> graphics
>>>>> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them
>>>>> only
>>>>> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to
>>>>> the
>>>>> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
>>>>> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things 
>>>>> one
>>>>> can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many
>>>>> links
>>>>> and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy 
>>>>> functions
>>>>> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to 
>>>>> see
>>>>> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is 
>>>>> write
>>>>> one
>>>>> message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol
>>>>> and
>>>>> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we 
>>>>> could
>>>>> change to make reading the site any easier?
>>>>>
>>>>> Very frustrated,
>>>>> Serena
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
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>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
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From Rachel at BeckerConsultants.com  Sun Jan 10 17:32:19 2010
From: Rachel at BeckerConsultants.com (Rachel Becker)
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 12:32:19 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
In-Reply-To: <007301ca920c$59023460$0201a8c0@Serene>
Message-ID: <FHENLGICKACMNOHLGEFJGEIKCKAA.Rachel@BeckerConsultants.com>

That's what happens to me too. I'm using ie. What browser do you use? This
seems very strange.

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org]On
Behalf Of Serena
Sent: Sunday, January 10, 2010 10:48 AM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!


When I try going to m.facebook.com, Jaws says something about not being able
to download a file.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Kerri Kosten" <kerrik2006 at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 10, 2010 12:10 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!


> Hey:
>
> Hmm, that's odd. I go to it all the time and it comes up as a
> site....I mean it's not the same as the regular one....it's a mobile
> version of the site....but it works and I can do things on it...and
> it's a lot cleaner than the regular site i find.
>
> What happens when you try it?
> Does any type of page come up?
>
> Kerri
>
> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>> m.facebook.com doesn't really exist anymore for people who only use
>> computers, not cell phones.  I already tried that.  Thanks anyway.
>>
>> Serena
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Cindy Bennett" <clb5590 at gmail.com>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 4:51 PM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
>>
>>
>>> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
>>> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
>>> activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
>>> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
>>> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
>>> it, so taht is just a thought.
>>>
>>> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
>>> users as it has, it can be.
>>>
>>> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
>>> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
>>> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
>>> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
>>> on on the site.
>>>
>>> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
>>> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
>>> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
>>> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
>>> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
>>> mobile site.
>>>
>>> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
>>> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
>>> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
>>>
>>> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
>>> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
>>> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
>>> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
>>> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
>>> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
>>>
>>> Cindy
>>>
>>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>>> Hi nabsters,
>>>>
>>>> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or,
>>>> at
>>>> least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
>>>> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any
>>>> graphics
>>>> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them
>>>> only
>>>> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to
>>>> the
>>>> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
>>>> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things
>>>> one
>>>> can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many
>>>> links
>>>> and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy
>>>> functions
>>>> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to see
>>>> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is
>>>> write
>>>> one
>>>> message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol
>>>> and
>>>> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we
>>>> could
>>>> change to make reading the site any easier?
>>>>
>>>> Very frustrated,
>>>> Serena
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizo
n.net
>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.c
om
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizo
n.net


_______________________________________________
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http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
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ltants.com



From steve.jacobson at visi.com  Sun Jan 10 19:18:15 2010
From: steve.jacobson at visi.com (Steve Jacobson)
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 13:18:15 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
In-Reply-To: <007301ca920c$59023460$0201a8c0@Serene>
Message-ID: <auto-000134653180@mailfront1.g2host.com>

You probably have an older browser.  They made a change in October or November that seems to cause that to 
happen with Internet Explorer 6.  Do you happen to have Internet explorer version 6?  I have the same problem.


On Sun, 10 Jan 2010 10:48:26 -0500, Serena wrote:

>When I try going to m.facebook.com, Jaws says something about not being able 
>to download a file.


>----- Original Message ----- 
>From: "Kerri Kosten" <kerrik2006 at gmail.com>
>To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
><nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>Sent: Sunday, January 10, 2010 12:10 AM
>Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!


>> Hey:
>>
>> Hmm, that's odd. I go to it all the time and it comes up as a
>> site....I mean it's not the same as the regular one....it's a mobile
>> version of the site....but it works and I can do things on it...and
>> it's a lot cleaner than the regular site i find.
>>
>> What happens when you try it?
>> Does any type of page come up?
>>
>> Kerri
>>
>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>> m.facebook.com doesn't really exist anymore for people who only use
>>> computers, not cell phones.  I already tried that.  Thanks anyway.
>>>
>>> Serena
>>>
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Cindy Bennett" <clb5590 at gmail.com>
>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 4:51 PM
>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
>>>
>>>
>>>> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
>>>> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
>>>> activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
>>>> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
>>>> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
>>>> it, so taht is just a thought.
>>>>
>>>> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
>>>> users as it has, it can be.
>>>>
>>>> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
>>>> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
>>>> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
>>>> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
>>>> on on the site.
>>>>
>>>> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
>>>> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
>>>> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
>>>> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
>>>> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
>>>> mobile site.
>>>>
>>>> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
>>>> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
>>>> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
>>>>
>>>> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
>>>> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
>>>> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
>>>> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
>>>> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
>>>> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
>>>>
>>>> Cindy
>>>>
>>>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>>>> Hi nabsters,
>>>>>
>>>>> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or, 
>>>>> at
>>>>> least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
>>>>> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any
>>>>> graphics
>>>>> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them
>>>>> only
>>>>> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to
>>>>> the
>>>>> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
>>>>> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things 
>>>>> one
>>>>> can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many
>>>>> links
>>>>> and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy 
>>>>> functions
>>>>> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to see
>>>>> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is 
>>>>> write
>>>>> one
>>>>> message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol
>>>>> and
>>>>> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we 
>>>>> could
>>>>> change to make reading the site any easier?
>>>>>
>>>>> Very frustrated,
>>>>> Serena
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net 


>_______________________________________________
>nabs-l mailing list
>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/steve.jacobson%40visi.com






From skittlesfreak69 at gmail.com  Sun Jan 10 19:31:25 2010
From: skittlesfreak69 at gmail.com (Karrie Kinstetter)
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 13:31:25 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
In-Reply-To: <auto-000134653180@mailfront1.g2host.com>
References: <007301ca920c$59023460$0201a8c0@Serene>
	<auto-000134653180@mailfront1.g2host.com>
Message-ID: <010201ca922b$811d98d0$8358ca70$@com>

Ok, so I don't use facebook mobile hardly ever, I've gotten to the point
where I just remember what I want, and type it in the jaws find box.
Then again, I have to much time on my hands to mess around with it, so yeah.
My only annoyance with facebook is that some of the aps like Farmville and
others are inaccessible, but I've found quite a few accessible aps to use
with facebook. That's one reason why I don't use the mobile site. Then
again, that's me.
I've never really explored the mobile site simply, cuz unlike a lot of blind
people I don't have many problems with the regular facebook site.
Sincerely,
Karrie Kinstetter

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Steve Jacobson
Sent: Sunday, January 10, 2010 1:18 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!

You probably have an older browser.  They made a change in October or
November that seems to cause that to 
happen with Internet Explorer 6.  Do you happen to have Internet explorer
version 6?  I have the same problem.


On Sun, 10 Jan 2010 10:48:26 -0500, Serena wrote:

>When I try going to m.facebook.com, Jaws says something about not being
able 
>to download a file.


>----- Original Message ----- 
>From: "Kerri Kosten" <kerrik2006 at gmail.com>
>To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
><nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>Sent: Sunday, January 10, 2010 12:10 AM
>Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!


>> Hey:
>>
>> Hmm, that's odd. I go to it all the time and it comes up as a
>> site....I mean it's not the same as the regular one....it's a mobile
>> version of the site....but it works and I can do things on it...and
>> it's a lot cleaner than the regular site i find.
>>
>> What happens when you try it?
>> Does any type of page come up?
>>
>> Kerri
>>
>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>> m.facebook.com doesn't really exist anymore for people who only use
>>> computers, not cell phones.  I already tried that.  Thanks anyway.
>>>
>>> Serena
>>>
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Cindy Bennett" <clb5590 at gmail.com>
>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 4:51 PM
>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
>>>
>>>
>>>> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
>>>> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
>>>> activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
>>>> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
>>>> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
>>>> it, so taht is just a thought.
>>>>
>>>> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
>>>> users as it has, it can be.
>>>>
>>>> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
>>>> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
>>>> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
>>>> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
>>>> on on the site.
>>>>
>>>> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
>>>> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
>>>> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
>>>> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
>>>> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
>>>> mobile site.
>>>>
>>>> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
>>>> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
>>>> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
>>>>
>>>> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
>>>> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
>>>> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
>>>> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
>>>> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
>>>> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
>>>>
>>>> Cindy
>>>>
>>>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>>>> Hi nabsters,
>>>>>
>>>>> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or,

>>>>> at
>>>>> least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
>>>>> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any
>>>>> graphics
>>>>> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them
>>>>> only
>>>>> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to
>>>>> the
>>>>> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
>>>>> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things 
>>>>> one
>>>>> can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many
>>>>> links
>>>>> and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy 
>>>>> functions
>>>>> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to
see
>>>>> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is 
>>>>> write
>>>>> one
>>>>> message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol
>>>>> and
>>>>> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we 
>>>>> could
>>>>> change to make reading the site any easier?
>>>>>
>>>>> Very frustrated,
>>>>> Serena
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizo
n.net
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.c
om
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizo
n.net 


>_______________________________________________
>nabs-l mailing list
>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/steve.jacobson%40vi
si.com





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To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
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ail.com



From bunnykatie6 at gmail.com  Sun Jan 10 19:46:40 2010
From: bunnykatie6 at gmail.com (Katie Wang)
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 14:46:40 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
In-Reply-To: <auto-000134653180@mailfront1.g2host.com>
References: <007301ca920c$59023460$0201a8c0@Serene>
	<auto-000134653180@mailfront1.g2host.com>
Message-ID: <5096b4731001101146x269c84fap3c340f4843eb7d50@mail.gmail.com>

I use IE 7 and it works fine with the mobile site, so I would imagine
updating your browser may solve the problem. This is very odd indeed!
   Katie

On 1/10/10, Steve Jacobson <steve.jacobson at visi.com> wrote:
> You probably have an older browser.  They made a change in October or
> November that seems to cause that to
> happen with Internet Explorer 6.  Do you happen to have Internet explorer
> version 6?  I have the same problem.
>
>
> On Sun, 10 Jan 2010 10:48:26 -0500, Serena wrote:
>
>>When I try going to m.facebook.com, Jaws says something about not being
>> able
>>to download a file.
>
>
>>----- Original Message -----
>>From: "Kerri Kosten" <kerrik2006 at gmail.com>
>>To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>><nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>Sent: Sunday, January 10, 2010 12:10 AM
>>Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
>
>
>>> Hey:
>>>
>>> Hmm, that's odd. I go to it all the time and it comes up as a
>>> site....I mean it's not the same as the regular one....it's a mobile
>>> version of the site....but it works and I can do things on it...and
>>> it's a lot cleaner than the regular site i find.
>>>
>>> What happens when you try it?
>>> Does any type of page come up?
>>>
>>> Kerri
>>>
>>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>>> m.facebook.com doesn't really exist anymore for people who only use
>>>> computers, not cell phones.  I already tried that.  Thanks anyway.
>>>>
>>>> Serena
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>> From: "Cindy Bennett" <clb5590 at gmail.com>
>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>> Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 4:51 PM
>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
>>>>> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
>>>>> activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
>>>>> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
>>>>> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
>>>>> it, so taht is just a thought.
>>>>>
>>>>> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
>>>>> users as it has, it can be.
>>>>>
>>>>> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
>>>>> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
>>>>> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
>>>>> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
>>>>> on on the site.
>>>>>
>>>>> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
>>>>> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
>>>>> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
>>>>> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
>>>>> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
>>>>> mobile site.
>>>>>
>>>>> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
>>>>> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
>>>>> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
>>>>>
>>>>> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
>>>>> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
>>>>> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
>>>>> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
>>>>> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
>>>>> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
>>>>>
>>>>> Cindy
>>>>>
>>>>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>>>>> Hi nabsters,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind or,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> at
>>>>>> least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
>>>>>> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any
>>>>>> graphics
>>>>>> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them
>>>>>> only
>>>>>> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go to
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to the
>>>>>> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things
>>>>>> one
>>>>>> can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many
>>>>>> links
>>>>>> and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy
>>>>>> functions
>>>>>> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to
>>>>>> see
>>>>>> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is
>>>>>> write
>>>>>> one
>>>>>> message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages lol
>>>>>> and
>>>>>> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we
>>>>>> could
>>>>>> change to make reading the site any easier?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Very frustrated,
>>>>>> Serena
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net
>>>
>
>
>>_______________________________________________
>>nabs-l mailing list
>>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/steve.jacobson%40visi.com
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bunnykatie6%40gmail.com
>


From serenacucco at verizon.net  Sun Jan 10 20:41:06 2010
From: serenacucco at verizon.net (Serena)
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 15:41:06 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
References: <auto-000134653180@mailfront1.g2host.com>
Message-ID: <001301ca9235$3c94b0e0$0201a8c0@Serene>

Hi all,

I just installed Internet Explorer 8, just to see if it would change 
anything ... The mobile site works now!  For all of you who, like I did, 
have a dinosaur version of IE lol, go ahead and install version 8

Serena.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steve Jacobson" <steve.jacobson at visi.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 10, 2010 2:18 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!


> You probably have an older browser.  They made a change in October or 
> November that seems to cause that to
> happen with Internet Explorer 6.  Do you happen to have Internet explorer 
> version 6?  I have the same problem.
>
>
> On Sun, 10 Jan 2010 10:48:26 -0500, Serena wrote:
>
>>When I try going to m.facebook.com, Jaws says something about not being 
>>able
>>to download a file.
>
>
>>----- Original Message ----- 
>>From: "Kerri Kosten" <kerrik2006 at gmail.com>
>>To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>><nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>Sent: Sunday, January 10, 2010 12:10 AM
>>Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
>
>
>>> Hey:
>>>
>>> Hmm, that's odd. I go to it all the time and it comes up as a
>>> site....I mean it's not the same as the regular one....it's a mobile
>>> version of the site....but it works and I can do things on it...and
>>> it's a lot cleaner than the regular site i find.
>>>
>>> What happens when you try it?
>>> Does any type of page come up?
>>>
>>> Kerri
>>>
>>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>>> m.facebook.com doesn't really exist anymore for people who only use
>>>> computers, not cell phones.  I already tried that.  Thanks anyway.
>>>>
>>>> Serena
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>> From: "Cindy Bennett" <clb5590 at gmail.com>
>>>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>> Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 4:51 PM
>>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> Maybe instead of going to the regular site and clicking on mobile, go
>>>>> to m.facebook.com I think there might be a couple of links about
>>>>> activating your phone and such, but other than that, it is clean.
>>>>> Clicking on mobile might outline the features of facebook mobile
>>>>> rather than take you to the mobile site, but i have never clicked on
>>>>> it, so taht is just a thought.
>>>>>
>>>>> I understand though, facebook is quite annoying, but with as many
>>>>> users as it has, it can be.
>>>>>
>>>>> A lot of the applications are accessible though, and sometimes
>>>>> facebook is finicky not because of your screen reader, because i know
>>>>> several sighted friends who have problems. I feel like it is almost
>>>>> unavoidable with how many users there are and with how much is going
>>>>> on on the site.
>>>>>
>>>>> The mobile site is definitely useful for wall posts and sending
>>>>> messages and such, but isn't for other things such as the fact that it
>>>>> does not verbalize captions people might right on their pictures, and
>>>>> it doesn't give all of the information about groups and events, so
>>>>> depending on what i want to do, i switch between the regular and
>>>>> mobile site.
>>>>>
>>>>> One problem i just started encountering with JAWS 11 though is that
>>>>> when i enter an edit box, i am unable to get out of it. It has gotten
>>>>> to the point where i have to close the window and open another.
>>>>>
>>>>> Firefox helps ith some facebook problems but also presents others. For
>>>>> example, i cannot edit the heading about myself, the "write something
>>>>> about yourself" link unless i use firefox, but as of a couple of
>>>>> months ago, firefox wouldn't allow me to go offline. So i haven't
>>>>> found a browser that works optimally with JAWS and facebook. I will
>>>>> definitely be excited when voiceover improves.
>>>>>
>>>>> Cindy
>>>>>
>>>>> On 1/9/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>>>>> Hi nabsters,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> It seems that facebook has become more inaccessible to t the blind 
>>>>>> or,
>>>>>> at
>>>>>> least, more cumbersome to use.  It seems that all the features on the
>>>>>> facebook mobile site that made it really great, such as few if any
>>>>>> graphics
>>>>>> or advertizements and not that many links on each page, and made them
>>>>>> only
>>>>>> useable by those who have facebook on their cell phones.  When I go 
>>>>>> to
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> link on the regular site that says "mobile," it merely takes me to 
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> regular site plus a section that talks about all the wonderful things
>>>>>> one
>>>>>> can do with facebook on their cell phones.  There are simply too many
>>>>>> links
>>>>>> and features on every page!  Ok, it's great to know about fancy
>>>>>> functions
>>>>>> like importing contacts and facebook chat, but do we really have to 
>>>>>> see
>>>>>> those sections on every page when all I'm really on there to do is
>>>>>> write
>>>>>> one
>>>>>> message to someone?  For those of us who might be in the dark ages 
>>>>>> lol
>>>>>> and
>>>>>> don't have a internet on our cell phones, are there any settings we
>>>>>> could
>>>>>> change to make reading the site any easier?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Very frustrated,
>>>>>> Serena
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net
>
>
>>_______________________________________________
>>nabs-l mailing list
>>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>>nabs-l:
>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/steve.jacobson%40visi.com
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net 



From myangelblessings at hotmail.com  Sun Jan 10 21:47:46 2010
From: myangelblessings at hotmail.com (Ben Peters)
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 13:47:46 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] frustrated with facebook!
In-Reply-To: <001301ca9235$3c94b0e0$0201a8c0@Serene>
References: <auto-000134653180@mailfront1.g2host.com>,
	<001301ca9235$3c94b0e0$0201a8c0@Serene>
Message-ID: <BLU141-W218EB7278B5FA509E9F664C26E0@phx.gbl>


Ok, quick comment. With all the problems that facebook and myspace etc presents to us blind folk  for accessibility on their regular sites, has anyone thought of starting a petition outlining all the problems/barriors  and after getting as many signitures as possible presenting it to them? Asking for change? I don't have the energy or desire to do this, but its been an idea in my head. --Ben   
 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Your E-mail and More On-the-Go. Get Windows Live Hotmail Free.
http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390709/direct/01/

From carter.tjoseph at gmail.com  Sun Jan 10 23:10:51 2010
From: carter.tjoseph at gmail.com (T. Joseph Carter)
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 15:10:51 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] petition
In-Reply-To: <000b01ca920f$eda022a0$6601a8c0@server>
References: <007301ca9105$8e79a040$0301a8c0@alexdesktopcph8e6hjk>
	<00e501ca9195$857fa490$6601a8c0@server>
	<20100110060909.GE41900@yumi.bluecherry.net>
	<000b01ca920f$eda022a0$6601a8c0@server>
Message-ID: <20100110231051.GG41900@yumi.bluecherry.net>

I recognized the petition server in the link, so it wasn't a big 
deal.  I have had to become much more aware of what's happening as a 
result, which is why I am learning about things like duplications of 
laws (and how that gets abused), citation of sources, etc.

I would actually like to have the discussion about what the law 
actually says regarding choice of training centers, if we can find 
someone knowledgeable enough on the subject to spell out the various 
particulars.

Joseph

On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 08:14:03AM -0800, Dennis Clark wrote:
>Hi Joseph,'
>Thanks for letting us know what this is all about.  It would be a 
>good practice for anyone asking people to click on a link in an email 
>to explain why.  Clicking on an unknown link in an email is a risky 
>practice because it is an excellent way to introduce a virus or 
>Trojan into ones computer.
>Best,
>Dennis
>
>----- Original Message ----- From: "T. Joseph Carter" 
><carter.tjoseph at gmail.com>
>To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
><nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 10:09 PM
>Subject: Re: [nabs-l] petition
>
>
>>It's a petition to ask Congress to add in their next 
>>reauthorization of the Rehab Act explicit language requiring that 
>>clients be allowed to choose to attend NFB training centers and 
>>allowing for penalties if this is denied.
>>
>>This is superfluous, they already must permit you to do so.  Yes, I 
>>am quite aware that in fact they often do not, but the law already 
>>requires that they do so.
>>
>>What is needed is enforcement.
>>
>>Joseph
>>
>>On Sat, Jan 09, 2010 at 05:37:50PM -0800, Dennis Clark wrote:
>>>What is this you want us to sign.  Clicking on an unknown link in 
>>>an email is a great way to infect ones computer with a virus.  
>>>Your seeming sneakiness is suspicious.
>>>Dennis
>>>
>>>----- Original Message ----- From: "Mr. Alexander Scott Kaiser" 
>>><MisterAlexanderScottKaiser10301990 at gmx.com>
>>>To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 12:27 AM
>>>Subject: [nabs-l] petition
>>>
>>>
>>>>check read and sign
>>>>
>>>>http://www.petition2congress.com/2/2768/rewriting-us-rehabilitation-act-1973/
>>>>    Quick
>>>>_______________________________________________
>>>>nabs-l mailing list
>>>>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account 
>>>>info for nabs-l:
>>>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dennisgclark%40sbcglobal.net
>>>
>>>
>>>_______________________________________________
>>>nabs-l mailing list
>>>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info 
>>>for nabs-l:
>>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40gmail.com
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>nabs-l mailing list
>>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info 
>>for nabs-l:
>>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dennisgclark%40sbcglobal.net
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>nabs-l mailing list
>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/carter.tjoseph%40gmail.com


From albertyoo1 at hotmail.com  Mon Jan 11 15:04:04 2010
From: albertyoo1 at hotmail.com (Albert Yoo)
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:04:04 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] I Need Your Help
Message-ID: <BAY139-W19EC494854716C88F2A94B8B6D0@phx.gbl>


Hello,
     How are you doing ? I hope you are doing fine, I'm sorry that I didn't inform you about my traveling to England for a Seminar.
I need a favor from you as soon as you receive this e-mail because I misplaced my wallet on my way to the hotel where my money,and other valuable things were kept, I will like you to assist me with a  soft loan urgently. I will be needing the sum of $2,500 to sort-out my hotel bills and get myself back home.
I will appreciate whatever you can afford to help me with, I will pay you back as soon as I return,I'm counting on you on this,Kindly let me know if you can be of help so I can send you my details to use when sending the money through western union.
I look forward to read from you soon.
Your reply will be greatly appreciated. Thanks 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Your E-mail and More On-the-Go. Get Windows Live Hotmail Free.
http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390709/direct/01/

From bookwormahb at earthlink.net  Mon Jan 11 16:06:54 2010
From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net (Ashley  Bramlett)
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:06:54 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] I Need Your Help
References: <BAY139-W19EC494854716C88F2A94B8B6D0@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <F688F7B2FABD4C1B9BAD808F2642B84E@Ashley>

This sounds like a scam.  I hope you really are not in England
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Albert Yoo" <albertyoo1 at hotmail.com>
To: "Albert Yoo" <albertyoo1 at hotmail.com>
Sent: Monday, January 11, 2010 10:04 AM
Subject: [nabs-l] I Need Your Help


>
> Hello,
>     How are you doing ? I hope you are doing fine, I'm sorry that I didn't 
> inform you about my traveling to England for a Seminar.
> I need a favor from you as soon as you receive this e-mail because I 
> misplaced my wallet on my way to the hotel where my money,and other 
> valuable things were kept, I will like you to assist me with a  soft loan 
> urgently. I will be needing the sum of $2,500 to sort-out my hotel bills 
> and get myself back home.
> I will appreciate whatever you can afford to help me with, I will pay you 
> back as soon as I return,I'm counting on you on this,Kindly let me know if 
> you can be of help so I can send you my details to use when sending the 
> money through western union.
> I look forward to read from you soon.
> Your reply will be greatly appreciated. Thanks
> _________________________________________________________________
> Your E-mail and More On-the-Go. Get Windows Live Hotmail Free.
> http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390709/direct/01/
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
> 



From bookwormahb at earthlink.net  Mon Jan 11 17:04:43 2010
From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net (bookwormahb at earthlink.net)
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 12:04:43 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] talking pedometer ideas
Message-ID: <6F4C8F5BE4EC476CB946326168965199@Ashley>

Hi all,

With the vast array of experiences and interests, thought some of you might be into walking.  Please bear with the off topic.

I am looking for a talking pedometer.  I am getting a sense of their features by catalog descriptions, but specifics would be nice.  If you have a talking pedometer and like it, what do you like?  What features does it have?  I want one that counts steps but also distances.  Are any of them there that track time too?  If not I can do that with my watch.  If going for a walk, I'd like to know the distance so getting one would be a good idea.

From ginisd at sbcglobal.net  Mon Jan 11 17:35:14 2010
From: ginisd at sbcglobal.net (V Nork)
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 09:35:14 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Is the plea for help from Albert hoax or scam?
Message-ID: <EEF95126AE594EDD8EDDE3130176C283@windows4c0ed96>

Hello Listers, I did open the message from Albert asking for a loan.  I hope he is not really in dire straits, but the language here, the way words are put together, does not sound like albert at all, it is interesting to think what is behind this.  Ginny

From serenacucco at verizon.net  Mon Jan 11 18:07:33 2010
From: serenacucco at verizon.net (Serena)
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 13:07:33 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Is the plea for help from Albert hoax or scam?
References: <EEF95126AE594EDD8EDDE3130176C283@windows4c0ed96>
Message-ID: <001e01ca92e8$f2fe71f0$0201a8c0@Serene>

I'm sure it's a virus on Albert's computer and I'm sure he has no idea yet!

Serena


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "V Nork" <ginisd at sbcglobal.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Monday, January 11, 2010 12:35 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] Is the plea for help from Albert hoax or scam?


> Hello Listers, I did open the message from Albert asking for a loan.  I 
> hope he is not really in dire straits, but the language here, the way 
> words are put together, does not sound like albert at all, it is 
> interesting to think what is behind this.  Ginny
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net 



From serenacucco at verizon.net  Mon Jan 11 18:06:27 2010
From: serenacucco at verizon.net (Serena)
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 13:06:27 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] computer virus
Message-ID: <001401ca92e8$cbb5fcd0$0201a8c0@Serene>

Hi nabsters,

Albert, it seems that you have a virus on your computer.  There was an email sent to the list, supposedly from you, that mentioned something about going to England and losing a wallet--something I know you wouldn't actually write to the list.  Just thaught I'd let you know.

Serena

From kramc11 at gmail.com  Mon Jan 11 18:34:46 2010
From: kramc11 at gmail.com (Mark J. Cadigan)
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 13:34:46 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] I Need Your Help
In-Reply-To: <BAY139-W19EC494854716C88F2A94B8B6D0@phx.gbl>
References: <BAY139-W19EC494854716C88F2A94B8B6D0@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <B977697F36C748718D819791D33A55DA@SonyPC>

This appears to be a scam, if it is true, why would you send it to a list 
serve.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Albert Yoo" <albertyoo1 at hotmail.com>
To: "Albert Yoo" <albertyoo1 at hotmail.com>
Sent: Monday, January 11, 2010 10:04 AM
Subject: [nabs-l] I Need Your Help


>
> Hello,
>     How are you doing ? I hope you are doing fine, I'm sorry that I didn't 
> inform you about my traveling to England for a Seminar.
> I need a favor from you as soon as you receive this e-mail because I 
> misplaced my wallet on my way to the hotel where my money,and other 
> valuable things were kept, I will like you to assist me with a  soft loan 
> urgently. I will be needing the sum of $2,500 to sort-out my hotel bills 
> and get myself back home.
> I will appreciate whatever you can afford to help me with, I will pay you 
> back as soon as I return,I'm counting on you on this,Kindly let me know if 
> you can be of help so I can send you my details to use when sending the 
> money through western union.
> I look forward to read from you soon.
> Your reply will be greatly appreciated. Thanks
> _________________________________________________________________
> Your E-mail and More On-the-Go. Get Windows Live Hotmail Free.
> http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390709/direct/01/
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kramc11%40gmail.com 



From loneblindjedi at samobile.net  Mon Jan 11 18:38:36 2010
From: loneblindjedi at samobile.net (Jedi)
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 13:38:36 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Is the plea for help from Albert hoax or scam?
Message-ID: <20100111183836.17468.51397@web2.serotek.com>

Actually, that's a little scary because that means someone's using his 
address. Albert, I would suggest that you chuck that e-mail address if 
possible and subscribe to the list using a new address. As paranoyed as 
this sounds, I would also check your identity records if I were you and 
make sure other things haven't been stolen.

Respectfully,
Jedi


Original message:
> Hello Listers, I did open the message from Albert asking for a loan.  I 
> hope he is not really in dire straits, but the language here, the way 
> words are put together, does not sound like albert at all, it is 
> interesting to think what is behind this.  Ginny
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net

-- 
Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit 
www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.


From dsmithnfb at gmail.com  Mon Jan 11 19:07:34 2010
From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith)
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:07:34 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] I Need Your Help
In-Reply-To: <B977697F36C748718D819791D33A55DA@SonyPC>
References: <BAY139-W19EC494854716C88F2A94B8B6D0@phx.gbl>
	<B977697F36C748718D819791D33A55DA@SonyPC>
Message-ID: <409c235c1001111107w481ed907pe5890489c137300c@mail.gmail.com>

Good Morning Nabs listers,
  This is  indeed not Albert.
  somebody is messing with his account and  has posted this on the listserve.
 Please disregard  the message in question.
  sincerelr,
  Darian Smith
  board member- national association of blind students.



On 1/11/10, Mark J. Cadigan <kramc11 at gmail.com> wrote:
> This appears to be a scam, if it is true, why would you send it to a list
> serve.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Albert Yoo" <albertyoo1 at hotmail.com>
> To: "Albert Yoo" <albertyoo1 at hotmail.com>
> Sent: Monday, January 11, 2010 10:04 AM
> Subject: [nabs-l] I Need Your Help
>
>
>>
>> Hello,
>>     How are you doing ? I hope you are doing fine, I'm sorry that I didn't
>>
>> inform you about my traveling to England for a Seminar.
>> I need a favor from you as soon as you receive this e-mail because I
>> misplaced my wallet on my way to the hotel where my money,and other
>> valuable things were kept, I will like you to assist me with a  soft loan
>> urgently. I will be needing the sum of $2,500 to sort-out my hotel bills
>> and get myself back home.
>> I will appreciate whatever you can afford to help me with, I will pay you
>> back as soon as I return,I'm counting on you on this,Kindly let me know if
>>
>> you can be of help so I can send you my details to use when sending the
>> money through western union.
>> I look forward to read from you soon.
>> Your reply will be greatly appreciated. Thanks
>> _________________________________________________________________
>> Your E-mail and More On-the-Go. Get Windows Live Hotmail Free.
>> http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390709/direct/01/
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kramc11%40gmail.com
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>


-- 
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
before us;
if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
past and future generations,
then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
done, and
usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama


From bookwormahb at earthlink.net  Mon Jan 11 19:18:13 2010
From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net (Ashley  Bramlett)
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:18:13 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] I Need Your Help
References: <BAY139-W19EC494854716C88F2A94B8B6D0@phx.gbl>
	<B977697F36C748718D819791D33A55DA@SonyPC>
Message-ID: <27D3D5AFBE314E5FAB1A1A35BC748EA0@Ashley>

There must be a virus on Albert's computer that sent this to all in the 
address book.  Lets ignore it.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark J. Cadigan" <kramc11 at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>; "Albert Yoo" <albertyoo1 at hotmail.com>
Sent: Monday, January 11, 2010 1:34 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] I Need Your Help


> This appears to be a scam, if it is true, why would you send it to a list 
> serve.
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Albert Yoo" <albertyoo1 at hotmail.com>
> To: "Albert Yoo" <albertyoo1 at hotmail.com>
> Sent: Monday, January 11, 2010 10:04 AM
> Subject: [nabs-l] I Need Your Help
>
>
>>
>> Hello,
>>     How are you doing ? I hope you are doing fine, I'm sorry that I 
>> didn't inform you about my traveling to England for a Seminar.
>> I need a favor from you as soon as you receive this e-mail because I 
>> misplaced my wallet on my way to the hotel where my money,and other 
>> valuable things were kept, I will like you to assist me with a  soft loan 
>> urgently. I will be needing the sum of $2,500 to sort-out my hotel bills 
>> and get myself back home.
>> I will appreciate whatever you can afford to help me with, I will pay you 
>> back as soon as I return,I'm counting on you on this,Kindly let me know 
>> if you can be of help so I can send you my details to use when sending 
>> the money through western union.
>> I look forward to read from you soon.
>> Your reply will be greatly appreciated. Thanks
>> _________________________________________________________________
>> Your E-mail and More On-the-Go. Get Windows Live Hotmail Free.
>> http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390709/direct/01/
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kramc11%40gmail.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
> 



From smwhalenpsp at gmail.com  Mon Jan 11 20:39:20 2010
From: smwhalenpsp at gmail.com (Sean Whalen)
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:39:20 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] talking pedometer ideas
In-Reply-To: <mailman.25.1263232803.6642.nabs-l_nfbnet.org@nfbnet.org>
References: <mailman.25.1263232803.6642.nabs-l_nfbnet.org@nfbnet.org>
Message-ID: <C5A9BC2DAF35495E8F64C17342BE08C7@VALUED04C3B21F>

It is my understanding that the iPod nano 5th gen. has a pedometer built in
which can be accessed with Apple's Voiceover. This is probably a pretty
expensive option if a pedometer is all you are after, but it might give you
a good excuse to buy an iPod.



From ntorcolini at wavecable.com  Mon Jan 11 20:49:17 2010
From: ntorcolini at wavecable.com (Nicole B. Torcolini)
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 12:49:17 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] talking pedometer ideas
References: <6F4C8F5BE4EC476CB946326168965199@Ashley>
Message-ID: <23D37CF0B12446F6AAD391E8268BE86C@stanford.edu>

I'm sorry that I do not remember the specifics, but one that I had had time, 
distance walked, an alarm feature, and optional playing music as you walked. 
It was not really great music, but it was one way to know that it was 
working because it only played the music when you walked.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <bookwormahb at earthlink.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Monday, January 11, 2010 9:04 AM
Subject: [nabs-l] talking pedometer ideas


> Hi all,
>
> With the vast array of experiences and interests, thought some of you 
> might be into walking.  Please bear with the off topic.
>
> I am looking for a talking pedometer.  I am getting a sense of their 
> features by catalog descriptions, but specifics would be nice.  If you 
> have a talking pedometer and like it, what do you like?  What features 
> does it have?  I want one that counts steps but also distances.  Are any 
> of them there that track time too?  If not I can do that with my watch. 
> If going for a walk, I'd like to know the distance so getting one would be 
> a good idea.
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/ntorcolini%40wavecable.com 



From ntorcolini at wavecable.com  Mon Jan 11 20:51:30 2010
From: ntorcolini at wavecable.com (Nicole B. Torcolini)
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 12:51:30 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Don't Use that Subject
References: <001401ca92e8$cbb5fcd0$0201a8c0@Serene>
Message-ID: <25BCAD8D965D4829949A2D3FD935A400@stanford.edu>

It is not a good idea to use the subject Computer Virus because many emails 
that are actually viruses have a title like that.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Serena" <serenacucco at verizon.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Monday, January 11, 2010 10:06 AM
Subject: [nabs-l] computer virus


> Hi nabsters,
>
> Albert, it seems that you have a virus on your computer.  There was an 
> email sent to the list, supposedly from you, that mentioned something 
> about going to England and losing a wallet--something I know you wouldn't 
> actually write to the list.  Just thaught I'd let you know.
>
> Serena
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/ntorcolini%40wavecable.com 



From freespirit328 at gmail.com  Mon Jan 11 21:12:51 2010
From: freespirit328 at gmail.com (Jennifer Aberdeen)
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:12:51 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Is the plea for help from Albert hoax or scam?
References: <EEF95126AE594EDD8EDDE3130176C283@windows4c0ed96>
Message-ID: <43D0343ED07940C6B84576ED500CAEB5@Gateway>

It's definitely a hoax. Someone might have hacked into his email account. 
I've seen enough of those types of emails...

Jen
_____________________________________

Jennifer Aberdeen, AVON Independent Sales E-Representative
401-644-5607

Shop AVON at home or office. Personal delivery
and a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee.

www.youravon.com/jaberdeen
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "V Nork" <ginisd at sbcglobal.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Monday, January 11, 2010 12:35 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] Is the plea for help from Albert hoax or scam?


> Hello Listers, I did open the message from Albert asking for a loan.  I 
> hope he is not really in dire straits, but the language here, the way 
> words are put together, does not sound like albert at all, it is 
> interesting to think what is behind this.  Ginny
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/freespirit328%40gmail.com 



From rjaquiss at earthlink.net  Tue Jan 12 02:27:28 2010
From: rjaquiss at earthlink.net (Robert Jaquiss)
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:27:28 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Is the plea for help from Albert hoax or scam?
References: <EEF95126AE594EDD8EDDE3130176C283@windows4c0ed96>
Message-ID: <BC2AACE44C3246EDB0622E2CCD07B2F7@D3DTZP41>

Hello List:

     If Albert is someone you recognize, I would suspect that someone has 
spoffed his email address. Whatever you do, DO NOT reply to the original 
message, or click on any links in it. If you have, I would suggest doing a 
virus and spyware scan on your PC immediately.

Regards,

Robert Jaquiss

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "V Nork" <ginisd at sbcglobal.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Monday, January 11, 2010 11:35 AM
Subject: [nabs-l] Is the plea for help from Albert hoax or scam?


> Hello Listers, I did open the message from Albert asking for a loan.  I 
> hope he is not really in dire straits, but the language here, the way 
> words are put together, does not sound like albert at all, it is 
> interesting to think what is behind this.  Ginny
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/rjaquiss%40earthlink.net 



From JFreeh at nfb.org  Tue Jan 12 02:49:04 2010
From: JFreeh at nfb.org (Freeh,
	Jessica)
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:49:04 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Blindness Organizations and Arizona State University
 Resolve Litigation Over Kindle
Message-ID: <auto-000134842778@mailfront1.g2host.com>


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE



CONTACT:

Chris Danielsen

Director of Public Relations

National Federation of the Blind

(410) 659-9314, extension 2330

(410) 262-1281 (Cell)

<mailto:cdanielsen at nfb.org>cdanielsen at nfb.org



Mitch Pomerantz, President

American Council of the Blind

(626) 372-5150 (Cell)

<mailto:mitch.pomerantz at earthlink.net>mitch.pomerantz at earthlink.net



Department of Justice

Office of Public Affairs

(202) 514-2007



Sharon Keeler

Arizona State University

(480) 965-4012 (Office)

(602) 540-8453 (Cell)

<mailto:sharon.keeler at asu.edu>sharon.keeler at asu.edu





Blindness Organizations and Arizona State University

Resolve Litigation Over Kindle



Phoenix, Arizona (January 11, 2010): The National Federation of the 
Blind (NFB), the American Council of the Blind (ACB), and Arizona 
State University (ASU), today announced a settlement agreement 
resolving litigation filed by NFB and ACB against the Arizona Board 
of Regents (ABOR) and ASU.  The lawsuit arose from the university's 
participation in a pilot program using the Kindle DX, a dedicated 
device for reading electronic books, or e-books, developed by 
Amazon.com, Inc.  The NFB and ACB alleged that the Kindle DX was 
inaccessible to blind students and thus violated federal law.  ABOR 
and ASU denied and continue to deny any violations of the law.



The settlement agreement among the parties was reached in light of 
several factors, including: (1) ASU's commitment to providing access 
to all programs and facilities for students with disabilities, 
including students who are blind or have low vision; (2) the fact 
that the pilot program will end in the Spring of 2010; (3) Amazon and 
others are making improvements to and progress in the accessibility 
of e-book readers; and (4) the university's agreement that should ASU 
deploy e-book readers in future classes over the next two years, it 
will strive to use devices that are accessible to the blind.



The United States Department of Justice is also a party to the 
agreement, which does not involve the payment of any damages or 
attorney's fees or costs.



Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, said: 
"The National Federation of the Blind is pleased with this 
settlement, which we believe will help to ensure that new 
technologies create new opportunities for blind students rather than 
new barriers."



Mitch Pomerantz, President of the American Council of the Blind, 
expressed support by commenting: "I believe this settlement between 
Arizona State University and the two major national consumer-advocacy 
organizations of blind and visually impaired persons will encourage 
the industry to develop fully accessible e-book readers in the near future."



###


From noreply at serotek.com  Tue Jan 12 03:08:26 2010
From: noreply at serotek.com (Serotek Announcements)
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 21:08:26 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Serotek Announces Build A Bundle
Message-ID: <auto-000134844231@mailfront1.g2host.com>


Serotek Corporation demonstrates its continued commitment to 
providing accessibility anywhere at an affordable price with its 
build a bundle offering.  Build A Bundle is an exclusively online 
offering which allows an individual to customize a package of Serotek 
products and services to specifically meet their financial and 
technical needs.  With Build A Bundle, customers can choose from 
Serotek products and services such as the System Access screen 
reader, SAMNet content, and SAMNet Remote Training and Support.   The 
package is billed on a monthly basis, and individuals can add or 
subtract services at any time in order to best suit their particular 
accessible digital lifestyle.  "We believe that assistive technology 
should be as easily attainable by a consumer as a phone line or cable 
service,", said Mike Calvo, CEO.  "Now, with Build a Bundle, 
consumers can have accessibility on the go for less than the cost of a meal."



Build A Bundle is available to Serotek customers who wish to add to 
their existing package, as well as to those who currently have no 
Serotek products or services.  The default synthesizer for the Build 
a Bundle offering is the DECTalk TTS engine, and Neospeech and 
Eloquence synthesizers are available as one-time purchases which will 
will remain a part of your account from the purchase point 
forward.  For a limited time, Serotek is offering the Eloquence TTS 
engine for free with any Build a Bundle purchase.  For those who 
don't currently wish to purchase a Build a Bundle package but would 
like to use the Eloquence TTS engine with Serotek's free 
<http://www.satogo.com/>System Access to Go service, Eloquence may be 
purchased for $40, a portion of which will be donated to the 
<http://www.accessibilityisaright.org/>Accessibility is a Right (AIR) 
Foundation.



Building a bundle is easy.  Existing customers may log in to their 
accounts through <http://www.satogo.com/>System Access to Go, or from 
the Serotek software installed on their computer.  Those who do not 
currently have an account may create one by launching 
<http://www.satogo.com/>www.satogo.com and choosing the "create a 
System Access to Go" account from the login screen.  Once logged on, 
simply choose the "my account" option by pressing the modifier key 
plus the letter f, followed by the letter a.  From the "my account" 
screen, choose the "build a Bundle" option and begin creating your 
customized package for affordable accessibility anywhere life takes you.



To see a list of frequently asked questions and a price list for 
Build a Bundle, read the Build a Bundle faq at 
<http://serotek.com/build-a-bundle-faq>http://serotek.com/build-a-bundle-faq


From JChwalow at nfb.org  Tue Jan 12 03:19:22 2010
From: JChwalow at nfb.org (Chwalow,
	Judith)
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 21:19:22 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Research in the Rockies
Message-ID: <auto-000134845125@mailfront1.g2host.com>



Dear Colleague:


Because of your demonstrated interest in Braille, 
we are forwarding an announcement of the first 
international seminar devoted entirely to 
Braille. We would like to encourage you to submit 
an abstract for presentation. Please note that 
the deadline for submissions has been extended to February 1, 2010.


Research in the Rockies: Research <?xml:namespace 
prefix = st1 ns = 
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" 
/>Summit on Braille Reading and Writing


June 10-12, 2010, Denver, Colorado at the Denver Marriott City Center


Call for Papers




Sponsored by<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = 
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

National Center for Severe and Sensory Disabilities (NCSSD)
Bresnahan-Halstead Center on Disabilities
The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) Jernigan Institute


Purpose:

The purpose of this conference is to explore 
current and emerging research from a wide range 
of disciplines that pertains to Braille reading and writing.


Call-for-Papers Submission Guidelines:

§         Submit 250-word abstract online at: 
<http://www.unco.edu/ncssd>www.unco.edu/ncssd

§         Submission deadline has been extended to February 1, 2010

§         ***Anything submitted after midnight on 
February 1, 2010 will not be accepted***

§         Presentation formats:

a.       Research paper presentation (20 minutes)

b.       Panel (minimum 60 minutes)

c.       Poster (posters will be presented in roundtable sessions)

§         If you have problems with the online 
submission form, please contact: <mailto:ncssd at unco.edu>ncssd at unco.edu

§         Please note that any handout material 
must be made available in Braille, large print, 
and electronic formats. Provide explanations for all PowerPoint presentations.


Proposals Invited from:

Cognitive scientists, linguists, educators, 
rehabilitation specialists, neurologists, 
sociologists and experimental psychologists, 
researchers in haptic and tactile perception, 
demographers, occupational therapists, and others


A. Judith Chwalow, DrPH

Director of Research, Jernigan Institute

National Federation of the Blind

200 East Wells Street

Jernigan Place

Baltimore, MD 21230



410 659 9314 x 2404

FAX: 410 659 5129

jchwalow at NFB.org


From nabs.president at gmail.com  Tue Jan 12 03:42:55 2010
From: nabs.president at gmail.com (Arielle Silverman)
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:42:55 +1100
Subject: [nabs-l] NABS January Bulletin
Message-ID: <85ff10071001111942l6f81ddd3jf89709770985ab8e@mail.gmail.com>

National Association of Blind Students
>From the Desk of the President
January 11, 2010

In This Bulletin:
1.  Washington Seminar Is Almost Here!
2.  NABS On Facebook and Twitter!
3.  Pennies for Pages Wrap-Up
4. NFB 2010 Scholarship Program

5. State Division Announcements:
News from Wisconsin
NABS Conference Call Jan. 24
News from Virginia

1.  Washington Seminar is Almost Here!

On Sunday January 31, NABS will hold our annual winter gathering at
the Holiday Inn Capitol Hotel, 550 C Street SW, in Washington, D.C.
Come to our seminar to learn about such issues as accessing textbooks,
educational testing, scholarships, and blindness training.  We'll also
be talking about strategies for finding jobs, both while you're in
school and after graduation.  Whether you're in high school, college,
grad school, recently graduated, or even just thinking about becoming
a student, this seminar will have something for you.

After the seminar, you can mingle with other blind students and NFB
members at our reception, beginning at 8:00 p.m.  Sandwiches, snacks,
and a cash bar will be available, along with music and a live auction.

Finally, on Monday morning, we will hold a NABS open house where our
speakers from the seminar will be able to answer your individual
questions.  You'll also have a chance to meet and talk with the
students on the NABS board of directors.

We look forward to seeing you in Washington!

2. NABS on Facebook and Twitter:

The National Association of Blind Students now has a page on Facebook
and an account on Twitter! Become a fan of NABS on Facebook to stay in
touch and communicate with other blind students across the country.
Follow us on Twitter to receive announcements about what NABS is doing
both nationally and in our state divisions.  You can find us by
searching for "National Association of Blind Students" on Facebook and
"NABSLINK" on Twitter.

Do you have a piece of news that you want us to post on Facebook and
Twitter? Please send it to the membership committee by writing an
email to
Nabs.membership at gmail.com
3. Pennies for Pages:
Thanks to all of you who raised money for NABS in our Pennies for
Pages contest! Please email Sean Whalen at
smwhalenpsp at gmail.com
and let him know how much money you raised.  He will let you know how
to send in the money.  Remember that the person who raises the most
money will win an Amazon gift card! Pledges can be collected up until
Jan.  22, 2010.

4.  2010 Scholarship Applications Now Available:
Each year the National Federation of the Blind awards thirty
scholarships to legally blind college and graduate students across the
country.  The scholarship includes a cash award ranging from $3000 to
$12000, plus a free trip to the NFB national convention and often a
piece of assistive technology such as a KNFB Reader Mobile.  The
scholarship application for 2010 is now on the Web at
www.nfb.org/scholarships
Applications are due by March 31, 2010.
Already won a national NFB scholarship? You can apply again and
potentially win a second scholarship, also known as a TenBroek
fellowship.

5. State Division Announcements:
News from Wisconsin:
WABS had a busy end and start to the year.  We all got together for a
new years party, and we had a great time.  On January 2nd, we held a
Bowl-A-Thon for a fundraiser for those of us going to Washington
Seminar.  We will have 7 students in attendence, and we made around
$1000 bowling.  We are also selling cookie dough to fundraise for
D.C., and we are selling raffle tickets to win an Ipod Nano.  The
drawing will be in April.  We are hosting our state convention this
year in Appleton Wisconsin, so we are busy with preparations.  We've
got a lot to get done before April!

We're also in the process of getting T-shirts designed and printed for
our division.  Things have been busy, and it seems they will only be
getting more busy.  We purchased popcorn makers for fundraising at
events we attend, and we have dedicated members working to help us
move forward in our goals as a division.  There are great things for
WABS in 2010!

Best,
Meghan Whalen, President
Wisconsin Association of Blind Students

NABS Conference Call Jan. 24:
On Sunday, January 24, we will have a conference call to discuss
Washington Seminar legislative issues, how to lobby, etc. The call
will begin at 7:00 p.m. Eastern time. Please call
712-775-7100
And enter access code 257963.
>From the NABS Membership Committee

News from Virginia:
At the 2009 NFB of Virginia convention, the Virginia Student Division
held its annual meeting. During this meeting, President Corbb O’Connor
conducted a series of “Larry King Live” interviews. He interviewed
Fairfax chapter President John Bailey about his experiences in
activities like fire-walking, walking on broken glass (not the song,
though we’re told John can sing quite well), and breaking boards with
his bare hands. John also talked about his experience losing his
vision in high school and college. Corbb also interviewed Josh
Boudreaux from the Louisiana Center for the Blind and Monique Melton
from the Colorado Center for the Blind. Josh and Monique spoke about
why students should consider training centers for improved independent
living skills and how the centers are unique.


After these insightful interviews President O’Conner led a discussion
of possible future activities that the organization would like to see
take place.  The overall consensus was to have a social gathering for
students in the hopes of increasing our outreach program and engaging
students prior to the next state convention.  The idea was raised to
host such an event at the Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind.
There was a discussion about having more student activities at the
2010 state convention as well as an attempt to involve students in the
Richmond Seminar. Having just spent thousands of dollars on the Youth
Blow-out, however the group decided to try to plan a larger event for
both parents and students to attend together sometime in the late
spring, possibly at the National Center for the Blind.


One task that Corbb hoped the group could achieve by the late January
timeframe was to develop a Constitution for the Division.


The meeting concluded with elections.  Corbb O’Connor was re-elected
President, Brittany Savage was elected Vice President, Michael Fish
was elected as Secretary, C. J. Fish was elected as Treasurer, and
Chelsea Cook was elected as the Board Member. All will serve for one
year, and the next election will be held at the 2010 NFB of Virginia
state convention.

Corbb O’Connor, President
Virginia Association of Blind Students


-- 
Arielle Silverman
President, National Association of Blind Students
Phone:  602-502-2255
Email:
nabs.president at gmail.com
Website:
www.nabslink.org


From freespirit328 at gmail.com  Tue Jan 12 03:45:13 2010
From: freespirit328 at gmail.com (Jennifer Aberdeen)
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 22:45:13 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Question about Talking Books
Message-ID: <C34CB7633F50422A95B29FEA7F79F700@Gateway>

Hi all,

I was just wondering if anyone knew what format LT stands for?

I keep seeing LT followed by numbers, but I don't know what it means.

I mean I know what RC and DB and BR mean, but I'm stuck on LT.

Does anyone know?

Thanks,

Jen
_____________________________________

Jennifer Aberdeen, AVON Independent Sales E-Representative
401-644-5607

Shop AVON at home or office. Personal delivery 
and a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. 

www.youravon.com/jaberdeen

From nabs.president at gmail.com  Tue Jan 12 04:54:53 2010
From: nabs.president at gmail.com (Arielle Silverman)
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:54:53 +1100
Subject: [nabs-l] Fwd: Roommate needed to split a cheap Washington Seminar
	hotel room
In-Reply-To: <529661.10900.qm@web65705.mail.ac4.yahoo.com>
References: <529661.10900.qm@web65705.mail.ac4.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <85ff10071001112054p62efc785h26eb8db5beb798d9@mail.gmail.com>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jim Reed <jim275_2 at yahoo.com>
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 2010 10:21:07 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Roommate needed to split a cheap Washington Seminar hotel room
To: NABS mail list <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>, NABS presidents
<nabs-presidents at nfbnet.org>, Arielle Silverman
<nabs.president at gmail.com>
Cc: Dan Burke <burke.dall at gmail.com>

Hello,

I just reserved a double room at the Winsor Park hotel in DC for
$67.55 per night (includes tax). I will be staying there fron January
30 through Febuary 5th. I am looking for a roommate (or roommates) for
all or part of my stay.

The hotel is located in the embassy section of DC (apparantly a good
neighborhood).The hotel is 2.5 miles from the capitol, and is a 5
miniute walk to the subway that will take you to the capitol. The
address is 2116 Kalorama Rd. Northwest. The phone number is 202 483
7700.

If you or anyone you know is interested in a room, please contact me via email.

Thanks,

Jim Reed






-- 
Arielle Silverman
President, National Association of Blind Students
Phone:  602-502-2255
Email:
nabs.president at gmail.com
Website:
www.nabslink.org


From jessica.trask.reagan at gmail.com  Tue Jan 12 12:01:04 2010
From: jessica.trask.reagan at gmail.com (Jess)
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 07:01:04 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Question about Talking Books
In-Reply-To: <C34CB7633F50422A95B29FEA7F79F700@Gateway>
References: <C34CB7633F50422A95B29FEA7F79F700@Gateway>
Message-ID: <46FDDCB9D7074106A88EA5B7F8EF2243@Jessica>

Jennifer,
My guess would be Large Type.
Jessica
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jennifer Aberdeen" <freespirit328 at gmail.com>
To: "NABS-L" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Monday, January 11, 2010 10:45 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] Question about Talking Books


> Hi all,
>
> I was just wondering if anyone knew what format LT stands for?
>
> I keep seeing LT followed by numbers, but I don't know what it means.
>
> I mean I know what RC and DB and BR mean, but I'm stuck on LT.
>
> Does anyone know?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jen
> _____________________________________
>
> Jennifer Aberdeen, AVON Independent Sales E-Representative
> 401-644-5607
>
> Shop AVON at home or office. Personal delivery
> and a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee.
>
> www.youravon.com/jaberdeen
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jessica.trask.reagan%40gmail.com 




From alexandera.castillo at gmail.com  Tue Jan 12 18:33:54 2010
From: alexandera.castillo at gmail.com (Alexander Castillo)
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:33:54 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] books on Grad schools and GRE testing material
Message-ID: <e7c236691001121033h6646ede6r5ae59fbe083977f1@mail.gmail.com>

Hello all, where are the best places to find or request accessible
reading material on graduate programs?  There are many APA guides to
grad program type books out there, but I don't want to bother with
scanning.

Also, where is the best place to get accessible mmaterial for the GRE?
Any pointers on books or prep programs are welcome.

Thanks,
Alex Castillo


From freespirit328 at gmail.com  Tue Jan 12 18:58:26 2010
From: freespirit328 at gmail.com (Jennifer Aberdeen)
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:58:26 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Question about Talking Books
References: <C34CB7633F50422A95B29FEA7F79F700@Gateway>
	<46FDDCB9D7074106A88EA5B7F8EF2243@Jessica>
Message-ID: <4E34BF058E3C4566A6640FF2C7761B27@Gateway>

Oh yeah, that's true.

LOL, sometimes I wonder about myself.

Jen
_____________________________________

Jennifer Aberdeen, AVON Independent Sales E-Representative
401-644-5607

Shop AVON at home or office. Personal delivery
and a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee.

www.youravon.com/jaberdeen
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jess" <jessica.trask.reagan at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2010 7:01 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Question about Talking Books


> Jennifer,
> My guess would be Large Type.
> Jessica
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Jennifer Aberdeen" <freespirit328 at gmail.com>
> To: "NABS-L" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Monday, January 11, 2010 10:45 PM
> Subject: [nabs-l] Question about Talking Books
>
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I was just wondering if anyone knew what format LT stands for?
>>
>> I keep seeing LT followed by numbers, but I don't know what it means.
>>
>> I mean I know what RC and DB and BR mean, but I'm stuck on LT.
>>
>> Does anyone know?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Jen
>> _____________________________________
>>
>> Jennifer Aberdeen, AVON Independent Sales E-Representative
>> 401-644-5607
>>
>> Shop AVON at home or office. Personal delivery
>> and a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee.
>>
>> www.youravon.com/jaberdeen
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jessica.trask.reagan%40gmail.com
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/freespirit328%40gmail.com 



From agrima at nbp.org  Tue Jan 12 19:35:43 2010
From: agrima at nbp.org (Tony Grima)
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:35:43 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] NBP's 2010 print/braille Valentines are here!
Message-ID: <26E762AB6EDB429296B37B962D5D4478@nbp2.local>

NBP announces our Valentines for 2010!
-Tony Grima, National Braille Press

This year's print/braille Valentine lets your sighted classmates or
friends learn a little braille, and smile!

A jolly pizza slice - with arms, legs, eyes, and a smile - greets you
with a big red heart on his chest. Above him are two lines of braille,
which can be read by using the printed braille decoder on the backside.
(The secret message is revealed on our webpage below - don't look if you
don't want to spoil it!)

Small Packs: 20 print/braille Valentines plus envelopes: $10
Large Packs: 32 print/braille Valentines plus envelopes: $14

Check out this year's fun design - and place your order soon, because
the big day is only one month away!
http://www.nbp.org/ic/nbp/VAL10-32.html

Some Valentines from previous years are also still available - click
through the link above to find them.

And don't miss out on our 2010 print/braille Winnie-the-Pooh Calendar:
http://www.nbp.org/ic/nbp/2010POOH.html

******
To order any books, send payment to:
NBP, 88 St. Stephen Street, Boston, MA 02115-4302
Or call and charge it: toll-free (800) 548-7323 or (617) 266-6160 ext
20. Or order any of our books online at
http://www.nbp.org/ic/nbp/publications/index.html .




From william.odonnell1 at yahoo.com  Tue Jan 12 20:58:04 2010
From: william.odonnell1 at yahoo.com (William ODonnell)
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 12:58:04 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [nabs-l] books on Grad schools and GRE testing material
In-Reply-To: <e7c236691001121033h6646ede6r5ae59fbe083977f1@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <406063.92785.qm@web30907.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

RFBD has the following related texts for prepairing to take A standard GRE.
1. Cracking the GRE with several additions.
2. The lateist Kaplan course book and supplemental material.
3. Kaplan power words.
There are many others; however, I can not think of the tytles at this point in time.  Hope this helps.


--- On Tue, 1/12/10, Alexander Castillo <alexandera.castillo at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Alexander Castillo <alexandera.castillo at gmail.com>
> Subject: [nabs-l] books on Grad schools and GRE testing material
> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> Date: Tuesday, January 12, 2010, 1:33 PM
> Hello all, where are the best places
> to find or request accessible
> reading material on graduate programs?  There are many
> APA guides to
> grad program type books out there, but I don't want to
> bother with
> scanning.
> 
> Also, where is the best place to get accessible mmaterial
> for the GRE?
> Any pointers on books or prep programs are welcome.
> 
> Thanks,
> Alex Castillo
> 
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your
> account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/william.odonnell1%40yahoo.com
> 


      


From trillian551 at gmail.com  Tue Jan 12 21:44:37 2010
From: trillian551 at gmail.com (Mary Fernandez)
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:44:37 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Question about Talking Books
In-Reply-To: <4E34BF058E3C4566A6640FF2C7761B27@Gateway>
References: <C34CB7633F50422A95B29FEA7F79F700@Gateway>
	<46FDDCB9D7074106A88EA5B7F8EF2243@Jessica>
	<4E34BF058E3C4566A6640FF2C7761B27@Gateway>
Message-ID: <fba03a171001121344h36d76d5dm2cbe145aaec0863e@mail.gmail.com>

large text.
Mary

On 1/12/10, Jennifer Aberdeen <freespirit328 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Oh yeah, that's true.
>
> LOL, sometimes I wonder about myself.
>
> Jen
> _____________________________________
>
> Jennifer Aberdeen, AVON Independent Sales E-Representative
> 401-644-5607
>
> Shop AVON at home or office. Personal delivery
> and a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee.
>
> www.youravon.com/jaberdeen
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jess" <jessica.trask.reagan at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2010 7:01 AM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Question about Talking Books
>
>
>> Jennifer,
>> My guess would be Large Type.
>> Jessica
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Jennifer Aberdeen" <freespirit328 at gmail.com>
>> To: "NABS-L" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Monday, January 11, 2010 10:45 PM
>> Subject: [nabs-l] Question about Talking Books
>>
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I was just wondering if anyone knew what format LT stands for?
>>>
>>> I keep seeing LT followed by numbers, but I don't know what it means.
>>>
>>> I mean I know what RC and DB and BR mean, but I'm stuck on LT.
>>>
>>> Does anyone know?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Jen
>>> _____________________________________
>>>
>>> Jennifer Aberdeen, AVON Independent Sales E-Representative
>>> 401-644-5607
>>>
>>> Shop AVON at home or office. Personal delivery
>>> and a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee.
>>>
>>> www.youravon.com/jaberdeen
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jessica.trask.reagan%40gmail.com
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/freespirit328%40gmail.com
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/trillian551%40gmail.com
>


-- 
Mary Fernandez
Emory University 2012
P.O. Box 123056
Atlanta Ga.
30322
Phone: 732-857-7004
In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that
greatness is never a given. It must be earned.
President Barack Obama


From corbbo at gmail.com  Tue Jan 12 23:02:57 2010
From: corbbo at gmail.com (Corbb O'Connor)
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:02:57 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Fwd: 2010 NFB Leadership and Advocacy in Washington
	Program for Students
References: <auto-000128518755@mailfront2.g2host.com>
Message-ID: <D6634E93-110D-4AC9-922E-19D91B6043C8@gmail.com>

Students!

I'm re-forwarding this opportunity sent last November from Mary Jo.  
Don't let this GREAT opportunity pass you by. The deadline to apply is  
February 1, right in the middle of Washington Seminar so get your apps  
in before you leave for that!

Corbb

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Hartle, Mary Jo" <mhartle at nfb.org> (by way of David Andrews <dandrews at visi.com 
 >)
Date: November 21, 2009 7:53:17 PM EST
To: david.andrews at nfbnet.org
Subject: [Vabs] 2010 NFB Leadership and Advocacy in Washington Program  
for Students
Reply-To: Virginia Association of Blind Students list <vabs at nfbnet.org>


The National Federation of the Blind Announces
The 2010 NFB Leadership and Advocacy in Washington, D.C., (LAW) Program
Engaging the Voice of America's Blind Youth

For Youth Grades 6-9 or Ages 12-16
April 16-20, 2010
Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, MD

This four-day experience will provide blind and low vision students  
with a unique opportunity to explore the inner workings of our  
country's government, its history, and its culture while staying at  
the national headquarters for the National Federation of the Blind in  
Baltimore, MD. In addition to learning about grassroots legislation  
efforts, how resolutions are passed, and how various blindness  
legislation is brought about, participants will learn more about  
advocacy work for blind individuals and available resources for blind  
students and adults.

Highlights of the Program include:

* Visits to historical sites in Washington, D.C.
* Meetings with, and presentations from, influential government leaders
* Presentations by influential leaders from the largest blindness  
advocacy group in the country
* Tours of the National Federation of the Blind national headquarters
* A visit to the International Braille and Technology Center, the  
largest lab of accessible technology for the blind

Program Details:
* Cost: There will be a $250 fee for accepted students.  All other  
expenses including transportation, room, and board will be provided
* All accepted students must be accompanied by a parent/guardian,  
teacher, or blind/low vision mentor from their home state
* No more than twenty-five participants from across the country will  
be accepted
* Applications are due by February 1, 2010, to be considered

To learn more about this exciting new program, or to apply online,  
please visit <http://www.nfb.org/LAWProgram>www.nfb.org/LAWProgram or  
contact Mary Jo T. Hartle, director of education at (410) 659-9314,  
ext. 2407,  or by e-mail at <mailto:mhartle at nfb.org>mhartle at nfb.org.

<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft- 
com:office:office" />

Mary Jo T. Hartle



Mary Jo Thorpe-Hartle, MEd, NOMC

Director of Education
Jernigan Institute
NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND
200 East Wells Street
Baltimore, MD 21230
Phone: (410)659-9314 ext. 2407
Email: <mailto:mhartle at nfb.org>mhartle at nfb.org
Fax: (410) 659-5129
Visit <http://www.nfb.org/>www.nfb.org

_______________________________________________
Vabs mailing list
Vabs at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/vabs_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for  
Vabs:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/vabs_nfbnet.org/corbbo%40gmail.com



From freespirit328 at gmail.com  Tue Jan 12 23:31:18 2010
From: freespirit328 at gmail.com (Jennifer Aberdeen)
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:31:18 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Question about Talking Books
References: <C34CB7633F50422A95B29FEA7F79F700@Gateway><46FDDCB9D7074106A88EA5B7F8EF2243@Jessica><4E34BF058E3C4566A6640FF2C7761B27@Gateway>
	<fba03a171001121344h36d76d5dm2cbe145aaec0863e@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <10F82CC2B0384D7AAEF01F3D4F9FF63A@Gateway>

Thanks so much.

Jen
_____________________________________

Jennifer Aberdeen, AVON Independent Sales E-Representative
401-644-5607

Shop AVON at home or office. Personal delivery
and a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee.

www.youravon.com/jaberdeen
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mary Fernandez" <trillian551 at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2010 4:44 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Question about Talking Books


> large text.
> Mary
>
> On 1/12/10, Jennifer Aberdeen <freespirit328 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Oh yeah, that's true.
>>
>> LOL, sometimes I wonder about myself.
>>
>> Jen
>> _____________________________________
>>
>> Jennifer Aberdeen, AVON Independent Sales E-Representative
>> 401-644-5607
>>
>> Shop AVON at home or office. Personal delivery
>> and a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee.
>>
>> www.youravon.com/jaberdeen
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Jess" <jessica.trask.reagan at gmail.com>
>> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2010 7:01 AM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Question about Talking Books
>>
>>
>>> Jennifer,
>>> My guess would be Large Type.
>>> Jessica
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Jennifer Aberdeen" <freespirit328 at gmail.com>
>>> To: "NABS-L" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Monday, January 11, 2010 10:45 PM
>>> Subject: [nabs-l] Question about Talking Books
>>>
>>>
>>>> Hi all,
>>>>
>>>> I was just wondering if anyone knew what format LT stands for?
>>>>
>>>> I keep seeing LT followed by numbers, but I don't know what it means.
>>>>
>>>> I mean I know what RC and DB and BR mean, but I'm stuck on LT.
>>>>
>>>> Does anyone know?
>>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>>
>>>> Jen
>>>> _____________________________________
>>>>
>>>> Jennifer Aberdeen, AVON Independent Sales E-Representative
>>>> 401-644-5607
>>>>
>>>> Shop AVON at home or office. Personal delivery
>>>> and a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee.
>>>>
>>>> www.youravon.com/jaberdeen
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jessica.trask.reagan%40gmail.com
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/freespirit328%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/trillian551%40gmail.com
>>
>
>
> -- 
> Mary Fernandez
> Emory University 2012
> P.O. Box 123056
> Atlanta Ga.
> 30322
> Phone: 732-857-7004
> In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that
> greatness is never a given. It must be earned.
> President Barack Obama
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/freespirit328%40gmail.com 



From mhartle at nfb.org  Wed Jan 13 02:00:36 2010
From: mhartle at nfb.org (Hartle,
	Mary Jo)
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:00:36 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] NFB LAW Program:  Deadline coming up soon--February 1, 2010
Message-ID: <auto-000134727929@mailfront2.g2host.com>


The National Federation of the Blind Announces
The 2010 NFB Leadership and Advocacy in Washington, D.C., (LAW) Program
Engaging the Voice of America's Blind Youth

For Youth Grades 6-9 or Ages 12-16
April 16-20, 2010
Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, MD

This four-day experience will provide blind and low vision students 
with a unique opportunity to explore the inner workings of our 
country's government, its history, and its culture while staying at 
the national headquarters for the National Federation of the Blind in 
Baltimore, MD. In addition to learning about grassroots legislation 
efforts, how resolutions are passed, and how various blindness 
legislation is brought about, participants will learn more about 
advocacy work for blind individuals and available resources for blind 
students and adults.

Highlights of the Program include:
* Visits to historical sites in Washington, D.C.
* Meetings with, and presentations from, influential government leaders
* Presentations by influential leaders from the largest blindness 
advocacy group in the country
* Tours of the National Federation of the Blind national headquarters
* A visit to the International Braille and Technology Center, the 
largest lab of accessible technology for the blind

Program Details:
* Cost: There will be a $250 fee for accepted students.  All other 
expenses including transportation, room, and board will be provided
* All accepted students must be accompanied by a parent/guardian, 
teacher, or blind/low vision mentor from their home state
* No more than twenty-five participants from across the country will 
be accepted
* Applications are due by February 1, 2010, to be considered

To learn more about this exciting new program, or to apply online, 
please visit <http://www.nfb.org/LAWProgram>www.nfb.org/LAWProgram or 
contact Mary Jo T. Hartle, director of education at (410) 659-9314, 
ext. 2407,  or by e-mail at <mailto:mhartle at nfb.org>mhartle at nfb.org.

<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Mary Jo T. Hartle



Mary Jo Thorpe-Hartle, MEd, NOMC

Director of Education
Jernigan Institute
NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND
200 East Wells Street
Baltimore, MD 21230
Phone: (410)659-9314 ext. 2407
Email: <mailto:mhartle at nfb.org>mhartle at nfb.org
Fax: (410) 659-5129
         Visit <http://www.nfb.org/>www.nfb.org


From rwest at nfb.org  Wed Jan 13 02:14:05 2010
From: rwest at nfb.org (NFB-NEWSLINE)
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:14:05 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Upcoming NFB-NEWSLINE Show and Webinar Appearances
Message-ID: <auto-000134729035@mailfront2.g2host.com>


Having trouble viewing this email? 
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here
Newspaper boat header


                                           On the Air with NFB-NEWSLINE®

Would you like to learn more about NFB-NEWSLINE®, 
and how it can be of value to you or those that 
you serve?  Are you interested in how subscribers 
can access over three hundred newspapers and 
magazines over the phone, on our Web site, or by 
download to a digital talking-book player?  While 
you can always call us to get personal help, you 
might also be interested to participate in, or 
just listen to, a show or Webinar that discusses 
NFB-NEWSLINE® and its features and benefits.  We 
have two appearances scheduled already for 2010; 
below are the shows where we will be talking about NFB-NEWSLINE®.

This Wednesday (January 13) at 8 p.m. EST, please 
join as we speak with Bonnie Blose on the Books 
and Beyond show on ACB Radio.  We will cover the 
basics of our service, and how it can play a 
valuable service in the lives of the 
print-disabled.  If you'd like to join the 
conversation, please call (218) 844-3388 and 
enter access code "books," followed by the pound 
sign (26657#).  Callers to the Books and Beyond 
show will be invited to join the discussion 
during the second half of the show, so please be 
sure to call in and ask any questions you may 
have.  If you are unable to participate tomorrow 
evening but would like to hear us present 
information about NFB-NEWSLINE®, please visit the 
Mainstream channel on ACB Radio to hear the 
rebroadcasts of the show.  Shows will be played 
every two hours from Saturday 8 p.m. EST, until Sunday evening at 6 p.m. EST.

Seminars at Hadley will feature a conversation with 
us on Thursday, January 21, at 3 p.m. EST.  In 
this Webinar you will learn about the use and 
value of the service, as well as the newer access 
methods for NFB-NEWSLINE® Online.  For more 
information, or to register for this Webinar, 
please visit: http://www.hadley.edu/5_c_seminarAtHadley.asp.

These appearances are geared to help you 
understand the use and value of NFB-NEWSLINE®, 
and to keep you up-to-date on the service.  We 
would love to interact with you live, but if you 
can't participate, please consider listening to 
the rebroadcast or archive of the show or 
Webinar.  If you have any questions about these 
appearances, please e-mail Renee West, Marketing 
and Outreach Manager, at rwest at nfb.org.

                                                   The NFB-NEWSLINE® Team

NFB-NEWSLINE®

200 East Wells Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21230
410-659-9314 x2411
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From spangler.robert at gmail.com  Wed Jan 13 05:45:50 2010
From: spangler.robert at gmail.com (Robert Spangler)
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:45:50 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Geology Laboratory
Message-ID: <19ccaa051001122145k296eaa52oaedbeb34c519edd5@mail.gmail.com>

Hello all,

I attempted to send a message to the list yesterday regarding this but
I don't think it went through.  anyways - my undergraduate program
requires that I take one science lab and I have decided to take
geology, as it is the natural science that most interests me.  In this
lab, we must identify rocks and minerals by color, shininess,
hardness, all of that stuff.  My question is - how would a blind
person participate in this class?  Is there anyone on this list who
has taken such a lab and who would be willing to give me some tips?  I
took a lecture geology course last year and the teacher from that
class, stating that I am the first blind person she's known of to take
such a lab here, has offered to come and work with me in the lab but
still some ideas would be helpful.  Also, the teacher of the lab seems
to think that the office of accessibility services will be able to
assist us, like most professors do, but besides providing a student
who would act as my eyes in the class, I doubt the office would be
able to help much.  Thanks for any advice you all may be able to
provide!

Thanks,
-- 
Robert Spangler
The University of Toledo
Student Senator - Administrative Affairs Committee Chair, College of
Arts and Sciences


From clb5590 at gmail.com  Wed Jan 13 13:59:29 2010
From: clb5590 at gmail.com (Cindy Bennett)
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:59:29 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Geology Laboratory
In-Reply-To: <19ccaa051001122145k296eaa52oaedbeb34c519edd5@mail.gmail.com>
References: <19ccaa051001122145k296eaa52oaedbeb34c519edd5@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <3fea3c411001130559l7907c520i4e90bf6ff5b79e95@mail.gmail.com>

You can definitely distinct some rocks by feeling them, but you will
definitely also need someone to describe them for you to identify.
During labs, i chose to do more of the writing related work and lab
exercises i could effectively do independently as to not burden my
partner with having to do more than her fair share.

Cindy

On 1/13/10, Robert Spangler <spangler.robert at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I attempted to send a message to the list yesterday regarding this but
> I don't think it went through.  anyways - my undergraduate program
> requires that I take one science lab and I have decided to take
> geology, as it is the natural science that most interests me.  In this
> lab, we must identify rocks and minerals by color, shininess,
> hardness, all of that stuff.  My question is - how would a blind
> person participate in this class?  Is there anyone on this list who
> has taken such a lab and who would be willing to give me some tips?  I
> took a lecture geology course last year and the teacher from that
> class, stating that I am the first blind person she's known of to take
> such a lab here, has offered to come and work with me in the lab but
> still some ideas would be helpful.  Also, the teacher of the lab seems
> to think that the office of accessibility services will be able to
> assist us, like most professors do, but besides providing a student
> who would act as my eyes in the class, I doubt the office would be
> able to help much.  Thanks for any advice you all may be able to
> provide!
>
> Thanks,
> --
> Robert Spangler
> The University of Toledo
> Student Senator - Administrative Affairs Committee Chair, College of
> Arts and Sciences
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>


From dsmithnfb at gmail.com  Wed Jan 13 19:36:46 2010
From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith)
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:36:46 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] I Need Your Help
In-Reply-To: <27D3D5AFBE314E5FAB1A1A35BC748EA0@Ashley>
References: <BAY139-W19EC494854716C88F2A94B8B6D0@phx.gbl>
	<B977697F36C748718D819791D33A55DA@SonyPC>
	<27D3D5AFBE314E5FAB1A1A35BC748EA0@Ashley>
Message-ID: <409c235c1001131136n3f334300r97e4d5c4999a8386@mail.gmail.com>

Hey Albert,
 I would suggest changing your  password, but before doing so,  I
would  run my antivirus and spyware softwareand then change the
password.
  Best,
  Darian

On 1/11/10, Ashley  Bramlett <bookwormahb at earthlink.net> wrote:
> There must be a virus on Albert's computer that sent this to all in the
> address book.  Lets ignore it.
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mark J. Cadigan" <kramc11 at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>; "Albert Yoo" <albertyoo1 at hotmail.com>
> Sent: Monday, January 11, 2010 1:34 PM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] I Need Your Help
>
>
>> This appears to be a scam, if it is true, why would you send it to a list
>> serve.
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Albert Yoo" <albertyoo1 at hotmail.com>
>> To: "Albert Yoo" <albertyoo1 at hotmail.com>
>> Sent: Monday, January 11, 2010 10:04 AM
>> Subject: [nabs-l] I Need Your Help
>>
>>
>>>
>>> Hello,
>>>     How are you doing ? I hope you are doing fine, I'm sorry that I
>>> didn't inform you about my traveling to England for a Seminar.
>>> I need a favor from you as soon as you receive this e-mail because I
>>> misplaced my wallet on my way to the hotel where my money,and other
>>> valuable things were kept, I will like you to assist me with a  soft loan
>>>
>>> urgently. I will be needing the sum of $2,500 to sort-out my hotel bills
>>> and get myself back home.
>>> I will appreciate whatever you can afford to help me with, I will pay you
>>>
>>> back as soon as I return,I'm counting on you on this,Kindly let me know
>>> if you can be of help so I can send you my details to use when sending
>>> the money through western union.
>>> I look forward to read from you soon.
>>> Your reply will be greatly appreciated. Thanks
>>> _________________________________________________________________
>>> Your E-mail and More On-the-Go. Get Windows Live Hotmail Free.
>>> http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390709/direct/01/
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kramc11%40gmail.com
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>


-- 
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


"And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
before us;
if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
past and future generations,
then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
done, and
usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama


From gwunder at earthlink.net  Thu Jan 14 04:02:21 2010
From: gwunder at earthlink.net (Gary Wunder)
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:02:21 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Legislative Alert-Washington Seminar Fact Sheets Available
Message-ID: <auto-000135205937@mailfront1.g2host.com>


----- Original Message -----
From: Hartle, Jesse
Sent: Friday, January 08, 2010 1:22 PM
Subject: Legislative Alert-Washington Seminar Fact Sheets Available


Fellow Federationists:



I am writing to you to let you know that the fact 
sheets for the 2010 Washington Seminar are now on 
the NFB Web site.  They can be found on the "NFB 
2010 Washington Seminar" page at 
http://www.nfb.org/nfb/Washington_Seminar.asp. 
For your convenience, the fact sheets are also 
attached to this e-mail.  The hot issues for the 2010 seminar are:



-- Passage of the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act;

-- Passage of a Technology Bill of Rights for the Blind; and

-- Passage of the Blind Persons Return to Work Act.



             Please review these fact sheets in 
preparation for your appointments during 
Washington Seminar.  We expect that bills related 
to the Technology Bill of Rights and a Senate 
companion bill to the Blind Persons Return to 
Work Act will soon be introduced.  When these 
bills are introduced, the fact sheets will be 
updated to include that information.



             Should you have questions, I have 
included my contact information at the bottom of 
this message.  I look forward to seeing all of 
you at Washington Seminar as we work towards 
passage of these crucial issues.  Once again, 
thank you in advance for all of your hard work.



Jesse M. Hartle

Government Programs Specialist

NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND

Phone:  (410) 659-9314, extension 2233

E-mail:  jharle at nfb.org



JMH/wmb



Attachments



Legislative Agenda of Blind Americans:

Priorities for the 111th Congress, SECOND Session





             The National Federation of the Blind 
(NFB) is the oldest and largest organization of 
blind people in the United States.  As the Voice 
of the Nation's Blind, we represent the 
collective views of blind people throughout 
society.  All of our leaders and the vast 
majority of our members are blind, but anyone can 
participate in our movement.  There are an 
estimated 1.3 million blind people in the United 
States, and every year approximately 75,000 
Americans become blind.  The social and economic 
consequences of blindness affect not only blind 
people, but also our families, our friends, and our coworkers.



             Three legislative initiatives demand 
the immediate attention of the 111th Congress in its second session:

1.                  We urge Congress to ensure 
the safety of blind and other pedestrians by 
passing the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement 
Act.  This legislation would require the U.S. Secretary of Transportation to:

· 
begin a study within ninety days of its enactment 
to determine the most practical means of assuring 
that blind and other pedestrians receive 
essentially similar information to that which 
they now receive from sound emitted by internal combustion engines;

· 
determine the minimum amount of sound necessary 
to offer sufficient information for blind 
pedestrians to make safe travel judgments, based 
on appropriate scientific research and 
consultation with blind Americans and other affected groups;

· 
within two years of beginning the study, 
promulgate a motor vehicle safety standard to 
address the needs of blind and other pedestrians 
by requiring either a minimum level of sound or 
an equally effective means of providing the same 
information as is available from hearing internal combustion engines; and

· 
apply the standard to all motor vehicles 
manufactured or sold in the United States 
beginning no later than two years after the date it is promulgated.



2.                  We urge Congress to work with 
blind Americans to create a Technology Bill of 
Rights for the Blind that mandates that consumer 
electronics, home appliances, kiosks, and 
electronic office technology provide user 
interfaces that are accessible through nonvisual 
means.  This legislation should:



· 
mandate that all consumer electronics, home 
appliances, kiosks, and electronic office 
technology be designed so that blind people can 
access the same functions as sighted people 
through nonvisual means and with substantially equivalent ease of use;



· 
create a commission comprised of essential 
stakeholders to establish standards for nonvisual 
accessibility of electronic devices intended for use in the home or office;



· 
endow the Department of Justice with the 
authority to enforce the regulations promulgated 
by the commission established by this legislation; and



· 
authorize the commission to reexamine and rewrite 
standards periodically as consumer electronic technology continues to evolve.



3.                  We urge Congress to promote 
and facilitate the transition by blind Americans 
from recipients of Social Security Disability 
Insurance benefits to income-earning, tax-paying, 
productive members of the American workforce by enacting legislation to:



·         replace the monthly earnings penalty 
with a graduated three-for-one phase-out (i.e., a 
$1 reduction in benefits for each $3 earned above the limit);



·         replace the monthly earnings test with 
an annualized earnings test in an amount equal to 
twelve times the Substantial Gainful Activity amount; and



·         establish an impairment-related work 
expense deduction for blind Social Security 
Disability Insurance beneficiaries equal to the 
amount applicable for this deduction when 
determining an appropriate income subsidy under 
Medicare Part D or 16.3 percent of earnings, whichever is greater.







             For more information about these 
priorities, please consult the attached fact sheets.



             Blind Americans need your help to 
achieve our goals of economic security, increased 
opportunity, and full integration into American 
society on a basis of equality.  Enactment of 
these legislative proposals will represent 
important steps toward reaching these goals.  We 
need the help and support of each member of 
Congress.  Our success benefits not only us, but 
the whole of America as well.  In this time of 
national economic insecurity, these measures will 
contribute to increasing the tax base and 
encouraging the purchase of consumer goods.







ENHANCING PEDESTRIAN SAFETY:

ENSURING THE BLIND CAN CONTINUE

TO TRAVEL SAFELY AND INDEPENDENTLY





Purpose:  To enact the Pedestrian Safety 
Enhancement Act, which will establish a motor 
vehicle safety standard to alert blind and other 
pedestrians of the presence of silent hybrid and electric vehicles.





Background:  Until recently independent travel 
for the blind has been a relatively simple matter 
once a blind person has been trained in travel 
techniques and has learned to use a white cane or 
to travel with a guide dog.  Blind people listen 
to the sound of automobile engines to determine 
the direction, speed, and pattern of 
traffic.  Sounds from traffic tell blind 
pedestrians how many vehicles are near them and 
how fast they are moving; whether the vehicles 
are accelerating or decelerating; and whether the 
vehicles are traveling toward, away from, or 
parallel to them.  With all of this information 
blind people can accurately determine when it is 
safe to advance into an intersection or across a 
driveway or parking lot.  The information 
obtained from listening to traffic sounds allows 
blind people to travel with complete confidence 
and without assistance.  Studies have shown that 
sighted pedestrians also use auditory information when traveling.



Over the past few years, however, vehicles that 
are completely silent in certain modes of 
operation have come on the market, and many more 
silent vehicles are expected in the near 
future.  These vehicles are designed to have many 
benefits, including improved fuel efficiency and 
reduced emissions, but they do not need to be 
silent in order to achieve these intended 
benefits.  An unintended consequence of these 
vehicles as they are currently designed is that 
they endanger the safety, not only of blind 
people, but also of small children, seniors, cyclists, and runners.





Need for Congressional Action:  For several years 
the National Federation of the Blind has been 
concerned about the proliferation of silent 
vehicles.  These concerns were validated by a 
recent report from the National Highway Traffic 
Safety Administration, which concluded that at 
low speeds hybrid and electric vehicles are twice 
as likely to be involved in accidents with 
pedestrians as vehicles with internal combustion 
engines.  Recently automobile manufacturers have 
acknowledged the dangers posed to blind 
pedestrians by silent-vehicle technology and have 
begun to work with the National Federation of the 
Blind to craft solutions.  While participation 
from some manufacturers is an important first 
step, many others continue to take a wait-and-see 
approach on this important issue.  Congress must 
therefore direct the Department of Transportation 
to take action.  It is crucial that this problem 
be addressed before the inevitable avalanche of 
tragedies involving blind people (including newly 
blinded veterans), small children, seniors, 
cyclists, and runners shocks the nation.





Proposed Legislation:  The Pedestrian Safety 
Enhancement Act (H.R. 734 and S. 841) was 
introduced by Congressmen Towns and Stearns in 
the House and by Senators Kerry and Specter in 
the Senate.  This legislation directs the 
secretary of transportation to conduct a study 
and establish a motor vehicle safety standard 
that provides a means of alerting blind and other 
pedestrians of motor vehicle operation based on 
appropriate scientific research and consultation 
with blind Americans and other affected 
groups.  This national motor vehicle safety 
standard must have the following characteristics:

   a.. In all phases of operation (including 
times when the vehicle is at a full stop), 
pedestrians must be able to identify vehicles by nonvisual means.
   b.. The motor vehicle safety standard must 
also provide pedestrians with the range of 
information that is currently provided by 
combustion engines, including whether the vehicle 
is idling, maintaining a constant speed, accelerating, or decelerating.
The standard need not prescribe the apparatus, 
technology, or method to be used by vehicle 
manufacturers to achieve the required safety 
standard.  This approach will encourage 
manufacturers to use innovative and 
cost-effective techniques to achieve the motor vehicle safety standard.

Automobiles that operate in complete silence 
endanger the safety of all of us; silent 
operation should be viewed as a design flaw 
comparable to the lack of seat belts or air bags, 
and therefore this safety issue must be addressed.





Requested Action:  Please support blind Americans 
by cosponsoring the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement 
Act to authorize the U.S. Department of 
Transportation to establish and promulgate 
regulations specifying a motor vehicle safety 
standard for all new automobiles sold in the 
United States.  In the House of Representatives 
members can be added by contacting Emily Khoury 
in Congressman Towns's office, or James Thomas in 
Congressman Stearns's office.  In the Senate 
members can be added as cosponsors by contacting 
Doug Frost in Senator Kerry's office.





Contact Information:

Jesse Hartle

Government Programs Specialist

NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND

Phone:  (410) 659-9314, extension 2233

Email:  jhartle at nfb.org







A TECHNOLOGY BILL OF RIGHTS FOR THE BLIND





Purpose:  To mandate that consumer electronics, 
home appliances, kiosks, and electronic office 
technology provide user interfaces that are 
accessible through nonvisual means.





Background:  In recent years rapid advances in 
microchip and digital technology have led to 
increasingly complex user interfaces for everyday 
products such as consumer electronics, home 
appliances, kiosks, and electronic office 
technology.  Many new devices in these categories 
require interaction with visual displays, 
on-screen menus, touch screens, and other user 
interfaces that are inaccessible to individuals 
who are blind or have low vision.  Settings on 
the stove, dishwasher, or home entertainment 
system are no longer controlled by knobs, 
switches, and buttons that can be readily 
identified and whose settings can be easily 
discerned.  Inaccessibility of these devices is a 
major barrier to a blind person's independence 
and productivity.  If a blind person cannot 
operate the interfaces of basic office equipment 
such as copiers and fax machines, this is a 
potential threat to that person's opportunity to 
join the workforce or to maintain an existing job.



Many popular nonvisual mechanisms are available 
for manufacturers to create interfaces accessible 
to everyone.  For example, text-to-speech 
technology is inexpensive and more ubiquitous 
than it has ever been-it is used in everything 
from automated telephone systems to the weather 
forecasting service broadcast by the National 
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.  Indeed, 
a few manufacturers have incorporated this 
technology into their products to create talking 
menus or to articulate what is on the display 
screen, but many manufacturers have continued to 
design interfaces that do not include any 
nonvisual means of use, rendering the devices inaccessible to blind people.





Need for Legislation:  Currently no enforceable 
mandates exist for manufacturers of consumer 
electronics, home appliances, kiosks, and 
electronic office technology to make their 
products accessible to all consumers.  There are 
also no accessibility standards to provide 
guidance to manufacturers on how to avoid 
creating barriers to access by the blind.



Congress should therefore enact a Technology Bill 
of Rights for the Blind which:

   a.. establishes that manufacturers must create 
accessible user interfaces for their products,
   b.. provides a means for enforcement, and
   c.. establishes standards that will provide 
meaningful benchmarks that manufacturers can use 
to make their products accessible.


This legislation does not mandate a single, 
one-size-fits-all solution for all consumer 
technology, home appliances, kiosks, or 
electronic office technology.  Rather it mandates 
regulations setting meaningful accessibility 
standards that allow manufacturers to select from 
a menu of potential solutions or create new 
ones.  This will not only give manufacturers the 
freedom and flexibility they desire, but will 
also encourage innovations that make consumer 
technology more usable for everyone.





Proposed Legislation:  Congress should enact a 
Technology Bill of Rights for the Blind that:



   a.. Mandates that all consumer electronics, 
home appliances, kiosks, and electronic office 
technology be designed so that blind people are 
able to access the same functions as sighted 
people by nonvisual means and with substantially equivalent ease of use.


   a.. Creates a commission to establish 
standards for nonvisual accessibility of 
electronic devices intended for use in the home 
or office.  Such a commission should represent all stakeholders, including:
-          organizations of the blind;

-          manufacturers of consumer electronics, 
home appliances, kiosks, and electronic office 
technology, or associations representing such manufacturers; and

-          experts on universal design, 
electronic engineering, and related fields.



   a.. Endows the Department of Justice with the 
authority to enforce the regulations promulgated 
by the commission established by this legislation.


   a.. Authorizes the commission to reexamine and 
rewrite standards periodically as consumer 
electronic technology continues to evolve.




Requested Action:  Please support blind Americans 
and cosponsor a Technology Bill of Rights for the 
Blind to ensure that blind people can fully 
participate in all aspects of American 
society.  Increased access leads to increased 
independence, increased employment, and increased tax revenue.





Contact Information:

Lauren McLarney

Government Programs Specialist

NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND

Phone:  (410) 659-9314, extension 2207

Email:  lmclarney at nfb.org







REMOVING THE EARNINGS PENALTY:

A COMMON SENSE WORK INCENTIVE

FOR BLIND SOCIAL SECURITY BENEFICIARIES





Purpose:  To promote and facilitate the 
transition by blind Americans from Social 
Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) 
beneficiaries to income-earning, taxpaying, 
productive members of the American workforce.



Background:  The unemployment rate for 
working-age blind people is over 70 
percent.  Part of the reason for this 
disproportionately high statistic is the myths 
and misconceptions about the true capacities of 
blind people.  These erroneous perceptions are 
manifested when employers refuse to hire the 
blind.  Low societal expectations result in low 
representation of the blind in the workforce.

In addition, governmental programs intended to 
provide economic security to blind workers during 
periods of unemployment, especially the SSDI 
program, have had the unintended consequence of 
creating an incentive for blind people to remain 
unemployed or underemployed, despite their desire to work.

Despite the efforts of the National Federation of 
the Blind, blindness still has profound social 
and economic consequences.  Governmental programs 
should encourage blind people to reach their full 
employment potential; they should not encourage economic dependence.



Existing Law:  Title II of the Social Security 
Act provides that disability benefits paid to 
blind beneficiaries are eliminated if the 
beneficiary exceeds a monthly earnings 
limit.  This earnings limit is in effect a 
penalty imposed on blind Americans when they 
work.  This penalty imposed by the SSDI program 
means that, if a blind person earns just $1 over 
$1,640 (the monthly limit in 2010 following a 
Trial Work Period), all benefits are lost.

Section 216(i)(1)(B) of the Social Security Act 
defines blindness as a disability based on 
objective measurement of acuity and visual field, 
as opposed to the subjective criterion of 
inability to perform Substantial Gainful Activity 
(SGA).  For blind people, doing work valued at 
the SGA earnings limit terminates benefits but 
does not terminate disability.  Only blind people 
not working or those with work earnings below an 
annually adjusted statutory earnings limit receive benefits.



Need for Legislation:  When a blind person enters 
the workforce, there is no guarantee that wages 
earned will replace SSDI benefits after taxes are 
paid and work expenses are deducted.  For 
example, Jane worked as a customer service 
representative with an annual income of $35,000 
until she became blind from diabetic 
retinopathy.  Jane meets the criteria for SSDI 
benefits, which provide income of $1,060 a month 
(or $12,720 a year) tax-free while she is not 
working.  Jane wants additional income to meet 
her financial needs.  After an adjustment period 
and blindness skills training, she finds 
employment as a part-time representative making 
$10 an hour for thirty-five hours a week.  Jane 
grosses $350 a week for an average of $1,517 a 
month.  Using a conservative 25 percent 
withholding tax, Jane nets $1,137.50 from her 
work, combined with her $1,060 disability 
benefit, for a net total of  $2,197.50 a 
month.  If Jane should have the opportunity to 
work full time (forty hours), her weekly salary 
would go up to $400 a week for a monthly average 
of $1,733.  This amount is over the 2010 earnings 
limit, so Jane loses all of her disability 
benefits.  Using the same 25 percent tax level, 
Jane nets only $1,300 a month-working an extra 
five hours a week has cost Jane $897.50 net 
income (over $10,500 a year).  This example 
illustrates the work disincentive contained in current law.

A gradual reduction of $1 in benefits for every 
$3 earned over the earnings limit would remove 
the earnings penalty and provide a financial 
incentive to work.  The benefit amount paid to an 
individual will gradually decrease, while the 
individual's contribution to the Social Security 
trust fund increases over time.  Under this 
approach, as Jane earns more, she pays more into 
the trust fund, and her dependence on benefits decreases.

Monthly earnings evaluations are unnecessarily 
complicated for both the beneficiaries and the 
Social Security Administration.  Since the 
medical prognosis for blind people rarely changes 
and because blindness is objectively measurable, 
blind people should be subject to an annual 
earnings test with the limit equal to twelve 
times the applicable monthly SGA amount.

Under current law blind workers frequently pay 
for items and services related to their blindness 
that are necessary for them to work, and they are 
permitted to subtract these Impairment-Related 
Work Expenses (IRWE) from monthly earnings when 
determining monthly income.  Properly crediting 
IRWE poses a serious challenge to the SSDI 
program and creates a lack of predictability for 
the blind person trying to determine whether 
benefits will be available.  To address both 
issues, Congress should permit SSDI recipients to 
claim the same amount used when determining an 
income subsidy under the Medicare prescription 
drug program, currently 16.3 percent of earnings.



Proposed Legislation:  Congress should enact legislation to:

·                     provide that earnings of 
blind SSDI beneficiaries in excess of the annual 
earnings limit result in a gradual benefit 
reduction of $1 for each $3 earned over the limit;

·                     establish an annual 
earnings test for blind SSDI beneficiaries; and

·                     establish one standard IRWE 
deduction for blind SSDI beneficiaries equal to 
the amount presently applicable for this 
deduction when determining an appropriate income 
subsidy under the Medicare prescription drug 
program or 16.3 percent of earnings, whichever is greater.



Requested Action:  For the House, please 
cosponsor the Blind Persons Return to Work Act 
(H.R. 886) by contacting Michaeleen Crowell in 
Rep. John Lewis's office, and provide a common 
sense work incentive for blind Social Security 
beneficiaries.  For the Senate please consider 
introducing companion legislation.





Contact Information:

Lauren McLarney

Government Programs Specialist

NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND

Phone:  (410) 659-9314, extension 2207

Email:  lmclarney at nfb.org
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From bunnykatie6 at gmail.com  Thu Jan 14 04:24:29 2010
From: bunnykatie6 at gmail.com (Katie Wang)
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 23:24:29 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] on-line survey follow-up
Message-ID: <5096b4731001132024y64ec25eate1b21af669bdfb40@mail.gmail.com>

Hi, all,
  Hope everyone is having a good start of the new year. I wrote to the
list a while ago about an on-line study I'm conducting regarding the
experiences of students with disabilities. I want to thank those of
you who have participated and encourage the rest of you to take the
survey if you have a chance. Your participation should only take 15-20
minutes and your input will contribute greatly to my research. Also,
don't forget that you will have the opportunity to win a $25 gift
certificate at amazon.com! Please click on the link below if you are
interested. Thanks so much!
   Katie Wang

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DS89CZF


From clb5590 at gmail.com  Thu Jan 14 21:52:16 2010
From: clb5590 at gmail.com (Cindy Bennett)
Date: Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:52:16 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes
Message-ID: <3fea3c411001141352p2d82889bu38c409163c96d78a@mail.gmail.com>

I recently upgraded to JAWS 11 and noticed this problem consistently
occurring after installing it. Sometimes when i enter edit boxes, this
occurs more often on facebook but other sites as well, i cannot get
out of it no matter what i do. I end up having to close the browser
and sometimes shut down my computer. This is frustrating, so is anyone
else experiencing this? Is there an update perhaps?

Thanks

Cindy


From brownbears at mchsi.com  Thu Jan 14 23:00:25 2010
From: brownbears at mchsi.com (Miranda brown)
Date: Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:00:25 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Windows 7
Message-ID: <D43791A6A1A449AEA01E95E621412233@MIRANDA>

I just bought a netbook computer with windows 7 and Microsoft office 2007 on
it. I am slowly figuring out windows 7, but I am having trouble with
Microsoft word, it is totally different than 2003, does anyone know if their
are any tutorials for 2007? I also just started using JAWS 11.

From raniaismail04 at gmail.com  Thu Jan 14 23:55:49 2010
From: raniaismail04 at gmail.com (Rania)
Date: Thu, 14 Jan 2010 18:55:49 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Windows 7
References: <D43791A6A1A449AEA01E95E621412233@MIRANDA>
Message-ID: <000501ca9575$1b3682f0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>

I am also just learning how to use windows 7 and jaws 11.
Does anyone have any tips they can share?
Rania,
"For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
See you at the finish line."
~Christopher Reeve

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Miranda brown" <brownbears at mchsi.com>
To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2010 6:00 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] Windows 7


>I just bought a netbook computer with windows 7 and Microsoft office 2007 
>on
> it. I am slowly figuring out windows 7, but I am having trouble with
> Microsoft word, it is totally different than 2003, does anyone know if 
> their
> are any tutorials for 2007? I also just started using JAWS 11.
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaismail04%40gmail.com 



From rmlambert1987 at yahoo.com  Fri Jan 15 01:12:40 2010
From: rmlambert1987 at yahoo.com (Rob Lambert)
Date: Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:12:40 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [nabs-l] Windows 7
Message-ID: <446924.92232.qm@web56104.mail.re3.yahoo.com>

I don't know of tutorials, but a far as I know, Windows 7 starter can only run up to 3 apps at once, and no more, so keep that in mind. 

Sent from my iPod

On Jan 14, 2010, at 11:00 PM, "Miranda brown" <brownbears at mchsi.com> wrote:

I just bought a netbook computer with windows 7 and Microsoft office 2007 on
it. I am slowly figuring out windows 7, but I am having trouble with
Microsoft word, it is totally different than 2003, does anyone know if their
are any tutorials for 2007? I also just started using JAWS 11.
_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/rmlambert1987%40yahoo.com



      



From tealbloodworth at gmail.com  Fri Jan 15 04:06:17 2010
From: tealbloodworth at gmail.com (Teal Bloodworth)
Date: Thu, 14 Jan 2010 22:06:17 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes
References: <3fea3c411001141352p2d82889bu38c409163c96d78a@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <BFA79A56FE3E4BA4B6F2A1212167FB3F@teal6e6857f643>

try pushing escape when you want to get out of the edit box. this should 
turn off virtual cursor or you could always try to shift tab until you hear 
the noise indicating you have entered or left a form field.

            -teal
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Cindy Bennett" <clb5590 at gmail.com>
To: "National Asociation of Blind Students" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2010 3:52 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes


>I recently upgraded to JAWS 11 and noticed this problem consistently
> occurring after installing it. Sometimes when i enter edit boxes, this
> occurs more often on facebook but other sites as well, i cannot get
> out of it no matter what i do. I end up having to close the browser
> and sometimes shut down my computer. This is frustrating, so is anyone
> else experiencing this? Is there an update perhaps?
>
> Thanks
>
> Cindy
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com 



From clb5590 at gmail.com  Fri Jan 15 13:57:38 2010
From: clb5590 at gmail.com (Cindy Bennett)
Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:57:38 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes
In-Reply-To: <BFA79A56FE3E4BA4B6F2A1212167FB3F@teal6e6857f643>
References: <3fea3c411001141352p2d82889bu38c409163c96d78a@mail.gmail.com>
	<BFA79A56FE3E4BA4B6F2A1212167FB3F@teal6e6857f643>
Message-ID: <3fea3c411001150557x46c62415me5fe32788a216e32@mail.gmail.com>

Thanks, i had tried all of these things. I think it is mainly an issue
with jaws and facebook, so i turned off the automatic forms  mode for
that site.

Thanks though.

Cindy

On 1/14/10, Teal Bloodworth <tealbloodworth at gmail.com> wrote:
> try pushing escape when you want to get out of the edit box. this should
> turn off virtual cursor or you could always try to shift tab until you hear
> the noise indicating you have entered or left a form field.
>
>             -teal
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Cindy Bennett" <clb5590 at gmail.com>
> To: "National Asociation of Blind Students" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2010 3:52 PM
> Subject: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes
>
>
>>I recently upgraded to JAWS 11 and noticed this problem consistently
>> occurring after installing it. Sometimes when i enter edit boxes, this
>> occurs more often on facebook but other sites as well, i cannot get
>> out of it no matter what i do. I end up having to close the browser
>> and sometimes shut down my computer. This is frustrating, so is anyone
>> else experiencing this? Is there an update perhaps?
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Cindy
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>


From nabs.president at gmail.com  Fri Jan 15 17:00:27 2010
From: nabs.president at gmail.com (Arielle Silverman)
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 04:00:27 +1100
Subject: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes
In-Reply-To: <3fea3c411001150557x46c62415me5fe32788a216e32@mail.gmail.com>
References: <3fea3c411001141352p2d82889bu38c409163c96d78a@mail.gmail.com>
	<BFA79A56FE3E4BA4B6F2A1212167FB3F@teal6e6857f643>
	<3fea3c411001150557x46c62415me5fe32788a216e32@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <85ff10071001150900i6c6e152el2d5fb8f2259e65cb@mail.gmail.com>

Hi Cindy,

I press the "PC Cursor" button which exits forms mode. What is
happening is that JAWS is automatically bouncing into forms mode
whenever it sees an edit box. So PC-Cursor should fix this.

Arielle

On 1/16/10, Cindy Bennett <clb5590 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks, i had tried all of these things. I think it is mainly an issue
> with jaws and facebook, so i turned off the automatic forms  mode for
> that site.
>
> Thanks though.
>
> Cindy
>
> On 1/14/10, Teal Bloodworth <tealbloodworth at gmail.com> wrote:
>> try pushing escape when you want to get out of the edit box. this should
>> turn off virtual cursor or you could always try to shift tab until you
>> hear
>> the noise indicating you have entered or left a form field.
>>
>>             -teal
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Cindy Bennett" <clb5590 at gmail.com>
>> To: "National Asociation of Blind Students" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2010 3:52 PM
>> Subject: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes
>>
>>
>>>I recently upgraded to JAWS 11 and noticed this problem consistently
>>> occurring after installing it. Sometimes when i enter edit boxes, this
>>> occurs more often on facebook but other sites as well, i cannot get
>>> out of it no matter what i do. I end up having to close the browser
>>> and sometimes shut down my computer. This is frustrating, so is anyone
>>> else experiencing this? Is there an update perhaps?
>>>
>>> Thanks
>>>
>>> Cindy
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/nabs.president%40gmail.com
>


-- 
Arielle Silverman
President, National Association of Blind Students
Phone:  602-502-2255
Email:
nabs.president at gmail.com
Website:
www.nabslink.org


From rloew at ETS.ORG  Fri Jan 15 18:56:18 2010
From: rloew at ETS.ORG (Loew, Ruth)
Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2010 13:56:18 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] books on Grad schools and GRE testing material
Message-ID: <BA343F32003E4A40B7646F98EE9E23B808F7C8AC@rosnt115.etslan.org>

ETS provides GRE General Test practice material in a variety of formats.
Please feel free to contact me off-list if you'd like more detail on
what's available and how to obtain it.

Ruth C. Loew, Ph.D.
Assistant Director
Office of Disability Policy, ETS
RLoew at ets.org

--------------------------------------------------
This e-mail and any files transmitted with it may contain privileged or confidential information.
It is solely for use by the individual for whom it is intended, even if addressed incorrectly.
If you received this e-mail in error, please notify the sender; do not disclose, copy, distribute,
or take any action in reliance on the contents of this information; and delete it from
your system. Any other use of this e-mail is prohibited.

Thank you for your compliance.
--------------------------------------------------

From nabs.president at gmail.com  Fri Jan 15 19:47:33 2010
From: nabs.president at gmail.com (Arielle Silverman)
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 06:47:33 +1100
Subject: [nabs-l] Fwd: Blind Industries and Services of Maryland
	Independence 2010
In-Reply-To: <144BBD32E57C5045B736FBC8D447D0EC0265B1B9@blindmail.BISM.COM>
References: <144BBD32E57C5045B736FBC8D447D0EC0265B1B9@blindmail.BISM.COM>
Message-ID: <85ff10071001151147p68b5a07qeddac121806ff78c@mail.gmail.com>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Amy Phelps <aphelps at bism.org>
Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:30:51 -0500
Subject: Blind Industries and Services of Maryland Independence 2010
To: Arielle Silverman <nabs.president at gmail.com>

Will you please post this to the NABS listserv.



Please find attached the flyer for Independence 2010. We are very
excited about this opportunity to have a summer youth program again in
2010. Please help us to spread the word by forwarding these flyers to
teachers, parents, and other professionals with whom you believe may be
in contact with blind youth. It is going to be an exciting fun filled
summer!





Warm regards,



Amy C. Phelps





Amy C. Phelps, CRC, NOMC

Director of Rehabilitation Services



Blind Industries and Services of Maryland

3345 Washington Blvd

Baltimore, MD 21227

Phone: 410-737-2642

Mobile: 410-274-1647

Fax: 410-737-2689

Toll Free: 888-322-4567

E-mail: aphelps at bism.org

Web site: www.bism.org <http://www.bism.org/>



"A frog in a well, can only see its piece of the sky" ~Unknown







Confidentiality Note:  The information contained in this message may be
privileged and confidential and protected from disclosure. If the reader
of this message is not the intended recipient, or an employee or agent
responsible for delivering this message to the intended recipient, you
are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of
this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this
communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to the
message and deleting it from your computer.






-- 
Arielle Silverman
President, National Association of Blind Students
Phone:  602-502-2255
Email:
nabs.president at gmail.com
Website:
www.nabslink.org
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From jackson.dezman at gmail.com  Fri Jan 15 20:13:38 2010
From: jackson.dezman at gmail.com (Dezman Jackson)
Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:13:38 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes
References: <3fea3c411001141352p2d82889bu38c409163c96d78a@mail.gmail.com><BFA79A56FE3E4BA4B6F2A1212167FB3F@teal6e6857f643><3fea3c411001150557x46c62415me5fe32788a216e32@mail.gmail.com>
	<85ff10071001150900i6c6e152el2d5fb8f2259e65cb@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <E159A78D502A450292883419B00B0B56@Dezman>

There's also a way to turn off auto forms mode through the configuration 
manager if you don't prefer this.

Dezman
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Arielle Silverman" <nabs.president at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 15, 2010 11:00 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes


> Hi Cindy,
>
> I press the "PC Cursor" button which exits forms mode. What is
> happening is that JAWS is automatically bouncing into forms mode
> whenever it sees an edit box. So PC-Cursor should fix this.
>
> Arielle
>
> On 1/16/10, Cindy Bennett <clb5590 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Thanks, i had tried all of these things. I think it is mainly an issue
>> with jaws and facebook, so i turned off the automatic forms  mode for
>> that site.
>>
>> Thanks though.
>>
>> Cindy
>>
>> On 1/14/10, Teal Bloodworth <tealbloodworth at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> try pushing escape when you want to get out of the edit box. this should
>>> turn off virtual cursor or you could always try to shift tab until you
>>> hear
>>> the noise indicating you have entered or left a form field.
>>>
>>>             -teal
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Cindy Bennett" <clb5590 at gmail.com>
>>> To: "National Asociation of Blind Students" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2010 3:52 PM
>>> Subject: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes
>>>
>>>
>>>>I recently upgraded to JAWS 11 and noticed this problem consistently
>>>> occurring after installing it. Sometimes when i enter edit boxes, this
>>>> occurs more often on facebook but other sites as well, i cannot get
>>>> out of it no matter what i do. I end up having to close the browser
>>>> and sometimes shut down my computer. This is frustrating, so is anyone
>>>> else experiencing this? Is there an update perhaps?
>>>>
>>>> Thanks
>>>>
>>>> Cindy
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/nabs.president%40gmail.com
>>
>
>
> -- 
> Arielle Silverman
> President, National Association of Blind Students
> Phone:  602-502-2255
> Email:
> nabs.president at gmail.com
> Website:
> www.nabslink.org
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jackson.dezman%40gmail.com
> 



From daydreamingncolor at gmail.com  Fri Jan 15 21:30:33 2010
From: daydreamingncolor at gmail.com (Aziza C)
Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2010 13:30:33 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] FW: Free and accessible credit reports
Message-ID: <2F0DF22293184BE4948ECDA99D4876EA@azizadell>

Exciting news for those who are conscious and concerned about their credit
histories (have you checked recently?  I almost always find errors and
suspicious items...scary!).  I have longed searched for the elusive
once-yearly truly free credit report we are due by law (Fair and Accurate
Credit Transactions Act of 2003, or FACTA) from one of the three major
credit reporting agencies and they finally appear to have gotten their act
together to make it available, and it's accessible to the blind!

It is a combined effort of Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion.  You can
download and print online, request by phone, or request in writing any or
all of your reports from these companies once a year--FREE.  I was dubious
of the accessibility of the online version and currently have no printer, so
I opted to call and order a print version to be mailed to me.  It is an
automated system that is not too long or frustrating--relatively quick and
simple--and I was thrilled to encounter an option for receiving it in
braille or large print, so my braille version should be arriving in a couple
of weeks!

If you've never checked your credit report, you'd be amazed at some of the
errors and inconsistencies that can be found there, and in times when fraud
and identity theft are so prevalent, it's a good idea to keep tabs on this
stuff, especially if you are job hunting, like me...employers read this
stuff!!

Here's the 411:
www.annualcreditreport.com
877.322.8228

Someone check their online version and report back about accessibility!

Enjoy,

--
Serena Olsen, MAIPS

_______________________________________________
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m
No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 9.0.725 / Virus Database: 270.14.141/2622 - Release Date: 01/15/10
04:47:00

From raniaismail04 at gmail.com  Fri Jan 15 22:11:14 2010
From: raniaismail04 at gmail.com (Rania Ismail)
Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2010 17:11:14 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes
In-Reply-To: <E159A78D502A450292883419B00B0B56@Dezman>
References: <3fea3c411001141352p2d82889bu38c409163c96d78a@mail.gmail.com><BFA79A56FE3E4BA4B6F2A1212167FB3F@teal6e6857f643><3fea3c411001150557x46c62415me5fe32788a216e32@mail.gmail.com><85ff10071001150900i6c6e152el2d5fb8f2259e65cb@mail.gmail.com>
	<E159A78D502A450292883419B00B0B56@Dezman>
Message-ID: <707472F1AF9743CDBFD93A9FA49C8C07@RANIAPC>

How do you tern off audio forms mode for certain things?
Rania, 

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Dezman Jackson
Sent: Friday, January 15, 2010 3:14 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes

There's also a way to turn off auto forms mode through the configuration
manager if you don't prefer this.

Dezman
----- Original Message -----
From: "Arielle Silverman" <nabs.president at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 15, 2010 11:00 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes


> Hi Cindy,
>
> I press the "PC Cursor" button which exits forms mode. What is
> happening is that JAWS is automatically bouncing into forms mode
> whenever it sees an edit box. So PC-Cursor should fix this.
>
> Arielle
>
> On 1/16/10, Cindy Bennett <clb5590 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Thanks, i had tried all of these things. I think it is mainly an issue
>> with jaws and facebook, so i turned off the automatic forms  mode for
>> that site.
>>
>> Thanks though.
>>
>> Cindy
>>
>> On 1/14/10, Teal Bloodworth <tealbloodworth at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> try pushing escape when you want to get out of the edit box. this should
>>> turn off virtual cursor or you could always try to shift tab until you
>>> hear
>>> the noise indicating you have entered or left a form field.
>>>
>>>             -teal
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Cindy Bennett" <clb5590 at gmail.com>
>>> To: "National Asociation of Blind Students" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2010 3:52 PM
>>> Subject: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes
>>>
>>>
>>>>I recently upgraded to JAWS 11 and noticed this problem consistently
>>>> occurring after installing it. Sometimes when i enter edit boxes, this
>>>> occurs more often on facebook but other sites as well, i cannot get
>>>> out of it no matter what i do. I end up having to close the browser
>>>> and sometimes shut down my computer. This is frustrating, so is anyone
>>>> else experiencing this? Is there an update perhaps?
>>>>
>>>> Thanks
>>>>
>>>> Cindy
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gma
il.com
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/nabs.president%40gma
il.com
>>
>
>
> -- 
> Arielle Silverman
> President, National Association of Blind Students
> Phone:  602-502-2255
> Email:
> nabs.president at gmail.com
> Website:
> www.nabslink.org
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jackson.dezman%40gma
il.com
> 


_______________________________________________
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nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaismail04%40gmai
l.com

No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com 
Version: 9.0.725 / Virus Database: 270.14.143/2624 - Release Date: 01/15/10
07:47:00



From clb5590 at gmail.com  Sat Jan 16 06:21:28 2010
From: clb5590 at gmail.com (Cindy Bennett)
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 01:21:28 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] GRE testing materials
Message-ID: <3fea3c411001152221nae3d3fdhb3ed44053f2a99f0@mail.gmail.com>

I saw your message on the NABS list. I will be looking to take the GRE
next fall, so I know it is a bit early, but I am curious as to what is
available as far as testing materials.

Thanks

Cindy Bennett

On 1/15/10, Loew, Ruth <rloew at ets.org> wrote:
> ETS provides GRE General Test practice material in a variety of formats.
> Please feel free to contact me off-list if you'd like more detail on
> what's available and how to obtain it.
>
> Ruth C. Loew, Ph.D.
> Assistant Director
> Office of Disability Policy, ETS
> RLoew at ets.org
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> This e-mail and any files transmitted with it may contain privileged or
> confidential information.
> It is solely for use by the individual for whom it is intended, even if
> addressed incorrectly.
> If you received this e-mail in error, please notify the sender; do not
> disclose, copy, distribute,
> or take any action in reliance on the contents of this information; and
> delete it from
> your system. Any other use of this e-mail is prohibited.
>
> Thank you for your compliance.
> --------------------------------------------------
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>


From jackson.dezman at gmail.com  Sat Jan 16 07:54:45 2010
From: jackson.dezman at gmail.com (Dezman Jackson)
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 01:54:45 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes
References: <3fea3c411001141352p2d82889bu38c409163c96d78a@mail.gmail.com><BFA79A56FE3E4BA4B6F2A1212167FB3F@teal6e6857f643><3fea3c411001150557x46c62415me5fe32788a216e32@mail.gmail.com><85ff10071001150900i6c6e152el2d5fb8f2259e65cb@mail.gmail.com><E159A78D502A450292883419B00B0B56@Dezman>
	<707472F1AF9743CDBFD93A9FA49C8C07@RANIAPC>
Message-ID: <6A613A0ADE8647D9889F8A4B44E5EC10@Dezman>

Rania,

If you want to turn it off temporarily, while you're in your browser press 
insert+V to bring up the verbosity dialog.  Then hit a for autoforms mode 
and space to check or uncheck it then enter.  To disable it permanently, 
while in the browser hit Insert+6 to bring up the jaws configuration file, 
then go to the set options menu and arrow down to auto forms mode, press 
enter  and uncheck the box, then enter to ok it. Be sure to hit ctrl+s to 
save the file after making changes.

HTH
Dezman
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rania Ismail" <raniaismail04 at gmail.com>
To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 15, 2010 4:11 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes


> How do you tern off audio forms mode for certain things?
> Rania,
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On 
> Behalf
> Of Dezman Jackson
> Sent: Friday, January 15, 2010 3:14 PM
> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes
>
> There's also a way to turn off auto forms mode through the configuration
> manager if you don't prefer this.
>
> Dezman
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Arielle Silverman" <nabs.president at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Friday, January 15, 2010 11:00 AM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes
>
>
>> Hi Cindy,
>>
>> I press the "PC Cursor" button which exits forms mode. What is
>> happening is that JAWS is automatically bouncing into forms mode
>> whenever it sees an edit box. So PC-Cursor should fix this.
>>
>> Arielle
>>
>> On 1/16/10, Cindy Bennett <clb5590 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Thanks, i had tried all of these things. I think it is mainly an issue
>>> with jaws and facebook, so i turned off the automatic forms  mode for
>>> that site.
>>>
>>> Thanks though.
>>>
>>> Cindy
>>>
>>> On 1/14/10, Teal Bloodworth <tealbloodworth at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> try pushing escape when you want to get out of the edit box. this 
>>>> should
>>>> turn off virtual cursor or you could always try to shift tab until you
>>>> hear
>>>> the noise indicating you have entered or left a form field.
>>>>
>>>>             -teal
>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>> From: "Cindy Bennett" <clb5590 at gmail.com>
>>>> To: "National Asociation of Blind Students" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>> Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2010 3:52 PM
>>>> Subject: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>I recently upgraded to JAWS 11 and noticed this problem consistently
>>>>> occurring after installing it. Sometimes when i enter edit boxes, this
>>>>> occurs more often on facebook but other sites as well, i cannot get
>>>>> out of it no matter what i do. I end up having to close the browser
>>>>> and sometimes shut down my computer. This is frustrating, so is anyone
>>>>> else experiencing this? Is there an update perhaps?
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks
>>>>>
>>>>> Cindy
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gma
> il.com
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/nabs.president%40gma
> il.com
>>>
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> Arielle Silverman
>> President, National Association of Blind Students
>> Phone:  602-502-2255
>> Email:
>> nabs.president at gmail.com
>> Website:
>> www.nabslink.org
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jackson.dezman%40gma
> il.com
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaismail04%40gmai
> l.com
>
> No virus found in this incoming message.
> Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
> Version: 9.0.725 / Virus Database: 270.14.143/2624 - Release Date: 
> 01/15/10
> 07:47:00
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jackson.dezman%40gmail.com
> 



From raniaismail04 at gmail.com  Sat Jan 16 14:51:57 2010
From: raniaismail04 at gmail.com (Rania Ismail)
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 09:51:57 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes
In-Reply-To: <6A613A0ADE8647D9889F8A4B44E5EC10@Dezman>
References: <3fea3c411001141352p2d82889bu38c409163c96d78a@mail.gmail.com><BFA79A56FE3E4BA4B6F2A1212167FB3F@teal6e6857f643><3fea3c411001150557x46c62415me5fe32788a216e32@mail.gmail.com><85ff10071001150900i6c6e152el2d5fb8f2259e65cb@mail.gmail.com><E159A78D502A450292883419B00B0B56@Dezman><707472F1AF9743CDBFD93A9FA49C8C07@RANIAPC>
	<6A613A0ADE8647D9889F8A4B44E5EC10@Dezman>
Message-ID: <D96914C076E84E7A9DEACF1BE25B4DDB@RANIAPC>

Thanks for your help.
Rania, 

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Dezman Jackson
Sent: Saturday, January 16, 2010 2:55 AM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes

Rania,

If you want to turn it off temporarily, while you're in your browser press 
insert+V to bring up the verbosity dialog.  Then hit a for autoforms 
insert+mode
and space to check or uncheck it then enter.  To disable it permanently,
while in the browser hit Insert+6 to bring up the jaws configuration file,
then go to the set options menu and arrow down to auto forms mode, press
enter  and uncheck the box, then enter to ok it. Be sure to hit ctrl+s to
save the file after making changes.

HTH
Dezman
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rania Ismail" <raniaismail04 at gmail.com>
To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 15, 2010 4:11 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes


> How do you tern off audio forms mode for certain things?
> Rania,
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On 
> Behalf
> Of Dezman Jackson
> Sent: Friday, January 15, 2010 3:14 PM
> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes
>
> There's also a way to turn off auto forms mode through the configuration
> manager if you don't prefer this.
>
> Dezman
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Arielle Silverman" <nabs.president at gmail.com>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Friday, January 15, 2010 11:00 AM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes
>
>
>> Hi Cindy,
>>
>> I press the "PC Cursor" button which exits forms mode. What is
>> happening is that JAWS is automatically bouncing into forms mode
>> whenever it sees an edit box. So PC-Cursor should fix this.
>>
>> Arielle
>>
>> On 1/16/10, Cindy Bennett <clb5590 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Thanks, i had tried all of these things. I think it is mainly an issue
>>> with jaws and facebook, so i turned off the automatic forms  mode for
>>> that site.
>>>
>>> Thanks though.
>>>
>>> Cindy
>>>
>>> On 1/14/10, Teal Bloodworth <tealbloodworth at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> try pushing escape when you want to get out of the edit box. this 
>>>> should
>>>> turn off virtual cursor or you could always try to shift tab until you
>>>> hear
>>>> the noise indicating you have entered or left a form field.
>>>>
>>>>             -teal
>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>> From: "Cindy Bennett" <clb5590 at gmail.com>
>>>> To: "National Asociation of Blind Students" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>> Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2010 3:52 PM
>>>> Subject: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>I recently upgraded to JAWS 11 and noticed this problem consistently
>>>>> occurring after installing it. Sometimes when i enter edit boxes, this
>>>>> occurs more often on facebook but other sites as well, i cannot get
>>>>> out of it no matter what i do. I end up having to close the browser
>>>>> and sometimes shut down my computer. This is frustrating, so is anyone
>>>>> else experiencing this? Is there an update perhaps?
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks
>>>>>
>>>>> Cindy
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>
>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gma
> il.com
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>
>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>>
>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/nabs.president%40gma
> il.com
>>>
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> Arielle Silverman
>> President, National Association of Blind Students
>> Phone:  602-502-2255
>> Email:
>> nabs.president at gmail.com
>> Website:
>> www.nabslink.org
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>
>
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> il.com
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
>
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> l.com
>
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14:35:00



From nabs.president at gmail.com  Sat Jan 16 22:30:19 2010
From: nabs.president at gmail.com (Arielle Silverman)
Date: Sun, 17 Jan 2010 09:30:19 +1100
Subject: [nabs-l] Mentors Wanted!
Message-ID: <85ff10071001161430u19f722c5k6c3bfcdf0ed681d3@mail.gmail.com>

Looking for Mentors for the 2010 Junior Science Academy Programs
Who: Positive blind role models over the age of 18 who are enthusiastic,
high energy, and enjoy working with children.  (Expertise in science is
not a requirement.)

Where: Baltimore, MD at the NFB Jernigan Institute

When: There are two sessions for which we need mentors.  You can apply
for one or both of them.
**Session 1: JULY 28-AUG 1(mentors would need to be available to travel
to Baltimore on JULY 26 to attend a training seminar on JULY 27)

**Session 2: AUG 4-8 (mentors would need to be available to travel to
Baltimore on AUG 2 to attend a training seminar on AUG 3 )

This is a volunteer experience, but looks great on resumes!  All travel,
room, and board is paid for accepted mentors.  Mentors will stay at the
NFB Jernigan Institute during the program.

Duties include:
**helping to facilitate science academy activities
**supervision of children (each mentor will be responsible for three
children )
**--Role model blindness skills to children and parents

Please visit www.blindscience.org To learn more about the Junior Science
Academy.  You can also apply online at this same site.  Contact Mary Jo
T. Hartle, Director of Education at 410-659-9314 ext. 2407.


Mary Jo T. Hartle



Mary Jo Thorpe-Hartle, MEd, NOMC

Director of Education

NFB Jernigan Institute




-----Original Message-----
From: Arielle Silverman [mailto:nabs.president at gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2010 12:42 PM
To: Hartle, Mary Jo
Subject: Re: Action in Delaware

Hi Mary Jo,

Sure, I can announce and also recirculate on our lists. Would you like
to have a table for the Jernigan Institute Education Team at our open
house on Monday morning?

Arielle

On 1/13/10, Hartle, Mary Jo <mhartle at nfb.org> wrote:
> Thanks.  Will do.  ON another note, would you be able to announce at
> Washington Seminar that we are looking for mentors for this summers
> two Junior Science Academy programs?  I can send you an email with the

> details if you think this is something you could announce for me.
> Thanks.
>
>
>
> Mary Jo T. Hartle
>
>
>
> Mary Jo Thorpe-Hartle, MEd, NOMC
>
> Director of Education
>
> NFB Jernigan Institute
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Arielle Silverman [mailto:nabs.president at gmail.com]
> Sent: Monday, January 11, 2010 11:36 PM
> To: Hartle, Mary Jo
> Cc: Wilson, Joanne; Carranza, Rosy; Ewell, Jason; Carol Castellano;
> Arielle Silverman; nabs_Delawaredivision at yahoo.com
> Subject: Re: Action in Delaware
>
> Hi Mary Jo,
>
> Thanks for including me in this discussion. I have had several
> discussions with Catherine and we sent a NABS board member to their
> convention and student meeting in October. In addition to the youth
> leadership seminars being planned for this spring, NABS will probably
> have another leadership seminar sometime next year for older students.
> We will certainly let you know when this occurs and ask for
> recommendations of students to invite to attend. Please feel free to
> contact me if you need anything else, and please continue to update us

> on your progress!
>
> Regards,
> Arielle
>
> On 1/7/10, Hartle, Mary Jo <mhartle at nfb.org> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>     I spoke to Catherine Newman who is a student in DE.  She is also
>> their student division president.  She's been working to get a lot of

>> their youth into some of the programs we are having here this year
>> and
>
>> has helped in the past to recruit students for other programs.  We
>> were talking today and she started telling me about how their student

>> division was organized last year and they now have about 15 active
>> students--high school and college.  She then went on to ask me how
>> she
>
>> should go about starting a new chapter as they have two new ones they

>> want to start, and apparently have people for.  She said they
>> organized a new one last year too.  They also are starting a parents
> division.
>> All of this is to say that they have really made some big strides
> there.
>> I didn't know if you all were aware of this.  I told her that she
>> should talk to her state president about starting new chapters and to

>> Carol Castellano about starting a parents division.  She then started

>> asking me how she could get the students they have there to
>> leadership
>
>> seminars.  I told her that typically this comes by being nominated by

>> your state president to Dr. Maurer.  It sounds like they could really

>> benefit from working with all of you.  You may already be helping
>> them, so if you are, please disregard this.  Otherwise, it sounds
>> like
>
>> this is a hot bed of activity right now and that we should consider
>> getting some of these students into the Youth Slam follow up and
>> other
>
>> NABS leadership seminars coming up in the next few months.
>>     I have copied Catherine on this message as way of connecting her
>> to all of you.  Her contact info is:
>> Catherine Newman
>> 302.384.6879
>> 500 North Ford Ave apt. b
>> Wilmington DE 19805
>> nabs_Delawaredivision at yahoo.com
>> <mailto:nabs_Delawaredivision at yahoo.com>
>>
>>
>> So, for what its worth, there you have it.
>> Thanks.
>> MJH
>>
>> Mary Jo T. Hartle
>>
>>
>>
>> Mary Jo Thorpe-Hartle, MEd, NOMC
>>
>> Director of Education
>>
>> Jernigan Institute
>> NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND
>> 200 East Wells Street
>> Baltimore, MD 21230
>> Phone: (410)659-9314 ext. 2407
>> Email: mhartle at nfb.org
>> Fax: (410) 659-5129
>> Visit www.nfb.org <http://www.nfb.org/>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Arielle Silverman
> President, National Association of Blind Students
> Phone:  602-502-2255
> Email:
> nabs.president at gmail.com
> Website:
> www.nabslink.org
>


--
Arielle Silverman
President, National Association of Blind Students
Phone:  602-502-2255
Email:
nabs.president at gmail.com
Website:
www.nabslink.org



-- 
Arielle Silverman
President, National Association of Blind Students
Phone:  602-502-2255
Email:
nabs.president at gmail.com
Website:
www.nabslink.org


From nabs.president at gmail.com  Sat Jan 16 22:34:49 2010
From: nabs.president at gmail.com (Arielle Silverman)
Date: Sun, 17 Jan 2010 09:34:49 +1100
Subject: [nabs-l] Fwd: Colorado Center for the Blind at Wahsington Seminar
In-Reply-To: <b6b933031001161433n49ababc4g6e13f56dd9bd30c8@mail.gmail.com>
References: <002f01ca9486$a42224b0$ec666e10$@org>
	<b6b933031001161433n49ababc4g6e13f56dd9bd30c8@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <85ff10071001161434x6043da7bt8acbe4738c4593e8@mail.gmail.com>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Arielle Silverman <arielle71 at gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 17 Jan 2010 09:33:50 +1100
Subject: Fwd: Colorado Center for the Blind at Wahsington Seminar
To: nabs.president at gmail.com

Arielle



Will you please post this to the NABS list?  I would greatly appreciate it.



As we approach Washington Seminar, The Colorado Center for the Blind is
busily planning for our summer programs.  We have three residential programs
for youth:  Summer for Success College Prep Program; Earn and Learn High
School Program; and the Initiation to Independence Middle School Program.



If you are interested in being a summer student or if you currently have
good blindness skills, are well rounded and are looking for a rewarding
summer job, we would like to meet with you in Washington.



The dates that you will need to be available to be considered for employment
are June 1 through August 14.  There will be two weeks of in-depth training
provided and the summer students will be arriving on June 12 and departing
on August 7.  We are looking for instructors for all core classes; Braille,
Cane Travel, Home Management and Technology.



As a summer staff or student, you will have the opportunity to participate
in our challenge recreation activities which include rock climbing, hiking
and white water rafting.



Please feel free to contact Brent Batron, Youth Services Coordinator, for
more information or to schedule an interview.  Brent can be reached via
email at bbatron at cocenter.org , by phone at 303-778-1130 x 222 or by cell
phone at 720-384-3023.













Brent C. Batron

Youth Services Coordinator

Colorado Center for the Blind

2233 W Shepperd Ave

Littleton, CO 80120

voice 303-778-1130 x 222

fax    303-778-1598

 <mailto:bbatron at cocenter.org> bbatron at cocenter.org

 <http://www.cocenter.org/> www.cocenter.org



Take charge with confidence and self-reliance



-- 
Arielle Silverman
President, National Association of Blind Students
Phone:  602-502-2255
Email:
nabs.president at gmail.com
Website:
www.nabslink.org


From MisterAlexanderScottKaiser10301990 at gmx.com  Sat Jan 16 22:41:44 2010
From: MisterAlexanderScottKaiser10301990 at gmx.com (Mr. Alexander Scott Kaiser)
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 17:41:44 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] petition
Message-ID: <014501ca96fd$1499da80$0301a8c0@youra9279112e3>

Please read and sign this pettition
http://www.petition2congress.com/2/2796/help-with-rewriting-united-statess-america-rehabilitation-act-197/

From MisterAlexanderScottKaiser10301990 at gmx.com  Sat Jan 16 23:25:53 2010
From: MisterAlexanderScottKaiser10301990 at gmx.com (Mr. Alexander Scott Kaiser)
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 18:25:53 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] petition
Message-ID: <030401ca9703$3f680c40$0301a8c0@youra9279112e3>

Please read and sign
http://www.petition2congress.com/2/2796/help-with-rewriting-united-statess-america-rehabilitation-act-197/ 

From jp100 at earthlink.net  Sun Jan 17 01:16:37 2010
From: jp100 at earthlink.net (Jim)
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 17:16:37 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Facebook question
Message-ID: <009d01ca9712$b84c63e0$28e52ba0$@net>

Howdy,

 

I'm almost positive that someone can help me using Facebook.

So, here we go.

 

I use both the mobile regular websites for different things.

I am writing something about an event and will post that event on Facebook.
I've got everything ready, but I'm running into the problem of inviting
people.

I just figured I'd invite my entire facebook list.

However, I have to select or highlight each name and then go to the
appropriate select link.  I've not been successful at this yet.

 

I tried it on the mobile site, and I can get the option of inviting people,
but when I do, there's an add button under each person's name.
Unfortunately, when I hit the add button, it takes me to the next step, so I
basically have to go through the adding process one at a time.  I'm just not
going to do that 200 times.

 

So, back to the normal site, how can I select a bunch of names and then move
to the link without deselecting all of the names?  I'm selecting everyone
with the Shift down arrow, but I know that if I were to hit the arrow by
itself afterward, it would probably deselect everything.  Of course, when I
did this before, my sighted friend selected or highlighted everyone with the
mouse, went to the next group, and finished everything without
dehighlighting anything.  Easy for her to do.

 

Any help with this would be appreciated!  I need to get this event out to
the public soon.

 

Jim

 


From raniaismail04 at gmail.com  Sun Jan 17 03:37:20 2010
From: raniaismail04 at gmail.com (Rania Ismail)
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 22:37:20 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Facebook question
In-Reply-To: <009d01ca9712$b84c63e0$28e52ba0$@net>
References: <009d01ca9712$b84c63e0$28e52ba0$@net>
Message-ID: <37473E43A6244F9DB12A69CB7399598A@RANIAPC>

You can just use the enter key or the space bar on the link for each name
then when you are done you can press the send invatations button.
Hope this helps.
Rania, 

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Jim
Sent: Saturday, January 16, 2010 8:17 PM
To: 'List for teachers and trainers of adaptive technology'; 'NFBnet NFBCS
Mailing List'; 'Blind Talk Mailing List'; 'NFB Talk Mailing List'; 'National
Association of Blind Students mailing list'; 'NFB of Washington Talk Mailing
List'
Subject: [nabs-l] Facebook question

Howdy,

 

I'm almost positive that someone can help me using Facebook.

So, here we go.

 

I use both the mobile regular websites for different things.

I am writing something about an event and will post that event on Facebook.
I've got everything ready, but I'm running into the problem of inviting
people.

I just figured I'd invite my entire facebook list.

However, I have to select or highlight each name and then go to the
appropriate select link.  I've not been successful at this yet.

 

I tried it on the mobile site, and I can get the option of inviting people,
but when I do, there's an add button under each person's name.
Unfortunately, when I hit the add button, it takes me to the next step, so I
basically have to go through the adding process one at a time.  I'm just not
going to do that 200 times.

 

So, back to the normal site, how can I select a bunch of names and then move
to the link without deselecting all of the names?  I'm selecting everyone
with the Shift down arrow, but I know that if I were to hit the arrow by
itself afterward, it would probably deselect everything.  Of course, when I
did this before, my sighted friend selected or highlighted everyone with the
mouse, went to the next group, and finished everything without
dehighlighting anything.  Easy for her to do.

 

Any help with this would be appreciated!  I need to get this event out to
the public soon.

 

Jim

 

_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaismail04%40gmai
l.com
No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 9.0.725 / Virus Database: 270.14.145/2626 - Release Date: 01/16/10
02:35:00



From darrell.shandrow at gmail.com  Sun Jan 17 04:39:22 2010
From: darrell.shandrow at gmail.com (Darrell Shandrow)
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 21:39:22 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] Looking for roommates for Washington Seminar.
Message-ID: <4b52948b.1608c00a.2a00.0b6d@mx.google.com>

Hello Everyone,

 

It turns out I will be attending Washington Seminar from Monday Feb. 1 to
Thursday Feb. 4. I have the airline tickets but no hotel arrangements at
this time. If anyone would be interested in rooming with me, please send a
private reply.

 

Thanks,

 

Darrell

 

 


From lawnmower84 at hotmail.com  Mon Jan 18 07:28:20 2010
From: lawnmower84 at hotmail.com (Jacob Struiksma)
Date: Sun, 17 Jan 2010 23:28:20 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes
In-Reply-To: <707472F1AF9743CDBFD93A9FA49C8C07@RANIAPC>
References: <3fea3c411001141352p2d82889bu38c409163c96d78a@mail.gmail.com><BFA79A56FE3E4BA4B6F2A1212167FB3F@teal6e6857f643><3fea3c411001150557x46c62415me5fe32788a216e32@mail.gmail.com><85ff10071001150900i6c6e152el2d5fb8f2259e65cb@mail.gmail.com><E159A78D502A450292883419B00B0B56@Dezman>
	<707472F1AF9743CDBFD93A9FA49C8C07@RANIAPC>
Message-ID: <COL107-DS11126F8A502F8213852C64B5660@phx.gbl>

You have to go to the JAWS configuration manager.  If you go to jaws
utilities then configuration manager   then press letter S and alt key then
down arrow to forms manager options enter then tab to check box for audio
sound for forms mode on and uncheck it and save it so now you will not get
the sound every time you go past edit box on website
From
Jacob Struiksma


-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Rania Ismail
Sent: Friday, January 15, 2010 2:11 PM
To: 'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes

How do you tern off audio forms mode for certain things?
Rania, 

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Dezman Jackson
Sent: Friday, January 15, 2010 3:14 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes

There's also a way to turn off auto forms mode through the configuration
manager if you don't prefer this.

Dezman
----- Original Message -----
From: "Arielle Silverman" <nabs.president at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 15, 2010 11:00 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes


> Hi Cindy,
>
> I press the "PC Cursor" button which exits forms mode. What is 
> happening is that JAWS is automatically bouncing into forms mode 
> whenever it sees an edit box. So PC-Cursor should fix this.
>
> Arielle
>
> On 1/16/10, Cindy Bennett <clb5590 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Thanks, i had tried all of these things. I think it is mainly an 
>> issue with jaws and facebook, so i turned off the automatic forms  
>> mode for that site.
>>
>> Thanks though.
>>
>> Cindy
>>
>> On 1/14/10, Teal Bloodworth <tealbloodworth at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> try pushing escape when you want to get out of the edit box. this 
>>> should turn off virtual cursor or you could always try to shift tab 
>>> until you hear the noise indicating you have entered or left a form 
>>> field.
>>>
>>>             -teal
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Cindy Bennett" <clb5590 at gmail.com>
>>> To: "National Asociation of Blind Students" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2010 3:52 PM
>>> Subject: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes
>>>
>>>
>>>>I recently upgraded to JAWS 11 and noticed this problem consistently  
>>>>occurring after installing it. Sometimes when i enter edit boxes, 
>>>>this  occurs more often on facebook but other sites as well, i 
>>>>cannot get  out of it no matter what i do. I end up having to close 
>>>>the browser  and sometimes shut down my computer. This is 
>>>>frustrating, so is anyone  else experiencing this? Is there an update
perhaps?
>>>>
>>>> Thanks
>>>>
>>>> Cindy
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info 
>>>> for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gma
il.com
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info 
>>> for
>>> nabs-l:
>>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/nabs.president%40gma
il.com
>>
>
>
> --
> Arielle Silverman
> President, National Association of Blind Students
> Phone:  602-502-2255
> Email:
> nabs.president at gmail.com
> Website:
> www.nabslink.org
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jackson.dezman%40gma
il.com
> 


_______________________________________________
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nabs-l:
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l.com

No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 9.0.725 / Virus Database: 270.14.143/2624 - Release Date: 01/15/10
07:47:00


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l.com



From lawnmower84 at hotmail.com  Mon Jan 18 07:43:17 2010
From: lawnmower84 at hotmail.com (Jacob Struiksma)
Date: Sun, 17 Jan 2010 23:43:17 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes
In-Reply-To: <3fea3c411001141352p2d82889bu38c409163c96d78a@mail.gmail.com>
References: <3fea3c411001141352p2d82889bu38c409163c96d78a@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <COL107-DS4FF8BDCC1AFCFD4DF3D3AB5660@phx.gbl>

If you just press esc and then forms mode goes off.  
From
Jacob Struiksma
 

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Cindy Bennett
Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2010 1:52 PM
To: National Asociation of Blind Students
Subject: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes

I recently upgraded to JAWS 11 and noticed this problem consistently
occurring after installing it. Sometimes when i enter edit boxes, this
occurs more often on facebook but other sites as well, i cannot get out of
it no matter what i do. I end up having to close the browser and sometimes
shut down my computer. This is frustrating, so is anyone else experiencing
this? Is there an update perhaps?

Thanks

Cindy

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From raniaismail04 at gmail.com  Mon Jan 18 13:12:48 2010
From: raniaismail04 at gmail.com (Rania Ismail)
Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2010 08:12:48 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes
In-Reply-To: <COL107-DS11126F8A502F8213852C64B5660@phx.gbl>
References: <3fea3c411001141352p2d82889bu38c409163c96d78a@mail.gmail.com><BFA79A56FE3E4BA4B6F2A1212167FB3F@teal6e6857f643><3fea3c411001150557x46c62415me5fe32788a216e32@mail.gmail.com><85ff10071001150900i6c6e152el2d5fb8f2259e65cb@mail.gmail.com><E159A78D502A450292883419B00B0B56@Dezman><707472F1AF9743CDBFD93A9FA49C8C07@RANIAPC>
	<COL107-DS11126F8A502F8213852C64B5660@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <DA85A4E7E67645CC8808DDE91CB8DD1B@RANIAPC>

Thank you.
Rania, 

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Jacob Struiksma
Sent: Monday, January 18, 2010 2:28 AM
To: 'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes

You have to go to the JAWS configuration manager.  If you go to jaws
utilities then configuration manager   then press letter S and alt key then
down arrow to forms manager options enter then tab to check box for audio
sound for forms mode on and uncheck it and save it so now you will not get
the sound every time you go past edit box on website From Jacob Struiksma


-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Rania Ismail
Sent: Friday, January 15, 2010 2:11 PM
To: 'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes

How do you tern off audio forms mode for certain things?
Rania, 

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Dezman Jackson
Sent: Friday, January 15, 2010 3:14 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes

There's also a way to turn off auto forms mode through the configuration
manager if you don't prefer this.

Dezman
----- Original Message -----
From: "Arielle Silverman" <nabs.president at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 15, 2010 11:00 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes


> Hi Cindy,
>
> I press the "PC Cursor" button which exits forms mode. What is 
> happening is that JAWS is automatically bouncing into forms mode 
> whenever it sees an edit box. So PC-Cursor should fix this.
>
> Arielle
>
> On 1/16/10, Cindy Bennett <clb5590 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Thanks, i had tried all of these things. I think it is mainly an 
>> issue with jaws and facebook, so i turned off the automatic forms 
>> mode for that site.
>>
>> Thanks though.
>>
>> Cindy
>>
>> On 1/14/10, Teal Bloodworth <tealbloodworth at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> try pushing escape when you want to get out of the edit box. this 
>>> should turn off virtual cursor or you could always try to shift tab 
>>> until you hear the noise indicating you have entered or left a form 
>>> field.
>>>
>>>             -teal
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Cindy Bennett" <clb5590 at gmail.com>
>>> To: "National Asociation of Blind Students" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2010 3:52 PM
>>> Subject: [nabs-l] problem with jaws 11 and edit boxes
>>>
>>>
>>>>I recently upgraded to JAWS 11 and noticed this problem consistently 
>>>>occurring after installing it. Sometimes when i enter edit boxes, 
>>>>this  occurs more often on facebook but other sites as well, i 
>>>>cannot get  out of it no matter what i do. I end up having to close 
>>>>the browser  and sometimes shut down my computer. This is 
>>>>frustrating, so is anyone  else experiencing this? Is there an 
>>>>update
perhaps?
>>>>
>>>> Thanks
>>>>
>>>> Cindy
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info 
>>>> for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gma
il.com
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info 
>>> for
>>> nabs-l:
>>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/clb5590%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/nabs.president%40gma
il.com
>>
>
>
> --
> Arielle Silverman
> President, National Association of Blind Students
> Phone:  602-502-2255
> Email:
> nabs.president at gmail.com
> Website:
> www.nabslink.org
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jackson.dezman%40gma
il.com
> 


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No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 9.0.725 / Virus Database: 270.14.143/2624 - Release Date: 01/15/10
07:47:00


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02:35:00



From gymnastdave at sbcglobal.net  Mon Jan 18 14:12:22 2010
From: gymnastdave at sbcglobal.net (Dave Wright)
Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2010 08:12:22 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] System Access Limited time Special!
Message-ID: <E7503B68332F4DCE9E4D203FAD53F219@yourdd0a3c7a34>

Hello Everyone and Best Regards for the New Year, 

Have you been seeking an affordable screenreader for that new computer you received during the holidays? Are you wanting to give your Valentine's sweetheart the ability to bridge the digital divide? Would you like the ability to enrich your life with a constantly growing library of multimedia content tailored to be fully accessible? If you answered yes to any of these questions, please take a moment to give us a call at Handy Tech North America (HTNA), to discuss which one of our adaptive solutions might best suit your lifestyle.  HTNA is proud to be hosting one of our biggest sales yet. In keeping with our motto, "Its all about adapting," Handy Tech will be offering deep discounts for a limited time, on our Serotek screen access solutions.

If you've been searching for a screenreader with an easy and intuitive interface, then any of Serotek's award winning  solutions might be right for you.

System Access Standalone license, gives one the ability to compose documents, browse iTunes content, read and respond to emails on up to two computers for $199.99. This is a savings of almost $200.00 off the current market price. 


If your lifestyle requires you to embrace portability and mobility, HTNA is offering the  System Access Mobile for only $299.99 (Again $200.00 less than market pricing).With this package, one can install a license of System Access on up to two computers and a third license can be installed to a U3 enabled USB thumb drive. This USB thumb drive can give the user access to Windows machines at work, at home, and anywhere on the go by inserting the drive into a USB port. When the drive is inserted, System Access automatically launches giving the user screenreader access to the computer. Once the drive is removed, no trace of the screenreader is left on the machine.

If you are seeking a more natural human sounding voice for your screenreader configuration, you can now add NeoSpeech VoiceText to any System Access package for only $49.99.

Finally, if you received a netbook during the holidays and wish to give that machine a voice, HTNA is offering the ability to purchase a netbook license of System Access for the low price of $99.00. Here at Handy Tech, we recognize adaptability as  the primary key to success. Please remember that this is a limited time special offer only available from Handy Tech North America while quantities last and pricing is subject to change without notice. We hope you'll keep us in mind when you have any technology questions. If you have any questions about how to best ease your way into this digital age, or about any of our products, please feel free to call us any time by phone:

(651)636-5184

Or by email:

sales at handytech.us

We look forward to speaking with you, to helping you find technology solutions, and to sharing a wonderful 2010! 




 

Best regards,
   Dave Wright
Regional Sales Manager- Handy Tech North America

Phone:  651-636-5184 X803

Mobile: 347-422-7085

Fax:  866-347-8249

E-mail:
dave at handytech.us

Web site:
http://www.handytech.us

From sarah.jevnikar at utoronto.ca  Mon Jan 18 15:51:48 2010
From: sarah.jevnikar at utoronto.ca (Sarah Jevnikar)
Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2010 10:51:48 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] ITunes Solution and Question
Message-ID: <003001ca9856$2538f6a0$6faae3e0$@jevnikar@utoronto.ca>

Hi NABS,

I made a recent discovery on using ITunes with JAWS and thought I'd share in
case others found it helpful. It's in regards to selecting songs and moving
them into playlists.

1. Open ITunes.
2. Press control-n to create a new playlist.
3. Type a name and press enter.
4. In the "sources" tree view, go to "Music" and press f6 twice to get to
the list of songs. Find the one(s) you want with the arrow keys.
5. One at a time, while on the song you want, press the Applications key to
get to the context menu.
6. Press a to get to the "add to playlist" submenu. Press enter and select
the playlist with the arrow keys.
7. Press enter and the song will be added to your playlist of choice.

Notes
-- usually the right mouse button activates the context menu as well, but in
this case it selects/deselects the current item.
-- you have to do this for individual songs but if you want multiple songs
that contain a common key word, you can type that into the search box and
then go to "edit" (alt-e) and "select all". You can then copy (control-c)
this list, open the new list you want to put these songs in, and paste
(control-v) them there.

Sorry this is so long. I hope it helps. Does anyone know how to add items to
one's wish list in the ITunes store? I think I'll spend much less if I can
access that feature <grin>

Take care,

Sarah Jevnikar



From braille at nbpcb.org  Mon Jan 18 19:52:30 2010
From: braille at nbpcb.org (Louise Walch)
Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:52:30 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] NCLB Braille Exam at NFB National Convention
Message-ID: <auto-000135749217@mailfront1.g2host.com>



Attention all interested in receiving National Certification in 
Literary Braille (NCLB):



The National Blindness Professional Certification Board (NBPCB) would 
like to again offer NCLB braille certification at the NFB National 
Convention in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = 
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Dallas this July. The 
NCLB is the only nationally recognized certification in literary 
braille geared specifically toward teachers. The NCLB is a five-year 
renewable certification awarded to those who successfully pass all 
four sections of the National Literary Braille Competency Test. The 
cost is $250.

<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

If you are interested in testing at the NFB national convention, we 
request that you fill out our brief online interest form with a note 
that you are interested in testing in Dallas. Please do so before 
February 10th. This is an interest form only and is NOT an 
application. A sufficient number of candidates are needed before the 
test room can be scheduled; Thus, by filling out the interest form 
you are increasing the chances that the exam will be offered. You 
will be notified of the decision by mid February.



We urge that you fill out the brief online NCLB interest form at:



<http://www.nbpcb.org/forms/NCLBInterest/NCLBInterest_1.htm?id=694562449>http://www.nbpcb.org/forms/NCLBInterest/NCLBInterest_1.htm?id=694562449



For more information, updates, deadlines, sample exams, and to apply 
online, go to:



<http://www.nbpcb.org/>www.nbpcb.org



If you have further questions or would like to host an exam in your 
area, contact Louise Walch, NCLB Test Coordinator at 
<mailto:braille at nbpcb.org>braille at nbpcb.org or call (318) 257-4554.


Louise G. Walch
NBPCB Coordinator
<mailto:braille at nbpcb.org>braille at nbpcb.org
www.nbpcb.org

From jj at bestmidi.com  Tue Jan 19 06:15:06 2010
From: jj at bestmidi.com (J.J. Meddaugh)
Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:15:06 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] MABS Beanie Hats while Supplies Last at Washington Seminar
Message-ID: <AE19E0F31C8B4BDB852901F3118293DF@jage>

Last year, we began selling these cool-looking beanies at Washington Seminar. Well, we didn't sell a lot because it was 60 degrees the whole week.
Plus, our friends from the south boasted it would never be cold enough to wear them where they lived.
Boy has the recent weather proven you wrong.

This year, you'll have a second chance to buy these stylish hats, but only while supplies last. They feature a Whozit and the words National Federation of the Blind and will keep you warm when you need it most.

Look for a Michigan Association of Blind Students member to score yours for just $10 at Washington Seminar and support MABS and the establishment of a scholarship for blind students in Michigan.

Thank you in advance for your support.

J.J. Meddaugh
Treasurer,
Michigan Association of Blind Students



From dandrews at visi.com  Tue Jan 19 13:40:58 2010
From: dandrews at visi.com (David Andrews)
Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 07:40:58 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Accessible World's Special Program Series presents Lloyd
 Rasmussen, January 26, 2010
Message-ID: <auto-000135842903@mailfront1.g2host.com>

From: News Wire
listservice at accessibleworld.org
Subject: Accessible World's Special Program
Series presents Lloyd Rasmussen, January 26,
2010
News Wire:
Accessible World Special Program Series
Lloyd Rasmussen of NLS will unofficially
speak to us on how to use the BARD
Downloadable web site. He will give us useful
tips for finding books and in general getting
around the site.
Let us now read what Lloyd has to say about
his presentation.
Lloyd Rasmussen, a senior electronics
engineer at the National Library Service for
the Blind and Physically Handicapped will
discuss "the evolution and devolution of the
NLS talking book program". From his
perspective, he will be prepared to discuss
the history of the talking book program in
the United States, factors which have driven
the technology of the program along the way,
its current status and future prospects.
There will also be some discussion of how
consumers can use and support the program.
You can expect a lively question and answer
segment after his presentation
Date: Tuesday January 26, 2010
Time: 6:00 PM PST, 7:00 PM MST, 8:00PM. CST,
9:00 PM EST and elsewhere in the world
Wednesday 2:00 GMT.
Approximately 15 minutes prior to the event
start time; go to the Accessible World
Auditorium at:
http://conference321.com/masteradmin/room.asp?id=rs5affc3cfa191
Or, alternatively,
Select the Accessible World Auditorium at:
www.accessibleworld.org
Enter your first and last name
If you are a first-time user of the Talking
Communities online conferencing software,
there is a small, safe software program that
you need to download and then run. A link to
the software is available on every entry
screen to the Accessible World rooms.
All online interactive programs require no
password, are free of charge, and open to
anyone worldwide having an Internet
connection, a computer, speakers, and a sound
card. Those with microphones can interact
audibly with the presenters and others in the
virtual audience. To speak to us, hold down
the control key and let up to listen. If no
microphone is available, you may text chat
with the attendees.
Accessible World uses News Wires, like this
one, to inform people of the topic and times
for the many Discussion Groups on Accessible
World. The lists are announce only to keep
the traffic to a minimum. You can join the
Accessible World Announce List, the Tek Talk
Announce List or the Sports Talk Announce
List by completing the form at:
www.accessibleworld.org/mailinglists
Accessible World Contacts:
Robert Acosta, Chair
Accessible World
818-998-0044
Email: boacosta at pacbell.net
Web:
www.helpinghands4theblind.org
Joann Becker, Events Coordinator
Accessible World
617-969-1213
Email: joannbecker at pcomcast.net
George Buys, CEO.
Talking Communities
Email: buys at talkingcommunities.com
The Accessible World, a division of Helping
Hands For The Blind, a 501(c)(3)
not-for-profit organization, seeks to educate
the general public, the disabled community
and the professionals who serve them by
providing highly relevant information about
new products, services, and training
opportunities designed specifically to
eliminate geographic and access barriers that
adversely affect them



From mrsmigs at migliorelli.org  Sun Jan 17 15:03:02 2010
From: mrsmigs at migliorelli.org (Maryann Migliorelli)
Date: Sun, 17 Jan 2010 08:03:02 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] question about clep testing
Message-ID: <67FB3E85CACE42CD973BF0C29392235F@PAULLAPTOP>

Hi Gang,
I was wondering what experiences any of you have had with clep testing.  Are they readily accessible?  Has anyone used System Access for the testing?  How are they with Jaws and Windows_eyes?  Have you found that they are more easily taken privately or just in the standard testing centers?
I'm sorry for the many questions, but I'm just getting back into being a student after many years away from the college setting and want to get my ducks in a row so to speak.
You can reply privately at
mrsmigs at migliorelli.org
Thanks for any help.
Maryann Migliorelli


From freespirit328 at gmail.com  Tue Jan 19 19:53:47 2010
From: freespirit328 at gmail.com (Jennifer Aberdeen)
Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:53:47 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] question about clep testing
References: <67FB3E85CACE42CD973BF0C29392235F@PAULLAPTOP>
Message-ID: <7F8E677B869A42478849AF1AD8923EE7@Gateway>

Hi Maryann,

I'm not sure if it is this way at all Community colleges or Universities for 
that matter, but my experience with the CLEP exam was very negative.

I attempted to take the English CLEP exam, and I will say it was "Hell." 
Someone from the Disabilites office had to read everything to me because the 
computer did not have any type of screen reader on it. Braille was not 
offered to me because as the lady from the disabilities office told me, "We 
don't usually do that."

It probably took longer than it should have, and I failed anyway. I only got 
thrity two out of eighty nine questions right.

I sincerely hope others haven't had the same experience as I did. I hope 
other institutions are more accessible to blind students.

Jennifer
_____________________________________

Jennifer Aberdeen, AVON Independent Sales E-Representative
401-644-5607

Shop AVON at home or office. Personal delivery
and a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee.

www.youravon.com/jaberdeen
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Maryann Migliorelli" <mrsmigs at migliorelli.org>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 17, 2010 10:03 AM
Subject: [nabs-l] question about clep testing


> Hi Gang,
> I was wondering what experiences any of you have had with clep testing. 
> Are they readily accessible?  Has anyone used System Access for the 
> testing?  How are they with Jaws and Windows_eyes?  Have you found that 
> they are more easily taken privately or just in the standard testing 
> centers?
> I'm sorry for the many questions, but I'm just getting back into being a 
> student after many years away from the college setting and want to get my 
> ducks in a row so to speak.
> You can reply privately at
> mrsmigs at migliorelli.org
> Thanks for any help.
> Maryann Migliorelli
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/freespirit328%40gmail.com 



From JFreeh at nfb.org  Wed Jan 20 02:00:56 2010
From: JFreeh at nfb.org (Freeh,
	Jessica)
Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:00:56 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] National Federation of the Blind Announces 2010 Race for
 Independence
Message-ID: <auto-000135719767@mailfront2.g2host.com>


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE



CONTACT:

Chris Danielsen

Director of Public Relations

National Federation of the Blind

(410) 659-9314, extension 2330

(410) 262-1281 (Cell)

cdanielsen at nfb.org





National Federation of the Blind
Announces 2010 Race for Independence





Fundraising Effort to Focus on Access to Technology for Blind Americans



Baltimore, Maryland (January 19, 2010): The National Federation of 
the Blind (NFB), the oldest and largest organization of blind people 
in the United States, today announced the 2010 Race for Independence, 
a fundraising effort focused on improving access to technology by 
blind Americans and supporting other NFB initiatives.  The Race for 
Independence is designed to raise funds for the National Federation 
of the Blind Imagination Fund, which supports the education, 
technology, and research projects of the NFB Jernigan Institute, as 
well as programs conducted by the fifty-two affiliates and over seven 
hundred local chapters of the Federation.  The Race for Independence 
will also bring public attention to the need for full and equal 
access for blind Americans to modern technology, in everything from 
home appliances to automobiles.  The initiative begins with a 
six-month campaign to raise funds from NFB members and friends that 
will close on July 31, 2010.



Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, 
said: "The Imagination Fund represents the hopes and aspirations of 
blind Americans.  Through this effort we are able to create 
innovative research, training, education, and technology programs 
that improve the lives of the blind and move us closer to our 
ultimate goal of full integration into society on a basis of 
equality.  The crisis in Braille literacy for blind children and 
advances in technology that, if not properly designed, will threaten 
the independence of the blind mean that time is of the essence.  But 
I am confident that with the help of our members and friends, we will 
ensure that blind children are literate and can pursue the

career of their choice; that blind people have access to cutting-edge 
technology; and that opportunities for all blind Americans are 
limited only by our capacity to dream."



Parnell Diggs, Chairman of the NFB Imagination Fund, said: "The Race 
for Independence is quite simply the expression of our desire to 
speed toward our goal of achieving first-class citizenship status in 
society at an ever-increasing pace.  It is the anchor of the National 
Federation of the Blind's Imagination Fund, the annual campaign to 
raise proceeds for NFB programs at the national, state, and local levels."



To sign up to be an Imaginator and help build the Imagination Fund, 
please visit 
<http://www.raceforindependence.org/>www.raceforindependence.org or 
call (410) 659-9314, extension 2371.





###




About the National Federation of the Blind

With more than 50,000 members, the National Federation of the Blind 
is the largest and most influential membership organization of blind 
people in the United States.   The NFB improves blind people's lives 
through advocacy, education, research, technology, and programs 
encouraging independence and self-confidence.  It is the leading 
force in the blindness field today and the voice of the nation's 
blind.  In January 2004 the NFB opened the National Federation of the 
Blind Jernigan Institute, the first research and training center in 
the United States for the blind led by the blind.


From jaedpo96 at aol.com  Wed Jan 20 22:09:59 2010
From: jaedpo96 at aol.com (Polansky)
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:09:59 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Bank accounts
Message-ID: <8CC6834711B8BD4-2CBC-EC6A@webmail-m039.sysops.aol.com>

Hi all. My parents and I are thinking about getting me a bank account 
and a debit card. I would like to know what bank accounts' websites are 
accessible with JAWS. I hope that Bank Of America or PNC's websites are 
accessible because those are the only banks in the town that I live in. 
To get to any other bank you have to drive at least 20 minutes. There 
is another bank called Woodsboro Bank in my town, but you probably 
haven't heard of it because it is a local bank in my county.



From bunnykatie6 at gmail.com  Thu Jan 21 00:21:27 2010
From: bunnykatie6 at gmail.com (Katie Wang)
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:21:27 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Bank accounts
In-Reply-To: <8CC6834711B8BD4-2CBC-EC6A@webmail-m039.sysops.aol.com>
References: <8CC6834711B8BD4-2CBC-EC6A@webmail-m039.sysops.aol.com>
Message-ID: <5096b4731001201621m51af1e4n3542506cf591d983@mail.gmail.com>

I use the Bank of America site regularly and it works well with JAWS.
It is a convenient option as it has many branches located all over the
country so you can keep your account almost wherever you go. Hope that
helps!
   Katie

On 1/20/10, Polansky <jaedpo96 at aol.com> wrote:
> Hi all. My parents and I are thinking about getting me a bank account
> and a debit card. I would like to know what bank accounts' websites are
> accessible with JAWS. I hope that Bank Of America or PNC's websites are
> accessible because those are the only banks in the town that I live in.
> To get to any other bank you have to drive at least 20 minutes. There
> is another bank called Woodsboro Bank in my town, but you probably
> haven't heard of it because it is a local bank in my county.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bunnykatie6%40gmail.com
>


From kramc11 at gmail.com  Thu Jan 21 00:33:14 2010
From: kramc11 at gmail.com (Mark J. Cadigan)
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:33:14 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Bank accounts
In-Reply-To: <8CC6834711B8BD4-2CBC-EC6A@webmail-m039.sysops.aol.com>
References: <8CC6834711B8BD4-2CBC-EC6A@webmail-m039.sysops.aol.com>
Message-ID: <3EEFF4147B2548DEBC0B1B03A50854A9@SonyPC>

I am not a jaws user, so I can't answer that part of the question, but I 
have had good luck with Citizen's Bank's talking ATM's. There customer 
service is also quite helpful.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Polansky" <jaedpo96 at aol.com>
To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 20, 2010 5:09 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] Bank accounts


> Hi all. My parents and I are thinking about getting me a bank account and 
> a debit card. I would like to know what bank accounts' websites are 
> accessible with JAWS. I hope that Bank Of America or PNC's websites are 
> accessible because those are the only banks in the town that I live in. To 
> get to any other bank you have to drive at least 20 minutes. There is 
> another bank called Woodsboro Bank in my town, but you probably haven't 
> heard of it because it is a local bank in my county.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kramc11%40gmail.com 



From freespirit328 at gmail.com  Thu Jan 21 01:33:59 2010
From: freespirit328 at gmail.com (Jennifer Aberdeen)
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:33:59 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Bank accounts
References: <8CC6834711B8BD4-2CBC-EC6A@webmail-m039.sysops.aol.com>
Message-ID: <83A491737391464484E741CB17C7CF5A@Gateway>

Bank Of America's website is accessible. I use it :)

Jen
_____________________________________

Jennifer Aberdeen, AVON Independent Sales E-Representative
401-644-5607

Shop AVON at home or office. Personal delivery
and a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee.

www.youravon.com/jaberdeen
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Polansky" <jaedpo96 at aol.com>
To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 20, 2010 5:09 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] Bank accounts


> Hi all. My parents and I are thinking about getting me a bank account and 
> a debit card. I would like to know what bank accounts' websites are 
> accessible with JAWS. I hope that Bank Of America or PNC's websites are 
> accessible because those are the only banks in the town that I live in. To 
> get to any other bank you have to drive at least 20 minutes. There is 
> another bank called Woodsboro Bank in my town, but you probably haven't 
> heard of it because it is a local bank in my county.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/freespirit328%40gmail.com 



From dsmithnfb at gmail.com  Thu Jan 21 02:53:01 2010
From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith)
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:53:01 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Bank accounts
In-Reply-To: <83A491737391464484E741CB17C7CF5A@Gateway>
References: <8CC6834711B8BD4-2CBC-EC6A@webmail-m039.sysops.aol.com>
	<83A491737391464484E741CB17C7CF5A@Gateway>
Message-ID: <409c235c1001201853k68e04b28y2fa5b57ea69656ed@mail.gmail.com>

Hello,
 I too use Bank Of America and have  had no problems with it's
websitt.  As PNC goes, I would  take a look at  their website if I had
concerns about it.
  hope that helps,
  Darian

On 1/20/10, Jennifer Aberdeen <freespirit328 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Bank Of America's website is accessible. I use it :)
>
> Jen
> _____________________________________
>
> Jennifer Aberdeen, AVON Independent Sales E-Representative
> 401-644-5607
>
> Shop AVON at home or office. Personal delivery
> and a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee.
>
> www.youravon.com/jaberdeen
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Polansky" <jaedpo96 at aol.com>
> To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, January 20, 2010 5:09 PM
> Subject: [nabs-l] Bank accounts
>
>
>> Hi all. My parents and I are thinking about getting me a bank account and
>> a debit card. I would like to know what bank accounts' websites are
>> accessible with JAWS. I hope that Bank Of America or PNC's websites are
>> accessible because those are the only banks in the town that I live in. To
>>
>> get to any other bank you have to drive at least 20 minutes. There is
>> another bank called Woodsboro Bank in my town, but you probably haven't
>> heard of it because it is a local bank in my county.
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/freespirit328%40gmail.com
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>


-- 
Darian Smith
Skype: The_Blind_Truth
Windows Live: Lightningrod2010 at live.com
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


From dandrews at visi.com  Thu Jan 21 03:35:33 2010
From: dandrews at visi.com (David Andrews)
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2010 21:35:33 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Youth and Adult Writing Contests
Message-ID: <auto-000135908190@mailfront2.g2host.com>

I want to bring to your attention that the annual youth and adult 
writing contests sponsored by the Writers' Division of the NFB, 
opened January 1st and will close April 1st.

Adult contests, poetry and fiction, are open to all entrants eighteen 
years and over.

The youth contests are all about Braille and all poetry and fiction 
entries are required to be submitted in Braille. The age groups are 
divided into three categories: first through sixth grades, seventh 
and eighth grades, and ninth through twelfth grades.

Prizes for contest winners range up to $100 for adult categories and 
up to $25 for youth categories.

  All contest winners will be announced at the Writers' Division 
business meeting during the NFB national convention to be held in 
Dallas, Texas, the first week of July, 2010. In addition, shortly 
after convention, a list of winners will appear on the Writers' 
Division website, 
<file:///www.nfb-writers-division.org>www.nfb-writers-division.org. 
First, second, and third place winners in each category will appear 
in the summer and fall issues of the Writers' Division magazine, 
"Slate and Style."

For additional contest details and submission guidelines, go to the 
Writers' Division website, 
<file:///www.nfb-writers-division.org>www.nfb-writers-division.org.

President NFB Writers' Division
Robert Leslie Newman
Email- newmanrl at cox.net
Division Website
Http://www.nfb-writers-division.org

From commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net  Thu Jan 21 15:21:26 2010
From: commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net (Kevin Wassmer)
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:21:26 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] The Ozone
Message-ID: <3EA7C82A5F184F43B1499212BA53C7A6@kevin9ee0841f6>

Hello folks. I just baught the Ozone. Is there a review somewhere on where I can learn how to use it with talkx? Idealy there would be a CD that would tell me how to run it.

From gymnastdave at sbcglobal.net  Thu Jan 21 15:55:59 2010
From: gymnastdave at sbcglobal.net (Dave Wright)
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:55:59 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] iRead: "simply reading"
Message-ID: <5A80AB87959D4F87B3BF36D68524682E@yourdd0a3c7a34>

iRead: "simply reading"
Handy Tech North America is pleased to offer iRead, a new, robust, cost effective and easy to use reading solution developed by Handy Tech GmbH of Horb Germany.

iRead is software that converts a Windows-PC with a scanner and screen reader into an open reading system.

Gain access to print material with minimal effort. There is only one key press between the start of the program and the reading of the first page of printed text. iRead automatically detects the connected scanner and searches for the best settings for the individual model. Check the orientation of a document with a single keystroke.

iRead captures the structure of a document. Not only does iRead detect headings, but also creates a table of contents based on these headings. Simply select a heading from the created table of contents and then easily jump to the selected position in the document.

Use the search function of iRead to jump to a specific word within the scanned document. Set a bookmark and easily pick up where you left off.

iRead lets you import images from different formats such as PDF and several image types which are quickly and accurately rendered into accessible text. Perspective distortions and misalignments are automatically corrected by iRead.

iRead is designed and optimized to be used in combination with screen reader programs. If you are not using one of the leading screen readers like Window-Eyes, Zoomtext with speech or JAWS, you have the option of using iRead along with NVDA, a free and open source screen reader. Enjoy the ability to use any Handy Tech Braille display along with iRead and any of the popular screen readers including NVDA.

"As North America master distributors of Handy Tech products, we are very pleased to add a high quality OCR package to our offerings" says Handy Tech North America President and Founder Earle Harrison, "At first I questioned the introduction of a version 1 OCR software program in an industry where other products have had time to develop over 15-20 years; however, after experiencing the speed and accuracy of iRead firsthand, I knew we had a contender".

Handy Tech GmbH Managing Director Sigi Kipke states "Earle and his team have done an extraordinary job representing Handy Tech products over the past 4 years and I have every confidence in their ability to make iRead a success as they continue to serve our Canadian and U.S customers".

The cost of iRead is $750.00 USD.

You may download a 30 day trial version of iRead from:

http://www.handytech.us/iRead_1.0.2.0a_Setup.exe

Licensing iRead is simply a matter of obtaining an activation code.

For more information, please call Handy Tech North America at:

651-636-5184

or e-mail:

sales at handytech.us

You may also visit our web site at:

http://www.handytech.us


Best regards,
   Dave Wright
Regional Sales Manager- Handy Tech North America

Phone:  651-636-5184 X803

Mobile: 347-422-7085

Fax:  866-347-8249

E-mail:
dave at handytech.us

Web site:
http://www.handytech.us

From myangelblessings at hotmail.com  Thu Jan 21 16:36:21 2010
From: myangelblessings at hotmail.com (Ben Peters)
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:36:21 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] powerpoint slides
Message-ID: <BLU141-W3B38EE7DB1667B39F9A30C2630@phx.gbl>


Hi, a quick question. Are powerpoint documents/slides readable by jaws version 9 or 10? I'm taking statistics, and my prof has given the class his slides in hard copy, but its a lot of text (mostly written words right now) and some things like tables aren't scanning right. So I'm curious if jaws would read an electronic version if I have him send it to me. If you wish feel free to write me off list. Thanks and I hope everyone's new semester is going good. Ben

myangelblessings at hotmail.com 

 



 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail: Powerful Free email with security by Microsoft.
http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390710/direct/01/

From oceanrls at hotmail.com  Fri Jan 22 17:39:02 2010
From: oceanrls at hotmail.com (Rachel Jacobs)
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 12:39:02 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] powerpoint slides
References: <BLU141-W3B38EE7DB1667B39F9A30C2630@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <BLU0-SMTP71F38A284BA628B5C25A5EC4630@phx.gbl>

Yes. Click enter on the power point, then push F5 then to go from slide to 
slide hit the space bar.
Rachel
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ben Peters" <myangelblessings at hotmail.com>
To: "nabs-l" <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>; "NABS" <nabs at acb.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 11:36 AM
Subject: [nabs-l] powerpoint slides


>
> Hi, a quick question. Are powerpoint documents/slides readable by jaws 
> version 9 or 10? I'm taking statistics, and my prof has given the class 
> his slides in hard copy, but its a lot of text (mostly written words right 
> now) and some things like tables aren't scanning right. So I'm curious if 
> jaws would read an electronic version if I have him send it to me. If you 
> wish feel free to write me off list. Thanks and I hope everyone's new 
> semester is going good. Ben
>
> myangelblessings at hotmail.com
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Hotmail: Powerful Free email with security by Microsoft.
> http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390710/direct/01/
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/oceanrls%40hotmail.com
> 



From raniaismail04 at gmail.com  Thu Jan 21 17:53:03 2010
From: raniaismail04 at gmail.com (Rania Ismail)
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:53:03 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] powerpoint slides
In-Reply-To: <BLU141-W3B38EE7DB1667B39F9A30C2630@phx.gbl>
References: <BLU141-W3B38EE7DB1667B39F9A30C2630@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <5364359299894942895BB5D19F960069@RANIAPC>

I used jaws 9 with power point slides and it red them just fine.
Rania, 

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Ben Peters
Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 11:36 AM
To: nabs-l; NABS
Subject: [nabs-l] powerpoint slides


Hi, a quick question. Are powerpoint documents/slides readable by jaws
version 9 or 10? I'm taking statistics, and my prof has given the class his
slides in hard copy, but its a lot of text (mostly written words right now)
and some things like tables aren't scanning right. So I'm curious if jaws
would read an electronic version if I have him send it to me. If you wish
feel free to write me off list. Thanks and I hope everyone's new semester is
going good. Ben

myangelblessings at hotmail.com 

 



 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail: Powerful Free email with security by Microsoft.
http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390710/direct/01/
_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaismail04%40gmai
l.com
No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 9.0.730 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/2636 - Release Date: 01/21/10
02:34:00



From thebluesisloose at gmail.com  Thu Jan 21 19:02:20 2010
From: thebluesisloose at gmail.com (Beth)
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:02:20 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] powerpoint slides
Message-ID: <4b58a4a3.1408c00a.350e.3fa0@mx.google.com>

I don't know about Power Point slides for JAWS 10 though.  I need 
to know all that for a computer fluency class.  Des anybody know 
if Office 2007 works with 10 or 11?  I also have Windows Vista 
Home premium.
Beth

> ----- Original Message -----
>From: "Rania Ismail" <raniaismail04 at gmail.com
>To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>Date sent: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:53:03 -0500
>Subject: Re: [nabs-l] powerpoint slides

>I used jaws 9 with power point slides and it red them just fine.
>Rania,

>-----Original Message-----
>From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org 
[mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
>Of Ben Peters
>Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 11:36 AM
>To: nabs-l; NABS
>Subject: [nabs-l] powerpoint slides


>Hi, a quick question. Are powerpoint documents/slides readable by 
jaws
>version 9 or 10? I'm taking statistics, and my prof has given the 
class his
>slides in hard copy, but its a lot of text (mostly written words 
right now)
>and some things like tables aren't scanning right. So I'm curious 
if jaws
>would read an electronic version if I have him send it to me. If 
you wish
>feel free to write me off list. Thanks and I hope everyone's new 
semester is
>going good. Ben

>myangelblessings at hotmail.com






>_________________________________________________________________
>Hotmail: Powerful Free email with security by Microsoft.
>http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390710/direct/01/
>_______________________________________________
>nabs-l mailing list
>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info 
for
>nabs-l:
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaisma
il04%40gmai
>l.com
>No virus found in this incoming message.
>Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
>Version: 9.0.730 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/2636 - Release Date: 
01/21/10
>02:34:00


>_______________________________________________
>nabs-l mailing list
>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info 
for nabs-l:
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesi
sloose%40gmail.com


From thebluesisloose at gmail.com  Thu Jan 21 19:02:23 2010
From: thebluesisloose at gmail.com (Beth)
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:02:23 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] powerpoint slides
Message-ID: <4b58a4a6.1408c00a.350e.3fa1@mx.google.com>

Wow.  That should be helpful.
Beth


From amylsabo at comcast.net  Thu Jan 21 21:41:38 2010
From: amylsabo at comcast.net (Amy Sabo)
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:41:38 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [nabs-l] powerpoint slides
In-Reply-To: <BLU141-W3B38EE7DB1667B39F9A30C2630@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <1724073676.11611461264110098981.JavaMail.root@sz0144a.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net>


hello ben,

yes, there is a way to read powerpointt slides with using jfw. just convertt them into ms word by going to file in ppt and, then go to send to ms word and, then check the box for outline format and then your document will open up in a ms word document.

i hope this will help you out in this matter. take care and i will talk to you soon!


hugs,
from amyy
----- Original Message -----
From: Ben Peters 
To: nabs-l , NABS 
Sent: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:36:21 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [nabs-l] powerpoint slides


Hi, a quick question. Are powerpoint documents/slides readable by jaws version 9 or 10? I'm taking statistics, and my prof has given the class his slides in hard copy, but its a lot of text (mostly written words right now) and some things like tables aren't scanning right. So I'm curious if jaws would read an electronic version if I have him send it to me. If you wish feel free to write me off list. Thanks and I hope everyone's new semester is going good. Ben

myangelblessings at hotmail.com 





                          
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail: Powerful Free email with security by Microsoft.
http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390710/direct/01/
_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/amylsabo%40comcast.net

From amylsabo at comcast.net  Thu Jan 21 21:43:48 2010
From: amylsabo at comcast.net (Amy Sabo)
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:43:48 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [nabs-l] The Ozone
In-Reply-To: <3EA7C82A5F184F43B1499212BA53C7A6@kevin9ee0841f6>
Message-ID: <1734279037.11612161264110228396.JavaMail.root@sz0144a.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net>

hello kevin,

as to using the ozone with talks i don't know what to tell you on this. i don't use talks with my ozone i use mobile speak. as for using talks i don't know where you can get a cd to play on how to use it.

i'm sorry that i couldn't help you out.. take care and i will talk to you soon.


hugs,
from amy

----- Original Message -----
From: Kevin Wassmer 
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list 
Cc: Discussion of accessible electronics and appliances 
Sent: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:21:26 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: [nabs-l] The Ozone

Hello folks. I just baught the Ozone. Is there a review somewhere on where I can learn how to use it with talkx? Idealy there would be a CD that would tell me how to run it.
_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/amylsabo%40comcast.net

From raniaismail04 at gmail.com  Thu Jan 21 22:30:26 2010
From: raniaismail04 at gmail.com (Rania Ismail)
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:30:26 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] power point and jaws 11
Message-ID: <3E351C33B9EA4BF7992419247AF2709C@RANIAPC>

I am using windows 7 and jaws 11.
My question is on jaws 11 and power point.
When trying to go threw the slides is it just me or does the spacebar not
move you threw the slides?
My other question is has anyone using jaws 11 experienced jaws repeating it
self after it reads a slide?
Rania,

From strunkr at tsbvi.edu  Thu Jan 21 23:28:13 2010
From: strunkr at tsbvi.edu (strunkr at tsbvi.edu)
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:28:13 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] powerpoint slides
References: <4b58a4a3.1408c00a.350e.3fa0@mx.google.com>
Message-ID: <000a01ca9af1$66870140$5317410a@wolfa>

Office 2007 works with both JAWS 10 and JAWS 11.  PowerPoint, Word, and
Excel are all very accessible.  Access not so much.

Randi

----- Original Message -----
From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 1:02 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] powerpoint slides


> I don't know about Power Point slides for JAWS 10 though.  I need
> to know all that for a computer fluency class.  Des anybody know
> if Office 2007 works with 10 or 11?  I also have Windows Vista
> Home premium.
> Beth
>
> > ----- Original Message -----
> >From: "Rania Ismail" <raniaismail04 at gmail.com
> >To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> >Date sent: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:53:03 -0500
> >Subject: Re: [nabs-l] powerpoint slides
>
> >I used jaws 9 with power point slides and it red them just fine.
> >Rania,
>
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org
> [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
> >Of Ben Peters
> >Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 11:36 AM
> >To: nabs-l; NABS
> >Subject: [nabs-l] powerpoint slides
>
>
> >Hi, a quick question. Are powerpoint documents/slides readable by
> jaws
> >version 9 or 10? I'm taking statistics, and my prof has given the
> class his
> >slides in hard copy, but its a lot of text (mostly written words
> right now)
> >and some things like tables aren't scanning right. So I'm curious
> if jaws
> >would read an electronic version if I have him send it to me. If
> you wish
> >feel free to write me off list. Thanks and I hope everyone's new
> semester is
> >going good. Ben
>
> >myangelblessings at hotmail.com
>
>
>
>
>
>
> >_________________________________________________________________
> >Hotmail: Powerful Free email with security by Microsoft.
> >http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390710/direct/01/
> >_______________________________________________
> >nabs-l mailing list
> >nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> >http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> >To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
> for
> >nabs-l:
> >http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaisma
> il04%40gmai
> >l.com
> >No virus found in this incoming message.
> >Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
> >Version: 9.0.730 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/2636 - Release Date:
> 01/21/10
> >02:34:00
>
>
> >_______________________________________________
> >nabs-l mailing list
> >nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> >http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> >To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
> for nabs-l:
> >http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesi
> sloose%40gmail.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/strunkr%40tsbvi.edu
>



From raniaismail04 at gmail.com  Fri Jan 22 00:00:16 2010
From: raniaismail04 at gmail.com (Rania Ismail)
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:00:16 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] powerpoint slides
In-Reply-To: <000a01ca9af1$66870140$5317410a@wolfa>
References: <4b58a4a3.1408c00a.350e.3fa0@mx.google.com>
	<000a01ca9af1$66870140$5317410a@wolfa>
Message-ID: <420CE7E1DDFB451D9ED95500AA3CB6CD@RANIAPC>

Thank you.
Rania, 

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of strunkr at tsbvi.edu
Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 6:28 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] powerpoint slides

Office 2007 works with both JAWS 10 and JAWS 11.  PowerPoint, Word, and
Excel are all very accessible.  Access not so much.

Randi

----- Original Message -----
From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 1:02 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] powerpoint slides


> I don't know about Power Point slides for JAWS 10 though.  I need to 
> know all that for a computer fluency class.  Des anybody know if 
> Office 2007 works with 10 or 11?  I also have Windows Vista Home 
> premium.
> Beth
>
> > ----- Original Message -----
> >From: "Rania Ismail" <raniaismail04 at gmail.com
> >To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> >Date sent: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:53:03 -0500
> >Subject: Re: [nabs-l] powerpoint slides
>
> >I used jaws 9 with power point slides and it red them just fine.
> >Rania,
>
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org
> [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
> >Of Ben Peters
> >Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 11:36 AM
> >To: nabs-l; NABS
> >Subject: [nabs-l] powerpoint slides
>
>
> >Hi, a quick question. Are powerpoint documents/slides readable by
> jaws
> >version 9 or 10? I'm taking statistics, and my prof has given the
> class his
> >slides in hard copy, but its a lot of text (mostly written words
> right now)
> >and some things like tables aren't scanning right. So I'm curious
> if jaws
> >would read an electronic version if I have him send it to me. If
> you wish
> >feel free to write me off list. Thanks and I hope everyone's new
> semester is
> >going good. Ben
>
> >myangelblessings at hotmail.com
>
>
>
>
>
>
> >_________________________________________________________________
> >Hotmail: Powerful Free email with security by Microsoft.
> >http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390710/direct/01/
> >_______________________________________________
> >nabs-l mailing list
> >nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> >http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> >To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
> for
> >nabs-l:
> >http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaisma
> il04%40gmai
> >l.com
> >No virus found in this incoming message.
> >Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
> >Version: 9.0.730 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/2636 - Release Date:
> 01/21/10
> >02:34:00
>
>
> >_______________________________________________
> >nabs-l mailing list
> >nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> >http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> >To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
> for nabs-l:
> >http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesi
> sloose%40gmail.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/strunkr%40tsbvi.edu
>


_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaismail04%40gmai
l.com
No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 9.0.730 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/2636 - Release Date: 01/21/10
02:34:00



From oceanrls at hotmail.com  Sat Jan 23 03:18:50 2010
From: oceanrls at hotmail.com (Rachel Jacobs)
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 22:18:50 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] power point and jaws 11
References: <3E351C33B9EA4BF7992419247AF2709C@RANIAPC>
Message-ID: <BLU0-SMTP922658ACE168256BCBA6DAC4620@phx.gbl>

Try hitting F5 first then spacebar.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rania Ismail" <raniaismail04 at gmail.com>
To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 5:30 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] power point and jaws 11


>I am using windows 7 and jaws 11.
> My question is on jaws 11 and power point.
> When trying to go threw the slides is it just me or does the spacebar not
> move you threw the slides?
> My other question is has anyone using jaws 11 experienced jaws repeating 
> it
> self after it reads a slide?
> Rania,
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/oceanrls%40hotmail.com
> 



From jim275_2 at yahoo.com  Fri Jan 22 04:17:08 2010
From: jim275_2 at yahoo.com (Jim Reed)
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:17:08 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Camp Eureka- a natural science camp for blind kids
Message-ID: <auto-000136081941@mailfront2.g2host.com>


The Montana Association for the Blind and NFB are sponsoring Camp 
Eureka, a natural science camp for blind kids (Please see the 
attachment for details). This year, the kids will be studying the 
migration of the Snow Goose as the birds take off and land by the 
tens of thousands at Freeze Out Lake, near Great Falls,Montana from 
March 19th-21st.

We have made some changes that are not reflected in the attached 
flier. We are allowing out-of-state kids to participate, we have 
expanded the age range to ages 8-16, and we have also set an 
application deadline of February 20th.

Transportation cost to and from Montana are the responsibility of the 
parent or the state affiliate. Arrival destinations in Montana will 
be arranged on a case-by-case basis. Once the kids are in Montana, we 
will cover all their cost (food, lodging, transportation).

Please write with any questions.

Thanks,

Jim Reed
President, Montana Association of Blind Students
406.371.5047



"The dictionary is the only place that success comes before work." 
-Vince Lombardi



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From dsmithnfb at gmail.com  Fri Jan 22 04:37:35 2010
From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith)
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:37:35 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Nabs Membership conference call series presents:
	Washington Seminar!
Message-ID: <409c235c1001212037x32346e96v1618bb737897c630@mail.gmail.com>

Hello all!  Here's hoping everybody is having a good semester  at the
very early point for most.
 It's time for the First conference call of 2010, and what topic could
be better than  that of Washington Seminar? - Nope, didn't think you'd
think of one :).
 Who?:  the   National Association of Blind students membership Committee.
What?: Washington Seminar 101
 Whuy?  Because you know you have questions about seminar. Yep, you know you do!
Where?: Conference call. Call-in information 712.775.7100 passcode: 257963
 When?:
This Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!  at 7 p.m.  eastern.
We look forward to  having you on the  call!
   Warm Regards
  Darian
-- 
Darian Smith- membership co-chair: National Association of Blind Students.
  www.nabslink.org
Skype: The_Blind_Truth
Windows Live: Lightningrod2010 at live.com
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


From iamantonio at cox.net  Fri Jan 22 04:56:49 2010
From: iamantonio at cox.net (Antonio M. Guimaraes)
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:56:49 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] University of Phoenix question
References: <FED903FB37EB466A9C505665EFF50F22@PAULLAPTOP>
Message-ID: <E411464A6D4C46CBB5056C026B0608EB@userf9b4fa60eb>

Maryann,

Since I see no reply as yet to your question of accessibility at U Phoenics, 
I would only say be cautious.

I never attended that school, but attend another online only university, 
Western Governors University. I am facing issues of accessibility posed by 
the technology used by the school, including Mathlab from pearson Education.

The school is very much willing to make necessary changes to make access a 
reality for me, and all that remains to be seen when I sign up for my math 
and science courses in 6 months.

I am a social studies teaching major, and don't have to contend with too 
much math and science. I also expect I will need heavy reader use for my 
Geography work, but I can not afford, not should I have to carry a reader in 
my pocket to get through my course work independently. That is what all 
other students are doing, and it is what I expect from a school that 
receives public funds like financial aid: accessibility, accessibility, 
accessibility.

So, dig deeper to find a student or two from phoenics, or write me privately 
for more private thoughts I can share regarding online school accessibility.

Antonio Guimaraes

If an infinite number of rednecks riding in an infinite number of pickup 
trucks fire an infinite number of shotgun rounds at an infinite number of 
highway signs, they will eventually produce all the world's great literary 
works in Braille.

Shop online and support the NFB of RI at no additional cost to you.
http://www.givebackamerica.com/charity.php?b=169
Givebackamerica.org, America's Online Charity Shopping Mall
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Maryann Migliorelli" <mrsmigs at migliorelli.org>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 05, 2010 12:34 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] University of Phoenix question


> Hi all,  Is anyone on the list attending University of Phoenix?  I'm 
> looking at it for some online classes and am wondering about 
> accessibility.
> Please share your thoughts and experiences either on or of list.
> Thanks.
> Maryann Migliorelli
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/iamantonio%40cox.net 


From madeleine_rothberg at wgbh.org  Fri Jan 22 19:01:42 2010
From: madeleine_rothberg at wgbh.org (Madeleine Rothberg)
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:01:42 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Free Training on Description of Science Images from WGBH
Message-ID: <auto-000136169365@mailfront2.g2host.com>

Apologies if you see this announcement more than once.

The WGBH National Center for Accessible Media is offering additional dates
for our web-based training on "Effective Practices for Description of
Science Content Within Digital Talking Books." We are offering free online
training on the dates listed below. In addition, we are pleased to announce
that we will be offering training in person at the CSUN Conference on March
26th for those attending the conference.

The guidelines cover description of a variety of information types,
including bar charts, line graphs, Venn diagrams, tables, pie charts, flow
charts and complex diagrams and illustrations. A resource section is also
included, providing links to many organizations, tools and standards which
all contribute to generating more accessible STEM materials. The guidelines
are available online at:

http://ncam.wgbh.org/experience_learn/educational_media/stemdx

Our CSUN presentation is session BLV-2015, Friday, March 26, 2010 - 9:20 -
10:20 AM PST in Room Emma AB. You can save a seat at the session once you
are registered for the conference.

The free webinars last an hour and a half, and offer the same training at
each session. (It is not a multi-part course.) You can register for the time
most convenient for you by sending an email to stemdescription at wgbh.org

Training times are:
* Wednesday, February 10th, 1 pm to 2:30 pm, US Eastern time
* Thursday, March 11th, 12 noon to 1:30 pm, US Eastern time
* Wednesday, April 7th, 2 pm to 3:30 pm, US Eastern time

Additional dates will be offered later in 2010. These sessions are available
at no cost thanks to funding from the National Science Foundation (grant
#0833608).


_______________________________________________
UACCESS-L mailing list
UACCESS-L at trace.wisc.edu
http://trace.wisc.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/uaccess-l



From sparklylicious at suddenlink.net  Sat Jan 23 01:18:56 2010
From: sparklylicious at suddenlink.net (hannah)
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:18:56 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Free Training on Description of Science Images from
	WGBH
Message-ID: <20100123011853.MSMZ5414.omta01.suddenlink.net@BrailleNote>



> ----- Original Message -----
>From: Madeleine Rothberg <madeleine_rothberg at wgbh.org> (by way of 
DavidAndrews <dandrews at visi.com>)
>To: david.andrews at nfbnet.org
>Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:01:42 -0600
>Subject: [nabs-l] Free Training on Description of Science Images 
from WGBH

>Apologies if you see this announcement more than once.

>The WGBH National Center for Accessible Media is offering 
additional dates
>for our web-based training on "Effective Practices for 
Description of
>Science Content Within Digital Talking Books." We are offering 
free online
>training on the dates listed below.  In addition, we are pleased 
to announce
>that we will be offering training in person at the CSUN 
Conference on March
>26th for those attending the conference.

>The guidelines cover description of a variety of information 
types,
>including bar charts, line graphs, Venn diagrams, tables, pie 
charts, flow
>charts and complex diagrams and illustrations.  A resource 
section is also
>included, providing links to many organizations, tools and 
standards which
>all contribute to generating more accessible STEM materials.  The 
guidelines
>are available online at:

>http://ncam.wgbh.org/experience_learn/educational_media/stemdx

>Our CSUN presentation is session BLV-2015, Friday, March 26, 2010 
- 9:20 -
>10:20 AM PST in Room Emma AB.  You can save a seat at the session 
once you
>are registered for the conference.

>The free webinars last an hour and a half, and offer the same 
training at
>each session.  (It is not a multi-part course.) You can register 
for the time
>most convenient for you by sending an email to 
stemdescription at wgbh.org

>Training times are:
>* Wednesday, February 10th, 1 pm to 2:30 pm, US Eastern time
>* Thursday, March 11th, 12 noon to 1:30 pm, US Eastern time
>* Wednesday, April 7th, 2 pm to 3:30 pm, US Eastern time

>Additional dates will be offered later in 2010.  These sessions 
are available
>at no cost thanks to funding from the National Science Foundation 
(grant
>#0833608).


>_______________________________________________
>UACCESS-L mailing list
>UACCESS-L at trace.wisc.edu
>http://trace.wisc.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/uaccess-l


>_______________________________________________
>nabs-l mailing list
>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info 
for nabs-l:
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/sparklyli
cious%40suddenlink.net
>


From brileyp at gmail.com  Sat Jan 23 02:10:23 2010
From: brileyp at gmail.com (Briley Pollard)
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 20:10:23 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Voice Sense and SyncBraille for sale!
Message-ID: <5887C139-5B9A-4587-992A-86B3AB9B7A1B@gmail.com>

Hello all,

I have a GWMicro Voice Sense and a SyncBraille 32 I am trying to get off my hands. They are in perfect as new condition, but I just don't use them. I'd rather someone get good use out of these than watching them sit collecting dust. Price is negotiable. For details please EMail me off list.
brileyp at gmail.com

Thanks,
Briley

From myangelblessings at hotmail.com  Sat Jan 23 02:58:53 2010
From: myangelblessings at hotmail.com (Ben Peters)
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 18:58:53 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] powerpoint slides
In-Reply-To: <1724073676.11611461264110098981.JavaMail.root@sz0144a.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net>
References: <BLU141-W3B38EE7DB1667B39F9A30C2630@phx.gbl>,
	<1724073676.11611461264110098981.JavaMail.root@sz0144a.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net>
Message-ID: <BLU141-W289ECF8A978213BF75D67CC2610@phx.gbl>


first thank you everyone who answered.

Second, Amy I did as you said, and as others have said, and a message pops up in powerpoint saying powerpoint was unable to write the file to ms word. And it just gives me a blank word document when I do an outline (nothing there for sighted ppl either). Any other suggestions please? Thanks, Ben 

 



 
> Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:41:38 +0000
> From: amylsabo at comcast.net
> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] powerpoint slides
> 
> 
> hello ben,
> 
> yes, there is a way to read powerpointt slides with using jfw. just convertt them into ms word by going to file in ppt and, then go to send to ms word and, then check the box for outline format and then your document will open up in a ms word document.
> 
> i hope this will help you out in this matter. take care and i will talk to you soon!
> 
> 
> hugs,
> from amyy
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Ben Peters 
> To: nabs-l , NABS 
> Sent: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:36:21 +0000 (UTC)
> Subject: [nabs-l] powerpoint slides
> 
> 
> Hi, a quick question. Are powerpoint documents/slides readable by jaws version 9 or 10? I'm taking statistics, and my prof has given the class his slides in hard copy, but its a lot of text (mostly written words right now) and some things like tables aren't scanning right. So I'm curious if jaws would read an electronic version if I have him send it to me. If you wish feel free to write me off list. Thanks and I hope everyone's new semester is going good. Ben
> 
> myangelblessings at hotmail.com 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _________________________________________________________________
> Hotmail: Powerful Free email with security by Microsoft.
> http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390710/direct/01/
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/amylsabo%40comcast.net
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/myangelblessings%40hotmail.com
 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail: Free, trusted and rich email service.
http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/196390708/direct/01/

From LRovig at nfb.org  Sat Jan 23 03:27:10 2010
From: LRovig at nfb.org (Rovig,
	Lorraine)
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 21:27:10 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Scholarships for blind college students in US and PR
Message-ID: <auto-000136495847@mailfront1.g2host.com>

Dear Students,

Are you researching scholarships for college in the fall of 2010? Our 
National Federation of the Blind 2010 Scholarship Program for the 
United States and Puerto Rico (wherever we have an affiliate) is up 
and running, with its deadline coming up March 31, 2010.  For the ins 
and outs of making an application, you can go to 
<http://www.nfb.org/scholarships>www.nfb.org/scholarships to read the 
SUBMISSION CHECKLIST and the FAQ; then fill out and submit the 
application form (online or in print).

Cordially,

Mr. Anil Lewis, Chairperson--NFB Scholarship Committee
NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND at Jernigan Place
200 East Wells Street, Baltimore, MD 21230
Office:  (410) 659-9314, x2415; Email:  scholarships at nfb.org;
Website:  <http://www.nfb.org/scholarships>www.nfb.org/scholarships; 
Discussion Groups: www.nfb.net.org
There is a Braille literacy crisis in America.  For the whole story, 
go to <http://www.braille.org/>www.braille.org.


From william.odonnell1 at yahoo.com  Sat Jan 23 04:07:25 2010
From: william.odonnell1 at yahoo.com (William ODonnell)
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 20:07:25 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [nabs-l] Statistics and Accounting:
Message-ID: <443538.63054.qm@web30905.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

I am planning to take online courses through Argosy University online.  I understand that for a MBA, one need to take some courses involving statistics and accounting.  I am looking for pointers to do this with jaws since I am totally blind.  I would appreciate any input from anyone who has taken these types of courses.  Please email me off list to william.odonnell1 at yahoo.com.  Please place "statistics/accounting” in the subject.  Thank you in advance,
William O'Donnell



      


From nabs.president at gmail.com  Sat Jan 23 21:14:17 2010
From: nabs.president at gmail.com (Arielle Silverman)
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 2010 15:14:17 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Room Wanted for Male Student
Message-ID: <85ff10071001231314w3050893au3d06ed067f744ad1@mail.gmail.com>

Men going to D.C. if your room isn't full yet, please consider the
below message. It'll save you money and will save Jim a bunch of money
too.

Arielle

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jim Reed <jim275_2 at yahoo.com>
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 2010 11:10:32 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Looking for a room at Washington Seminar
To: Arielle Silverman <nabs.president at gmail.com>, NABS presidents
<nabs-presidents at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Dan Burke <burke.dall at gmail.com>

Hey guys,

I am looking to join a room on Satuday and Sunday night, and, if you
have room for two people, I am also looking to join a room for Monday
night as well.

Please write if you are looking for a roommate.

Thanks,

Jim

"The dictionary is the only place that success comes before work."
-Vince Lombardi





-- 
Arielle Silverman
President, National Association of Blind Students
Phone:  602-502-2255
Email:
nabs.president at gmail.com
Website:
www.nabslink.org


From nabs.president at gmail.com  Sat Jan 23 22:03:30 2010
From: nabs.president at gmail.com (Arielle Silverman)
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 2010 16:03:30 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] NABS Special Announcement: Washington Seminar!
Message-ID: <85ff10071001231403v40208b24g580bd1689b78756@mail.gmail.com>

Dear NABS members:

We are but one week away from the National Federation of the Blind
Washington Seminar, our annual legislative conference in Washington,
D.C. This year, as usual, the National Association of Blind Students
will be holding our annual midwinter meeting all day on Sunday,
January 31.

Please note that we will be handling registration in a slightly
different manner than we have in the past. As always the seminar
registration fee will be $5. However, if you were at the NABS meeting
at last year's national convention, or if you have given us your
contact information online since the last convention, you won't need
to give us your contact information again during registration. Simply
come to the Columbia Ballroom and tell the marshal that you have
already given us your contact info, and
you will be directed to the front of the line to pay your $5 and go
in. We hope this new arrangement will cut down on registration chaos
and redundant recording of information. If you weren't at convention
in Detroit and haven't registered online yet, you can do so at
http://www.nabslink.org/members/membership_registration.shtml
I will send out the agenda for our seminar tomorrow morning.

We will also be holding our traditional luncheon for state student
division presidents. If you are a current president, please attend. If
your state's division president isn't attending Washington Seminar,
please send one delegate from your state to attend the lunch. Even if
you are from a state that has no division, consider coming to the
lunch to learn about starting a division and to network with other
state student leaders and members of the NABS board. Pizza will be
served.

Our seminar will adjourn at 5:00 p.m. and we will reconvene for our
NABS mixer from 8:00 p.m.-midnight. Mixer tickets are $10 if purchased
during registration or $12 if purchased at the door. We will be
serving roast turkey sandwiches, snacks, and will include a cash bar
and music. We will also be auctioning off a few items throughout the
night. Please come to hang out with other blind students!

Finally, we're starting something new on Monday morning. From 10:30
a.m.-noon there will be a student information fair. Representatives
from our three NFB training centers, RFB&D, BookShare, Educational
Testing Service, the Department of Education, and a few others will be
on hand to distribute literature, answer questions, and help students
sign up for their services. Whether you are having difficulties with
GRE accommodations, want to become an RFB or BookShare member, or want
to learn more about which training center will be best for you, you'll
find something of interest at the student information fair.

After the NABS events conclude, the NFB's annual Great Gathering-In
meeting will be held on Monday evening, and legislative appointments
will occur on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Talk to your state
president to determine when your appointments will be and to learn
about the legislative agenda.

I look forward to seeing everyone in Washington!

Cordially,
Arielle Silverman
President, National Association of Blind Students
Phone:  602-502-2255
Email:
nabs.president at gmail.com
Website:
www.nabslink.org


From oceanrls at hotmail.com  Mon Jan 25 03:12:27 2010
From: oceanrls at hotmail.com (Rachel Jacobs)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:12:27 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
Message-ID: <BLU0-SMTP8962BAD8479965C7B44D9EC4600@phx.gbl>

Hello. I am a jaws user and I can't seem to get PDF files to read using jaws. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks,
Rachel Jacobs

From serenacucco at verizon.net  Sun Jan 24 03:46:37 2010
From: serenacucco at verizon.net (Serena)
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 2010 22:46:37 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
References: <BLU0-SMTP8962BAD8479965C7B44D9EC4600@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <002901ca9ca7$d4b0d2b0$0201a8c0@Serene>

I assume you're using Adoby reader?  If not, you need to install that on 
your computer.  Some PDFs are made accessible to blind people ... some 
aren't.  I think it depends on if the person who created the files knows 
what he/she is doing about accessibility.  There is sometimes a menu option 
to convert the PDF file to text, but I don't remember where it is.

Serena


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rachel Jacobs" <oceanrls at hotmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 10:12 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs


> Hello. I am a jaws user and I can't seem to get PDF files to read using 
> jaws. Does anyone have any suggestions?
> Thanks,
> Rachel Jacobs
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net 



From slabarre at labarrelaw.com  Sun Jan 24 04:41:15 2010
From: slabarre at labarrelaw.com (Scott C. LaBarre)
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 2010 21:41:15 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] Chiropractic College
Message-ID: <B8A588F2EB014BC3B3682544092D91A2@labarre>

Greetings:

We are very interested in talking to any blind students either considering or applying to chiropractic college.  Please contact me off list if you are such a person or if you know of such a person.  Feel free to  forward this message as appropriate.  
Thanks,
Scott C. LaBarre, Esq.

LaBarre Law Offices P.C.
1660 South Albion Street, Ste. 918
Denver, Colorado 80222
303 504-5979 (voice)
303 757-3640 (fax)
slabarre at labarrelaw.com (e-mail)
www.labarrelaw.com (website)

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This message may contain confidential and privileged information. If you are not the designated recipient, you may not read, copy, distribute or retain this message. If you received this message in error, please notify the sender at 303) 504-5979 or slabarre at labarrelaw.com, and destroy and delete it from your system. This message and any attachments are covered by the Electronic
Communications Privacy Act, 18 U.S.C. §§ 2510-2521.

From flmom2006 at gmail.com  Sun Jan 24 05:21:14 2010
From: flmom2006 at gmail.com (Sherri)
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 2010 23:21:14 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] article from Debra Kendrick
Message-ID: <auto-000136567589@mailfront1.g2host.com>


Article from the INDEPENDENCE TODAY 
Newspaper<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = 
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

October 2009

N.Y. Governor Paterson
Blind to Tools of Success

By Deborah Kendrick

Several years ago, when I received some 
mystifyingly bad treatment at the hands of other 
people who shared my disability, a friend who was 
both black and blind comforted me with her 
insight. “Blind people can sometimes be like a 
basket of crabs,” she told me. “When one of them 
makes it to the top, the others scramble to pull 
him down.” Folks I thought to be my peers, in 
other words, were attacking me out of envy.

I vowed I would never do that. I would fervently 
support anyone with any disability who achieved 
success in any field. We should all be one happy family, right?

Then, following the 2006 elections, alarms went 
off that challenged that personal pledge. The 
good news was that New York state had elected a 
lieutenant governor who was both black and blind. 
The more troubling news was that David Paterson, 
that newly elected official, by declaring that he 
didn't use any of those blindness tools – 
Braille, assistive technology, a white cane – 
indicated to those who don't have disabilities 
that he was too cool for all that nonsense. Those 
of us who proudly use the tools of blindness, who 
depend on them to give us a competitive edge in a 
host of professional and educational 
environments, tried to be tolerant. I wanted to 
be first and foremost proud. A blind guy – a sort 
of brother to me in the disability family – was 
rising to the top, and it was cause for serious celebration.

Governor Paterson clean shaven. A new image
Of course, when Eliot Spitzer was caught with his 
pants down, so to speak, and Paterson rose to the 
very top of his state, sworn in as New York 
governor on March 17th, 2008, the media made even 
more noise about how this brilliant guy didn't 
need Braille or talking computers or any of that 
blind nonsense. He had a superhuman memory, we 
were told, and relied heavily on staff. His staff 
read important memos and documents into voicemail 
messages that he listened to at all hours.

Voicemail messages? What?

He’s governor of one of our most important 
states, and he doesn't use a computer? Still, I 
reminded myself to be tolerant. Each of us has 
different techniques, different ways to 
accomplish the same goal. One deaf person reads 
lips. Another uses American Sign Language. 
Another uses Signed English. And on it goes. The 
man was governor, after all. He didn't have to do 
things the way other blind people do them to earn 
our support. He was one of us, and we should stand behind him.

Then Paterson started doing really dumb things. 
He didn't always know the facts. He made 
decisions and then, under pressure of one kind or 
another, reversed them. He appointed a lieutenant 
governor when nobody was sure he was even allowed 
to do that and who, to add insult to injury, had 
trampled with dirty boots on transportation 
prospects for New Yorkers with disabilities.

He seemed to “get it” when he responded with 
disdain to the "Saturday Night Live" skit that 
ridiculed his blindness. And yet, he didn't 
hesitate to grab a few laughs himself at the 
possible expense of people with disabilities when 
he appeared in a wheelchair for a charity gig.

More recently, he has vetoed one bill that would 
prevent discrimination against people with 
disabilities in public facilities in his state 
and another that would require all polling places 
to be made physically accessible.

OK, we could argue, just because he has a 
disability doesn't mean he has to always agree 
with us, supporting every bill that comes down 
the political pike to improve the quality of life 
for New Yorkers with disabilities. Shouldn't we 
still support him? He’s both black and blind, after all.

The proverbial “last straw” in struggling to hang 
on as a cheerleader for this New York governor 
came when I started seeing references in the 
press linking his failures to his blindness. One 
New York state senator, Diane Savino, was widely 
quoted as saying, in effect, that hey, even 
though the guy is brilliant, he’s blind, after 
all, and being blind means he can't use the same 
digital tools -- such as e-mail or a Blackberry -- as his peers.

Wait a New York minute! And let me do some deep 
breathing so as not to do anything undignified 
like spew bad words in my own e-mail or Smartphone messages!

One headline read: “It’s not his race, it’s his 
blindness.” Let me set the record straight: “It” 
-- his failure to lead -- is not because of his 
race or his blindness. It’s the man himself. But 
blindness is something I know well and know more 
than a little bit about with regard to tools and 
techniques, so let me tell you now what I was suppressing all along.

His avoidance – since childhood – of tools 
related to blindness, don't make him superior to 
other blind people, but rather inferior. He can't 
read print but refused to learn Braille. That’s 
denial to the point of masochism. In other words, 
he’s illiterate by choice! Why, I wonder, if he’s 
so “brilliant” did it take him 12 years to get 
two advanced degrees, when lots of “ordinary” 
blind people have obtained those same two degrees 
in six? And even though the second of those two 
degrees is a law degree, he never went into 
practice as a lawyer because he couldn't pass the 
bar exam. Why was that? Was it because he 
couldn't read Braille or use a computer? Now, in 
all fairness, I don't know the answer to that 
question, but his explanation is that he didn't 
receive adequate accommodations. But what would 
those accommodations be, anyway, for a man who is 
blind but doesn't know how to use any of the 
tools that similarly educated blind people avail themselves of daily?

You could say it’s not his fault. When he was a 
child, New York City schools couldn't promise 
that he wouldn't receive any special education, 
and his parents moved to a suburb where he could 
go to public school “unhindered” by special ed. 
Now, maybe that was a good thing. I wasn't there. 
But it sounds to me like being perceived as 
sighted was more important to the family than 
getting the best education possible.

And so, here we have a 21st-century governor – 
the first legally blind governor to serve in any 
state longer than 11 days – and he’s using 1960s 
or '70s tools to do his job. Staffers read 
materials onto tapes and into voicemail for him. 
He has no means of prompting himself with notes, 
which would be effortless had he taken the time 
to learn to read and write Braille.

Had he been governor in 1975, the tools he now 
uses would have been adequate because sighted 
people at the time were using them at the same 
level of sophistication. But those tools now are inadequate.

Why doesn't Paterson use a computer with one of 
the popular screen-reading programs, such as JAWS 
or Window-Eyes or System Access? If he did, 99 
percent of all documents generated by other 
computers could then simply be e-mailed to him. 
If he wanted to travel light, he could carry a 
netbook (a small laptop computer) or a thumb 
drive, into which staffers could pop anything he 
needed to read. With practice, he could do what 
blind professionals all over the world do – crank 
their reading speed up to several hundred words a 
minute and get through material as quickly as any 
sighted politician. Add that to his amazing 
memory, and he could have been a governor to make us proud.

Why does he have staffers read newspapers to him? 
For free, he could sign up for the National 
Federation of the Blind's NEWSLINE, a telephone 
service that would enable him to read any of 220 
newspapers around the country, from any phone 
anywhere, at any speed he chose. He could zip 
through articles at his own speed as quickly or 
even quicker than his sighted peers.

Now, this “brilliant” guy is using tools that 
were state of the art when Jimmy Carter was 
president, has an approval rating that has 
dropped at a staggering rate, and against even 
the advice of President Obama, said he’ll run 
again in 2010. It’s pitiable, really, but I’m not 
feeling sorry for him. How can I when, along with 
his own failure, he’s pulling the overall 
acceptance of and employment opportunities for 
other blind people down with him?

I’m not saying I could do his job. I don't think 
I could. But I am saying that lots of people who 
are blind could and do it brilliantly. He wanted 
so much to hide his blindness that now, in his 
appalling unpopularity, it’s the one thing that 
outsiders are interpreting as his weakness. It 
hasn't been. His weakness has been his own 
arrogance and denial of reality. It’s a shame. 
With proper training, he might have done a good job.

But he isn't doing one, and I’m OK with having 
broken my promise to myself. I know now that just 
because he has a disability doesn't mean I have 
to like him. And if he’s going to fall headlong 
into the basket, I don't want him to kick the 
rest of us down to the bottom as well.

Deborah Kendrick is a newspaper columnist, editor 
and poet. She is currently working on a biography of Dr. Abraham Nemeth.



----------



From nabs.president at gmail.com  Sun Jan 24 05:49:29 2010
From: nabs.president at gmail.com (Arielle Silverman)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 16:49:29 +1100
Subject: [nabs-l] NABS Washington Seminar Agenda!
Message-ID: <85ff10071001232149l3efc2d88s22123dd59072aefc@mail.gmail.com>

Sunday January 31, 2010
National Association of Blind Students
Midwinter Gathering
Holiday Inn Capitol Hotel
Washington, D.C.
Columbia Ballroom
“Working For a Brighter Future”
9:00-10:00 Registration ($5.00)
10:00 Call to Order and Welcome
Arielle Silverman, President, National Association of Blind Students
10:10 The Big Payoff: What You Should Know about the NFB Scholarship Program
Anil Lewis, Chairman, National Federation of the Blind Scholarship Committee
10:30 Working to Get Where We Are Today: A Word from our National NFB President
Marc Maurer, President, National Federation of the Blind
10:50 Working on the Hill: Legislative Update
Jesse Hartle, Governmental Affairs Specialist, National Federation of the Blind
11:00 Recruit, Recruit, Recruit!
Rosy Carranza, Department of Affiliate Action, National Federation of the Blind
11:10 Learning through Listening: What's New at RFB&D
Annemarie Cooke, Consultant, Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic, Princeton, NJ
11:20 Reading Made Easy: What's New at BookShare
Allison Hilliker, Collection Development Associate, BookShare, Palo Alto, CA
11:30 Update from Newsline
Renee West, Manager of Marketing and Outreach for Sponsored Technology
Programs, National Federation of the Blind
11:40 Roll Call of States

12:15-1:30 NABS Presidents' Luncheon.  Each state please send one
delegate to this luncheon.

2:00-2:40 Breakout Session I
1. Calling all high schoolers!
2. NFB 101: What you’ve always wanted to know about the NFB (but were
afraid to ask)?
3. Technology Q&A
4. Tips and tricks for academics, internships, and beyond!
5. Secrets for getting involved on campus!

2:40-3:20 Breakout Session II
1. BookShare: New members and users forum
2. NFB 101: What you’ve always wanted to know about the NFB (but were
afraid to ask)?
3. Technology Q&A
4. Tips and tricks for academics, internships, and beyond!
5. Secrets for getting involved on campus!

3:20 Introducing the College Preparation Checklist
Dave Rives, U.S. Department of Education
3:30 Working Toward Skills and Confidence: The Inside Track on NFB
Training Centers
Kayleigh Joiner, Graduate, Colorado Center for the Blind Summer Program
Kayla Stase, Student, BLIND, Inc.  Adult Program
Joshua Boudreaux, Technology Instructor, Louisiana Center for the Blind
3:50 Working in the Trenches: Summer Program Announcements
Julie Deden, Director, Colorado Center for the Blind
Pam Allen, Director, Louisiana Center for the Blind
Shawn Mayo, Director, BLIND, Inc.
4:00 Why Don't You Get a Job?
Corbb O'Connor, President, Virginia Association of Blind Students
Jennifer Kennedy, Cane Travel Instructor, Virginia Rehabilitation
Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired, Richmond, VA
Joe Orozco, Director of Development, Consumer Action, Washington, D.C.
4:30 Update from ETS
Ruth C.  Loew, Assistant Director, Office of Disability Policy,
Educational Testing Service, Princeton, NJ
4:40 What’s Up with the Kindle?
Mehgan Sidhu, Brown, Goldstein, and Levy, LLC
4:50 Going Totally Globally Mobile!
J.J.  Meddaugh, atguys.com
5:00 Adjourn

8:00-Midnight NABS Reception

Come mix and mingle with other blind students! Turkey sandwiches,
snacks, music, and a cash bar will be available for all to enjoy.  We
will also be auctioning off several items throughout the evening. All
proceeds support the National Association of Blind Students.
$10 if purchased in advance; $12 if purchased at the door.

Monday February 1, 2010

10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. NABS Information Fair, Discovery I Ballroom
Want to sign up for RFB, NewsLine, or Bookshare? Have questions about
taking  the GRE? Want to learn more about our NFB training centers?
Come to pick up information from our presenters and take the
opportunity to talk to them individually about questions, issues, or
suggestions you may have.


-- 
Arielle Silverman
President, National Association of Blind Students
Phone:  602-502-2255
Email:
nabs.president at gmail.com
Website:
www.nabslink.org


From darrell.shandrow at gmail.com  Sun Jan 24 11:31:58 2010
From: darrell.shandrow at gmail.com (Darrell Shandrow)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 04:31:58 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
In-Reply-To: <BLU0-SMTP8962BAD8479965C7B44D9EC4600@phx.gbl>
References: <BLU0-SMTP8962BAD8479965C7B44D9EC4600@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <6CD7B1E8BCAE4D708377F1A5CEDF42FD@DarrellPC>

Hello Rachel,

In order to help you in the most effective way possible, let me start by
asking you some questions. Don't worry if you can't answer them all. Just do
your best and I'll guide you to the rest of the needed answers.

What version of JAWS are you running? Do you have Adobe Reader on your
computer? If so, which version? Do you have any scanning and reading
products like Kurzweil K1000 or OpenBook installed on your computer? If so,
what versions?

There are a number of ways to read PDF documents. Some PDFs are fully
accessible, many can be read with some difficulty and far too many remain
completely out of our reach without a significant amount of expensive
assistive technology.

There is one free solution that can read many PDF documents. It is called
PDF2TXT, and it has been developed by a blind computer programmer. Visit
http://www.empowermentzone.com/p2tsetup.exe to install the program.

Regards,

Darrell




From raniaismail04 at gmail.com  Sun Jan 24 14:20:56 2010
From: raniaismail04 at gmail.com (Rania)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 09:20:56 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
References: <BLU0-SMTP8962BAD8479965C7B44D9EC4600@phx.gbl>
	<6CD7B1E8BCAE4D708377F1A5CEDF42FD@DarrellPC>
Message-ID: <002701ca9d00$72974ec0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>

I have never herd about this!
Can you give me more information?
Rania,
"For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
See you at the finish line."
~Christopher Reeve

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Darrell Shandrow" <darrell.shandrow at gmail.com>
To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 6:31 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs


> Hello Rachel,
>
> In order to help you in the most effective way possible, let me start by
> asking you some questions. Don't worry if you can't answer them all. Just 
> do
> your best and I'll guide you to the rest of the needed answers.
>
> What version of JAWS are you running? Do you have Adobe Reader on your
> computer? If so, which version? Do you have any scanning and reading
> products like Kurzweil K1000 or OpenBook installed on your computer? If 
> so,
> what versions?
>
> There are a number of ways to read PDF documents. Some PDFs are fully
> accessible, many can be read with some difficulty and far too many remain
> completely out of our reach without a significant amount of expensive
> assistive technology.
>
> There is one free solution that can read many PDF documents. It is called
> PDF2TXT, and it has been developed by a blind computer programmer. Visit
> http://www.empowermentzone.com/p2tsetup.exe to install the program.
>
> Regards,
>
> Darrell
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaismail04%40gmail.com 



From darrell.shandrow at gmail.com  Sun Jan 24 14:50:54 2010
From: darrell.shandrow at gmail.com (Darrell Shandrow)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 07:50:54 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
In-Reply-To: <002701ca9d00$72974ec0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>
References: <BLU0-SMTP8962BAD8479965C7B44D9EC4600@phx.gbl><6CD7B1E8BCAE4D708377F1A5CEDF42FD@DarrellPC>
	<002701ca9d00$72974ec0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>
Message-ID: <3B107AD464F649EE8472E9507311F91E@DarrellPC>

Hello Rania,

I assume you're asking about PDF2TXT? The documentation is below:

Version 3.3
April 6, 2009
Copyright 2005 - 2009 by Jamal Mazrui
LGPL license 
Contents
Description 
Installation 
Choosing PDF Source and TXT Target 
Text Extraction Settings 
Viewing Area 
Toggling between a File and Folder List 
Configuration Check Boxes 
Action Buttons 
URL Source, 
Hot Keys 
The Log File 
Command Line Operation 
File Association 
Development Notes 
Description

PDF to TXT (also written PDF2TXT) is a free program for converting files in
Portable Document Format (.pdf extension) to plain text(.txt extension). The
program lets you convert multiple files in a single, batch operation, either
from a GUI dialog or a console-mode command line. The resulting text files
can be read in almost any editing or viewing program. PDF2TXT, itself, also
includes a plain text view for reading PDF files. The program should work on
any version of Windows. 

Installation

The installation program for PDF2TXT is called p2tsetup.exe. When executed,
it prompts for an installation folder for the program. The default folder is
c:\pdf2txt. Although this is not a standard location for programs on a
Windows computer, a benefit is fewer keystrokes to type whenever you
manually enter the path to a PDF file or folder. If you want a standard
installation folder, however, respond to the prompt by entering
C:\Program Files\PDF to Text 
The installation process creates a program group for PDF2TXT on the Windows
start menu, containing choices to launch PDF2TXT, read Documentation for
PDF2TXT, and uninstall PDF2TXT. Also created is a desktop shortcut with an
associated hot key, enabling PDF2TXT to be conveniently launched by pressing
Control+Alt+Shift+P. Another shortcut is placed in the Send To folder so
that a PDF may be viewed in PDF2TXT via the context menu in Windows
Explorer. 


Choosing PDF Source and TXT Target

After PDF2TXT is installed, launching it activates a main dialog with
several capabilities and settings. First, it prompts you to select a PDF
source. This can be either a single PDF file or a folder containing multiple
PDF files (another section explains how it can also be an Internet URL). In
the initial edit box, you can type the full path to the file or folder
desired. Alternatively, you can tab to buttons that invoke different sub
dialogs depending on whether you want to choose a file or folder as the PDF
source. (Yet another option, described later, is to pass the path to the PDF
source as a parameter on the command line when pdf2txt.exe is launched.) 
By default, the PDF source is the folder c:\pdf2TXT\pdf. Any source may be
chosen, however, and the program remembers the last one used. 

Similarly, an edit box and associated button let you specify the target
folder for converted files. These will have the same base name, but an
extension of .txt instead of .pdf. The default target folder is
c:\pdf2TXT\txt. Note that the PDF source may be either a file or folder, but
the TXT target is always a folder. 


Text Extraction Settings

Two settings fundamentally affect how text is extracted from a PDF. If the
PDF requires a password to unlock its content, type it in the edit box
provided. If the PDF is an image format without textual characters -- e.g.,
the result of a scan -- mark the checkbox so that optical character
recognition (OCR) is performed instead of the usual techniques of extracting
text. This OCR technique was originally posted at
http://EmpowermentZone.com/pdf2ocr.zip 
OCR is a much slower and more error-prone process, but it may be the best
option when the usual methods do not work. This technique uses Google
Tesseract, the best open source OCR available, which is not as good as
commercial OCR packages. Due to technical issues, there is not a simple way
of aborting an OCR process that has already started. It is possible,
however, by launching another copy of PDF2TXT, which clears the deck during
its startup phase. 

Another checkbox lets you additionally produce a .htm target file -- in HTML
format. This uses a different conversion technique, originally posted at
http://EmpowermentZone.com/pdf2htm.zip 

This may be worth trying if the .txt result is unsatisfactory. It may also
be useful for webmasters who want to post AN HTML alternative to a PDF. The
conversion translates visual aspects of the PDF such as fonts, but not
structural elements such as headings, unfortunately. To further increase
conversion options, a different technique is also used for producing the
.txt file with this checkbox, using the PDFToText.exe utility that is also
seperately available at
http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/home.html 


Viewing Area

Within the main dialog, a read-only, multi-line edit control serves as a
viewing area between the source and target controls just discussed. This
scrollable view can show one of three kinds of information: (1) the text of
a PDF, 2) a list of PDF files, or (3) the results of a batch conversion. The
label for the viewing area changes to indicate the kind of information being
shown: "View file," "View folder," or "View results." 
You can navigate the viewing area with standard windows keystrokes, e.g.,
Control+Home or Control+End to go to the top or bottom of text. Control+F
lets you search forward for a string of characters, and Control+Shift+F lets
you search backward. F3 searches for the same string again in the forward
direction, and Shift+F3 searches again backward. Control+G lets you go to a
percent completion point through the file being viewed. Control+K sets a
bookmark for the file, Control+Shift+K clears it, and Alt+K goes to it. 

You can press Shift with arrow keys to select text or Control+A to select
all. Alternatively, you can press F8 to set the starting point of a
selection, navigate to the ending point desired, and then press Shift+F8 to
select the text between these points. 

Press Control+C to copy selected text to the clipboard. Alternatively, press
Control+Shift+C, or Alt+F8, to copy and append to the clipboard, adding to
rather than replacing its existing text. A form feed or page break character
(ANSI code 12) will separate each clip copied there. Control+F8 is a
shortcut that copies all text in the viewing area without having to select
it first, equivalent to Control+A followd by Control+C. 

If you invoke the Open button and choose a PDF from its sub dialog, the text
of the PDF will be placed in the viewing area, and keyboard focus will go
there. If you invoke the Select button to choose a PDF folder instead of a
file, its list of PDFs will be shown. A status bar at the bottom of the
dialog indicates the current position in the viewing area. 


Toggling between a File and Folder List

The Look button behaves in a special way when the viewing area has focus. If
you press Alt+L when in the viewing area, PDF2TXT will toggle between a
folder and file view. If viewing a folder, PDF2TXT will switch to a view of
the file that was on the line containing the caret. If viewing a file,
PDF2TXT will switch to a view of the folder that contained the file. In
addition, PDF2TXT will automatically search for the name of the file last
viewed and place the caret just after it if found. 
This feature lets you easily explore the PDFs in a folder, one after
another. Initially, You might display a list of files by pressing Alt+L when
the PDF source is a folder. You can then arrow down through the list until
you find a PDF you want to view. At that point, press Alt+L to view the
file. When you want to continue exploring the folder list again, press Alt+L
to return to it at the position of the file you last viewed. 


Configuration Check Boxes

Four check boxes let you configure PDF2TXT. The one labeled "Include
subfolders," will look for PDF files not only in the specified folder, but
in subfolders under it. For example, you could probably convert many PDF
files on your computer by checking this setting and specifying the c:\ root
folder as the PDF source! This setting is unchecked by default. 
The check box labeled "Move PDF when done" will transfer a PDF to a
subfolder called "Done" after a successful conversion. This is a subfolder
of the PDF2TXT program folder, with a default location of c:\pdf2TXT\done.
The benefit of this check box is that PDF files are stored away for backup
after they have been converted to text. This setting is unchecked by
default. 

The checkbox labeled "Replace TXT if found" determines whether to skip a
conversion if a corresponding target file already exists. If you do not
check the setting to move source files when done, you may want to check this
setting so that unnecessary time is not spent on repeatedly converting PDF
files left in the source folder, since they then will be skipped if
corresponding target files already exist. This setting is checked by
default. 

The Append check box determines whether a detailed conversion log file is
newly created each time a conversion is run. This setting is checked by
default so that previous information is not lost. A section below further
describes the log file. 


Action Buttons

The remaining controls of the main dialog are buttons that perform various
actions. The Convert button is the default: the one that will be activated
by pressing Enter on any control except another button. The viewing area
will show the results of a batch conversion. This information includes the
number of pages in each PDF converted. It also indicates when a conversion
was either not possible or was skipped because the target file already
existed and you chose not to replace files. 
Press Escape if you need to abort a batch conversion of many files that is
taking too long! Note that this program is relatively quick, however,
compared to other available methods of converting PDF files to text.
Moreover, its batch mode feature lets you run conversions unattended. 

The source for a conversion is treated differently if the viewing area has
focus. If viewing a list of PDFs in a folder or on a web page, then PDF2TXT
regards the source as the file name on the current line (the one containing
the caret). Thus, you can cursor to a PDF of interest and press Enter to
convert it to text. If successfully converted, PDF2TXT assumes you may also
want to examine its content in the viewing area, so a Look command is
automatically performed as well (see below). If there is a conversion error,
however, PDF2TXT leaves the error message in the viewing area. If you have
been examining a list of PDFs and decide you want to convert them all rather
than a single file, navigate to the top line of the viewing area that lists
the number of PDFs in the list, and then press Enter. 

If the source edit box already specifies what you want to view, or a path is
easy to type into it, then the Look button is quicker to use than the Open
or Select sub dialog. Activating the Look button takes the current source
specification and goes to a view of either the text of a source file or the
list of a source folder, putting focus in the view area so you can read the
information. 

The Defaults button restores the default configuration settings of PDF2TXT.
You can use it to return to the initial folders and checkbox settings. 

The Explorer button lets you browse the source, target, or done folder with
Windows Explorer. It allows you to examine files that either have been
converted or would not convert--thus needing other approaches to access
their content. 

The Quit button closes PDF2TXT. Alt+F4 does the same thing. 

The Help button displays this complete documentation in the default web
browser. For context-sensitive help on a particular control, press F1 when
it has focus. Hence, you can tab through the dialog and press F1 on each
control to learn how to use it. 


URL Source,

If you are connected to the Internet, you can specify a URL as a PDF source
instead of a file or folder on your local computer. The URL can be the
complete download path to a PDF on the Internet. Alternatively, the URL can
be the path to a web page containing one or more links to PDF files. You can
use Internet Explorer to navigate to such a web page and then invoke the
"Grab URL" button to put its URL into the source edit box of PDF2TXT. 
The Look button works with a URL source similarly to a local file or folder.
For example, you can press Alt+L to view a list of PDFs on a web page. The
toggling feature, described above, is also supported, allowing you to
consecutively examine the PDFs linked to a web page. If you view a PDF on
the Internet, PDF2TXT will automatically download a copy to the PDF
subfolder of the program folder, e.g., to
c:\pdf2txt\pdf 

The Convert button also works with a URL source. Thus, you can easily
convert all PDFs on a web page with a single batch operation! 


Hot Keys

Almost all controls of PDF2TXT are directly usable with unique, mnemonic Alt
key combinations based on the initial letter of the control's label. Thus,
as you become familiar with the controls, you can operate them more quickly
with hot keys rather than navigating to them with the tab key or mouse. For
example, press Alt+P to go to the edit box for typing a PDF source, or Alt+S
to select a source folder from a tree view of your computer. Press Alt+L to
look at a file or folder, or Alt+V to red what is already in the viewing
area. Press Alt+I to toggle the "Include subfolders" setting, or Alt+D to
restore all defaults. The text extraction settings in the second row of
controls use a letter corresponding to the second syllable or word, i.e.,
Alt+W for the Password edit box and Alt+F for the Image Format checkbox. 

The Log File

The conversion log file is named log.txt and located in the Done subfolder
of the PDF2TXT program folder. It records information about each attempt to
convert a PDF to TXT file. It indicates whether the conversion succeeded
(meaning any resulting text), and then lists many attributes of the PDF,
including security settings that could explain a failed conversion. 
There is a choice to view the log file in the PDF2TXT program group off the
Start Menu. You can also get to the file via the Explore button of the
PDF2TXT program, choosing the Done folder to navigate with Windows Explorer.
Additionally, you can open the file in another application through its
direct path (default settings):
c:\pdf2txt\done\log.txt 

If the log file grows larger than you want, simply delete it or uncheck the
setting that configures PDF2TXT to append to an existing log file. Each use
of the Convert button would then generate a new log file. This information
is more detailed than the results placed in the viewing area. 


Command Line Operation

The pdf2txt.exe executable may be run with various command line parameters.
The parameters can set values for controls in the main dialog. Parameters
can also cause PDF2TXT to run in an automatic, console mode--without a
dialog box or further user intervention involved. 
When the .pdf extension is associated with the PDF2TXT program (explained in
another section), Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer will open a PDF file
by launching PDF2TXT with the name of the PDF passed as a parameter on the
command line. If PDF2TXT is launched with more than one command line
parameter, however, the program will assume you want to run it in console
rather than GUI mode. The syntax for parameters is described as follows. If
a PDF source file, folder, or URL is specified, it must be the first
parameter. If a TXT target folder is specified, it must be the second
parameter. The source or target must be enclosed in quotes if its name
contains spaces. 

All parameters besides source and target names begin with a space and
forward slash (/), followed by the hot key letter in the dialog
corresponding to the setting affected. A trailing plus (+) sign in the
parameter indicates a status of On, and a minus (-) sign indicates Off. The
plus sign can also be omitted to indicate On. Capitalization does not
matter. Here is a list of parameters: 

a = Automatic, console mode (use /a- to force GUI mode with multiple
parameters)
i = Include subfolders
m = Move PDF when done
r = Replace TXT if found
d = Default settings (no /d- is defined)
g = Grab URL as source from Internet Explorer (no /g- is defined) 

For example, to convert all files using default settings except for the Move
setting, you could enter:
pdf2txt /d /m 

To use current settings except grab a URL as source, enter:
pdf2txt /a /g 

To convert files from a temporary folder to the current folder, enter:
pdf2txt "c:\temp files" . 

To do the same, but in GUI rather than console mode, enter:
pdf2txt "c:\temp files" . /a- 

For greater console mode convenience, another version of PDF2TXT, having the
abbreviated name p2t.exe, is also available in the program folder. This
version only runs in console mode, whether zero, one, or more parameters are
specified. It uses "standard output" to display conversion results. The
shorter executable name means less characters to type on the command line.
For example, to run a batch conversion in console mode using the current
settings of PDF2TXT, you could simply enter
p2t 

Like DOS commands generally, the above assumes that you have either made
c:\pdf2txt the current directory or included it in a PATH statement. 


File Association

The PDF2TXT group on the Start Menu contains shortcuts for changing what
program automatically opens a file with a .pdf extension in Windows
Explorer. If you decide that you like the interface of PDF2TXT enough to
make it the default program for PDF files, you can set the file association
accordingly. Later, if you decide you want to return to the conventional
association, you can do that, too. 
When the .pdf extension is associated with PDF2TXT, an application such as
Windows Explorer when opening a file, or Internet Explorer after downloading
a file, will pass the name of the PDF as a command-line parameter to
pdf2txt.exe. When the program is launched in this way, it automatically
invokes the Look button, placing text of the PDF in the viewing area and
putting keyboard focus there. 


Development Notes

I welcome comments and suggestions on PDF to TXT. For the technically
curious, I developed it with the PowerBASIC programming language from
http://PowerBASIC.com
and a couple of third party libraries: EZGUI from
http://EZGUI.com
and QuickPDF from
http://QuickPDF.com 
An alternate text extraction technique is tried if the first one fails,
using the GetText.exe utility that is also available seperately at
http://www.kryltech.com
The file GetText.txt in the PDF2TXT program folder contains the license for
this utility. 

The OCR is done by incorporating the open source PDF2OCR package, available
at
http://EmpowermentZone.com/pdf2ocr.zip 

Some status messages are spoken with the JAWS, System Access, or Window-Eyes
screen reader if currently active. These direct speech messages are produced
with APIs via a component of the SayTools library, which is also available
seperately at
http://EmpowermentZone.com/saysetup.exe 

The PowerBASIC code to PDF2TXT, itself (but not commercial libraries used),
is open source under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL), documented at
http://gnu.org 

This Windows program is the successor to my first version of PDF2TXT,
developed several years ago as a DOS-based, command-line only utility. Ideas
and feedbak from the discussion list
ProgrammingBlind at FreeLists.org
have aided the design and testing of PDF2TXT. The latest version is
available at the same address,
http://EmpowermentZone.com/p2tsetup.exe 

You can download it with the Elevate Version hotkey, F11. This checks
whether a newer version is available, and offers to install it. 

Jamal Mazrui
jamal at EmpowermentZone.com  

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Rania
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 7:21 AM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs

I have never herd about this!
Can you give me more information?
Rania,
"For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
See you at the finish line."
~Christopher Reeve

----- Original Message -----
From: "Darrell Shandrow" <darrell.shandrow at gmail.com>
To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 6:31 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs


> Hello Rachel,
>
> In order to help you in the most effective way possible, let me start by
> asking you some questions. Don't worry if you can't answer them all. Just 
> do
> your best and I'll guide you to the rest of the needed answers.
>
> What version of JAWS are you running? Do you have Adobe Reader on your
> computer? If so, which version? Do you have any scanning and reading
> products like Kurzweil K1000 or OpenBook installed on your computer? If 
> so,
> what versions?
>
> There are a number of ways to read PDF documents. Some PDFs are fully
> accessible, many can be read with some difficulty and far too many remain
> completely out of our reach without a significant amount of expensive
> assistive technology.
>
> There is one free solution that can read many PDF documents. It is called
> PDF2TXT, and it has been developed by a blind computer programmer. Visit
> http://www.empowermentzone.com/p2tsetup.exe to install the program.
>
> Regards,
>
> Darrell
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaismail04%40gmai
l.com 


_______________________________________________
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To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
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mail.com



From raniaismail04 at gmail.com  Sun Jan 24 16:14:29 2010
From: raniaismail04 at gmail.com (Rania)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 11:14:29 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
References: <BLU0-SMTP8962BAD8479965C7B44D9EC4600@phx.gbl><6CD7B1E8BCAE4D708377F1A5CEDF42FD@DarrellPC><002701ca9d00$72974ec0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>
	<3B107AD464F649EE8472E9507311F91E@DarrellPC>
Message-ID: <002301ca9d10$4f9f7bd0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>

Is it easier to use then Adoby? just asking because I don't like Adoby all 
that much.
Rania,
"For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
See you at the finish line."
~Christopher Reeve

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Darrell Shandrow" <darrell.shandrow at gmail.com>
To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 9:50 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs


> Hello Rania,
>
> I assume you're asking about PDF2TXT? The documentation is below:
>
> Version 3.3
> April 6, 2009
> Copyright 2005 - 2009 by Jamal Mazrui
> LGPL license
> Contents
> Description
> Installation
> Choosing PDF Source and TXT Target
> Text Extraction Settings
> Viewing Area
> Toggling between a File and Folder List
> Configuration Check Boxes
> Action Buttons
> URL Source,
> Hot Keys
> The Log File
> Command Line Operation
> File Association
> Development Notes
> Description
>
> PDF to TXT (also written PDF2TXT) is a free program for converting files 
> in
> Portable Document Format (.pdf extension) to plain text(.txt extension). 
> The
> program lets you convert multiple files in a single, batch operation, 
> either
> from a GUI dialog or a console-mode command line. The resulting text files
> can be read in almost any editing or viewing program. PDF2TXT, itself, 
> also
> includes a plain text view for reading PDF files. The program should work 
> on
> any version of Windows.
>
> Installation
>
> The installation program for PDF2TXT is called p2tsetup.exe. When 
> executed,
> it prompts for an installation folder for the program. The default folder 
> is
> c:\pdf2txt. Although this is not a standard location for programs on a
> Windows computer, a benefit is fewer keystrokes to type whenever you
> manually enter the path to a PDF file or folder. If you want a standard
> installation folder, however, respond to the prompt by entering
> C:\Program Files\PDF to Text
> The installation process creates a program group for PDF2TXT on the 
> Windows
> start menu, containing choices to launch PDF2TXT, read Documentation for
> PDF2TXT, and uninstall PDF2TXT. Also created is a desktop shortcut with an
> associated hot key, enabling PDF2TXT to be conveniently launched by 
> pressing
> Control+Alt+Shift+P. Another shortcut is placed in the Send To folder so
> that a PDF may be viewed in PDF2TXT via the context menu in Windows
> Explorer.
>
>
> Choosing PDF Source and TXT Target
>
> After PDF2TXT is installed, launching it activates a main dialog with
> several capabilities and settings. First, it prompts you to select a PDF
> source. This can be either a single PDF file or a folder containing 
> multiple
> PDF files (another section explains how it can also be an Internet URL). 
> In
> the initial edit box, you can type the full path to the file or folder
> desired. Alternatively, you can tab to buttons that invoke different sub
> dialogs depending on whether you want to choose a file or folder as the 
> PDF
> source. (Yet another option, described later, is to pass the path to the 
> PDF
> source as a parameter on the command line when pdf2txt.exe is launched.)
> By default, the PDF source is the folder c:\pdf2TXT\pdf. Any source may be
> chosen, however, and the program remembers the last one used.
>
> Similarly, an edit box and associated button let you specify the target
> folder for converted files. These will have the same base name, but an
> extension of .txt instead of .pdf. The default target folder is
> c:\pdf2TXT\txt. Note that the PDF source may be either a file or folder, 
> but
> the TXT target is always a folder.
>
>
> Text Extraction Settings
>
> Two settings fundamentally affect how text is extracted from a PDF. If the
> PDF requires a password to unlock its content, type it in the edit box
> provided. If the PDF is an image format without textual characters --  
> e.g.,
> the result of a scan -- mark the checkbox so that optical character
> recognition (OCR) is performed instead of the usual techniques of 
> extracting
> text. This OCR technique was originally posted at
> http://EmpowermentZone.com/pdf2ocr.zip
> OCR is a much slower and more error-prone process, but it may be the best
> option when the usual methods do not work. This technique uses Google
> Tesseract, the best open source OCR available, which is not as good as
> commercial OCR packages. Due to technical issues, there is not a simple 
> way
> of aborting an OCR process that has already started. It is possible,
> however, by launching another copy of PDF2TXT, which clears the deck 
> during
> its startup phase.
>
> Another checkbox lets you additionally produce a .htm target file -- in 
> HTML
> format. This uses a different conversion technique, originally posted at
> http://EmpowermentZone.com/pdf2htm.zip
>
> This may be worth trying if the .txt result is unsatisfactory. It may also
> be useful for webmasters who want to post AN HTML alternative to a PDF. 
> The
> conversion translates visual aspects of the PDF such as fonts, but not
> structural elements such as headings, unfortunately. To further increase
> conversion options, a different technique is also used for producing the
> .txt file with this checkbox, using the PDFToText.exe utility that is also
> seperately available at
> http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/home.html
>
>
> Viewing Area
>
> Within the main dialog, a read-only, multi-line edit control serves as a
> viewing area between the source and target controls just discussed. This
> scrollable view can show one of three kinds of information: (1) the text 
> of
> a PDF, 2) a list of PDF files, or (3) the results of a batch conversion. 
> The
> label for the viewing area changes to indicate the kind of information 
> being
> shown: "View file," "View folder," or "View results."
> You can navigate the viewing area with standard windows keystrokes, e.g.,
> Control+Home or Control+End to go to the top or bottom of text. Control+F
> lets you search forward for a string of characters, and Control+Shift+F 
> lets
> you search backward. F3 searches for the same string again in the forward
> direction, and Shift+F3 searches again backward. Control+G lets you go to 
> a
> percent completion point through the file being viewed. Control+K sets a
> bookmark for the file, Control+Shift+K clears it, and Alt+K goes to it.
>
> You can press Shift with arrow keys to select text or Control+A to select
> all. Alternatively, you can press F8 to set the starting point of a
> selection, navigate to the ending point desired, and then press Shift+F8 
> to
> select the text between these points.
>
> Press Control+C to copy selected text to the clipboard. Alternatively, 
> press
> Control+Shift+C, or Alt+F8, to copy and append to the clipboard, adding to
> rather than replacing its existing text. A form feed or page break 
> character
> (ANSI code 12) will separate each clip copied there. Control+F8 is a
> shortcut that copies all text in the viewing area without having to select
> it first, equivalent to Control+A followd by Control+C.
>
> If you invoke the Open button and choose a PDF from its sub dialog, the 
> text
> of the PDF will be placed in the viewing area, and keyboard focus will go
> there. If you invoke the Select button to choose a PDF folder instead of a
> file, its list of PDFs will be shown. A status bar at the bottom of the
> dialog indicates the current position in the viewing area.
>
>
> Toggling between a File and Folder List
>
> The Look button behaves in a special way when the viewing area has focus. 
> If
> you press Alt+L when in the viewing area, PDF2TXT will toggle between a
> folder and file view. If viewing a folder, PDF2TXT will switch to a view 
> of
> the file that was on the line containing the caret. If viewing a file,
> PDF2TXT will switch to a view of the folder that contained the file. In
> addition, PDF2TXT will automatically search for the name of the file last
> viewed and place the caret just after it if found.
> This feature lets you easily explore the PDFs in a folder, one after
> another. Initially, You might display a list of files by pressing Alt+L 
> when
> the PDF source is a folder. You can then arrow down through the list until
> you find a PDF you want to view. At that point, press Alt+L to view the
> file. When you want to continue exploring the folder list again, press 
> Alt+L
> to return to it at the position of the file you last viewed.
>
>
> Configuration Check Boxes
>
> Four check boxes let you configure PDF2TXT. The one labeled "Include
> subfolders," will look for PDF files not only in the specified folder, but
> in subfolders under it. For example, you could probably convert many PDF
> files on your computer by checking this setting and specifying the c:\ 
> root
> folder as the PDF source! This setting is unchecked by default.
> The check box labeled "Move PDF when done" will transfer a PDF to a
> subfolder called "Done" after a successful conversion. This is a subfolder
> of the PDF2TXT program folder, with a default location of c:\pdf2TXT\done.
> The benefit of this check box is that PDF files are stored away for backup
> after they have been converted to text. This setting is unchecked by
> default.
>
> The checkbox labeled "Replace TXT if found" determines whether to skip a
> conversion if a corresponding target file already exists. If you do not
> check the setting to move source files when done, you may want to check 
> this
> setting so that unnecessary time is not spent on repeatedly converting PDF
> files left in the source folder, since they then will be skipped if
> corresponding target files already exist. This setting is checked by
> default.
>
> The Append check box determines whether a detailed conversion log file is
> newly created each time a conversion is run. This setting is checked by
> default so that previous information is not lost. A section below further
> describes the log file.
>
>
> Action Buttons
>
> The remaining controls of the main dialog are buttons that perform various
> actions. The Convert button is the default: the one that will be activated
> by pressing Enter on any control except another button. The viewing area
> will show the results of a batch conversion. This information includes the
> number of pages in each PDF converted. It also indicates when a conversion
> was either not possible or was skipped because the target file already
> existed and you chose not to replace files.
> Press Escape if you need to abort a batch conversion of many files that is
> taking too long! Note that this program is relatively quick, however,
> compared to other available methods of converting PDF files to text.
> Moreover, its batch mode feature lets you run conversions unattended.
>
> The source for a conversion is treated differently if the viewing area has
> focus. If viewing a list of PDFs in a folder or on a web page, then 
> PDF2TXT
> regards the source as the file name on the current line (the one 
> containing
> the caret). Thus, you can cursor to a PDF of interest and press Enter to
> convert it to text. If successfully converted, PDF2TXT assumes you may 
> also
> want to examine its content in the viewing area, so a Look command is
> automatically performed as well (see below). If there is a conversion 
> error,
> however, PDF2TXT leaves the error message in the viewing area. If you have
> been examining a list of PDFs and decide you want to convert them all 
> rather
> than a single file, navigate to the top line of the viewing area that 
> lists
> the number of PDFs in the list, and then press Enter.
>
> If the source edit box already specifies what you want to view, or a path 
> is
> easy to type into it, then the Look button is quicker to use than the Open
> or Select sub dialog. Activating the Look button takes the current source
> specification and goes to a view of either the text of a source file or 
> the
> list of a source folder, putting focus in the view area so you can read 
> the
> information.
>
> The Defaults button restores the default configuration settings of 
> PDF2TXT.
> You can use it to return to the initial folders and checkbox settings.
>
> The Explorer button lets you browse the source, target, or done folder 
> with
> Windows Explorer. It allows you to examine files that either have been
> converted or would not convert--thus needing other approaches to access
> their content.
>
> The Quit button closes PDF2TXT. Alt+F4 does the same thing.
>
> The Help button displays this complete documentation in the default web
> browser. For context-sensitive help on a particular control, press F1 when
> it has focus. Hence, you can tab through the dialog and press F1 on each
> control to learn how to use it.
>
>
> URL Source,
>
> If you are connected to the Internet, you can specify a URL as a PDF 
> source
> instead of a file or folder on your local computer. The URL can be the
> complete download path to a PDF on the Internet. Alternatively, the URL 
> can
> be the path to a web page containing one or more links to PDF files. You 
> can
> use Internet Explorer to navigate to such a web page and then invoke the
> "Grab URL" button to put its URL into the source edit box of PDF2TXT.
> The Look button works with a URL source similarly to a local file or 
> folder.
> For example, you can press Alt+L to view a list of PDFs on a web page. The
> toggling feature, described above, is also supported, allowing you to
> consecutively examine the PDFs linked to a web page. If you view a PDF on
> the Internet, PDF2TXT will automatically download a copy to the PDF
> subfolder of the program folder, e.g., to
> c:\pdf2txt\pdf
>
> The Convert button also works with a URL source. Thus, you can easily
> convert all PDFs on a web page with a single batch operation!
>
>
> Hot Keys
>
> Almost all controls of PDF2TXT are directly usable with unique, mnemonic 
> Alt
> key combinations based on the initial letter of the control's label. Thus,
> as you become familiar with the controls, you can operate them more 
> quickly
> with hot keys rather than navigating to them with the tab key or mouse. 
> For
> example, press Alt+P to go to the edit box for typing a PDF source, or 
> Alt+S
> to select a source folder from a tree view of your computer. Press Alt+L 
> to
> look at a file or folder, or Alt+V to red what is already in the viewing
> area. Press Alt+I to toggle the "Include subfolders" setting, or Alt+D to
> restore all defaults. The text extraction settings in the second row of
> controls use a letter corresponding to the second syllable or word, i.e.,
> Alt+W for the Password edit box and Alt+F for the Image Format checkbox.
>
> The Log File
>
> The conversion log file is named log.txt and located in the Done subfolder
> of the PDF2TXT program folder. It records information about each attempt 
> to
> convert a PDF to TXT file. It indicates whether the conversion succeeded
> (meaning any resulting text), and then lists many attributes of the PDF,
> including security settings that could explain a failed conversion.
> There is a choice to view the log file in the PDF2TXT program group off 
> the
> Start Menu. You can also get to the file via the Explore button of the
> PDF2TXT program, choosing the Done folder to navigate with Windows 
> Explorer.
> Additionally, you can open the file in another application through its
> direct path (default settings):
> c:\pdf2txt\done\log.txt
>
> If the log file grows larger than you want, simply delete it or uncheck 
> the
> setting that configures PDF2TXT to append to an existing log file. Each 
> use
> of the Convert button would then generate a new log file. This information
> is more detailed than the results placed in the viewing area.
>
>
> Command Line Operation
>
> The pdf2txt.exe executable may be run with various command line 
> parameters.
> The parameters can set values for controls in the main dialog. Parameters
> can also cause PDF2TXT to run in an automatic, console mode--without a
> dialog box or further user intervention involved.
> When the .pdf extension is associated with the PDF2TXT program (explained 
> in
> another section), Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer will open a PDF 
> file
> by launching PDF2TXT with the name of the PDF passed as a parameter on the
> command line. If PDF2TXT is launched with more than one command line
> parameter, however, the program will assume you want to run it in console
> rather than GUI mode. The syntax for parameters is described as follows. 
> If
> a PDF source file, folder, or URL is specified, it must be the first
> parameter. If a TXT target folder is specified, it must be the second
> parameter. The source or target must be enclosed in quotes if its name
> contains spaces.
>
> All parameters besides source and target names begin with a space and
> forward slash (/), followed by the hot key letter in the dialog
> corresponding to the setting affected. A trailing plus (+) sign in the
> parameter indicates a status of On, and a minus (-) sign indicates Off. 
> The
> plus sign can also be omitted to indicate On. Capitalization does not
> matter. Here is a list of parameters:
>
> a = Automatic, console mode (use /a- to force GUI mode with multiple
> parameters)
> i = Include subfolders
> m = Move PDF when done
> r = Replace TXT if found
> d = Default settings (no /d- is defined)
> g = Grab URL as source from Internet Explorer (no /g- is defined)
>
> For example, to convert all files using default settings except for the 
> Move
> setting, you could enter:
> pdf2txt /d /m
>
> To use current settings except grab a URL as source, enter:
> pdf2txt /a /g
>
> To convert files from a temporary folder to the current folder, enter:
> pdf2txt "c:\temp files" .
>
> To do the same, but in GUI rather than console mode, enter:
> pdf2txt "c:\temp files" . /a-
>
> For greater console mode convenience, another version of PDF2TXT, having 
> the
> abbreviated name p2t.exe, is also available in the program folder. This
> version only runs in console mode, whether zero, one, or more parameters 
> are
> specified. It uses "standard output" to display conversion results. The
> shorter executable name means less characters to type on the command line.
> For example, to run a batch conversion in console mode using the current
> settings of PDF2TXT, you could simply enter
> p2t
>
> Like DOS commands generally, the above assumes that you have either made
> c:\pdf2txt the current directory or included it in a PATH statement.
>
>
> File Association
>
> The PDF2TXT group on the Start Menu contains shortcuts for changing what
> program automatically opens a file with a .pdf extension in Windows
> Explorer. If you decide that you like the interface of PDF2TXT enough to
> make it the default program for PDF files, you can set the file 
> association
> accordingly. Later, if you decide you want to return to the conventional
> association, you can do that, too.
> When the .pdf extension is associated with PDF2TXT, an application such as
> Windows Explorer when opening a file, or Internet Explorer after 
> downloading
> a file, will pass the name of the PDF as a command-line parameter to
> pdf2txt.exe. When the program is launched in this way, it automatically
> invokes the Look button, placing text of the PDF in the viewing area and
> putting keyboard focus there.
>
>
> Development Notes
>
> I welcome comments and suggestions on PDF to TXT. For the technically
> curious, I developed it with the PowerBASIC programming language from
> http://PowerBASIC.com
> and a couple of third party libraries: EZGUI from
> http://EZGUI.com
> and QuickPDF from
> http://QuickPDF.com
> An alternate text extraction technique is tried if the first one fails,
> using the GetText.exe utility that is also available seperately at
> http://www.kryltech.com
> The file GetText.txt in the PDF2TXT program folder contains the license 
> for
> this utility.
>
> The OCR is done by incorporating the open source PDF2OCR package, 
> available
> at
> http://EmpowermentZone.com/pdf2ocr.zip
>
> Some status messages are spoken with the JAWS, System Access, or 
> Window-Eyes
> screen reader if currently active. These direct speech messages are 
> produced
> with APIs via a component of the SayTools library, which is also available
> seperately at
> http://EmpowermentZone.com/saysetup.exe
>
> The PowerBASIC code to PDF2TXT, itself (but not commercial libraries 
> used),
> is open source under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL), documented 
> at
> http://gnu.org
>
> This Windows program is the successor to my first version of PDF2TXT,
> developed several years ago as a DOS-based, command-line only utility. 
> Ideas
> and feedbak from the discussion list
> ProgrammingBlind at FreeLists.org
> have aided the design and testing of PDF2TXT. The latest version is
> available at the same address,
> http://EmpowermentZone.com/p2tsetup.exe
>
> You can download it with the Elevate Version hotkey, F11. This checks
> whether a newer version is available, and offers to install it.
>
> Jamal Mazrui
> jamal at EmpowermentZone.com
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On 
> Behalf
> Of Rania
> Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 7:21 AM
> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
>
> I have never herd about this!
> Can you give me more information?
> Rania,
> "For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
> For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
> For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
> See you at the finish line."
> ~Christopher Reeve
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Darrell Shandrow" <darrell.shandrow at gmail.com>
> To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 6:31 AM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
>
>
>> Hello Rachel,
>>
>> In order to help you in the most effective way possible, let me start by
>> asking you some questions. Don't worry if you can't answer them all. Just
>> do
>> your best and I'll guide you to the rest of the needed answers.
>>
>> What version of JAWS are you running? Do you have Adobe Reader on your
>> computer? If so, which version? Do you have any scanning and reading
>> products like Kurzweil K1000 or OpenBook installed on your computer? If
>> so,
>> what versions?
>>
>> There are a number of ways to read PDF documents. Some PDFs are fully
>> accessible, many can be read with some difficulty and far too many remain
>> completely out of our reach without a significant amount of expensive
>> assistive technology.
>>
>> There is one free solution that can read many PDF documents. It is called
>> PDF2TXT, and it has been developed by a blind computer programmer. Visit
>> http://www.empowermentzone.com/p2tsetup.exe to install the program.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Darrell
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaismail04%40gmai
> l.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
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> mail.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaismail04%40gmail.com 



From darrell.shandrow at gmail.com  Sun Jan 24 19:21:43 2010
From: darrell.shandrow at gmail.com (Darrell Shandrow)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 12:21:43 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
In-Reply-To: <002301ca9d10$4f9f7bd0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>
References: <BLU0-SMTP8962BAD8479965C7B44D9EC4600@phx.gbl><6CD7B1E8BCAE4D708377F1A5CEDF42FD@DarrellPC><002701ca9d00$72974ec0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1><3B107AD464F649EE8472E9507311F91E@DarrellPC>
	<002301ca9d10$4f9f7bd0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>
Message-ID: <0CD1EE54B4DF49A484BA5CB29AB98B9B@DarrellPC>

Hello Rania,

My experience is that PDF2TXT is quite a bit easier to use than Adobe
Reader, but it's free, so you may try it for yourself. :-)
 

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Rania
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 9:14 AM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs

Is it easier to use then Adoby? just asking because I don't like Adoby all
that much.
Rania,
"For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
See you at the finish line."
~Christopher Reeve

----- Original Message -----
From: "Darrell Shandrow" <darrell.shandrow at gmail.com>
To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 9:50 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs


> Hello Rania,
>
> I assume you're asking about PDF2TXT? The documentation is below:
>
> Version 3.3
> April 6, 2009
> Copyright 2005 - 2009 by Jamal Mazrui
> LGPL license
> Contents
> Description
> Installation
> Choosing PDF Source and TXT Target
> Text Extraction Settings
> Viewing Area
> Toggling between a File and Folder List
> Configuration Check Boxes
> Action Buttons
> URL Source,
> Hot Keys
> The Log File
> Command Line Operation
> File Association
> Development Notes
> Description
>
> PDF to TXT (also written PDF2TXT) is a free program for converting files 
> in
> Portable Document Format (.pdf extension) to plain text(.txt extension). 
> The
> program lets you convert multiple files in a single, batch operation, 
> either
> from a GUI dialog or a console-mode command line. The resulting text files
> can be read in almost any editing or viewing program. PDF2TXT, itself, 
> also
> includes a plain text view for reading PDF files. The program should work 
> on
> any version of Windows.
>
> Installation
>
> The installation program for PDF2TXT is called p2tsetup.exe. When 
> executed,
> it prompts for an installation folder for the program. The default folder 
> is
> c:\pdf2txt. Although this is not a standard location for programs on a
> Windows computer, a benefit is fewer keystrokes to type whenever you
> manually enter the path to a PDF file or folder. If you want a standard
> installation folder, however, respond to the prompt by entering
> C:\Program Files\PDF to Text
> The installation process creates a program group for PDF2TXT on the 
> Windows
> start menu, containing choices to launch PDF2TXT, read Documentation for
> PDF2TXT, and uninstall PDF2TXT. Also created is a desktop shortcut with an
> associated hot key, enabling PDF2TXT to be conveniently launched by 
> pressing
> Control+Alt+Shift+P. Another shortcut is placed in the Send To folder so
> that a PDF may be viewed in PDF2TXT via the context menu in Windows
> Explorer.
>
>
> Choosing PDF Source and TXT Target
>
> After PDF2TXT is installed, launching it activates a main dialog with
> several capabilities and settings. First, it prompts you to select a PDF
> source. This can be either a single PDF file or a folder containing 
> multiple
> PDF files (another section explains how it can also be an Internet URL). 
> In
> the initial edit box, you can type the full path to the file or folder
> desired. Alternatively, you can tab to buttons that invoke different sub
> dialogs depending on whether you want to choose a file or folder as the 
> PDF
> source. (Yet another option, described later, is to pass the path to the 
> PDF
> source as a parameter on the command line when pdf2txt.exe is launched.)
> By default, the PDF source is the folder c:\pdf2TXT\pdf. Any source may be
> chosen, however, and the program remembers the last one used.
>
> Similarly, an edit box and associated button let you specify the target
> folder for converted files. These will have the same base name, but an
> extension of .txt instead of .pdf. The default target folder is
> c:\pdf2TXT\txt. Note that the PDF source may be either a file or folder, 
> but
> the TXT target is always a folder.
>
>
> Text Extraction Settings
>
> Two settings fundamentally affect how text is extracted from a PDF. If the
> PDF requires a password to unlock its content, type it in the edit box
> provided. If the PDF is an image format without textual characters --  
> e.g.,
> the result of a scan -- mark the checkbox so that optical character
> recognition (OCR) is performed instead of the usual techniques of 
> extracting
> text. This OCR technique was originally posted at
> http://EmpowermentZone.com/pdf2ocr.zip
> OCR is a much slower and more error-prone process, but it may be the best
> option when the usual methods do not work. This technique uses Google
> Tesseract, the best open source OCR available, which is not as good as
> commercial OCR packages. Due to technical issues, there is not a simple 
> way
> of aborting an OCR process that has already started. It is possible,
> however, by launching another copy of PDF2TXT, which clears the deck 
> during
> its startup phase.
>
> Another checkbox lets you additionally produce a .htm target file -- in 
> HTML
> format. This uses a different conversion technique, originally posted at
> http://EmpowermentZone.com/pdf2htm.zip
>
> This may be worth trying if the .txt result is unsatisfactory. It may also
> be useful for webmasters who want to post AN HTML alternative to a PDF. 
> The
> conversion translates visual aspects of the PDF such as fonts, but not
> structural elements such as headings, unfortunately. To further increase
> conversion options, a different technique is also used for producing the
> .txt file with this checkbox, using the PDFToText.exe utility that is also
> seperately available at
> http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/home.html
>
>
> Viewing Area
>
> Within the main dialog, a read-only, multi-line edit control serves as a
> viewing area between the source and target controls just discussed. This
> scrollable view can show one of three kinds of information: (1) the text 
> of
> a PDF, 2) a list of PDF files, or (3) the results of a batch conversion. 
> The
> label for the viewing area changes to indicate the kind of information 
> being
> shown: "View file," "View folder," or "View results."
> You can navigate the viewing area with standard windows keystrokes, e.g.,
> Control+Home or Control+End to go to the top or bottom of text. Control+F
> lets you search forward for a string of characters, and Control+Shift+F 
> lets
> you search backward. F3 searches for the same string again in the forward
> direction, and Shift+F3 searches again backward. Control+G lets you go to 
> a
> percent completion point through the file being viewed. Control+K sets a
> bookmark for the file, Control+Shift+K clears it, and Alt+K goes to it.
>
> You can press Shift with arrow keys to select text or Control+A to select
> all. Alternatively, you can press F8 to set the starting point of a
> selection, navigate to the ending point desired, and then press Shift+F8 
> to
> select the text between these points.
>
> Press Control+C to copy selected text to the clipboard. Alternatively, 
> press
> Control+Shift+C, or Alt+F8, to copy and append to the clipboard, adding to
> rather than replacing its existing text. A form feed or page break 
> character
> (ANSI code 12) will separate each clip copied there. Control+F8 is a
> shortcut that copies all text in the viewing area without having to select
> it first, equivalent to Control+A followd by Control+C.
>
> If you invoke the Open button and choose a PDF from its sub dialog, the 
> text
> of the PDF will be placed in the viewing area, and keyboard focus will go
> there. If you invoke the Select button to choose a PDF folder instead of a
> file, its list of PDFs will be shown. A status bar at the bottom of the
> dialog indicates the current position in the viewing area.
>
>
> Toggling between a File and Folder List
>
> The Look button behaves in a special way when the viewing area has focus. 
> If
> you press Alt+L when in the viewing area, PDF2TXT will toggle between a
> folder and file view. If viewing a folder, PDF2TXT will switch to a view 
> of
> the file that was on the line containing the caret. If viewing a file,
> PDF2TXT will switch to a view of the folder that contained the file. In
> addition, PDF2TXT will automatically search for the name of the file last
> viewed and place the caret just after it if found.
> This feature lets you easily explore the PDFs in a folder, one after
> another. Initially, You might display a list of files by pressing Alt+L 
> when
> the PDF source is a folder. You can then arrow down through the list until
> you find a PDF you want to view. At that point, press Alt+L to view the
> file. When you want to continue exploring the folder list again, press 
> Alt+L
> to return to it at the position of the file you last viewed.
>
>
> Configuration Check Boxes
>
> Four check boxes let you configure PDF2TXT. The one labeled "Include
> subfolders," will look for PDF files not only in the specified folder, but
> in subfolders under it. For example, you could probably convert many PDF
> files on your computer by checking this setting and specifying the c:\ 
> root
> folder as the PDF source! This setting is unchecked by default.
> The check box labeled "Move PDF when done" will transfer a PDF to a
> subfolder called "Done" after a successful conversion. This is a subfolder
> of the PDF2TXT program folder, with a default location of c:\pdf2TXT\done.
> The benefit of this check box is that PDF files are stored away for backup
> after they have been converted to text. This setting is unchecked by
> default.
>
> The checkbox labeled "Replace TXT if found" determines whether to skip a
> conversion if a corresponding target file already exists. If you do not
> check the setting to move source files when done, you may want to check 
> this
> setting so that unnecessary time is not spent on repeatedly converting PDF
> files left in the source folder, since they then will be skipped if
> corresponding target files already exist. This setting is checked by
> default.
>
> The Append check box determines whether a detailed conversion log file is
> newly created each time a conversion is run. This setting is checked by
> default so that previous information is not lost. A section below further
> describes the log file.
>
>
> Action Buttons
>
> The remaining controls of the main dialog are buttons that perform various
> actions. The Convert button is the default: the one that will be activated
> by pressing Enter on any control except another button. The viewing area
> will show the results of a batch conversion. This information includes the
> number of pages in each PDF converted. It also indicates when a conversion
> was either not possible or was skipped because the target file already
> existed and you chose not to replace files.
> Press Escape if you need to abort a batch conversion of many files that is
> taking too long! Note that this program is relatively quick, however,
> compared to other available methods of converting PDF files to text.
> Moreover, its batch mode feature lets you run conversions unattended.
>
> The source for a conversion is treated differently if the viewing area has
> focus. If viewing a list of PDFs in a folder or on a web page, then 
> PDF2TXT
> regards the source as the file name on the current line (the one 
> containing
> the caret). Thus, you can cursor to a PDF of interest and press Enter to
> convert it to text. If successfully converted, PDF2TXT assumes you may 
> also
> want to examine its content in the viewing area, so a Look command is
> automatically performed as well (see below). If there is a conversion 
> error,
> however, PDF2TXT leaves the error message in the viewing area. If you have
> been examining a list of PDFs and decide you want to convert them all 
> rather
> than a single file, navigate to the top line of the viewing area that 
> lists
> the number of PDFs in the list, and then press Enter.
>
> If the source edit box already specifies what you want to view, or a path 
> is
> easy to type into it, then the Look button is quicker to use than the Open
> or Select sub dialog. Activating the Look button takes the current source
> specification and goes to a view of either the text of a source file or 
> the
> list of a source folder, putting focus in the view area so you can read 
> the
> information.
>
> The Defaults button restores the default configuration settings of 
> PDF2TXT.
> You can use it to return to the initial folders and checkbox settings.
>
> The Explorer button lets you browse the source, target, or done folder 
> with
> Windows Explorer. It allows you to examine files that either have been
> converted or would not convert--thus needing other approaches to access
> their content.
>
> The Quit button closes PDF2TXT. Alt+F4 does the same thing.
>
> The Help button displays this complete documentation in the default web
> browser. For context-sensitive help on a particular control, press F1 when
> it has focus. Hence, you can tab through the dialog and press F1 on each
> control to learn how to use it.
>
>
> URL Source,
>
> If you are connected to the Internet, you can specify a URL as a PDF 
> source
> instead of a file or folder on your local computer. The URL can be the
> complete download path to a PDF on the Internet. Alternatively, the URL 
> can
> be the path to a web page containing one or more links to PDF files. You 
> can
> use Internet Explorer to navigate to such a web page and then invoke the
> "Grab URL" button to put its URL into the source edit box of PDF2TXT.
> The Look button works with a URL source similarly to a local file or 
> folder.
> For example, you can press Alt+L to view a list of PDFs on a web page. The
> toggling feature, described above, is also supported, allowing you to
> consecutively examine the PDFs linked to a web page. If you view a PDF on
> the Internet, PDF2TXT will automatically download a copy to the PDF
> subfolder of the program folder, e.g., to
> c:\pdf2txt\pdf
>
> The Convert button also works with a URL source. Thus, you can easily
> convert all PDFs on a web page with a single batch operation!
>
>
> Hot Keys
>
> Almost all controls of PDF2TXT are directly usable with unique, mnemonic 
> Alt
> key combinations based on the initial letter of the control's label. Thus,
> as you become familiar with the controls, you can operate them more 
> quickly
> with hot keys rather than navigating to them with the tab key or mouse. 
> For
> example, press Alt+P to go to the edit box for typing a PDF source, or 
> Alt+S
> to select a source folder from a tree view of your computer. Press Alt+L 
> to
> look at a file or folder, or Alt+V to red what is already in the viewing
> area. Press Alt+I to toggle the "Include subfolders" setting, or Alt+D to
> restore all defaults. The text extraction settings in the second row of
> controls use a letter corresponding to the second syllable or word, i.e.,
> Alt+W for the Password edit box and Alt+F for the Image Format checkbox.
>
> The Log File
>
> The conversion log file is named log.txt and located in the Done subfolder
> of the PDF2TXT program folder. It records information about each attempt 
> to
> convert a PDF to TXT file. It indicates whether the conversion succeeded
> (meaning any resulting text), and then lists many attributes of the PDF,
> including security settings that could explain a failed conversion.
> There is a choice to view the log file in the PDF2TXT program group off 
> the
> Start Menu. You can also get to the file via the Explore button of the
> PDF2TXT program, choosing the Done folder to navigate with Windows 
> Explorer.
> Additionally, you can open the file in another application through its
> direct path (default settings):
> c:\pdf2txt\done\log.txt
>
> If the log file grows larger than you want, simply delete it or uncheck 
> the
> setting that configures PDF2TXT to append to an existing log file. Each 
> use
> of the Convert button would then generate a new log file. This information
> is more detailed than the results placed in the viewing area.
>
>
> Command Line Operation
>
> The pdf2txt.exe executable may be run with various command line 
> parameters.
> The parameters can set values for controls in the main dialog. Parameters
> can also cause PDF2TXT to run in an automatic, console mode--without a
> dialog box or further user intervention involved.
> When the .pdf extension is associated with the PDF2TXT program (explained 
> in
> another section), Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer will open a PDF 
> file
> by launching PDF2TXT with the name of the PDF passed as a parameter on the
> command line. If PDF2TXT is launched with more than one command line
> parameter, however, the program will assume you want to run it in console
> rather than GUI mode. The syntax for parameters is described as follows. 
> If
> a PDF source file, folder, or URL is specified, it must be the first
> parameter. If a TXT target folder is specified, it must be the second
> parameter. The source or target must be enclosed in quotes if its name
> contains spaces.
>
> All parameters besides source and target names begin with a space and
> forward slash (/), followed by the hot key letter in the dialog
> corresponding to the setting affected. A trailing plus (+) sign in the
> parameter indicates a status of On, and a minus (-) sign indicates Off. 
> The
> plus sign can also be omitted to indicate On. Capitalization does not
> matter. Here is a list of parameters:
>
> a = Automatic, console mode (use /a- to force GUI mode with multiple
> parameters)
> i = Include subfolders
> m = Move PDF when done
> r = Replace TXT if found
> d = Default settings (no /d- is defined)
> g = Grab URL as source from Internet Explorer (no /g- is defined)
>
> For example, to convert all files using default settings except for the 
> Move
> setting, you could enter:
> pdf2txt /d /m
>
> To use current settings except grab a URL as source, enter:
> pdf2txt /a /g
>
> To convert files from a temporary folder to the current folder, enter:
> pdf2txt "c:\temp files" .
>
> To do the same, but in GUI rather than console mode, enter:
> pdf2txt "c:\temp files" . /a-
>
> For greater console mode convenience, another version of PDF2TXT, having 
> the
> abbreviated name p2t.exe, is also available in the program folder. This
> version only runs in console mode, whether zero, one, or more parameters 
> are
> specified. It uses "standard output" to display conversion results. The
> shorter executable name means less characters to type on the command line.
> For example, to run a batch conversion in console mode using the current
> settings of PDF2TXT, you could simply enter
> p2t
>
> Like DOS commands generally, the above assumes that you have either made
> c:\pdf2txt the current directory or included it in a PATH statement.
>
>
> File Association
>
> The PDF2TXT group on the Start Menu contains shortcuts for changing what
> program automatically opens a file with a .pdf extension in Windows
> Explorer. If you decide that you like the interface of PDF2TXT enough to
> make it the default program for PDF files, you can set the file 
> association
> accordingly. Later, if you decide you want to return to the conventional
> association, you can do that, too.
> When the .pdf extension is associated with PDF2TXT, an application such as
> Windows Explorer when opening a file, or Internet Explorer after 
> downloading
> a file, will pass the name of the PDF as a command-line parameter to
> pdf2txt.exe. When the program is launched in this way, it automatically
> invokes the Look button, placing text of the PDF in the viewing area and
> putting keyboard focus there.
>
>
> Development Notes
>
> I welcome comments and suggestions on PDF to TXT. For the technically
> curious, I developed it with the PowerBASIC programming language from
> http://PowerBASIC.com
> and a couple of third party libraries: EZGUI from
> http://EZGUI.com
> and QuickPDF from
> http://QuickPDF.com
> An alternate text extraction technique is tried if the first one fails,
> using the GetText.exe utility that is also available seperately at
> http://www.kryltech.com
> The file GetText.txt in the PDF2TXT program folder contains the license 
> for
> this utility.
>
> The OCR is done by incorporating the open source PDF2OCR package, 
> available
> at
> http://EmpowermentZone.com/pdf2ocr.zip
>
> Some status messages are spoken with the JAWS, System Access, or 
> Window-Eyes
> screen reader if currently active. These direct speech messages are 
> produced
> with APIs via a component of the SayTools library, which is also available
> seperately at
> http://EmpowermentZone.com/saysetup.exe
>
> The PowerBASIC code to PDF2TXT, itself (but not commercial libraries 
> used),
> is open source under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL), documented 
> at
> http://gnu.org
>
> This Windows program is the successor to my first version of PDF2TXT,
> developed several years ago as a DOS-based, command-line only utility. 
> Ideas
> and feedbak from the discussion list
> ProgrammingBlind at FreeLists.org
> have aided the design and testing of PDF2TXT. The latest version is
> available at the same address,
> http://EmpowermentZone.com/p2tsetup.exe
>
> You can download it with the Elevate Version hotkey, F11. This checks
> whether a newer version is available, and offers to install it.
>
> Jamal Mazrui
> jamal at EmpowermentZone.com
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On 
> Behalf
> Of Rania
> Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 7:21 AM
> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
>
> I have never herd about this!
> Can you give me more information?
> Rania,
> "For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
> For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
> For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
> See you at the finish line."
> ~Christopher Reeve
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Darrell Shandrow" <darrell.shandrow at gmail.com>
> To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 6:31 AM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
>
>
>> Hello Rachel,
>>
>> In order to help you in the most effective way possible, let me start by
>> asking you some questions. Don't worry if you can't answer them all. Just
>> do
>> your best and I'll guide you to the rest of the needed answers.
>>
>> What version of JAWS are you running? Do you have Adobe Reader on your
>> computer? If so, which version? Do you have any scanning and reading
>> products like Kurzweil K1000 or OpenBook installed on your computer? If
>> so,
>> what versions?
>>
>> There are a number of ways to read PDF documents. Some PDFs are fully
>> accessible, many can be read with some difficulty and far too many remain
>> completely out of our reach without a significant amount of expensive
>> assistive technology.
>>
>> There is one free solution that can read many PDF documents. It is called
>> PDF2TXT, and it has been developed by a blind computer programmer. Visit
>> http://www.empowermentzone.com/p2tsetup.exe to install the program.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Darrell
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>
>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaismail04%40gmai
> l.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
>
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> mail.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
>
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l.com 


_______________________________________________
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To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
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mail.com



From beckyasabo at gmail.com  Sun Jan 24 20:28:30 2010
From: beckyasabo at gmail.com (becky sabo )
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 12:28:30 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] how to meet more people and get involved in activities
In-Reply-To: <BLU0-SMTP8962BAD8479965C7B44D9EC4600@phx.gbl>
References: <BLU0-SMTP8962BAD8479965C7B44D9EC4600@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <0793935AD9BE43A0A48AFD05430D5743@BeckySabo>

Dear List,
My name is Becky Sabo.  I live in Englewood Colorado.  My question is how to
get involved on campus and off campus to meet more people and also get
involved in other activities.  I do not have a lot of friends and on the
weekends I am usually board because I do not have plans to do anything or
with any one.  If any suggestions I would appreciate that a lot.
Sincerely 
Becky Sabo 

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Rachel Jacobs
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 7:12 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs

Hello. I am a jaws user and I can't seem to get PDF files to read using
jaws. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks,
Rachel Jacobs
_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
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om



From bunnykatie6 at gmail.com  Sun Jan 24 20:10:58 2010
From: bunnykatie6 at gmail.com (Katie Wang)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:10:58 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
In-Reply-To: <002301ca9d10$4f9f7bd0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>
References: <BLU0-SMTP8962BAD8479965C7B44D9EC4600@phx.gbl>
	<6CD7B1E8BCAE4D708377F1A5CEDF42FD@DarrellPC>
	<002701ca9d00$72974ec0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>
	<3B107AD464F649EE8472E9507311F91E@DarrellPC>
	<002301ca9d10$4f9f7bd0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>
Message-ID: <5096b4731001241210t6a86af00s33a9b6799422c770@mail.gmail.com>

Thanks for sharing the information about the Pdf2Txt software,
Darrell! For those of you who want to convert pdf files to text format
within Adobe, the "Save as Text" option is under Files. For pdf files
generated from scanned images, however, the text conversion method
won't work; these documents must be read through Open Book or similar
OCR technology.

On 1/24/10, Rania <raniaismail04 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is it easier to use then Adoby? just asking because I don't like Adoby all
> that much.
> Rania,
> "For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
> For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
> For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
> See you at the finish line."
> ~Christopher Reeve
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Darrell Shandrow" <darrell.shandrow at gmail.com>
> To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 9:50 AM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
>
>
>> Hello Rania,
>>
>> I assume you're asking about PDF2TXT? The documentation is below:
>>
>> Version 3.3
>> April 6, 2009
>> Copyright 2005 - 2009 by Jamal Mazrui
>> LGPL license
>> Contents
>> Description
>> Installation
>> Choosing PDF Source and TXT Target
>> Text Extraction Settings
>> Viewing Area
>> Toggling between a File and Folder List
>> Configuration Check Boxes
>> Action Buttons
>> URL Source,
>> Hot Keys
>> The Log File
>> Command Line Operation
>> File Association
>> Development Notes
>> Description
>>
>> PDF to TXT (also written PDF2TXT) is a free program for converting files
>> in
>> Portable Document Format (.pdf extension) to plain text(.txt extension).
>> The
>> program lets you convert multiple files in a single, batch operation,
>> either
>> from a GUI dialog or a console-mode command line. The resulting text files
>> can be read in almost any editing or viewing program. PDF2TXT, itself,
>> also
>> includes a plain text view for reading PDF files. The program should work
>> on
>> any version of Windows.
>>
>> Installation
>>
>> The installation program for PDF2TXT is called p2tsetup.exe. When
>> executed,
>> it prompts for an installation folder for the program. The default folder
>> is
>> c:\pdf2txt. Although this is not a standard location for programs on a
>> Windows computer, a benefit is fewer keystrokes to type whenever you
>> manually enter the path to a PDF file or folder. If you want a standard
>> installation folder, however, respond to the prompt by entering
>> C:\Program Files\PDF to Text
>> The installation process creates a program group for PDF2TXT on the
>> Windows
>> start menu, containing choices to launch PDF2TXT, read Documentation for
>> PDF2TXT, and uninstall PDF2TXT. Also created is a desktop shortcut with an
>> associated hot key, enabling PDF2TXT to be conveniently launched by
>> pressing
>> Control+Alt+Shift+P. Another shortcut is placed in the Send To folder so
>> that a PDF may be viewed in PDF2TXT via the context menu in Windows
>> Explorer.
>>
>>
>> Choosing PDF Source and TXT Target
>>
>> After PDF2TXT is installed, launching it activates a main dialog with
>> several capabilities and settings. First, it prompts you to select a PDF
>> source. This can be either a single PDF file or a folder containing
>> multiple
>> PDF files (another section explains how it can also be an Internet URL).
>> In
>> the initial edit box, you can type the full path to the file or folder
>> desired. Alternatively, you can tab to buttons that invoke different sub
>> dialogs depending on whether you want to choose a file or folder as the
>> PDF
>> source. (Yet another option, described later, is to pass the path to the
>> PDF
>> source as a parameter on the command line when pdf2txt.exe is launched.)
>> By default, the PDF source is the folder c:\pdf2TXT\pdf. Any source may be
>> chosen, however, and the program remembers the last one used.
>>
>> Similarly, an edit box and associated button let you specify the target
>> folder for converted files. These will have the same base name, but an
>> extension of .txt instead of .pdf. The default target folder is
>> c:\pdf2TXT\txt. Note that the PDF source may be either a file or folder,
>> but
>> the TXT target is always a folder.
>>
>>
>> Text Extraction Settings
>>
>> Two settings fundamentally affect how text is extracted from a PDF. If the
>> PDF requires a password to unlock its content, type it in the edit box
>> provided. If the PDF is an image format without textual characters --
>> e.g.,
>> the result of a scan -- mark the checkbox so that optical character
>> recognition (OCR) is performed instead of the usual techniques of
>> extracting
>> text. This OCR technique was originally posted at
>> http://EmpowermentZone.com/pdf2ocr.zip
>> OCR is a much slower and more error-prone process, but it may be the best
>> option when the usual methods do not work. This technique uses Google
>> Tesseract, the best open source OCR available, which is not as good as
>> commercial OCR packages. Due to technical issues, there is not a simple
>> way
>> of aborting an OCR process that has already started. It is possible,
>> however, by launching another copy of PDF2TXT, which clears the deck
>> during
>> its startup phase.
>>
>> Another checkbox lets you additionally produce a .htm target file -- in
>> HTML
>> format. This uses a different conversion technique, originally posted at
>> http://EmpowermentZone.com/pdf2htm.zip
>>
>> This may be worth trying if the .txt result is unsatisfactory. It may also
>> be useful for webmasters who want to post AN HTML alternative to a PDF.
>> The
>> conversion translates visual aspects of the PDF such as fonts, but not
>> structural elements such as headings, unfortunately. To further increase
>> conversion options, a different technique is also used for producing the
>> .txt file with this checkbox, using the PDFToText.exe utility that is also
>> seperately available at
>> http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/home.html
>>
>>
>> Viewing Area
>>
>> Within the main dialog, a read-only, multi-line edit control serves as a
>> viewing area between the source and target controls just discussed. This
>> scrollable view can show one of three kinds of information: (1) the text
>> of
>> a PDF, 2) a list of PDF files, or (3) the results of a batch conversion.
>> The
>> label for the viewing area changes to indicate the kind of information
>> being
>> shown: "View file," "View folder," or "View results."
>> You can navigate the viewing area with standard windows keystrokes, e.g.,
>> Control+Home or Control+End to go to the top or bottom of text. Control+F
>> lets you search forward for a string of characters, and Control+Shift+F
>> lets
>> you search backward. F3 searches for the same string again in the forward
>> direction, and Shift+F3 searches again backward. Control+G lets you go to
>> a
>> percent completion point through the file being viewed. Control+K sets a
>> bookmark for the file, Control+Shift+K clears it, and Alt+K goes to it.
>>
>> You can press Shift with arrow keys to select text or Control+A to select
>> all. Alternatively, you can press F8 to set the starting point of a
>> selection, navigate to the ending point desired, and then press Shift+F8
>> to
>> select the text between these points.
>>
>> Press Control+C to copy selected text to the clipboard. Alternatively,
>> press
>> Control+Shift+C, or Alt+F8, to copy and append to the clipboard, adding to
>> rather than replacing its existing text. A form feed or page break
>> character
>> (ANSI code 12) will separate each clip copied there. Control+F8 is a
>> shortcut that copies all text in the viewing area without having to select
>> it first, equivalent to Control+A followd by Control+C.
>>
>> If you invoke the Open button and choose a PDF from its sub dialog, the
>> text
>> of the PDF will be placed in the viewing area, and keyboard focus will go
>> there. If you invoke the Select button to choose a PDF folder instead of a
>> file, its list of PDFs will be shown. A status bar at the bottom of the
>> dialog indicates the current position in the viewing area.
>>
>>
>> Toggling between a File and Folder List
>>
>> The Look button behaves in a special way when the viewing area has focus.
>> If
>> you press Alt+L when in the viewing area, PDF2TXT will toggle between a
>> folder and file view. If viewing a folder, PDF2TXT will switch to a view
>> of
>> the file that was on the line containing the caret. If viewing a file,
>> PDF2TXT will switch to a view of the folder that contained the file. In
>> addition, PDF2TXT will automatically search for the name of the file last
>> viewed and place the caret just after it if found.
>> This feature lets you easily explore the PDFs in a folder, one after
>> another. Initially, You might display a list of files by pressing Alt+L
>> when
>> the PDF source is a folder. You can then arrow down through the list until
>> you find a PDF you want to view. At that point, press Alt+L to view the
>> file. When you want to continue exploring the folder list again, press
>> Alt+L
>> to return to it at the position of the file you last viewed.
>>
>>
>> Configuration Check Boxes
>>
>> Four check boxes let you configure PDF2TXT. The one labeled "Include
>> subfolders," will look for PDF files not only in the specified folder, but
>> in subfolders under it. For example, you could probably convert many PDF
>> files on your computer by checking this setting and specifying the c:\
>> root
>> folder as the PDF source! This setting is unchecked by default.
>> The check box labeled "Move PDF when done" will transfer a PDF to a
>> subfolder called "Done" after a successful conversion. This is a subfolder
>> of the PDF2TXT program folder, with a default location of c:\pdf2TXT\done.
>> The benefit of this check box is that PDF files are stored away for backup
>> after they have been converted to text. This setting is unchecked by
>> default.
>>
>> The checkbox labeled "Replace TXT if found" determines whether to skip a
>> conversion if a corresponding target file already exists. If you do not
>> check the setting to move source files when done, you may want to check
>> this
>> setting so that unnecessary time is not spent on repeatedly converting PDF
>> files left in the source folder, since they then will be skipped if
>> corresponding target files already exist. This setting is checked by
>> default.
>>
>> The Append check box determines whether a detailed conversion log file is
>> newly created each time a conversion is run. This setting is checked by
>> default so that previous information is not lost. A section below further
>> describes the log file.
>>
>>
>> Action Buttons
>>
>> The remaining controls of the main dialog are buttons that perform various
>> actions. The Convert button is the default: the one that will be activated
>> by pressing Enter on any control except another button. The viewing area
>> will show the results of a batch conversion. This information includes the
>> number of pages in each PDF converted. It also indicates when a conversion
>> was either not possible or was skipped because the target file already
>> existed and you chose not to replace files.
>> Press Escape if you need to abort a batch conversion of many files that is
>> taking too long! Note that this program is relatively quick, however,
>> compared to other available methods of converting PDF files to text.
>> Moreover, its batch mode feature lets you run conversions unattended.
>>
>> The source for a conversion is treated differently if the viewing area has
>> focus. If viewing a list of PDFs in a folder or on a web page, then
>> PDF2TXT
>> regards the source as the file name on the current line (the one
>> containing
>> the caret). Thus, you can cursor to a PDF of interest and press Enter to
>> convert it to text. If successfully converted, PDF2TXT assumes you may
>> also
>> want to examine its content in the viewing area, so a Look command is
>> automatically performed as well (see below). If there is a conversion
>> error,
>> however, PDF2TXT leaves the error message in the viewing area. If you have
>> been examining a list of PDFs and decide you want to convert them all
>> rather
>> than a single file, navigate to the top line of the viewing area that
>> lists
>> the number of PDFs in the list, and then press Enter.
>>
>> If the source edit box already specifies what you want to view, or a path
>> is
>> easy to type into it, then the Look button is quicker to use than the Open
>> or Select sub dialog. Activating the Look button takes the current source
>> specification and goes to a view of either the text of a source file or
>> the
>> list of a source folder, putting focus in the view area so you can read
>> the
>> information.
>>
>> The Defaults button restores the default configuration settings of
>> PDF2TXT.
>> You can use it to return to the initial folders and checkbox settings.
>>
>> The Explorer button lets you browse the source, target, or done folder
>> with
>> Windows Explorer. It allows you to examine files that either have been
>> converted or would not convert--thus needing other approaches to access
>> their content.
>>
>> The Quit button closes PDF2TXT. Alt+F4 does the same thing.
>>
>> The Help button displays this complete documentation in the default web
>> browser. For context-sensitive help on a particular control, press F1 when
>> it has focus. Hence, you can tab through the dialog and press F1 on each
>> control to learn how to use it.
>>
>>
>> URL Source,
>>
>> If you are connected to the Internet, you can specify a URL as a PDF
>> source
>> instead of a file or folder on your local computer. The URL can be the
>> complete download path to a PDF on the Internet. Alternatively, the URL
>> can
>> be the path to a web page containing one or more links to PDF files. You
>> can
>> use Internet Explorer to navigate to such a web page and then invoke the
>> "Grab URL" button to put its URL into the source edit box of PDF2TXT.
>> The Look button works with a URL source similarly to a local file or
>> folder.
>> For example, you can press Alt+L to view a list of PDFs on a web page. The
>> toggling feature, described above, is also supported, allowing you to
>> consecutively examine the PDFs linked to a web page. If you view a PDF on
>> the Internet, PDF2TXT will automatically download a copy to the PDF
>> subfolder of the program folder, e.g., to
>> c:\pdf2txt\pdf
>>
>> The Convert button also works with a URL source. Thus, you can easily
>> convert all PDFs on a web page with a single batch operation!
>>
>>
>> Hot Keys
>>
>> Almost all controls of PDF2TXT are directly usable with unique, mnemonic
>> Alt
>> key combinations based on the initial letter of the control's label. Thus,
>> as you become familiar with the controls, you can operate them more
>> quickly
>> with hot keys rather than navigating to them with the tab key or mouse.
>> For
>> example, press Alt+P to go to the edit box for typing a PDF source, or
>> Alt+S
>> to select a source folder from a tree view of your computer. Press Alt+L
>> to
>> look at a file or folder, or Alt+V to red what is already in the viewing
>> area. Press Alt+I to toggle the "Include subfolders" setting, or Alt+D to
>> restore all defaults. The text extraction settings in the second row of
>> controls use a letter corresponding to the second syllable or word, i.e.,
>> Alt+W for the Password edit box and Alt+F for the Image Format checkbox.
>>
>> The Log File
>>
>> The conversion log file is named log.txt and located in the Done subfolder
>> of the PDF2TXT program folder. It records information about each attempt
>> to
>> convert a PDF to TXT file. It indicates whether the conversion succeeded
>> (meaning any resulting text), and then lists many attributes of the PDF,
>> including security settings that could explain a failed conversion.
>> There is a choice to view the log file in the PDF2TXT program group off
>> the
>> Start Menu. You can also get to the file via the Explore button of the
>> PDF2TXT program, choosing the Done folder to navigate with Windows
>> Explorer.
>> Additionally, you can open the file in another application through its
>> direct path (default settings):
>> c:\pdf2txt\done\log.txt
>>
>> If the log file grows larger than you want, simply delete it or uncheck
>> the
>> setting that configures PDF2TXT to append to an existing log file. Each
>> use
>> of the Convert button would then generate a new log file. This information
>> is more detailed than the results placed in the viewing area.
>>
>>
>> Command Line Operation
>>
>> The pdf2txt.exe executable may be run with various command line
>> parameters.
>> The parameters can set values for controls in the main dialog. Parameters
>> can also cause PDF2TXT to run in an automatic, console mode--without a
>> dialog box or further user intervention involved.
>> When the .pdf extension is associated with the PDF2TXT program (explained
>> in
>> another section), Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer will open a PDF
>> file
>> by launching PDF2TXT with the name of the PDF passed as a parameter on the
>> command line. If PDF2TXT is launched with more than one command line
>> parameter, however, the program will assume you want to run it in console
>> rather than GUI mode. The syntax for parameters is described as follows.
>> If
>> a PDF source file, folder, or URL is specified, it must be the first
>> parameter. If a TXT target folder is specified, it must be the second
>> parameter. The source or target must be enclosed in quotes if its name
>> contains spaces.
>>
>> All parameters besides source and target names begin with a space and
>> forward slash (/), followed by the hot key letter in the dialog
>> corresponding to the setting affected. A trailing plus (+) sign in the
>> parameter indicates a status of On, and a minus (-) sign indicates Off.
>> The
>> plus sign can also be omitted to indicate On. Capitalization does not
>> matter. Here is a list of parameters:
>>
>> a = Automatic, console mode (use /a- to force GUI mode with multiple
>> parameters)
>> i = Include subfolders
>> m = Move PDF when done
>> r = Replace TXT if found
>> d = Default settings (no /d- is defined)
>> g = Grab URL as source from Internet Explorer (no /g- is defined)
>>
>> For example, to convert all files using default settings except for the
>> Move
>> setting, you could enter:
>> pdf2txt /d /m
>>
>> To use current settings except grab a URL as source, enter:
>> pdf2txt /a /g
>>
>> To convert files from a temporary folder to the current folder, enter:
>> pdf2txt "c:\temp files" .
>>
>> To do the same, but in GUI rather than console mode, enter:
>> pdf2txt "c:\temp files" . /a-
>>
>> For greater console mode convenience, another version of PDF2TXT, having
>> the
>> abbreviated name p2t.exe, is also available in the program folder. This
>> version only runs in console mode, whether zero, one, or more parameters
>> are
>> specified. It uses "standard output" to display conversion results. The
>> shorter executable name means less characters to type on the command line.
>> For example, to run a batch conversion in console mode using the current
>> settings of PDF2TXT, you could simply enter
>> p2t
>>
>> Like DOS commands generally, the above assumes that you have either made
>> c:\pdf2txt the current directory or included it in a PATH statement.
>>
>>
>> File Association
>>
>> The PDF2TXT group on the Start Menu contains shortcuts for changing what
>> program automatically opens a file with a .pdf extension in Windows
>> Explorer. If you decide that you like the interface of PDF2TXT enough to
>> make it the default program for PDF files, you can set the file
>> association
>> accordingly. Later, if you decide you want to return to the conventional
>> association, you can do that, too.
>> When the .pdf extension is associated with PDF2TXT, an application such as
>> Windows Explorer when opening a file, or Internet Explorer after
>> downloading
>> a file, will pass the name of the PDF as a command-line parameter to
>> pdf2txt.exe. When the program is launched in this way, it automatically
>> invokes the Look button, placing text of the PDF in the viewing area and
>> putting keyboard focus there.
>>
>>
>> Development Notes
>>
>> I welcome comments and suggestions on PDF to TXT. For the technically
>> curious, I developed it with the PowerBASIC programming language from
>> http://PowerBASIC.com
>> and a couple of third party libraries: EZGUI from
>> http://EZGUI.com
>> and QuickPDF from
>> http://QuickPDF.com
>> An alternate text extraction technique is tried if the first one fails,
>> using the GetText.exe utility that is also available seperately at
>> http://www.kryltech.com
>> The file GetText.txt in the PDF2TXT program folder contains the license
>> for
>> this utility.
>>
>> The OCR is done by incorporating the open source PDF2OCR package,
>> available
>> at
>> http://EmpowermentZone.com/pdf2ocr.zip
>>
>> Some status messages are spoken with the JAWS, System Access, or
>> Window-Eyes
>> screen reader if currently active. These direct speech messages are
>> produced
>> with APIs via a component of the SayTools library, which is also available
>> seperately at
>> http://EmpowermentZone.com/saysetup.exe
>>
>> The PowerBASIC code to PDF2TXT, itself (but not commercial libraries
>> used),
>> is open source under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL), documented
>> at
>> http://gnu.org
>>
>> This Windows program is the successor to my first version of PDF2TXT,
>> developed several years ago as a DOS-based, command-line only utility.
>> Ideas
>> and feedbak from the discussion list
>> ProgrammingBlind at FreeLists.org
>> have aided the design and testing of PDF2TXT. The latest version is
>> available at the same address,
>> http://EmpowermentZone.com/p2tsetup.exe
>>
>> You can download it with the Elevate Version hotkey, F11. This checks
>> whether a newer version is available, and offers to install it.
>>
>> Jamal Mazrui
>> jamal at EmpowermentZone.com
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
>> Behalf
>> Of Rania
>> Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 7:21 AM
>> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
>>
>> I have never herd about this!
>> Can you give me more information?
>> Rania,
>> "For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
>> For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
>> For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
>> See you at the finish line."
>> ~Christopher Reeve
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Darrell Shandrow" <darrell.shandrow at gmail.com>
>> To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 6:31 AM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
>>
>>
>>> Hello Rachel,
>>>
>>> In order to help you in the most effective way possible, let me start by
>>> asking you some questions. Don't worry if you can't answer them all. Just
>>> do
>>> your best and I'll guide you to the rest of the needed answers.
>>>
>>> What version of JAWS are you running? Do you have Adobe Reader on your
>>> computer? If so, which version? Do you have any scanning and reading
>>> products like Kurzweil K1000 or OpenBook installed on your computer? If
>>> so,
>>> what versions?
>>>
>>> There are a number of ways to read PDF documents. Some PDFs are fully
>>> accessible, many can be read with some difficulty and far too many remain
>>> completely out of our reach without a significant amount of expensive
>>> assistive technology.
>>>
>>> There is one free solution that can read many PDF documents. It is called
>>> PDF2TXT, and it has been developed by a blind computer programmer. Visit
>>> http://www.empowermentzone.com/p2tsetup.exe to install the program.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> Darrell
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>>
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaismail04%40gmai
>> l.com
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
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>> mail.com
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
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>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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From bookwormahb at earthlink.net  Sun Jan 24 20:34:52 2010
From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net (Ashley  Bramlett)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:34:52 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
References: <BLU0-SMTP8962BAD8479965C7B44D9EC4600@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <31CA10F554B04AEDB46245A424F22AA6@Ashley>

Hi Rachel,

Some pds work and others don't.  I use jaws too and find the same issues. 
If its an image, jaws will not read it.  But if you have a scanning program, 
that should convert for you.  I don't know how to do it, but I heard 
Openbook and Kurzweil will convert them.
If you can't read them, another option is printing them and scanning them in 
as well.

Ashley
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rachel Jacobs" <oceanrls at hotmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 10:12 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs


> Hello. I am a jaws user and I can't seem to get PDF files to read using 
> jaws. Does anyone have any suggestions?
> Thanks,
> Rachel Jacobs
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
> 



From loneblindjedi at samobile.net  Sun Jan 24 20:57:31 2010
From: loneblindjedi at samobile.net (Jedi)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:57:31 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] article from Debra Kendrick
Message-ID: <20100124205731.12739.448@web3.serotek.com>

What do you foks think about this article?

Respectfully,
Jedi


Original message:

> Article from the INDEPENDENCE TODAY
> Newspaper<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns =
> "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

> October 2009

> N.Y. Governor Paterson
> Blind to Tools of Success

> By Deborah Kendrick

> Several years ago, when I received some
> mystifyingly bad treatment at the hands of other
> people who shared my disability, a friend who was
> both black and blind comforted me with her
> insight. “Blind people can sometimes be like a
> basket of crabs,” she told me. “When one of them
> makes it to the top, the others scramble to pull
> him down.” Folks I thought to be my peers, in
> other words, were attacking me out of envy.

> I vowed I would never do that. I would fervently
> support anyone with any disability who achieved
> success in any field. We should all be one happy family, right?

> Then, following the 2006 elections, alarms went
> off that challenged that personal pledge. The
> good news was that New York state had elected a
> lieutenant governor who was both black and blind.
> The more troubling news was that David Paterson,
> that newly elected official, by declaring that he
> didn't use any of those blindness tools –
> Braille, assistive technology, a white cane –
> indicated to those who don't have disabilities
> that he was too cool for all that nonsense. Those
> of us who proudly use the tools of blindness, who
> depend on them to give us a competitive edge in a
> host of professional and educational
> environments, tried to be tolerant. I wanted to
> be first and foremost proud. A blind guy – a sort
> of brother to me in the disability family – was
> rising to the top, and it was cause for serious celebration.

> Governor Paterson clean shaven. A new image
> Of course, when Eliot Spitzer was caught with his
> pants down, so to speak, and Paterson rose to the
> very top of his state, sworn in as New York
> governor on March 17th, 2008, the media made even
> more noise about how this brilliant guy didn't
> need Braille or talking computers or any of that
> blind nonsense. He had a superhuman memory, we
> were told, and relied heavily on staff. His staff
> read important memos and documents into voicemail
> messages that he listened to at all hours.

> Voicemail messages? What?

> He’s governor of one of our most important
> states, and he doesn't use a computer? Still, I
> reminded myself to be tolerant. Each of us has
> different techniques, different ways to
> accomplish the same goal. One deaf person reads
> lips. Another uses American Sign Language.
> Another uses Signed English. And on it goes. The
> man was governor, after all. He didn't have to do
> things the way other blind people do them to earn
> our support. He was one of us, and we should stand behind him.

> Then Paterson started doing really dumb things.
> He didn't always know the facts. He made
> decisions and then, under pressure of one kind or
> another, reversed them. He appointed a lieutenant
> governor when nobody was sure he was even allowed
> to do that and who, to add insult to injury, had
> trampled with dirty boots on transportation
> prospects for New Yorkers with disabilities.

> He seemed to “get it” when he responded with
> disdain to the "Saturday Night Live" skit that
> ridiculed his blindness. And yet, he didn't
> hesitate to grab a few laughs himself at the
> possible expense of people with disabilities when
> he appeared in a wheelchair for a charity gig.

> More recently, he has vetoed one bill that would
> prevent discrimination against people with
> disabilities in public facilities in his state
> and another that would require all polling places
> to be made physically accessible.

> OK, we could argue, just because he has a
> disability doesn't mean he has to always agree
> with us, supporting every bill that comes down
> the political pike to improve the quality of life
> for New Yorkers with disabilities. Shouldn't we
> still support him? He’s both black and blind, after all.

> The proverbial “last straw” in struggling to hang
> on as a cheerleader for this New York governor
> came when I started seeing references in the
> press linking his failures to his blindness. One
> New York state senator, Diane Savino, was widely
> quoted as saying, in effect, that hey, even
> though the guy is brilliant, he’s blind, after
> all, and being blind means he can't use the same
> digital tools -- such as e-mail or a Blackberry -- as his peers.

> Wait a New York minute! And let me do some deep
> breathing so as not to do anything undignified
> like spew bad words in my own e-mail or Smartphone messages!

> One headline read: “It’s not his race, it’s his
> blindness.” Let me set the record straight: “It”
> -- his failure to lead -- is not because of his
> race or his blindness. It’s the man himself. But
> blindness is something I know well and know more
> than a little bit about with regard to tools and
> techniques, so let me tell you now what I was suppressing all along.

> His avoidance – since childhood – of tools
> related to blindness, don't make him superior to
> other blind people, but rather inferior. He can't
> read print but refused to learn Braille. That’s
> denial to the point of masochism. In other words,
> he’s illiterate by choice! Why, I wonder, if he’s
> so “brilliant” did it take him 12 years to get
> two advanced degrees, when lots of “ordinary”
> blind people have obtained those same two degrees
> in six? And even though the second of those two
> degrees is a law degree, he never went into
> practice as a lawyer because he couldn't pass the
> bar exam. Why was that? Was it because he
> couldn't read Braille or use a computer? Now, in
> all fairness, I don't know the answer to that
> question, but his explanation is that he didn't
> receive adequate accommodations. But what would
> those accommodations be, anyway, for a man who is
> blind but doesn't know how to use any of the
> tools that similarly educated blind people avail themselves of daily?

> You could say it’s not his fault. When he was a
> child, New York City schools couldn't promise
> that he wouldn't receive any special education,
> and his parents moved to a suburb where he could
> go to public school “unhindered” by special ed.
> Now, maybe that was a good thing. I wasn't there.
> But it sounds to me like being perceived as
> sighted was more important to the family than
> getting the best education possible.

> And so, here we have a 21st-century governor –
> the first legally blind governor to serve in any
> state longer than 11 days – and he’s using 1960s
> or '70s tools to do his job. Staffers read
> materials onto tapes and into voicemail for him.
> He has no means of prompting himself with notes,
> which would be effortless had he taken the time
> to learn to read and write Braille.

> Had he been governor in 1975, the tools he now
> uses would have been adequate because sighted
> people at the time were using them at the same
> level of sophistication. But those tools now are inadequate.

> Why doesn't Paterson use a computer with one of
> the popular screen-reading programs, such as JAWS
> or Window-Eyes or System Access? If he did, 99
> percent of all documents generated by other
> computers could then simply be e-mailed to him.
> If he wanted to travel light, he could carry a
> netbook (a small laptop computer) or a thumb
> drive, into which staffers could pop anything he
> needed to read. With practice, he could do what
> blind professionals all over the world do – crank
> their reading speed up to several hundred words a
> minute and get through material as quickly as any
> sighted politician. Add that to his amazing
> memory, and he could have been a governor to make us proud.

> Why does he have staffers read newspapers to him?
> For free, he could sign up for the National
> Federation of the Blind's NEWSLINE, a telephone
> service that would enable him to read any of 220
> newspapers around the country, from any phone
> anywhere, at any speed he chose. He could zip
> through articles at his own speed as quickly or
> even quicker than his sighted peers.

> Now, this “brilliant” guy is using tools that
> were state of the art when Jimmy Carter was
> president, has an approval rating that has
> dropped at a staggering rate, and against even
> the advice of President Obama, said he’ll run
> again in 2010. It’s pitiable, really, but I’m not
> feeling sorry for him. How can I when, along with
> his own failure, he’s pulling the overall
> acceptance of and employment opportunities for
> other blind people down with him?

> I’m not saying I could do his job. I don't think
> I could. But I am saying that lots of people who
> are blind could and do it brilliantly. He wanted
> so much to hide his blindness that now, in his
> appalling unpopularity, it’s the one thing that
> outsiders are interpreting as his weakness. It
> hasn't been. His weakness has been his own
> arrogance and denial of reality. It’s a shame.
> With proper training, he might have done a good job.

> But he isn't doing one, and I’m OK with having
> broken my promise to myself. I know now that just
> because he has a disability doesn't mean I have
> to like him. And if he’s going to fall headlong
> into the basket, I don't want him to kick the
> rest of us down to the bottom as well.

> Deborah Kendrick is a newspaper columnist, editor
> and poet. She is currently working on a biography of Dr. Abraham Nemeth.



> ----------


> _______________________________________________
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> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net

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From raniaismail04 at gmail.com  Sun Jan 24 21:00:52 2010
From: raniaismail04 at gmail.com (Rania)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 16:00:52 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
References: <BLU0-SMTP8962BAD8479965C7B44D9EC4600@phx.gbl><6CD7B1E8BCAE4D708377F1A5CEDF42FD@DarrellPC><002701ca9d00$72974ec0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1><3B107AD464F649EE8472E9507311F91E@DarrellPC><002301ca9d10$4f9f7bd0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>
	<0CD1EE54B4DF49A484BA5CB29AB98B9B@DarrellPC>
Message-ID: <000b01ca9d38$51656790$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>

Thank you! I will have to do that!
Rania,
"For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
See you at the finish line."
~Christopher Reeve

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Darrell Shandrow" <darrell.shandrow at gmail.com>
To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 2:21 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs


> Hello Rania,
>
> My experience is that PDF2TXT is quite a bit easier to use than Adobe
> Reader, but it's free, so you may try it for yourself. :-)
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On 
> Behalf
> Of Rania
> Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 9:14 AM
> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
>
> Is it easier to use then Adoby? just asking because I don't like Adoby all
> that much.
> Rania,
> "For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
> For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
> For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
> See you at the finish line."
> ~Christopher Reeve
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Darrell Shandrow" <darrell.shandrow at gmail.com>
> To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'"
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 9:50 AM
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
>
>
>> Hello Rania,
>>
>> I assume you're asking about PDF2TXT? The documentation is below:
>>
>> Version 3.3
>> April 6, 2009
>> Copyright 2005 - 2009 by Jamal Mazrui
>> LGPL license
>> Contents
>> Description
>> Installation
>> Choosing PDF Source and TXT Target
>> Text Extraction Settings
>> Viewing Area
>> Toggling between a File and Folder List
>> Configuration Check Boxes
>> Action Buttons
>> URL Source,
>> Hot Keys
>> The Log File
>> Command Line Operation
>> File Association
>> Development Notes
>> Description
>>
>> PDF to TXT (also written PDF2TXT) is a free program for converting files
>> in
>> Portable Document Format (.pdf extension) to plain text(.txt extension).
>> The
>> program lets you convert multiple files in a single, batch operation,
>> either
>> from a GUI dialog or a console-mode command line. The resulting text 
>> files
>> can be read in almost any editing or viewing program. PDF2TXT, itself,
>> also
>> includes a plain text view for reading PDF files. The program should work
>> on
>> any version of Windows.
>>
>> Installation
>>
>> The installation program for PDF2TXT is called p2tsetup.exe. When
>> executed,
>> it prompts for an installation folder for the program. The default folder
>> is
>> c:\pdf2txt. Although this is not a standard location for programs on a
>> Windows computer, a benefit is fewer keystrokes to type whenever you
>> manually enter the path to a PDF file or folder. If you want a standard
>> installation folder, however, respond to the prompt by entering
>> C:\Program Files\PDF to Text
>> The installation process creates a program group for PDF2TXT on the
>> Windows
>> start menu, containing choices to launch PDF2TXT, read Documentation for
>> PDF2TXT, and uninstall PDF2TXT. Also created is a desktop shortcut with 
>> an
>> associated hot key, enabling PDF2TXT to be conveniently launched by
>> pressing
>> Control+Alt+Shift+P. Another shortcut is placed in the Send To folder so
>> that a PDF may be viewed in PDF2TXT via the context menu in Windows
>> Explorer.
>>
>>
>> Choosing PDF Source and TXT Target
>>
>> After PDF2TXT is installed, launching it activates a main dialog with
>> several capabilities and settings. First, it prompts you to select a PDF
>> source. This can be either a single PDF file or a folder containing
>> multiple
>> PDF files (another section explains how it can also be an Internet URL).
>> In
>> the initial edit box, you can type the full path to the file or folder
>> desired. Alternatively, you can tab to buttons that invoke different sub
>> dialogs depending on whether you want to choose a file or folder as the
>> PDF
>> source. (Yet another option, described later, is to pass the path to the
>> PDF
>> source as a parameter on the command line when pdf2txt.exe is launched.)
>> By default, the PDF source is the folder c:\pdf2TXT\pdf. Any source may 
>> be
>> chosen, however, and the program remembers the last one used.
>>
>> Similarly, an edit box and associated button let you specify the target
>> folder for converted files. These will have the same base name, but an
>> extension of .txt instead of .pdf. The default target folder is
>> c:\pdf2TXT\txt. Note that the PDF source may be either a file or folder,
>> but
>> the TXT target is always a folder.
>>
>>
>> Text Extraction Settings
>>
>> Two settings fundamentally affect how text is extracted from a PDF. If 
>> the
>> PDF requires a password to unlock its content, type it in the edit box
>> provided. If the PDF is an image format without textual characters --
>> e.g.,
>> the result of a scan -- mark the checkbox so that optical character
>> recognition (OCR) is performed instead of the usual techniques of
>> extracting
>> text. This OCR technique was originally posted at
>> http://EmpowermentZone.com/pdf2ocr.zip
>> OCR is a much slower and more error-prone process, but it may be the best
>> option when the usual methods do not work. This technique uses Google
>> Tesseract, the best open source OCR available, which is not as good as
>> commercial OCR packages. Due to technical issues, there is not a simple
>> way
>> of aborting an OCR process that has already started. It is possible,
>> however, by launching another copy of PDF2TXT, which clears the deck
>> during
>> its startup phase.
>>
>> Another checkbox lets you additionally produce a .htm target file -- in
>> HTML
>> format. This uses a different conversion technique, originally posted at
>> http://EmpowermentZone.com/pdf2htm.zip
>>
>> This may be worth trying if the .txt result is unsatisfactory. It may 
>> also
>> be useful for webmasters who want to post AN HTML alternative to a PDF.
>> The
>> conversion translates visual aspects of the PDF such as fonts, but not
>> structural elements such as headings, unfortunately. To further increase
>> conversion options, a different technique is also used for producing the
>> .txt file with this checkbox, using the PDFToText.exe utility that is 
>> also
>> seperately available at
>> http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/home.html
>>
>>
>> Viewing Area
>>
>> Within the main dialog, a read-only, multi-line edit control serves as a
>> viewing area between the source and target controls just discussed. This
>> scrollable view can show one of three kinds of information: (1) the text
>> of
>> a PDF, 2) a list of PDF files, or (3) the results of a batch conversion.
>> The
>> label for the viewing area changes to indicate the kind of information
>> being
>> shown: "View file," "View folder," or "View results."
>> You can navigate the viewing area with standard windows keystrokes, e.g.,
>> Control+Home or Control+End to go to the top or bottom of text. Control+F
>> lets you search forward for a string of characters, and Control+Shift+F
>> lets
>> you search backward. F3 searches for the same string again in the forward
>> direction, and Shift+F3 searches again backward. Control+G lets you go to
>> a
>> percent completion point through the file being viewed. Control+K sets a
>> bookmark for the file, Control+Shift+K clears it, and Alt+K goes to it.
>>
>> You can press Shift with arrow keys to select text or Control+A to select
>> all. Alternatively, you can press F8 to set the starting point of a
>> selection, navigate to the ending point desired, and then press Shift+F8
>> to
>> select the text between these points.
>>
>> Press Control+C to copy selected text to the clipboard. Alternatively,
>> press
>> Control+Shift+C, or Alt+F8, to copy and append to the clipboard, adding 
>> to
>> rather than replacing its existing text. A form feed or page break
>> character
>> (ANSI code 12) will separate each clip copied there. Control+F8 is a
>> shortcut that copies all text in the viewing area without having to 
>> select
>> it first, equivalent to Control+A followd by Control+C.
>>
>> If you invoke the Open button and choose a PDF from its sub dialog, the
>> text
>> of the PDF will be placed in the viewing area, and keyboard focus will go
>> there. If you invoke the Select button to choose a PDF folder instead of 
>> a
>> file, its list of PDFs will be shown. A status bar at the bottom of the
>> dialog indicates the current position in the viewing area.
>>
>>
>> Toggling between a File and Folder List
>>
>> The Look button behaves in a special way when the viewing area has focus.
>> If
>> you press Alt+L when in the viewing area, PDF2TXT will toggle between a
>> folder and file view. If viewing a folder, PDF2TXT will switch to a view
>> of
>> the file that was on the line containing the caret. If viewing a file,
>> PDF2TXT will switch to a view of the folder that contained the file. In
>> addition, PDF2TXT will automatically search for the name of the file last
>> viewed and place the caret just after it if found.
>> This feature lets you easily explore the PDFs in a folder, one after
>> another. Initially, You might display a list of files by pressing Alt+L
>> when
>> the PDF source is a folder. You can then arrow down through the list 
>> until
>> you find a PDF you want to view. At that point, press Alt+L to view the
>> file. When you want to continue exploring the folder list again, press
>> Alt+L
>> to return to it at the position of the file you last viewed.
>>
>>
>> Configuration Check Boxes
>>
>> Four check boxes let you configure PDF2TXT. The one labeled "Include
>> subfolders," will look for PDF files not only in the specified folder, 
>> but
>> in subfolders under it. For example, you could probably convert many PDF
>> files on your computer by checking this setting and specifying the c:\
>> root
>> folder as the PDF source! This setting is unchecked by default.
>> The check box labeled "Move PDF when done" will transfer a PDF to a
>> subfolder called "Done" after a successful conversion. This is a 
>> subfolder
>> of the PDF2TXT program folder, with a default location of 
>> c:\pdf2TXT\done.
>> The benefit of this check box is that PDF files are stored away for 
>> backup
>> after they have been converted to text. This setting is unchecked by
>> default.
>>
>> The checkbox labeled "Replace TXT if found" determines whether to skip a
>> conversion if a corresponding target file already exists. If you do not
>> check the setting to move source files when done, you may want to check
>> this
>> setting so that unnecessary time is not spent on repeatedly converting 
>> PDF
>> files left in the source folder, since they then will be skipped if
>> corresponding target files already exist. This setting is checked by
>> default.
>>
>> The Append check box determines whether a detailed conversion log file is
>> newly created each time a conversion is run. This setting is checked by
>> default so that previous information is not lost. A section below further
>> describes the log file.
>>
>>
>> Action Buttons
>>
>> The remaining controls of the main dialog are buttons that perform 
>> various
>> actions. The Convert button is the default: the one that will be 
>> activated
>> by pressing Enter on any control except another button. The viewing area
>> will show the results of a batch conversion. This information includes 
>> the
>> number of pages in each PDF converted. It also indicates when a 
>> conversion
>> was either not possible or was skipped because the target file already
>> existed and you chose not to replace files.
>> Press Escape if you need to abort a batch conversion of many files that 
>> is
>> taking too long! Note that this program is relatively quick, however,
>> compared to other available methods of converting PDF files to text.
>> Moreover, its batch mode feature lets you run conversions unattended.
>>
>> The source for a conversion is treated differently if the viewing area 
>> has
>> focus. If viewing a list of PDFs in a folder or on a web page, then
>> PDF2TXT
>> regards the source as the file name on the current line (the one
>> containing
>> the caret). Thus, you can cursor to a PDF of interest and press Enter to
>> convert it to text. If successfully converted, PDF2TXT assumes you may
>> also
>> want to examine its content in the viewing area, so a Look command is
>> automatically performed as well (see below). If there is a conversion
>> error,
>> however, PDF2TXT leaves the error message in the viewing area. If you 
>> have
>> been examining a list of PDFs and decide you want to convert them all
>> rather
>> than a single file, navigate to the top line of the viewing area that
>> lists
>> the number of PDFs in the list, and then press Enter.
>>
>> If the source edit box already specifies what you want to view, or a path
>> is
>> easy to type into it, then the Look button is quicker to use than the 
>> Open
>> or Select sub dialog. Activating the Look button takes the current source
>> specification and goes to a view of either the text of a source file or
>> the
>> list of a source folder, putting focus in the view area so you can read
>> the
>> information.
>>
>> The Defaults button restores the default configuration settings of
>> PDF2TXT.
>> You can use it to return to the initial folders and checkbox settings.
>>
>> The Explorer button lets you browse the source, target, or done folder
>> with
>> Windows Explorer. It allows you to examine files that either have been
>> converted or would not convert--thus needing other approaches to access
>> their content.
>>
>> The Quit button closes PDF2TXT. Alt+F4 does the same thing.
>>
>> The Help button displays this complete documentation in the default web
>> browser. For context-sensitive help on a particular control, press F1 
>> when
>> it has focus. Hence, you can tab through the dialog and press F1 on each
>> control to learn how to use it.
>>
>>
>> URL Source,
>>
>> If you are connected to the Internet, you can specify a URL as a PDF
>> source
>> instead of a file or folder on your local computer. The URL can be the
>> complete download path to a PDF on the Internet. Alternatively, the URL
>> can
>> be the path to a web page containing one or more links to PDF files. You
>> can
>> use Internet Explorer to navigate to such a web page and then invoke the
>> "Grab URL" button to put its URL into the source edit box of PDF2TXT.
>> The Look button works with a URL source similarly to a local file or
>> folder.
>> For example, you can press Alt+L to view a list of PDFs on a web page. 
>> The
>> toggling feature, described above, is also supported, allowing you to
>> consecutively examine the PDFs linked to a web page. If you view a PDF on
>> the Internet, PDF2TXT will automatically download a copy to the PDF
>> subfolder of the program folder, e.g., to
>> c:\pdf2txt\pdf
>>
>> The Convert button also works with a URL source. Thus, you can easily
>> convert all PDFs on a web page with a single batch operation!
>>
>>
>> Hot Keys
>>
>> Almost all controls of PDF2TXT are directly usable with unique, mnemonic
>> Alt
>> key combinations based on the initial letter of the control's label. 
>> Thus,
>> as you become familiar with the controls, you can operate them more
>> quickly
>> with hot keys rather than navigating to them with the tab key or mouse.
>> For
>> example, press Alt+P to go to the edit box for typing a PDF source, or
>> Alt+S
>> to select a source folder from a tree view of your computer. Press Alt+L
>> to
>> look at a file or folder, or Alt+V to red what is already in the viewing
>> area. Press Alt+I to toggle the "Include subfolders" setting, or Alt+D to
>> restore all defaults. The text extraction settings in the second row of
>> controls use a letter corresponding to the second syllable or word, i.e.,
>> Alt+W for the Password edit box and Alt+F for the Image Format checkbox.
>>
>> The Log File
>>
>> The conversion log file is named log.txt and located in the Done 
>> subfolder
>> of the PDF2TXT program folder. It records information about each attempt
>> to
>> convert a PDF to TXT file. It indicates whether the conversion succeeded
>> (meaning any resulting text), and then lists many attributes of the PDF,
>> including security settings that could explain a failed conversion.
>> There is a choice to view the log file in the PDF2TXT program group off
>> the
>> Start Menu. You can also get to the file via the Explore button of the
>> PDF2TXT program, choosing the Done folder to navigate with Windows
>> Explorer.
>> Additionally, you can open the file in another application through its
>> direct path (default settings):
>> c:\pdf2txt\done\log.txt
>>
>> If the log file grows larger than you want, simply delete it or uncheck
>> the
>> setting that configures PDF2TXT to append to an existing log file. Each
>> use
>> of the Convert button would then generate a new log file. This 
>> information
>> is more detailed than the results placed in the viewing area.
>>
>>
>> Command Line Operation
>>
>> The pdf2txt.exe executable may be run with various command line
>> parameters.
>> The parameters can set values for controls in the main dialog. Parameters
>> can also cause PDF2TXT to run in an automatic, console mode--without a
>> dialog box or further user intervention involved.
>> When the .pdf extension is associated with the PDF2TXT program (explained
>> in
>> another section), Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer will open a PDF
>> file
>> by launching PDF2TXT with the name of the PDF passed as a parameter on 
>> the
>> command line. If PDF2TXT is launched with more than one command line
>> parameter, however, the program will assume you want to run it in console
>> rather than GUI mode. The syntax for parameters is described as follows.
>> If
>> a PDF source file, folder, or URL is specified, it must be the first
>> parameter. If a TXT target folder is specified, it must be the second
>> parameter. The source or target must be enclosed in quotes if its name
>> contains spaces.
>>
>> All parameters besides source and target names begin with a space and
>> forward slash (/), followed by the hot key letter in the dialog
>> corresponding to the setting affected. A trailing plus (+) sign in the
>> parameter indicates a status of On, and a minus (-) sign indicates Off.
>> The
>> plus sign can also be omitted to indicate On. Capitalization does not
>> matter. Here is a list of parameters:
>>
>> a = Automatic, console mode (use /a- to force GUI mode with multiple
>> parameters)
>> i = Include subfolders
>> m = Move PDF when done
>> r = Replace TXT if found
>> d = Default settings (no /d- is defined)
>> g = Grab URL as source from Internet Explorer (no /g- is defined)
>>
>> For example, to convert all files using default settings except for the
>> Move
>> setting, you could enter:
>> pdf2txt /d /m
>>
>> To use current settings except grab a URL as source, enter:
>> pdf2txt /a /g
>>
>> To convert files from a temporary folder to the current folder, enter:
>> pdf2txt "c:\temp files" .
>>
>> To do the same, but in GUI rather than console mode, enter:
>> pdf2txt "c:\temp files" . /a-
>>
>> For greater console mode convenience, another version of PDF2TXT, having
>> the
>> abbreviated name p2t.exe, is also available in the program folder. This
>> version only runs in console mode, whether zero, one, or more parameters
>> are
>> specified. It uses "standard output" to display conversion results. The
>> shorter executable name means less characters to type on the command 
>> line.
>> For example, to run a batch conversion in console mode using the current
>> settings of PDF2TXT, you could simply enter
>> p2t
>>
>> Like DOS commands generally, the above assumes that you have either made
>> c:\pdf2txt the current directory or included it in a PATH statement.
>>
>>
>> File Association
>>
>> The PDF2TXT group on the Start Menu contains shortcuts for changing what
>> program automatically opens a file with a .pdf extension in Windows
>> Explorer. If you decide that you like the interface of PDF2TXT enough to
>> make it the default program for PDF files, you can set the file
>> association
>> accordingly. Later, if you decide you want to return to the conventional
>> association, you can do that, too.
>> When the .pdf extension is associated with PDF2TXT, an application such 
>> as
>> Windows Explorer when opening a file, or Internet Explorer after
>> downloading
>> a file, will pass the name of the PDF as a command-line parameter to
>> pdf2txt.exe. When the program is launched in this way, it automatically
>> invokes the Look button, placing text of the PDF in the viewing area and
>> putting keyboard focus there.
>>
>>
>> Development Notes
>>
>> I welcome comments and suggestions on PDF to TXT. For the technically
>> curious, I developed it with the PowerBASIC programming language from
>> http://PowerBASIC.com
>> and a couple of third party libraries: EZGUI from
>> http://EZGUI.com
>> and QuickPDF from
>> http://QuickPDF.com
>> An alternate text extraction technique is tried if the first one fails,
>> using the GetText.exe utility that is also available seperately at
>> http://www.kryltech.com
>> The file GetText.txt in the PDF2TXT program folder contains the license
>> for
>> this utility.
>>
>> The OCR is done by incorporating the open source PDF2OCR package,
>> available
>> at
>> http://EmpowermentZone.com/pdf2ocr.zip
>>
>> Some status messages are spoken with the JAWS, System Access, or
>> Window-Eyes
>> screen reader if currently active. These direct speech messages are
>> produced
>> with APIs via a component of the SayTools library, which is also 
>> available
>> seperately at
>> http://EmpowermentZone.com/saysetup.exe
>>
>> The PowerBASIC code to PDF2TXT, itself (but not commercial libraries
>> used),
>> is open source under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL), documented
>> at
>> http://gnu.org
>>
>> This Windows program is the successor to my first version of PDF2TXT,
>> developed several years ago as a DOS-based, command-line only utility.
>> Ideas
>> and feedbak from the discussion list
>> ProgrammingBlind at FreeLists.org
>> have aided the design and testing of PDF2TXT. The latest version is
>> available at the same address,
>> http://EmpowermentZone.com/p2tsetup.exe
>>
>> You can download it with the Elevate Version hotkey, F11. This checks
>> whether a newer version is available, and offers to install it.
>>
>> Jamal Mazrui
>> jamal at EmpowermentZone.com
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
>> Behalf
>> Of Rania
>> Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 7:21 AM
>> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
>>
>> I have never herd about this!
>> Can you give me more information?
>> Rania,
>> "For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
>> For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
>> For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
>> See you at the finish line."
>> ~Christopher Reeve
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Darrell Shandrow" <darrell.shandrow at gmail.com>
>> To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'"
>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 6:31 AM
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
>>
>>
>>> Hello Rachel,
>>>
>>> In order to help you in the most effective way possible, let me start by
>>> asking you some questions. Don't worry if you can't answer them all. 
>>> Just
>>> do
>>> your best and I'll guide you to the rest of the needed answers.
>>>
>>> What version of JAWS are you running? Do you have Adobe Reader on your
>>> computer? If so, which version? Do you have any scanning and reading
>>> products like Kurzweil K1000 or OpenBook installed on your computer? If
>>> so,
>>> what versions?
>>>
>>> There are a number of ways to read PDF documents. Some PDFs are fully
>>> accessible, many can be read with some difficulty and far too many 
>>> remain
>>> completely out of our reach without a significant amount of expensive
>>> assistive technology.
>>>
>>> There is one free solution that can read many PDF documents. It is 
>>> called
>>> PDF2TXT, and it has been developed by a blind computer programmer. Visit
>>> http://www.empowermentzone.com/p2tsetup.exe to install the program.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> Darrell
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>>
>>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaismail04%40gmai
>> l.com
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/darrell.shandrow%40g
>> mail.com
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaismail04%40gmai
> l.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
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> mail.com
>
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From chriswright11 at verizon.net  Sun Jan 24 21:16:03 2010
From: chriswright11 at verizon.net (Christopher Wright)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 16:16:03 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] how to meet more people and get involved in activities
References: <BLU0-SMTP8962BAD8479965C7B44D9EC4600@phx.gbl>
	<0793935AD9BE43A0A48AFD05430D5743@BeckySabo>
Message-ID: <000601ca9d3a$74864120$2f01a8c0@myhome.westell.com>

Hi,
If your school's calendar is available online, use that as a resource.
Other than that, just open your mouth and start asking questions.


From darrell.shandrow at gmail.com  Sun Jan 24 21:19:26 2010
From: darrell.shandrow at gmail.com (Darrell Shandrow)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 14:19:26 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
In-Reply-To: <31CA10F554B04AEDB46245A424F22AA6@Ashley>
References: <BLU0-SMTP8962BAD8479965C7B44D9EC4600@phx.gbl>
	<31CA10F554B04AEDB46245A424F22AA6@Ashley>
Message-ID: <06CFEC43BC5F45E2ADAA51FC542D7A20@DarrellPC>

Hello Ashley,

You can convert image-based PDFs if printing is allowed by opening them in
Adobe Reader, pressing control+p and selecting the Kurzweil or OpenBook
virtual printer.
 

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Ashley Bramlett
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 1:35 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs

Hi Rachel,

Some pds work and others don't.  I use jaws too and find the same issues. 
If its an image, jaws will not read it.  But if you have a scanning program,
that should convert for you.  I don't know how to do it, but I heard
Openbook and Kurzweil will convert them.
If you can't read them, another option is printing them and scanning them in
as well.

Ashley
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rachel Jacobs" <oceanrls at hotmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 10:12 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs


> Hello. I am a jaws user and I can't seem to get PDF files to read using 
> jaws. Does anyone have any suggestions?
> Thanks,
> Rachel Jacobs
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthl
ink.net
> 


_______________________________________________
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To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/darrell.shandrow%40g
mail.com



From djdrocks4ever at gmail.com  Sun Jan 24 21:47:15 2010
From: djdrocks4ever at gmail.com (David Dunphy)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 16:47:15 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] article from Debra Kendrick
References: <20100124205731.12739.448@web3.serotek.com>
Message-ID: <20B6188102F7497DA42618E347FC2FA6@radio360usa>

I couldn't agree with this article more. Well stated and well said.

*****
Tired of listening to the same old stations playing the same old songs over 
and over again?
Then check out an internet radio station with plenty of interesting 
programming. Visit the home of Radio360 Where Variety Matters Most at
http://www.radio360.us
Check it out you won't be disappointed 


__________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 4802 (20100124) __________

The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.

http://www.eset.com





From blackbyrdfly at gmail.com  Sun Jan 24 22:06:49 2010
From: blackbyrdfly at gmail.com (Jamie Principato)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 17:06:49 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] how to meet more people and get involved in activities
In-Reply-To: <000601ca9d3a$74864120$2f01a8c0@myhome.westell.com>
References: <BLU0-SMTP8962BAD8479965C7B44D9EC4600@phx.gbl>
	<0793935AD9BE43A0A48AFD05430D5743@BeckySabo>
	<000601ca9d3a$74864120$2f01a8c0@myhome.westell.com>
Message-ID: <63af025c1001241406r4340c7f9i26d4d7ffc926c858@mail.gmail.com>

Hi, Becky! My name is Jamie. I'm a freshman at Florida State University.
When it comes to getting involved on and off campus. I'm wondering what's
standing in your way? Is it an issue of transportation? Or perhaps your
school doesn't list all of their activities on an online calendar? This will
give us a better idea of what kind of advice to offer you.

-Jamie

On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 4:16 PM, Christopher Wright <
chriswright11 at verizon.net> wrote:

> Hi,.
> If your school's calendar is available online, use that as a resource.
> Other than that, just open your mouth and start asking questions.
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/blackbyrdfly%40gmail.com
>

From dsmithnfb at gmail.com  Sun Jan 24 22:24:03 2010
From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 14:24:03 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Come one, come all and talk about washington seminar!
Message-ID: <409c235c1001241424v69c935ecjb73270e5d5ea46e7@mail.gmail.com>

 It's time for the First conference call of 2010, and what topic could
be better than  that of Washington Seminar? - Nope, didn't think you'd
think of one :).
 Who?:  the   National Association of Blind students membership Committee.
What?: Washington Seminar 101
 Whuy?  Because you know you have questions about seminar. Yep, you know you do!
Where?: Conference call. Call-in information 712.775.7100 passcode: 257963
 When?:
Today! Janurary 24th at 7 p.m.  eastern.
We look forward to  having you on the  call!
  Warm Regards
 The Nabs membership committee.

-- 
Darian Smith
Skype: The_Blind_Truth
Windows Live: Lightningrod2010 at live.com
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


From dsmithnfb at gmail.com  Sun Jan 24 23:50:17 2010
From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:50:17 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] how to meet more people and get involved in activities
In-Reply-To: <63af025c1001241406r4340c7f9i26d4d7ffc926c858@mail.gmail.com>
References: <BLU0-SMTP8962BAD8479965C7B44D9EC4600@phx.gbl>
	<0793935AD9BE43A0A48AFD05430D5743@BeckySabo>
	<000601ca9d3a$74864120$2f01a8c0@myhome.westell.com>
	<63af025c1001241406r4340c7f9i26d4d7ffc926c858@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <409c235c1001241550i7548b653h67a27731ff86529c@mail.gmail.com>

Hi Amy,
  one thing that worked for me was  finding my campuses student
activities office or student union. That's always a good place to just
kind of hange out and ask questions.  I can tend to be shy, so  one
thing I use to remind myself to talk is that people tend to be  pretty
nice  folks and will be pretty willing to chat  in an  area on campus
where you are just hanging out.
 if you can find  out by either word of mouth,  or on website or
something  like that about clubs; that's also good .
 I hope that helps some.
  Best,
 Darian

On 1/24/10, Jamie Principato <blackbyrdfly at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, Becky! My name is Jamie. I'm a freshman at Florida State University.
> When it comes to getting involved on and off campus. I'm wondering what's
> standing in your way? Is it an issue of transportation? Or perhaps your
> school doesn't list all of their activities on an online calendar? This will
> give us a better idea of what kind of advice to offer you.
>
> -Jamie
>
> On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 4:16 PM, Christopher Wright <
> chriswright11 at verizon.net> wrote:
>
>> Hi,.
>> If your school's calendar is available online, use that as a resource.
>> Other than that, just open your mouth and start asking questions.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/blackbyrdfly%40gmail.com
>>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>


-- 
Darian Smith
Skype: The_Blind_Truth
Windows Live: Lightningrod2010 at live.com
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


From loneblindjedi at samobile.net  Mon Jan 25 00:04:07 2010
From: loneblindjedi at samobile.net (Jedi)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 19:04:07 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] how to meet more people and get involved in activities
Message-ID: <20100125000407.22176.45743@web3.serotek.com>

Also, keep in mind that you may be an introvert which isn't a bad 
thing. However, your tendencies for introversion/extroversion should 
always be kept in mind when determining appropriate social 
environments. If clubs and campus activities turn out not to be your 
thing, try hanging out at a coffee shop on or off campus. You can also 
try using social networking sites to make friends in your local area 
and meeting them personally if they seem friendly and normal enough. As 
you make friends, you may find that you prefer to hang out with only 
one or two people at a time. That works, too. in that case, feel free 
to envite them out or have them over to your home for dinner. One other 
option for finding friends is through the classes you're taking. If you 
sit next to someone in class you get along with or are particularly 
close to, you can always make social overtures in that direction. Any 
options are good options. Just remember that different people 
appreciate different social contexts and that's okay.

Respectfully,
Jedi

Original message:
> Hi Amy,
>   one thing that worked for me was  finding my campuses student
> activities office or student union. That's always a good place to just
> kind of hange out and ask questions.  I can tend to be shy, so  one
> thing I use to remind myself to talk is that people tend to be  pretty
> nice  folks and will be pretty willing to chat  in an  area on campus
> where you are just hanging out.
>  if you can find  out by either word of mouth,  or on website or
> something  like that about clubs; that's also good .
>  I hope that helps some.
>   Best,
>  Darian

> On 1/24/10, Jamie Principato <blackbyrdfly at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi, Becky! My name is Jamie. I'm a freshman at Florida State University.
>> When it comes to getting involved on and off campus. I'm wondering what's
>> standing in your way? Is it an issue of transportation? Or perhaps your
>> school doesn't list all of their activities on an online calendar? This will
>> give us a better idea of what kind of advice to offer you.

>> -Jamie

>> On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 4:16 PM, Christopher Wright <
>> chriswright11 at verizon.net> wrote:

>>> Hi,.
>>> If your school's calendar is available online, use that as a resource.
>>> Other than that, just open your mouth and start asking questions.

>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:

>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/blackbyrdfly%40gmail.com

>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com



> --
> Darian Smith
> Skype: The_Blind_Truth
> Windows Live: Lightningrod2010 at live.com
> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
> www.TeachBlindStudents.org

> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net

-- 
Email services provided by the System Access Mobile Network.  Visit 
www.serotek.com to learn more about accessibility anywhere.


From kc2992a at student.american.edu  Mon Jan 25 00:08:33 2010
From: kc2992a at student.american.edu (Katy Carroll)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 19:08:33 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] how to meet more people and get involved in activities
In-Reply-To: <0793935AD9BE43A0A48AFD05430D5743@BeckySabo>
References: <BLU0-SMTP8962BAD8479965C7B44D9EC4600@phx.gbl>
	<0793935AD9BE43A0A48AFD05430D5743@BeckySabo>
Message-ID: <2fdbeb321001241608n6f33f6efpc1000b9472c14338@mail.gmail.com>

Dear Becky,

I am a student in Washington DC, and I have a generally quiet personality,
so I sometimes have a difficult time being social and starting friendships.
I have been able to overcome that though. my best advice to you is to find
something you are passionate about and find the club on campus that best
fits what you like to do - and show up at their meetings. Tat way, you will
be immediately surrounded by people that you automatically have something in
common with. No need to search for a conversation starter.

Best,
Kate

On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 3:28 PM, becky sabo <beckyasabo at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear List,
> My name is Becky Sabo.  I live in Englewood Colorado.  My question is how
> to
> get involved on campus and off campus to meet more people and also get
> involved in other activities.  I do not have a lot of friends and on the
> weekends I am usually board because I do not have plans to do anything or
> with any one.  If any suggestions I would appreciate that a lot.
> Sincerely
> Becky Sabo
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
> Behalf
> Of Rachel Jacobs
> Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 7:12 PM
> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
> Subject: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
>
> Hello. I am a jaws user and I can't seem to get PDF files to read using
> jaws. Does anyone have any suggestions?
> Thanks,
> Rachel Jacobs
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/beckyasabo%40gmail.c
> om<http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/beckyasabo%40gmail.c%0Aom>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kc2992a%40student.american.edu
>



-- 
Kathryn CARROLL
American University
631 521 3018

From dsmithnfb at gmail.com  Mon Jan 25 00:22:08 2010
From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 16:22:08 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] NABS Conference call happening now.
Message-ID: <409c235c1001241622wf2b7e3bj6efa40b61f91ca7f@mail.gmail.com>

Hi all,
   just  to let you know,  the conference call for the nabs membership
focusing on washington seminar is is currrently in progress.  If you
would like to be in on the  call you still can
  check it  out at  712.775.7100  passcode 257963
 (may have given the   wrong code before, if  so; my appoligies).
  Thanks,
  Darian


-- 
Darian Smith
Skype: The_Blind_Truth
Windows Live: Lightningrod2010 at live.com
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


From mrsmigs at migliorelli.org  Sun Jan 24 02:29:08 2010
From: mrsmigs at migliorelli.org (Maryann Migliorelli)
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 2010 19:29:08 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] The Ozone
References: <3EA7C82A5F184F43B1499212BA53C7A6@kevin9ee0841f6>
Message-ID: <6E62003C57514625A1D2877161C4B02F@PAULLAPTOP>

There are links on Verizon.com in the accessibility section.  Look under 
Talks on that page.  Hope this helps.
Maryann Migliorelli 




From newmanrl at cox.net  Mon Jan 25 02:17:43 2010
From: newmanrl at cox.net (Robert Leslie Newman)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 20:17:43 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] New THOUGHT PROVOKER #153- My Sister's Keeper
Message-ID: <21AE125F28DE4FC59466879483B2D0BC@RobertLesliePC>

NABS Listers

RE: My Sister's Keeper 

 

the newest TP is about someone thinking that a blind person is in need of
protection. Have you ever had this experience? If so, how did you handle it?
If you have not read the PROVOKER, it follows.  Recall that I collect
responses and post them upon my web site for all the WWW to read and learn
from and that URL is-  <http://thoughtprovoker.info/>
Http://thoughtprovoker.info  If you wish to receive THOUGHT PROVOKERS sent
directly to you, just write me and ask, at-  newmanrl at cox.net 

 

 

 

THOUGHT PROVOKER 153

MY SISTER'S KEEPER

 

By Guest Author

David Lafleche

 

 Vito stopped when he noticed J.C. sitting at a desk near the stairwell.
"Hey, J.C.! Everybody's getting together for a pickup game at the ballpark.
Wanna come?"

 "No time," J.C. answered. "I need to stay here."

 "Hall Monitor?" Vito wondered. "What's up with that?"

 "You know the rumors," J.C. explained. "Some girls have complained about
guys hanging out too close to their locker room, fooling around. And right
now, Rhoda is in there with her friend Mandy. They can't see if some guy is
looking for trouble, so I'm pretty much on guard duty."

 "What, they can't spare a girl to do that?"

 "No, they're too busy. Besides, that's my sister in there, and I want to
make sure nobody hits up on her."

 Just then, Rhoda and Mandy came out of the locker room. Mandy had her dog,
Beartrap. Rhoda had her cane. But neither of them could have been prepared
for what happened next. As the girls entered the corridor, a string, unseen
to anyone, shot across. Having no time to react, Rhoda tripped over it,
sprawling on the floor. She was sore, but unharmed. Mandy and Beartrap
reacted angrily. Rhoda was confused. "What in the world was that?!" she
asked.

 Beartrap barked loudly, and pawed at a nearby door, apparently the source
of the string. "I'll tell you what it was!" J.C. growled as he opened the
door. "It was HIM!"

 Brian, a teammate of his on the baseball team, had been in the janitor's
closet, waiting for the right moment for his prank. J.C. grabbed him by the
collar, slamming him into the wall.

 "What do you think you're doing, you punk!" he shouted. "I knew you were
behind all those pranks, and now I've got proof!"

 "Oh, come on, J.C., lighten up!" Brian pleaded lamely. "I was just having a
little fun!"

 "You call that 'fun'? You could have killed her!"

 "Ah, she'll get over it. But I suppose this means I'm suspended from the
baseball team?"

 "Oh, more than you bargained for, punk! I'm going downtown and pressing
assault charges! I'll need you there, Rhoda. Mandy, do you want to come?"

 "I guess so," Rhoda replied. "But it will have to wait till school's over."

 "Dude, aren't you being a little harsh?" Vito asked.

 "No way," J.C. insisted. "To pull a stunt like that on a blind person,
especially my own sister, is the lowest of the low. This punk needs to get
the message." 

 Surprisingly, Mandy also took exception to this, though for her own
reasons. "Excuse me, Mister Laval, O hero of the defenseless! Who asked you?
Rhoda doesn't need your help! She can fight her own battles! Tell him,
Rhoda!"

 
Robert Leslie Newman
Author of THOUGHT PROVOKER
http://www.thoughtprovoker.info <http://www.thoughtprovoker.info/> 
Thought Is The First Step To Beyond
 

From brice.smith319 at gmail.com  Mon Jan 25 02:54:11 2010
From: brice.smith319 at gmail.com (Brice Smith)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 21:54:11 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Jaws and Flash
Message-ID: <679a273c1001241854t2682f35y79e965c5e06e791e@mail.gmail.com>

Hi,

I've been having a lot of trouble with Jaws and flash content lately,
and its gotten to the point where I can't ignore the problem anymore.

Using Jaws 11 and the latest version of Flash, I cannot interact with
flash videos or content at all with Internet Explorer. For example, If
I'm on a site that says to watch this video, jaws will not even
indicate flash content at all. If I'm trying to watch a Facebook
video, Jaws gives me no indication there's video content on the page
even though I can see visually the flash controls on the screen. If I
use Firefox on the exact same page, Jaws does say "Flash movie start,
flash movie end," but with no controls to watch the video. Internet
explorer with Jaws does not even indicate flash content begins and
ends.

This is unbelievably frustrating, as older versions of Jaws could at
least move within the flash video and let me find the play button.
Does anyone know what I can do?

Thanks,
Brice


From darrell.shandrow at gmail.com  Mon Jan 25 03:02:58 2010
From: darrell.shandrow at gmail.com (Darrell Shandrow)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 20:02:58 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] Jaws and Flash
In-Reply-To: <679a273c1001241854t2682f35y79e965c5e06e791e@mail.gmail.com>
References: <679a273c1001241854t2682f35y79e965c5e06e791e@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <9906393D8CD74BAFBD30873DF54005BE@DarrellPC>

Hello Brice,

Are you sure you haven't adjusted JAWS to ignore Flash content at some
point? This can be adjusted in the Configuration Manager as follows:

1. Open Internet Explorer.
2. Press Insert+6 to open Configuration Manager.
3. Press alt+s to pull down the Settings menu.
4. Arrow down to HTML and press enter.
5. Press control+tab until you reach Misc.
6. Tab to the "Ignore Flash content" checkbox and make sure it is not
checked. If it is, press the space bar.
7. Press enter to accept any changes and dismiss the dialogue.
8. Press control+s to save the configuration changes, then press alt+f4 to
close Configuration Manager.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Darrell


 

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Brice Smith
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 7:54 PM
To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
Subject: [nabs-l] Jaws and Flash

Hi,

I've been having a lot of trouble with Jaws and flash content lately, and
its gotten to the point where I can't ignore the problem anymore.

Using Jaws 11 and the latest version of Flash, I cannot interact with flash
videos or content at all with Internet Explorer. For example, If I'm on a
site that says to watch this video, jaws will not even indicate flash
content at all. If I'm trying to watch a Facebook video, Jaws gives me no
indication there's video content on the page even though I can see visually
the flash controls on the screen. If I use Firefox on the exact same page,
Jaws does say "Flash movie start, flash movie end," but with no controls to
watch the video. Internet explorer with Jaws does not even indicate flash
content begins and ends.

This is unbelievably frustrating, as older versions of Jaws could at least
move within the flash video and let me find the play button.
Does anyone know what I can do?

Thanks,
Brice

_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/darrell.shandrow%40g
mail.com



From bookwormahb at earthlink.net  Mon Jan 25 03:29:57 2010
From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net (bookwormahb at earthlink.net)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:29:57 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [nabs-l] how to meet more people and get involved in activities
Message-ID: <9667394.1264390197238.JavaMail.root@wamui-hunyo.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

Becky,

I know what you mean.  I also have always have a hard time making friends.  When you walk into a room of general conversation, its hard to join in because you don't know who is there.

I'd say start finding out what is offered on campus.  What clubs and activities are there?  Go to the student activities office and find out or go online to the activity page if that is accessible.  Fingure out what you are interested in and hopefully there will be a club with that interest.  What is your major?  Often clubs are made for majors.  
For me I joined a few things but still it was hard.  Not all the same people came to every meeting and I did not always know who was in the room.  I recognized a handful of regulars by voice.  I joined a bible study and did some campus ministry volunteering such as stuffing backpacks for children.  I also joined the psychology club but that was not very active.  

Good luck and let us know how it goes.  
Oh for off campus that is a big challenge due to transportation and other factors.  I suggest going out with friends to the mall or coffee shop; they could drive you.  
Check the newspapers and you might find some opportunities to volunteer in the community too.


Ashley

-----Original Message-----
>From: Katy Carroll <kc2992a at student.american.edu>
>Sent: Jan 24, 2010 7:08 PM
>To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>Subject: Re: [nabs-l] how to meet more people and get involved in activities
>
>Dear Becky,
>
>I am a student in Washington DC, and I have a generally quiet personality,
>so I sometimes have a difficult time being social and starting friendships.
>I have been able to overcome that though. my best advice to you is to find
>something you are passionate about and find the club on campus that best
>fits what you like to do - and show up at their meetings. Tat way, you will
>be immediately surrounded by people that you automatically have something in
>common with. No need to search for a conversation starter.
>
>Best,
>Kate
>
>On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 3:28 PM, becky sabo <beckyasabo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Dear List,
>> My name is Becky Sabo.  I live in Englewood Colorado.  My question is how
>> to
>> get involved on campus and off campus to meet more people and also get
>> involved in other activities.  I do not have a lot of friends and on the
>> weekends I am usually board because I do not have plans to do anything or
>> with any one.  If any suggestions I would appreciate that a lot.
>> Sincerely
>> Becky Sabo
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
>> Behalf
>> Of Rachel Jacobs
>> Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 7:12 PM
>> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
>> Subject: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
>>
>> Hello. I am a jaws user and I can't seem to get PDF files to read using
>> jaws. Does anyone have any suggestions?
>> Thanks,
>> Rachel Jacobs
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/beckyasabo%40gmail.c
>> om<http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/beckyasabo%40gmail.c%0Aom>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kc2992a%40student.american.edu
>>
>
>
>
>-- 
>Kathryn CARROLL
>American University
>631 521 3018
>_______________________________________________
>nabs-l mailing list
>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net


Merry Christmas and Happy New Year


From brice.smith319 at gmail.com  Mon Jan 25 03:51:23 2010
From: brice.smith319 at gmail.com (Brice Smith)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:51:23 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Jaws and Flash
In-Reply-To: <9906393D8CD74BAFBD30873DF54005BE@DarrellPC>
References: <679a273c1001241854t2682f35y79e965c5e06e791e@mail.gmail.com>
	<9906393D8CD74BAFBD30873DF54005BE@DarrellPC>
Message-ID: <679a273c1001241951u3bd7f110w57059558913e72bf@mail.gmail.com>

Hi Darrell,
I checked and the ignore flash content box was not checked.

I've also double-checked this by pressing insert plus V on a webpage
just to make sure.

Thanks

brice


On 1/24/10, Darrell Shandrow <darrell.shandrow at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello Brice,
>
> Are you sure you haven't adjusted JAWS to ignore Flash content at some
> point? This can be adjusted in the Configuration Manager as follows:
>
> 1. Open Internet Explorer.
> 2. Press Insert+6 to open Configuration Manager.
> 3. Press alt+s to pull down the Settings menu.
> 4. Arrow down to HTML and press enter.
> 5. Press control+tab until you reach Misc.
> 6. Tab to the "Ignore Flash content" checkbox and make sure it is not
> checked. If it is, press the space bar.
> 7. Press enter to accept any changes and dismiss the dialogue.
> 8. Press control+s to save the configuration changes, then press alt+f4 to
> close Configuration Manager.
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> Regards,
>
> Darrell
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
> Of Brice Smith
> Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 7:54 PM
> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> Subject: [nabs-l] Jaws and Flash
>
> Hi,
>
> I've been having a lot of trouble with Jaws and flash content lately, and
> its gotten to the point where I can't ignore the problem anymore.
>
> Using Jaws 11 and the latest version of Flash, I cannot interact with flash
> videos or content at all with Internet Explorer. For example, If I'm on a
> site that says to watch this video, jaws will not even indicate flash
> content at all. If I'm trying to watch a Facebook video, Jaws gives me no
> indication there's video content on the page even though I can see visually
> the flash controls on the screen. If I use Firefox on the exact same page,
> Jaws does say "Flash movie start, flash movie end," but with no controls to
> watch the video. Internet explorer with Jaws does not even indicate flash
> content begins and ends.
>
> This is unbelievably frustrating, as older versions of Jaws could at least
> move within the flash video and let me find the play button.
> Does anyone know what I can do?
>
> Thanks,
> Brice
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/darrell.shandrow%40g
> mail.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com
>


From serenacucco at verizon.net  Mon Jan 25 04:20:09 2010
From: serenacucco at verizon.net (Serena)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 23:20:09 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] how to meet more people and get involved in activities
References: <BLU0-SMTP8962BAD8479965C7B44D9EC4600@phx.gbl>
	<0793935AD9BE43A0A48AFD05430D5743@BeckySabo>
Message-ID: <00e901ca9d75$aeb03b40$0201a8c0@Serene>

Hi Beckie,

As others have mentioned, looking on the college web site for activities or 
contacting the student activities office can be helpful.  If these options 
aren't accessible or don't work, if you happen to be religious, ask the 
priest (or whatever religious figure) on campus for guidance.  Religious 
figures are often open-minded people and quite tolerent of people who are 
different.  Also, if you use readers for books that aren't available in 
accessible format, readers could become your acquaintances or friends.  I 
even met some of my friends randomly on campus and they became great 
friends.

I'll admit, going to events off-campus isn't always simple.  Besides the 
issue of transportation, there are other barriers that may exist, depending 
on your skill level in cane travel.  One time, I really wanted to go to a NY 
Knicks basketball game.  (The trip was sponsored by the school, so we were 
all going on a bus from there.)  Nobody I knew was going--many of my friends 
hated sports ... some wanted to go, but had other obligations that night.  I 
called the student activities office to ask for names of students who were 
going, but, for some stupid, bureaucratic reason, the person in charge 
refused to tell me!  Finally, I asked the priest if he knew of anyone from 
our church group who was going.  Unfortunately, he didn't.  Before I knew 
it, he had called the student activities people and got them to tell him the 
chaperone who was going.  (This was a chaperone for all the students, 
nothing to do with my being blind.)  It turned out that I knew the chaperone 
from a club I was in.  She helped me stay with the group in the city and I 
had a great time!

Serena


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "becky sabo " <beckyasabo at gmail.com>
To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 3:28 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] how to meet more people and get involved in activities


> Dear List,
> My name is Becky Sabo.  I live in Englewood Colorado.  My question is how 
> to
> get involved on campus and off campus to meet more people and also get
> involved in other activities.  I do not have a lot of friends and on the
> weekends I am usually board because I do not have plans to do anything or
> with any one.  If any suggestions I would appreciate that a lot.
> Sincerely
> Becky Sabo
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On 
> Behalf
> Of Rachel Jacobs
> Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 7:12 PM
> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
> Subject: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
>
> Hello. I am a jaws user and I can't seem to get PDF files to read using
> jaws. Does anyone have any suggestions?
> Thanks,
> Rachel Jacobs
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/beckyasabo%40gmail.c
> om
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net 



From brileyp at gmail.com  Mon Jan 25 04:23:24 2010
From: brileyp at gmail.com (Briley Pollard)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:23:24 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] how to meet more people and get involved in activities
In-Reply-To: <9667394.1264390197238.JavaMail.root@wamui-hunyo.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
References: <9667394.1264390197238.JavaMail.root@wamui-hunyo.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
Message-ID: <EA3B984A-4D15-4A1F-AA4B-B4862637C91A@gmail.com>

Sometimes it just takes stepping a little out of your comfort zone and striking up a conversation with someone who you find interesting. If there is someone in one of your classes or at your church that you want to get to know, you extend an invite to lunch or coffee or something as simple as a study group. More structured social environments like clubs etc are also a good idea, which some people have mentioned. I had a hard tme making friends after I transferred universities. But once I forced myself out of my shell a little, people weren't as aloof as I originally thought.

Briley
On Jan 24, 2010, at 9:29 PM, bookwormahb at earthlink.net wrote:

> Becky,
> 
> I know what you mean.  I also have always have a hard time making friends.  When you walk into a room of general conversation, its hard to join in because you don't know who is there.
> 
> I'd say start finding out what is offered on campus.  What clubs and activities are there?  Go to the student activities office and find out or go online to the activity page if that is accessible.  Fingure out what you are interested in and hopefully there will be a club with that interest.  What is your major?  Often clubs are made for majors.  
> For me I joined a few things but still it was hard.  Not all the same people came to every meeting and I did not always know who was in the room.  I recognized a handful of regulars by voice.  I joined a bible study and did some campus ministry volunteering such as stuffing backpacks for children.  I also joined the psychology club but that was not very active.  
> 
> Good luck and let us know how it goes.  
> Oh for off campus that is a big challenge due to transportation and other factors.  I suggest going out with friends to the mall or coffee shop; they could drive you.  
> Check the newspapers and you might find some opportunities to volunteer in the community too.
> 
> 
> Ashley
> 
> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Katy Carroll <kc2992a at student.american.edu>
>> Sent: Jan 24, 2010 7:08 PM
>> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] how to meet more people and get involved in activities
>> 
>> Dear Becky,
>> 
>> I am a student in Washington DC, and I have a generally quiet personality,
>> so I sometimes have a difficult time being social and starting friendships.
>> I have been able to overcome that though. my best advice to you is to find
>> something you are passionate about and find the club on campus that best
>> fits what you like to do - and show up at their meetings. Tat way, you will
>> be immediately surrounded by people that you automatically have something in
>> common with. No need to search for a conversation starter.
>> 
>> Best,
>> Kate
>> 
>> On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 3:28 PM, becky sabo <beckyasabo at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Dear List,
>>> My name is Becky Sabo.  I live in Englewood Colorado.  My question is how
>>> to
>>> get involved on campus and off campus to meet more people and also get
>>> involved in other activities.  I do not have a lot of friends and on the
>>> weekends I am usually board because I do not have plans to do anything or
>>> with any one.  If any suggestions I would appreciate that a lot.
>>> Sincerely
>>> Becky Sabo
>>> 
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
>>> Behalf
>>> Of Rachel Jacobs
>>> Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 7:12 PM
>>> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
>>> Subject: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
>>> 
>>> Hello. I am a jaws user and I can't seem to get PDF files to read using
>>> jaws. Does anyone have any suggestions?
>>> Thanks,
>>> Rachel Jacobs
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> 
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/beckyasabo%40gmail.c
>>> om<http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/beckyasabo%40gmail.c%0Aom>
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> 
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kc2992a%40student.american.edu
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Kathryn CARROLL
>> American University
>> 631 521 3018
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
> 
> 
> Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
> 
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com



From valandkayla at gmail.com  Mon Jan 25 04:44:21 2010
From: valandkayla at gmail.com (Valerie Gibson)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 23:44:21 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] how to meet more people and get involved in activities
In-Reply-To: <EA3B984A-4D15-4A1F-AA4B-B4862637C91A@gmail.com>
References: <9667394.1264390197238.JavaMail.root@wamui-hunyo.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
	<EA3B984A-4D15-4A1F-AA4B-B4862637C91A@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <da706cb31001242044v1e6aa0es63d5ac2f3766592b@mail.gmail.com>

Becky,

Another good suggestion, at least for campus is to maybe ask someoen
in your class if they would like to form a study group.  you would get
two things accomplished then: studying and making new friends. :)

I know what you mean about making friends.  I'm not really one to jump
in a conversation unless directly spoken to...then you can't get me to
shut up.

I'm not sure what year of college you're in, but i know public
speaking is a gen ed class.  In that class, at least in mine, we had
to write an informative speech and present to the class.  Mine was on
the "dos and don'ts" of blindness. you know: don't be afraid to use
the word look in our presence, do talk directly to us, etc. that
really got me to open up to people and it eased the atmosphere around
me with my classmates.

I find another thing that helps is, if your class it partaking in a
discussion, join in as much as you can.  I go to a community college,
so this is easier than if you were in a large lecture hall.  the point
is, the more you talk, the less people get nervous around you, and
even if you're shy, people will come to talk to you.  Sometimes that's
what it takes.  You have to show people that you have your own
thoughts and oppinions so that they're not afraid to ask you more
about them, and to approach you.  It gives them a reason to talk to
you without them thinking they will offend you.

On 1/24/10, Briley Pollard <brileyp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sometimes it just takes stepping a little out of your comfort zone and
> striking up a conversation with someone who you find interesting. If there
> is someone in one of your classes or at your church that you want to get to
> know, you extend an invite to lunch or coffee or something as simple as a
> study group. More structured social environments like clubs etc are also a
> good idea, which some people have mentioned. I had a hard tme making friends
> after I transferred universities. But once I forced myself out of my shell a
> little, people weren't as aloof as I originally thought.
>
> Briley
> On Jan 24, 2010, at 9:29 PM, bookwormahb at earthlink.net wrote:
>
>> Becky,
>>
>> I know what you mean.  I also have always have a hard time making friends.
>>  When you walk into a room of general conversation, its hard to join in
>> because you don't know who is there.
>>
>> I'd say start finding out what is offered on campus.  What clubs and
>> activities are there?  Go to the student activities office and find out or
>> go online to the activity page if that is accessible.  Fingure out what
>> you are interested in and hopefully there will be a club with that
>> interest.  What is your major?  Often clubs are made for majors.
>> For me I joined a few things but still it was hard.  Not all the same
>> people came to every meeting and I did not always know who was in the
>> room.  I recognized a handful of regulars by voice.  I joined a bible
>> study and did some campus ministry volunteering such as stuffing backpacks
>> for children.  I also joined the psychology club but that was not very
>> active.
>>
>> Good luck and let us know how it goes.
>> Oh for off campus that is a big challenge due to transportation and other
>> factors.  I suggest going out with friends to the mall or coffee shop;
>> they could drive you.
>> Check the newspapers and you might find some opportunities to volunteer in
>> the community too.
>>
>>
>> Ashley
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Katy Carroll <kc2992a at student.american.edu>
>>> Sent: Jan 24, 2010 7:08 PM
>>> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] how to meet more people and get involved in
>>> activities
>>>
>>> Dear Becky,
>>>
>>> I am a student in Washington DC, and I have a generally quiet
>>> personality,
>>> so I sometimes have a difficult time being social and starting
>>> friendships.
>>> I have been able to overcome that though. my best advice to you is to
>>> find
>>> something you are passionate about and find the club on campus that best
>>> fits what you like to do - and show up at their meetings. Tat way, you
>>> will
>>> be immediately surrounded by people that you automatically have something
>>> in
>>> common with. No need to search for a conversation starter.
>>>
>>> Best,
>>> Kate
>>>
>>> On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 3:28 PM, becky sabo <beckyasabo at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Dear List,
>>>> My name is Becky Sabo.  I live in Englewood Colorado.  My question is
>>>> how
>>>> to
>>>> get involved on campus and off campus to meet more people and also get
>>>> involved in other activities.  I do not have a lot of friends and on the
>>>> weekends I am usually board because I do not have plans to do anything
>>>> or
>>>> with any one.  If any suggestions I would appreciate that a lot.
>>>> Sincerely
>>>> Becky Sabo
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
>>>> Behalf
>>>> Of Rachel Jacobs
>>>> Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 7:12 PM
>>>> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
>>>> Subject: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
>>>>
>>>> Hello. I am a jaws user and I can't seem to get PDF files to read using
>>>> jaws. Does anyone have any suggestions?
>>>> Thanks,
>>>> Rachel Jacobs
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/beckyasabo%40gmail.c
>>>> om<http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/beckyasabo%40gmail.c%0Aom>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kc2992a%40student.american.edu
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Kathryn CARROLL
>>> American University
>>> 631 521 3018
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
>>
>>
>> Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/valandkayla%40gmail.com
>


-- 
From,
Val, the human,
or
Kayla, the yellow naped amazon parrot

"your life is your's alone, rise up and live it!"


From valandkayla at gmail.com  Mon Jan 25 04:46:56 2010
From: valandkayla at gmail.com (Valerie Gibson)
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 23:46:56 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Jaws and Flash
In-Reply-To: <679a273c1001241951u3bd7f110w57059558913e72bf@mail.gmail.com>
References: <679a273c1001241854t2682f35y79e965c5e06e791e@mail.gmail.com>
	<9906393D8CD74BAFBD30873DF54005BE@DarrellPC>
	<679a273c1001241951u3bd7f110w57059558913e72bf@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <da706cb31001242046h7c5493edp20c9c357a6627993@mail.gmail.com>

I have not used jaws 11. i have jaws 10.  Perhaps running jaws 10
would help until fs is notafied of the problem and fixes it, or at
least until someone finds a solution?

On 1/24/10, Brice Smith <brice.smith319 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Darrell,
> I checked and the ignore flash content box was not checked.
>
> I've also double-checked this by pressing insert plus V on a webpage
> just to make sure.
>
> Thanks
>
> brice
>
>
> On 1/24/10, Darrell Shandrow <darrell.shandrow at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello Brice,
>>
>> Are you sure you haven't adjusted JAWS to ignore Flash content at some
>> point? This can be adjusted in the Configuration Manager as follows:
>>
>> 1. Open Internet Explorer.
>> 2. Press Insert+6 to open Configuration Manager.
>> 3. Press alt+s to pull down the Settings menu.
>> 4. Arrow down to HTML and press enter.
>> 5. Press control+tab until you reach Misc.
>> 6. Tab to the "Ignore Flash content" checkbox and make sure it is not
>> checked. If it is, press the space bar.
>> 7. Press enter to accept any changes and dismiss the dialogue.
>> 8. Press control+s to save the configuration changes, then press alt+f4 to
>> close Configuration Manager.
>>
>> Hope this helps.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Darrell
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
>> Behalf
>> Of Brice Smith
>> Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 7:54 PM
>> To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> Subject: [nabs-l] Jaws and Flash
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've been having a lot of trouble with Jaws and flash content lately, and
>> its gotten to the point where I can't ignore the problem anymore.
>>
>> Using Jaws 11 and the latest version of Flash, I cannot interact with
>> flash
>> videos or content at all with Internet Explorer. For example, If I'm on a
>> site that says to watch this video, jaws will not even indicate flash
>> content at all. If I'm trying to watch a Facebook video, Jaws gives me no
>> indication there's video content on the page even though I can see
>> visually
>> the flash controls on the screen. If I use Firefox on the exact same page,
>> Jaws does say "Flash movie start, flash movie end," but with no controls
>> to
>> watch the video. Internet explorer with Jaws does not even indicate flash
>> content begins and ends.
>>
>> This is unbelievably frustrating, as older versions of Jaws could at least
>> move within the flash video and let me find the play button.
>> Does anyone know what I can do?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Brice
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/darrell.shandrow%40g
>> mail.com
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brice.smith319%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/valandkayla%40gmail.com
>


-- 
From,
Val, the human,
or
Kayla, the yellow naped amazon parrot

"your life is your's alone, rise up and live it!"


From raniaismail04 at gmail.com  Mon Jan 25 12:41:41 2010
From: raniaismail04 at gmail.com (Rania)
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 07:41:41 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] how to meet more people and get involved in activities
References: <9667394.1264390197238.JavaMail.root@wamui-hunyo.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
	<EA3B984A-4D15-4A1F-AA4B-B4862637C91A@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <001701ca9dbb$bfb250e0$2f01a8c0@DHQ5QJF1>

at my school we have alectives on the main coumpis but we are with students 
from all campousis.
During my last weekend class My class mates took another class that same 
weekend so I just started talking to people that were in the class I was in 
and I even handed out my business cards and have even added some of the 
students I spoke to that weekend on facebook so now we are friends!
That is just another idea. Sinse I like to network and always enjoy making 
new friends that's what I did.
Rania,
"For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
See you at the finish line."
~Christopher Reeve

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Briley Pollard" <brileyp at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 11:23 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] how to meet more people and get involved in activities


> Sometimes it just takes stepping a little out of your comfort zone and 
> striking up a conversation with someone who you find interesting. If there 
> is someone in one of your classes or at your church that you want to get 
> to know, you extend an invite to lunch or coffee or something as simple as 
> a study group. More structured social environments like clubs etc are also 
> a good idea, which some people have mentioned. I had a hard tme making 
> friends after I transferred universities. But once I forced myself out of 
> my shell a little, people weren't as aloof as I originally thought.
>
> Briley
> On Jan 24, 2010, at 9:29 PM, bookwormahb at earthlink.net wrote:
>
>> Becky,
>>
>> I know what you mean.  I also have always have a hard time making 
>> friends.  When you walk into a room of general conversation, its hard to 
>> join in because you don't know who is there.
>>
>> I'd say start finding out what is offered on campus.  What clubs and 
>> activities are there?  Go to the student activities office and find out 
>> or go online to the activity page if that is accessible.  Fingure out 
>> what you are interested in and hopefully there will be a club with that 
>> interest.  What is your major?  Often clubs are made for majors.
>> For me I joined a few things but still it was hard.  Not all the same 
>> people came to every meeting and I did not always know who was in the 
>> room.  I recognized a handful of regulars by voice.  I joined a bible 
>> study and did some campus ministry volunteering such as stuffing 
>> backpacks for children.  I also joined the psychology club but that was 
>> not very active.
>>
>> Good luck and let us know how it goes.
>> Oh for off campus that is a big challenge due to transportation and other 
>> factors.  I suggest going out with friends to the mall or coffee shop; 
>> they could drive you.
>> Check the newspapers and you might find some opportunities to volunteer 
>> in the community too.
>>
>>
>> Ashley
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Katy Carroll <kc2992a at student.american.edu>
>>> Sent: Jan 24, 2010 7:08 PM
>>> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list 
>>> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] how to meet more people and get involved in 
>>> activities
>>>
>>> Dear Becky,
>>>
>>> I am a student in Washington DC, and I have a generally quiet 
>>> personality,
>>> so I sometimes have a difficult time being social and starting 
>>> friendships.
>>> I have been able to overcome that though. my best advice to you is to 
>>> find
>>> something you are passionate about and find the club on campus that best
>>> fits what you like to do - and show up at their meetings. Tat way, you 
>>> will
>>> be immediately surrounded by people that you automatically have 
>>> something in
>>> common with. No need to search for a conversation starter.
>>>
>>> Best,
>>> Kate
>>>
>>> On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 3:28 PM, becky sabo <beckyasabo at gmail.com> 
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Dear List,
>>>> My name is Becky Sabo.  I live in Englewood Colorado.  My question is 
>>>> how
>>>> to
>>>> get involved on campus and off campus to meet more people and also get
>>>> involved in other activities.  I do not have a lot of friends and on 
>>>> the
>>>> weekends I am usually board because I do not have plans to do anything 
>>>> or
>>>> with any one.  If any suggestions I would appreciate that a lot.
>>>> Sincerely
>>>> Becky Sabo
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
>>>> Behalf
>>>> Of Rachel Jacobs
>>>> Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 7:12 PM
>>>> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
>>>> Subject: [nabs-l] question about Jaws and PDFs
>>>>
>>>> Hello. I am a jaws user and I can't seem to get PDF files to read using
>>>> jaws. Does anyone have any suggestions?
>>>> Thanks,
>>>> Rachel Jacobs
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/beckyasabo%40gmail.c
>>>> om<http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/beckyasabo%40gmail.c%0Aom>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kc2992a%40student.american.edu
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> Kathryn CARROLL
>>> American University
>>> 631 521 3018
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net
>>
>>
>> Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/raniaismail04%40gmail.com 



From winy_kwany at yahoo.com  Mon Jan 25 15:14:49 2010
From: winy_kwany at yahoo.com (Winy Kwany)
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 07:14:49 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [nabs-l] Need Help About Baroque Pieces
Message-ID: <983421.21523.qm@web62401.mail.re1.yahoo.com>

Hi all,
I need your help. My Listening teacher asks me to find several most important baroque pieces. They are the most popular ones, ranging from opera to organ
music. They will be used for analysis, assignments and exams. Would you check whether you have those pieces in your collection? Would you send the BRF's
to me? I don't mind to emboss the whole volume as long as it includes piece that I need. 
I attach title of pieces with this message. There are numbers and page numbers indications based on table of content of the book. Please ignore it and
just pay atention to the titles.
Please send the files off list to my email:
winy_kwany at yahoo.com
I look forward to hearing from you very soon. Many thanks.
Winy.



      


From winy_kwany at yahoo.com  Mon Jan 25 15:17:41 2010
From: winy_kwany at yahoo.com (Winy Kwany)
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 07:17:41 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [nabs-l] Baroque Pieces
Message-ID: <316836.37061.qm@web62403.mail.re1.yahoo.com>

I appologize. I forgot to attach the titles. Here it is.


      
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From alexandera.castillo at gmail.com  Mon Jan 25 17:59:53 2010
From: alexandera.castillo at gmail.com (Alexander Castillo)
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:59:53 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] In need of room for Washington seminar.
Message-ID: <e7c236691001250959i39d88ddct5361a4b5306326b9@mail.gmail.com>

Hello list, I am looking for a room for Sunday Jan 31, 2010, at the
Holiday Inn Capital. I will pay for my stay of course, so if you are
looking to share the expenses for the night, drop me an email at

AlexanderA.Castillo at gmail.com

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Alex


From dsmithnfb at gmail.com  Mon Jan 25 20:24:14 2010
From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith)
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:24:14 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Fwd: [nfb-talk] Fw: Forget Gum. Walking and Using Phone Is
	Risky
In-Reply-To: <F0A58CD9DC3B4AEF83FED2B9FE374ADC@math.wisc.edu>
References: <F0A58CD9DC3B4AEF83FED2B9FE374ADC@math.wisc.edu>
Message-ID: <409c235c1001251224q45d26f1dt671019670eee3004@mail.gmail.com>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "John G. Heim" <jheim at math.wisc.edu>
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 09:49:05 -0600
Subject: [nfb-talk] Fw: Forget Gum. Walking and Using Phone Is Risky
To: NFB Talk Mailing List <nfb-talk at nfbnet.org>

Below is a copy of an article someone forwarded to meabout how dangerous it
is to walk and use your cell phone. The reason I'm forwarding it is that I
wwork on the campus of the University of Wisconsin and I can confirm that
this is a problem. Over the past few years, the number of collisions with
other pedestrians that I have experienced has increased dramatically. Almost
without exception, when I have a collision with someone, they're talking on
a cell phone or listening to an ipod.  Last summer I was hit by a girl on a
bicycle. She got knocked down and at first I was very apologetic. But then
on-lookers told me that she was talking on a cell phone when she hit me. So
she was riding her bike on a crowded sidewalk and talking on her cell phone.
In retrospect, I think she was lucky she didn't hurt me.

Sent: Monday, January 25, 2010 8:32 AM
Subject: Forget Gum. Walking and Using Phone Is Risky


> Driven to Distraction
> Forget Gum. Walking and Using Phone Is Risky.
> SAN FRANCISCO - On the day of the collision last month, visibility was
> good. The sidewalk was not under repair. As she walked, Tiffany Briggs,
> 25, was talking to her grandmother on her cellphone, lost in conversation.
> Very lost.
> "I ran into a truck," Ms. Briggs said.
>
> It was parked in a driveway.
>
> Distracted driving has gained much attention lately because of the
> inflated crash risk posed by drivers using cellphones to talk and text.
>
> But there is another growing problem caused by lower-stakes multitasking -
> distracted walking - which combines a pedestrian, an electronic device and
> an unseen crack in the sidewalk, the pole of a stop sign, a toy left on
> the living room floor or a parked (or sometimes moving) car.
>
> The era of the mobile gadget is making mobility that much more perilous,
> particularly on crowded streets and in downtown areas where multiple
> multitaskers veer and swerve and walk to the beat of their own devices.
>
> Most times, the mishaps for a distracted walker are minor, like the
> lightly dinged head and broken fingernail that Ms. Briggs suffered, a
> jammed digit or a sprained ankle, and, the befallen say, a nasty case of
> hurt pride. Of course, the injuries can sometimes be serious - and they
> are on the rise.
>
> Slightly more than 1,000 pedestrians visited emergency rooms in 2008
> because they got distracted and tripped, fell or ran into something while
> using a cellphone to talk or text. That was twice the number from 2007,
> which had nearly doubled from 2006, according to a study conducted by Ohio
> State University, which says it is the first to estimate such accidents.
>
> "It's the tip of the iceberg," said Jack L. Nasar, a professor of city and
> regional planning at Ohio State, noting that the number of mishaps is
> probably much higher considering that most of the injuries are not severe
> enough to require a hospital visit. What is more, he said, texting is
> rising sharply and devices like the iPhone have thousands of new, engaging
> applications to preoccupy phone users.
>
> Mr. Nasar supervised the statistical analysis, which was done by Derek
> Troyer, one of his graduate students. He looked at records of emergency
> room visits compiled by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
>
> Examples of such visits include a 16-year-old boy who walked into a
> telephone pole while texting and suffered a concussion; a 28-year-old man
> who tripped and fractured a finger on the hand gripping his cellphone; and
> a 68-year-old man who fell off the porch while talking on a cellphone,
> spraining a thumb and an ankle and causing dizziness.
>
> Young people injured themselves more often. About half the visits Mr.
> Troyer studied were by people under 30, and a quarter were 16 to 20 years
> old. But more than a quarter of those injured were 41 to 60 years old.
>
> Pedestrians, like drivers, have long been distracted by myriad tasks, like
> snacking or reading on the go. But the constant interaction with
> electronic devices has made single-tasking seem boring or even
> unproductive.
>
> Cognitive psychologists, neurologists and other researchers are beginning
> to study the impact of constant multitasking, whether behind a desk or the
> wheel or on foot. It might stand to reason that someone looking at a phone
> to read a message would misstep, but the researchers are finding that just
> talking on a phone takes its own considerable toll on cognition and
> awareness.
>
> Sometimes, pedestrians using their phones do not notice objects or people
> that are right in front of them - even a clown riding a unicycle. That was
> the finding of a recent study at Western Washington University in
> Bellingham, Wash., by a psychology professor, Ira Hyman, and his students.
>
> One of the students dressed as a clown and unicycled around a central
> square on campus. About half the people walking past by themselves said
> they had seen the clown, and the number was slightly higher for people
> walking in pairs. But only 25 percent of people talking on a cellphone
> said they had, Mr. Hyman said.
>
> He said the term commonly applied to such preoccupation is "inattention
> blindness," meaning a person can be looking at an object but fail to
> register it or process what it is.
>
> Particularly fascinating, Mr. Hyman said, is that people walking in pairs
> were more than twice as likely to see the clown as were people talking on
> a cellphone, suggesting that the act of simply having a conversation is
> not the cause of inattention blindness.
>
> One possible explanation is that a cellphone conversation taxes not just
> auditory resources in the brain but also visual functions, said Adam
> Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco.
> That combination, he said, prompts the listener to, for example, create
> visual imagery related to the conversation in a way that overrides or
> obscures the processing of real images.
>
> By comparison, walking and chewing gum (that age-old measure of pedestrian
> skill at multitasking) is a snap.
>
> "Walking and chewing are repetitive, well-practiced tasks that become
> automatic," Dr. Gazzaley said. "They don't compete for resources like
> texting and walking."
>
> Further, he said, the cellphone gives people a constant opportunity to
> pursue goals that feel more important than walking down the street.
>
> "An animal would never walk into a pole," he said, noting survival
> instincts would trump other priorities.
>
> For Shalamar Jones, 19, the priority was keeping in touch with her
> boyfriend. Last month while she was Christmas shopping in a mall near San
> Francisco, she was texting him when - bam! - she walked into the window of
> a New York & Company store, thinking it was a door.
>
> "I thought it was open," she said, noting that no harm was done. "I just
> started laughing at myself."
>
> The worst part is the humiliation, said Christopher Black, 20, an art
> student at San Francisco State University who 18 months ago had his own
> pratfall.
>
> At the time, Mr. Black said, the sidewalks were packed with pedestrians.
> So he decided he could move faster if he walked in the street, keeping
> close to the parked cars. The trouble is he was also texting - with a
> woman he was flirting with.
>
> He unwittingly started to veer into the road, prompting an oncoming car to
> honk. He said he instinctively jumped toward the sidewalk but, in the
> process, forgot about the line of parked cars.
>
> "I splayed against the side of the car, and the phone hit the ground," he
> said. He and his phone were uninjured, except for his pride. "It was
> pretty significantly embarrassing."
>
>


_______________________________________________
nfb-talk mailing list
nfb-talk at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nfb-talk_nfbnet.org



-- 
Darian Smith
Skype: The_Blind_Truth
Windows Live: Lightningrod2010 at live.com
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org





post from another list serve. I enjoyed  the article and the comments
that  the  person that forwarded them had  for it.


From thebluesisloose at gmail.com  Mon Jan 25 20:35:41 2010
From: thebluesisloose at gmail.com (Beth)
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:35:41 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] BrailleNote questions
Message-ID: <4b5e006d.0807c00a.1c5a.ffffc0c2@mx.google.com>

Hi, guys.  I have some BrailleNote question.  Every time I go and 
open a file, it comes out in computer braille and I want it to 
remain in Grade II/contracted English U.S.A. Braille.  How do I 
keep the language consistent so it doesn't keep changing on me?  
Every time I open a document, this happens, and it drives me 
nuts!  Any answers would be good.
Beth


From serenacucco at verizon.net  Mon Jan 25 22:02:40 2010
From: serenacucco at verizon.net (Serena)
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:02:40 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] BrailleNote questions
References: <4b5e006d.0807c00a.1c5a.ffffc0c2@mx.google.com>
Message-ID: <003f01ca9e0a$1cd73d50$0201a8c0@Serene>

Go to the Keyword Setup Options menu and make sure the format new documents 
are in (I forget the exact wording) is Braille Document keyword type.

Serena


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Monday, January 25, 2010 3:35 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] BrailleNote questions


> Hi, guys.  I have some BrailleNote question.  Every time I go and open a 
> file, it comes out in computer braille and I want it to remain in Grade 
> II/contracted English U.S.A. Braille.  How do I keep the language 
> consistent so it doesn't keep changing on me?  Every time I open a 
> document, this happens, and it drives me nuts!  Any answers would be good.
> Beth
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net 



From thebluesisloose at gmail.com  Tue Jan 26 00:12:22 2010
From: thebluesisloose at gmail.com (Beth)
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 19:12:22 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] BrailleNote questions
In-Reply-To: <003f01ca9e0a$1cd73d50$0201a8c0@Serene>
References: <4b5e006d.0807c00a.1c5a.ffffc0c2@mx.google.com>
	<003f01ca9e0a$1cd73d50$0201a8c0@Serene>
Message-ID: <4383d01d1001251612k6be7a64tdc53c16ab0006531@mail.gmail.com>

That's one suggestion, but I have to have them in Microsoft Word so I
can transfer the words I write from BrailleNote to computer and sync
them up so I can write anything and everything I need to write on my
BrailleNote and then turn it all in on my computer.
Beth

On 1/25/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
> Go to the Keyword Setup Options menu and make sure the format new documents
> are in (I forget the exact wording) is Braille Document keyword type.
>
> Serena
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
> To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Monday, January 25, 2010 3:35 PM
> Subject: [nabs-l] BrailleNote questions
>
>
>> Hi, guys.  I have some BrailleNote question.  Every time I go and open a
>> file, it comes out in computer braille and I want it to remain in Grade
>> II/contracted English U.S.A. Braille.  How do I keep the language
>> consistent so it doesn't keep changing on me?  Every time I open a
>> document, this happens, and it drives me nuts!  Any answers would be good.
>> Beth
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>


From lilrichie411 at gmail.com  Tue Jan 26 04:05:18 2010
From: lilrichie411 at gmail.com (Jordan Richardson)
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:05:18 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] BrailleNote questions
In-Reply-To: <4383d01d1001251612k6be7a64tdc53c16ab0006531@mail.gmail.com>
References: <4b5e006d.0807c00a.1c5a.ffffc0c2@mx.google.com>
	<003f01ca9e0a$1cd73d50$0201a8c0@Serene>
	<4383d01d1001251612k6be7a64tdc53c16ab0006531@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <ca301f5e1001252005g49cd4d20md6fcb29fcf128391@mail.gmail.com>

Beth,
In the options menu on the BrailleNote there's an option that says "grade of
braille for keyboard entry."  Did you try just going to that and selecting
grade 2?  Also, when converting to "Microsoft Word," simply do an "s" cord
for save and then "x" with backspace until you find "create a microsoft word
file."
Tell me if this helps.
Jordan

2010/1/25 Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>

> That's one suggestion, but I have to have them in Microsoft Word so I
> can transfer the words I write from BrailleNote to computer and sync
> them up so I can write anything and everything I need to write on my
> BrailleNote and then turn it all in on my computer.
> Beth
>
> On 1/25/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
> > Go to the Keyword Setup Options menu and make sure the format new
> documents
> > are in (I forget the exact wording) is Braille Document keyword type.
> >
> > Serena
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
> > To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> > Sent: Monday, January 25, 2010 3:35 PM
> > Subject: [nabs-l] BrailleNote questions
> >
> >
> >> Hi, guys.  I have some BrailleNote question.  Every time I go and open a
> >> file, it comes out in computer braille and I want it to remain in Grade
> >> II/contracted English U.S.A. Braille.  How do I keep the language
> >> consistent so it doesn't keep changing on me?  Every time I open a
> >> document, this happens, and it drives me nuts!  Any answers would be
> good.
> >> Beth
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> nabs-l mailing list
> >> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> >> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> >> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> >> nabs-l:
> >>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net
> >>
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > nabs-l mailing list
> > nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> > To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> > nabs-l:
> >
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>  >
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/lilrichie411%40gmail.com
>



-- 
Jordan Richardson
2nd Vice President, Minnesota Association of Blind Students
lilrichie411 at gmail.com
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

From thebluesisloose at gmail.com  Tue Jan 26 13:25:53 2010
From: thebluesisloose at gmail.com (Beth)
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:25:53 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] BrailleNote questions
In-Reply-To: <ca301f5e1001252005g49cd4d20md6fcb29fcf128391@mail.gmail.com>
References: <4b5e006d.0807c00a.1c5a.ffffc0c2@mx.google.com>
	<003f01ca9e0a$1cd73d50$0201a8c0@Serene>
	<4383d01d1001251612k6be7a64tdc53c16ab0006531@mail.gmail.com>
	<ca301f5e1001252005g49cd4d20md6fcb29fcf128391@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4383d01d1001260525qfb17097x6c938529ad3bcdc6@mail.gmail.com>

I"m using a QT model, sorry.  All that is checked.
Beth

On 1/25/10, Jordan Richardson <lilrichie411 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Beth,
> In the options menu on the BrailleNote there's an option that says "grade of
> braille for keyboard entry."  Did you try just going to that and selecting
> grade 2?  Also, when converting to "Microsoft Word," simply do an "s" cord
> for save and then "x" with backspace until you find "create a microsoft word
> file."
> Tell me if this helps.
> Jordan
>
> 2010/1/25 Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>
>> That's one suggestion, but I have to have them in Microsoft Word so I
>> can transfer the words I write from BrailleNote to computer and sync
>> them up so I can write anything and everything I need to write on my
>> BrailleNote and then turn it all in on my computer.
>> Beth
>>
>> On 1/25/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>> > Go to the Keyword Setup Options menu and make sure the format new
>> documents
>> > are in (I forget the exact wording) is Braille Document keyword type.
>> >
>> > Serena
>> >
>> >
>> > ----- Original Message -----
>> > From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>> > To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>> > Sent: Monday, January 25, 2010 3:35 PM
>> > Subject: [nabs-l] BrailleNote questions
>> >
>> >
>> >> Hi, guys.  I have some BrailleNote question.  Every time I go and open
>> >> a
>> >> file, it comes out in computer braille and I want it to remain in Grade
>> >> II/contracted English U.S.A. Braille.  How do I keep the language
>> >> consistent so it doesn't keep changing on me?  Every time I open a
>> >> document, this happens, and it drives me nuts!  Any answers would be
>> good.
>> >> Beth
>> >>
>> >> _______________________________________________
>> >> nabs-l mailing list
>> >> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> >> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> >> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> >> nabs-l:
>> >>
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net
>> >>
>> >
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > nabs-l mailing list
>> > nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> > To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> > nabs-l:
>> >
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>  >
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/lilrichie411%40gmail.com
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Jordan Richardson
> 2nd Vice President, Minnesota Association of Blind Students
> lilrichie411 at gmail.com
> "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
> --Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>


From corbbo at gmail.com  Tue Jan 26 19:23:10 2010
From: corbbo at gmail.com (Corbb O'Connor)
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:23:10 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Bank accounts
In-Reply-To: <409c235c1001201853k68e04b28y2fa5b57ea69656ed@mail.gmail.com>
References: <8CC6834711B8BD4-2CBC-EC6A@webmail-m039.sysops.aol.com>
	<83A491737391464484E741CB17C7CF5A@Gateway>
	<409c235c1001201853k68e04b28y2fa5b57ea69656ed@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <28A06EC8-D37B-4CD0-8209-2806629904E5@gmail.com>

PNC Bank's site is accessible as well, and they offer far superior  
service than Bank of America.

Corbb

On Jan 20, 2010, at 9:53 PM, Darian Smith wrote:

Hello,
I too use Bank Of America and have  had no problems with it's
websitt.  As PNC goes, I would  take a look at  their website if I had
concerns about it.
  hope that helps,
  Darian

On 1/20/10, Jennifer Aberdeen <freespirit328 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Bank Of America's website is accessible. I use it :)
>
> Jen
> _____________________________________
>
> Jennifer Aberdeen, AVON Independent Sales E-Representative
> 401-644-5607
>
> Shop AVON at home or office. Personal delivery
> and a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee.
>
> www.youravon.com/jaberdeen
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Polansky" <jaedpo96 at aol.com>
> To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, January 20, 2010 5:09 PM
> Subject: [nabs-l] Bank accounts
>
>
>> Hi all. My parents and I are thinking about getting me a bank  
>> account and
>> a debit card. I would like to know what bank accounts' websites are
>> accessible with JAWS. I hope that Bank Of America or PNC's websites  
>> are
>> accessible because those are the only banks in the town that I live  
>> in. To
>>
>> get to any other bank you have to drive at least 20 minutes. There is
>> another bank called Woodsboro Bank in my town, but you probably  
>> haven't
>> heard of it because it is a local bank in my county.
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/freespirit328%40gmail.com
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>


-- 
Darian Smith
Skype: The_Blind_Truth
Windows Live: Lightningrod2010 at live.com
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org

_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for  
nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/corbbo%40gmail.com



From chriswright11 at verizon.net  Tue Jan 26 19:59:22 2010
From: chriswright11 at verizon.net (Christopher Wright)
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:59:22 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Bank accounts
References: <8CC6834711B8BD4-2CBC-EC6A@webmail-m039.sysops.aol.com>
	<83A491737391464484E741CB17C7CF5A@Gateway>
	<409c235c1001201853k68e04b28y2fa5b57ea69656ed@mail.gmail.com>
	<28A06EC8-D37B-4CD0-8209-2806629904E5@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <000601ca9ec2$0f3ed320$2f01a8c0@myhome.westell.com>

Assuming that this wasn't already mentioned, HSBC is completely accessible
after you set up the Internet banking part. You just call customer service,
explain that your blind and that you want the virtual keyboard turned off.



From dsmithnfb at gmail.com  Tue Jan 26 20:31:51 2010
From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith)
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 12:31:51 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Bank accounts
In-Reply-To: <000601ca9ec2$0f3ed320$2f01a8c0@myhome.westell.com>
References: <8CC6834711B8BD4-2CBC-EC6A@webmail-m039.sysops.aol.com>
	<83A491737391464484E741CB17C7CF5A@Gateway>
	<409c235c1001201853k68e04b28y2fa5b57ea69656ed@mail.gmail.com>
	<28A06EC8-D37B-4CD0-8209-2806629904E5@gmail.com>
	<000601ca9ec2$0f3ed320$2f01a8c0@myhome.westell.com>
Message-ID: <409c235c1001261231s380437fckc2d7ba7c9c3d25a9@mail.gmail.com>

what I wonder about PNC is if   it's branches can be found  just about
anywhere in the country?
 I can't say I've heard of it in california, or on much of the west
coast, for that matter.
  Darian

On 1/26/10, Christopher Wright <chriswright11 at verizon.net> wrote:
> Assuming that this wasn't already mentioned, HSBC is completely accessible
> after you set up the Internet banking part. You just call customer service,
> explain that your blind and that you want the virtual keyboard turned off.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
>


-- 
Darian Smith
Skype: The_Blind_Truth
Windows Live: Lightningrod2010 at live.com
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org


From troubleclark at gmail.com  Tue Jan 26 20:34:17 2010
From: troubleclark at gmail.com (Nathan Clark)
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:34:17 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] BrailleNote questions
In-Reply-To: <4383d01d1001260525qfb17097x6c938529ad3bcdc6@mail.gmail.com>
References: <4b5e006d.0807c00a.1c5a.ffffc0c2@mx.google.com>
	<003f01ca9e0a$1cd73d50$0201a8c0@Serene>
	<4383d01d1001251612k6be7a64tdc53c16ab0006531@mail.gmail.com>
	<ca301f5e1001252005g49cd4d20md6fcb29fcf128391@mail.gmail.com>
	<4383d01d1001260525qfb17097x6c938529ad3bcdc6@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <fc8eb2b1001261234l3ccca8bdxb0cd3a24b448fd93@mail.gmail.com>

Beth
Go to options, l for language and hit e for english. Make sure you do
this when you are in a file.
Nathan

On 1/26/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
> I"m using a QT model, sorry.  All that is checked.
> Beth
>
> On 1/25/10, Jordan Richardson <lilrichie411 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Beth,
>> In the options menu on the BrailleNote there's an option that says "grade
>> of
>> braille for keyboard entry."  Did you try just going to that and selecting
>> grade 2?  Also, when converting to "Microsoft Word," simply do an "s" cord
>> for save and then "x" with backspace until you find "create a microsoft
>> word
>> file."
>> Tell me if this helps.
>> Jordan
>>
>> 2010/1/25 Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>
>>> That's one suggestion, but I have to have them in Microsoft Word so I
>>> can transfer the words I write from BrailleNote to computer and sync
>>> them up so I can write anything and everything I need to write on my
>>> BrailleNote and then turn it all in on my computer.
>>> Beth
>>>
>>> On 1/25/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>> > Go to the Keyword Setup Options menu and make sure the format new
>>> documents
>>> > are in (I forget the exact wording) is Braille Document keyword type.
>>> >
>>> > Serena
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > ----- Original Message -----
>>> > From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>> > To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> > Sent: Monday, January 25, 2010 3:35 PM
>>> > Subject: [nabs-l] BrailleNote questions
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >> Hi, guys.  I have some BrailleNote question.  Every time I go and open
>>> >> a
>>> >> file, it comes out in computer braille and I want it to remain in
>>> >> Grade
>>> >> II/contracted English U.S.A. Braille.  How do I keep the language
>>> >> consistent so it doesn't keep changing on me?  Every time I open a
>>> >> document, this happens, and it drives me nuts!  Any answers would be
>>> good.
>>> >> Beth
>>> >>
>>> >> _______________________________________________
>>> >> nabs-l mailing list
>>> >> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> >> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> >> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> >> nabs-l:
>>> >>
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net
>>> >>
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > _______________________________________________
>>> > nabs-l mailing list
>>> > nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> > To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> > nabs-l:
>>> >
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>  >
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>>
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/lilrichie411%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Jordan Richardson
>> 2nd Vice President, Minnesota Association of Blind Students
>> lilrichie411 at gmail.com
>> "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
>> --Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/troubleclark%40gmail.com
>


From thebluesisloose at gmail.com  Tue Jan 26 22:15:31 2010
From: thebluesisloose at gmail.com (Beth)
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:15:31 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] BrailleNote questions
In-Reply-To: <fc8eb2b1001261234l3ccca8bdxb0cd3a24b448fd93@mail.gmail.com>
References: <4b5e006d.0807c00a.1c5a.ffffc0c2@mx.google.com>
	<003f01ca9e0a$1cd73d50$0201a8c0@Serene>
	<4383d01d1001251612k6be7a64tdc53c16ab0006531@mail.gmail.com>
	<ca301f5e1001252005g49cd4d20md6fcb29fcf128391@mail.gmail.com>
	<4383d01d1001260525qfb17097x6c938529ad3bcdc6@mail.gmail.com>
	<fc8eb2b1001261234l3ccca8bdxb0cd3a24b448fd93@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4383d01d1001261415g53546a94v237317c44a57eda@mail.gmail.com>

I"ll give that one a try.

On 1/26/10, Nathan Clark <troubleclark at gmail.com> wrote:
> Beth
> Go to options, l for language and hit e for english. Make sure you do
> this when you are in a file.
> Nathan
>
> On 1/26/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I"m using a QT model, sorry.  All that is checked.
>> Beth
>>
>> On 1/25/10, Jordan Richardson <lilrichie411 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Beth,
>>> In the options menu on the BrailleNote there's an option that says "grade
>>> of
>>> braille for keyboard entry."  Did you try just going to that and
>>> selecting
>>> grade 2?  Also, when converting to "Microsoft Word," simply do an "s"
>>> cord
>>> for save and then "x" with backspace until you find "create a microsoft
>>> word
>>> file."
>>> Tell me if this helps.
>>> Jordan
>>>
>>> 2010/1/25 Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>
>>>> That's one suggestion, but I have to have them in Microsoft Word so I
>>>> can transfer the words I write from BrailleNote to computer and sync
>>>> them up so I can write anything and everything I need to write on my
>>>> BrailleNote and then turn it all in on my computer.
>>>> Beth
>>>>
>>>> On 1/25/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>>> > Go to the Keyword Setup Options menu and make sure the format new
>>>> documents
>>>> > are in (I forget the exact wording) is Braille Document keyword type.
>>>> >
>>>> > Serena
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> > ----- Original Message -----
>>>> > From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>> > To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>> > Sent: Monday, January 25, 2010 3:35 PM
>>>> > Subject: [nabs-l] BrailleNote questions
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> >> Hi, guys.  I have some BrailleNote question.  Every time I go and
>>>> >> open
>>>> >> a
>>>> >> file, it comes out in computer braille and I want it to remain in
>>>> >> Grade
>>>> >> II/contracted English U.S.A. Braille.  How do I keep the language
>>>> >> consistent so it doesn't keep changing on me?  Every time I open a
>>>> >> document, this happens, and it drives me nuts!  Any answers would be
>>>> good.
>>>> >> Beth
>>>> >>
>>>> >> _______________________________________________
>>>> >> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> >> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> >> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> >> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> >> nabs-l:
>>>> >>
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net
>>>> >>
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> > _______________________________________________
>>>> > nabs-l mailing list
>>>> > nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> > To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> > nabs-l:
>>>> >
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>>  >
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/lilrichie411%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Jordan Richardson
>>> 2nd Vice President, Minnesota Association of Blind Students
>>> lilrichie411 at gmail.com
>>> "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
>>> --Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/troubleclark%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>


From corbbo at gmail.com  Tue Jan 26 22:29:40 2010
From: corbbo at gmail.com (Corbb O'Connor)
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:29:40 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Bank accounts
In-Reply-To: <000601ca9ec2$0f3ed320$2f01a8c0@myhome.westell.com>
References: <8CC6834711B8BD4-2CBC-EC6A@webmail-m039.sysops.aol.com>
	<83A491737391464484E741CB17C7CF5A@Gateway>
	<409c235c1001201853k68e04b28y2fa5b57ea69656ed@mail.gmail.com>
	<28A06EC8-D37B-4CD0-8209-2806629904E5@gmail.com>
	<000601ca9ec2$0f3ed320$2f01a8c0@myhome.westell.com>
Message-ID: <24C1C1EB-75F0-4875-8261-4AB0AC565CC4@gmail.com>

PNC is primarily in the Northeast, though (for better or for worse)  
they took over National City, so they have a few branches in the  
Midwest now. They're growing. And they took zero TARP/bailout funds,  
so yay for them!

On Jan 26, 2010, at 2:59 PM, Christopher Wright wrote:

Assuming that this wasn't already mentioned, HSBC is completely  
accessible
after you set up the Internet banking part. You just call customer  
service,
explain that your blind and that you want the virtual keyboard turned  
off.


_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for  
nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/corbbo%40gmail.com



From pyyhkala at gmail.com  Tue Jan 26 22:33:34 2010
From: pyyhkala at gmail.com (Mika Pyyhkala)
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:33:34 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Need More Of You On Twitter - Washington Seminar Resources
Message-ID: <695ace541001261433m19d4bb8ewcf25c9afcb56843c@mail.gmail.com>

Good Afternoon,

This message is being sent to both the national and Massachusetts student lists.

First, we need a lot more of you to join the Twitter social networking
service.  This can be done at:
http://twitter.com/signup

The reason we need a lot more of us on Twitter, among other things, is
so that when someone is trying to advocate that a company or
organization increase accessibility or otherwise end a discriminatory
practice, that we have large numbers of people expressing support for
that.  This is often done by each person sending, what they call in
Twitter lingo, an at reply to the organization.  It essentially means
you are sending a somewhat public message to the organization.  Its
also important that we create buzz on the internet about our upcoming
Washington seminar events.

I wanted to also bring to your attention a number of Twitter resources
relating to the 2010 Washington Seminar and related weekend events
that have recently been created.

A hashtag of
#NFBWS10
has been set up for the event.  A hashtag is simply a way of
categorizing mesages regarding a topic.  You enter the above hashtag
in your Twitter post or tweet, and then someone can search on that
hashtag to get more information and related posts or tweets about
whatever it is the tag is about.  Anyone can read these so tagged
tweets or posts at the web page:
http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23nfbws10

For example you might tweet:
"Making last minute appointments for California's #nfbws10 legislative
meetings."

In the above example on the Twitter service someone can click on the
#NFBWS10
which would appear in the system as a link and find related posts.
You might think that some posts like the above are mundane and boring,
and maybe on some level they might be, but they show internet buzz and
chatter is building about the event.  They also connect people who may
be going to the event or who may be reading about it for the first
time.

Many of our representatives in Congress are also on Twitter, and we
can create tweets or posts linking their Twitter accounts to ours when
we meet with them to highlight our legislative issues.  Also many of
the organizations that will address the NABS conference on Sunday are
on Twitter, and this is a quick way to ask them questions, give them
feedback, etc.

The NFB of Massachusetts has also set up a Twitter list (lists are a
new feature in Twitter) for those attending the event.  The list is
located at
http://twitter.com/nfbma/nfbws10
Someone can go to this web page and both see who will be attending, as
well as read the posts (tweets) of the attendees.  Note that when
accessing the list, people will see all Tweets not just those with the
hashtag.  The list could also be used for networking or other efforts.

Finally I've set up a shortened URL that points directly at the NFB
2010 Washington Seminar official web page agenda:
http://bit.ly/nfbws10
(note the above is all in lower case and unlike most of the other
resources noted in this message it is case sensitive, again all lower
case)
This provides a short web page address that you can easily remember,
and give to people who may need to access fact sheets, or the agenda.
You may also want to put this short web address in some of your
Twitter posts or tweets.

NABS has a Twitter page which you can read and follow at:
http://twitter.com/nabslink

In conclusion, the most important thing you can do is begin
participating in these social networks such as Twitter and Facebook in
order to move our agenda forward, as well as educate your own networks
of contacts about what we are doing.  On top of that, you may well
find other interesting uses for these web sites.  Once you join the
sites, you will pick up jargon like hashtags, trending topics, at
replys, status updates, and soon be an expert in such things.  Email
while still widely used is ever so gradually (depending on what group
we are talking about) being replaced by communication in more
collaborative social networking services that essentially permit a 1
to many conversation and interaction.  In some newer conferences, for
example, tweets are used to solicit questions from the audience, and
also to give the event a sort of presence on the internet.

Thanks to those of you who who have already gotten involved in
creating buzz about Washington Seminar on Twitter and other social
networks.  I look forward to seeing many of you this weekend, and
remember its still really not too late to make plans to attend if you
find you are able to do so at the last minute.

The weekend is a fun event like a mid year convention, and of course
you can experience all Washington DC has to offer while visiting.

Best,
Mika Pyyhkala
President
National Federation of the Blind of Massachusetts
pyyhkala at gmail.com
http://twitter.com/pyyhkala
http://twitter.com/nfbma
http://twitter.com/nfb_voice
http://twitter.com/nabslink


From chriswright11 at verizon.net  Tue Jan 26 23:50:33 2010
From: chriswright11 at verizon.net (Christopher Wright)
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:50:33 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Bank accounts
References: <8CC6834711B8BD4-2CBC-EC6A@webmail-m039.sysops.aol.com>
	<83A491737391464484E741CB17C7CF5A@Gateway>
	<409c235c1001201853k68e04b28y2fa5b57ea69656ed@mail.gmail.com>
	<28A06EC8-D37B-4CD0-8209-2806629904E5@gmail.com>
	<000601ca9ec2$0f3ed320$2f01a8c0@myhome.westell.com>
	<409c235c1001261231s380437fckc2d7ba7c9c3d25a9@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <000601ca9ee2$5acd9360$2f01a8c0@myhome.westell.com>

Speaking for HSBC, they're not just nationwide. They're worldwide.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Darian Smith" <dsmithnfb at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list"
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 3:31 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Bank accounts


> what I wonder about PNC is if   it's branches can be found  just about
> anywhere in the country?
>  I can't say I've heard of it in california, or on much of the west
> coast, for that matter.
>   Darian
>
> On 1/26/10, Christopher Wright <chriswright11 at verizon.net> wrote:
> > Assuming that this wasn't already mentioned, HSBC is completely
accessible
> > after you set up the Internet banking part. You just call customer
service,
> > explain that your blind and that you want the virtual keyboard turned
off.
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > nabs-l mailing list
> > nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> > To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> > nabs-l:
> >
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com
> >
>
>
> -- 
> Darian Smith
> Skype: The_Blind_Truth
> Windows Live: Lightningrod2010 at live.com
> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
> individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/chriswright11%40verizon.net



From newmanrl at cox.net  Wed Jan 27 00:48:06 2010
From: newmanrl at cox.net (Robert Leslie Newman)
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:48:06 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] New THOUGHT PROVOKER #153- My Sister's Keeper
In-Reply-To: <24C1C1EB-75F0-4875-8261-4AB0AC565CC4@gmail.com>
References: <8CC6834711B8BD4-2CBC-EC6A@webmail-m039.sysops.aol.com><83A491737391464484E741CB17C7CF5A@Gateway><409c235c1001201853k68e04b28y2fa5b57ea69656ed@mail.gmail.com><28A06EC8-D37B-4CD0-8209-2806629904E5@gmail.com><000601ca9ec2$0f3ed320$2f01a8c0@myhome.westell.com>
	<24C1C1EB-75F0-4875-8261-4AB0AC565CC4@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <A83E64C4FF1F4E86B7447F73EF7C43C0@RobertLesliePC>

NABS Listers 
RE: My Sister's Keeper 

 

THOUGHT PROVOKER #153 is by a guest author. The issue is, how does a blind
person deal with a sighted person that feels you, the blind person is
needing protection and can't handle a bully? If you have not read the
PROVOKER, it follows.  Recall that I collect responses and post them upon my
web site for all the WWW to read and learn from and that URL is-
Http://thoughtprovoker.info  If you wish to receive THOUGHT PROVOKERS sent
directly to you, just write me and ask, at-  newmanrl at cox.net 

 

 

 

THOUGHT PROVOKER 153

MY SISTER'S KEEPER

 

By Guest Author

David Lafleche

 

 Vito stopped when he noticed J.C. sitting at a desk near the stairwell.
"Hey, J.C.! Everybody's getting together for a pickup game at the ballpark.
Wanna come?"

 "No time," J.C. answered. "I need to stay here."

 "Hall Monitor?" Vito wondered. "What's up with that?"

 "You know the rumors," J.C. explained. "Some girls have complained about
guys hanging out too close to their locker room, fooling around. And right
now, Rhoda is in there with her friend Mandy. They can't see if some guy is
looking for trouble, so I'm pretty much on guard duty."

 "What, they can't spare a girl to do that?"

 "No, they're too busy. Besides, that's my sister in there, and I want to
make sure nobody hits up on her."

 Just then, Rhoda and Mandy came out of the locker room. Mandy had her dog,
Beartrap. Rhoda had her cane. But neither of them could have been prepared
for what happened next. As the girls entered the corridor, a string, unseen
to anyone, shot across. Having no time to react, Rhoda tripped over it,
sprawling on the floor. She was sore, but unharmed. Mandy and Beartrap
reacted angrily. Rhoda was confused. "What in the world was that?!" she
asked.

 Beartrap barked loudly, and pawed at a nearby door, apparently the source
of the string. "I'll tell you what it was!" J.C. growled as he opened the
door. "It was HIM!"

 Brian, a teammate of his on the baseball team, had been in the janitor's
closet, waiting for the right moment for his prank. J.C. grabbed him by the
collar, slamming him into the wall.

 "What do you think you're doing, you punk!" he shouted. "I knew you were
behind all those pranks, and now I've got proof!"

 "Oh, come on, J.C., lighten up!" Brian pleaded lamely. "I was just having a
little fun!"

 "You call that 'fun'? You could have killed her!"

 "Ah, she'll get over it. But I suppose this means I'm suspended from the
baseball team?"

 "Oh, more than you bargained for, punk! I'm going downtown and pressing
assault charges! I'll need you there, Rhoda. Mandy, do you want to come?"

 "I guess so," Rhoda replied. "But it will have to wait till school's over."

 "Dude, aren't you being a little harsh?" Vito asked.

 "No way," J.C. insisted. "To pull a stunt like that on a blind person,
especially my own sister, is the lowest of the low. This punk needs to get
the message." 

 Surprisingly, Mandy also took exception to this, though for her own
reasons. "Excuse me, Mister Laval, O hero of the defenseless! Who asked you?
Rhoda doesn't need your help! She can fight her own battles! Tell him,
Rhoda!"

 
Robert Leslie Newman
Author of THOUGHT PROVOKER
http://www.thoughtprovoker.info
Thought Is The First Step To Beyond
 




From kerrik2006 at gmail.com  Wed Jan 27 01:30:14 2010
From: kerrik2006 at gmail.com (Kerri Kosten)
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 20:30:14 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Need More Of You On Twitter - Washington Seminar
	Resources
In-Reply-To: <695ace541001261433m19d4bb8ewcf25c9afcb56843c@mail.gmail.com>
References: <695ace541001261433m19d4bb8ewcf25c9afcb56843c@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <e5a820711001261730n4de9b42h147327f5b8864428@mail.gmail.com>

Hi:

I totally agree! I love twitter!

Kerri

On 1/26/10, Mika Pyyhkala <pyyhkala at gmail.com> wrote:
> Good Afternoon,
>
> This message is being sent to both the national and Massachusetts student
> lists.
>
> First, we need a lot more of you to join the Twitter social networking
> service.  This can be done at:
> http://twitter.com/signup
>
> The reason we need a lot more of us on Twitter, among other things, is
> so that when someone is trying to advocate that a company or
> organization increase accessibility or otherwise end a discriminatory
> practice, that we have large numbers of people expressing support for
> that.  This is often done by each person sending, what they call in
> Twitter lingo, an at reply to the organization.  It essentially means
> you are sending a somewhat public message to the organization.  Its
> also important that we create buzz on the internet about our upcoming
> Washington seminar events.
>
> I wanted to also bring to your attention a number of Twitter resources
> relating to the 2010 Washington Seminar and related weekend events
> that have recently been created.
>
> A hashtag of
> #NFBWS10
> has been set up for the event.  A hashtag is simply a way of
> categorizing mesages regarding a topic.  You enter the above hashtag
> in your Twitter post or tweet, and then someone can search on that
> hashtag to get more information and related posts or tweets about
> whatever it is the tag is about.  Anyone can read these so tagged
> tweets or posts at the web page:
> http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23nfbws10
>
> For example you might tweet:
> "Making last minute appointments for California's #nfbws10 legislative
> meetings."
>
> In the above example on the Twitter service someone can click on the
> #NFBWS10
> which would appear in the system as a link and find related posts.
> You might think that some posts like the above are mundane and boring,
> and maybe on some level they might be, but they show internet buzz and
> chatter is building about the event.  They also connect people who may
> be going to the event or who may be reading about it for the first
> time.
>
> Many of our representatives in Congress are also on Twitter, and we
> can create tweets or posts linking their Twitter accounts to ours when
> we meet with them to highlight our legislative issues.  Also many of
> the organizations that will address the NABS conference on Sunday are
> on Twitter, and this is a quick way to ask them questions, give them
> feedback, etc.
>
> The NFB of Massachusetts has also set up a Twitter list (lists are a
> new feature in Twitter) for those attending the event.  The list is
> located at
> http://twitter.com/nfbma/nfbws10
> Someone can go to this web page and both see who will be attending, as
> well as read the posts (tweets) of the attendees.  Note that when
> accessing the list, people will see all Tweets not just those with the
> hashtag.  The list could also be used for networking or other efforts.
>
> Finally I've set up a shortened URL that points directly at the NFB
> 2010 Washington Seminar official web page agenda:
> http://bit.ly/nfbws10
> (note the above is all in lower case and unlike most of the other
> resources noted in this message it is case sensitive, again all lower
> case)
> This provides a short web page address that you can easily remember,
> and give to people who may need to access fact sheets, or the agenda.
> You may also want to put this short web address in some of your
> Twitter posts or tweets.
>
> NABS has a Twitter page which you can read and follow at:
> http://twitter.com/nabslink
>
> In conclusion, the most important thing you can do is begin
> participating in these social networks such as Twitter and Facebook in
> order to move our agenda forward, as well as educate your own networks
> of contacts about what we are doing.  On top of that, you may well
> find other interesting uses for these web sites.  Once you join the
> sites, you will pick up jargon like hashtags, trending topics, at
> replys, status updates, and soon be an expert in such things.  Email
> while still widely used is ever so gradually (depending on what group
> we are talking about) being replaced by communication in more
> collaborative social networking services that essentially permit a 1
> to many conversation and interaction.  In some newer conferences, for
> example, tweets are used to solicit questions from the audience, and
> also to give the event a sort of presence on the internet.
>
> Thanks to those of you who who have already gotten involved in
> creating buzz about Washington Seminar on Twitter and other social
> networks.  I look forward to seeing many of you this weekend, and
> remember its still really not too late to make plans to attend if you
> find you are able to do so at the last minute.
>
> The weekend is a fun event like a mid year convention, and of course
> you can experience all Washington DC has to offer while visiting.
>
> Best,
> Mika Pyyhkala
> President
> National Federation of the Blind of Massachusetts
> pyyhkala at gmail.com
> http://twitter.com/pyyhkala
> http://twitter.com/nfbma
> http://twitter.com/nfb_voice
> http://twitter.com/nabslink
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kerrik2006%40gmail.com
>


From bunnykatie6 at gmail.com  Wed Jan 27 02:14:57 2010
From: bunnykatie6 at gmail.com (Katie Wang)
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:14:57 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] BrailleNote questions
In-Reply-To: <4383d01d1001261415g53546a94v237317c44a57eda@mail.gmail.com>
References: <4b5e006d.0807c00a.1c5a.ffffc0c2@mx.google.com>
	<003f01ca9e0a$1cd73d50$0201a8c0@Serene>
	<4383d01d1001251612k6be7a64tdc53c16ab0006531@mail.gmail.com>
	<ca301f5e1001252005g49cd4d20md6fcb29fcf128391@mail.gmail.com>
	<4383d01d1001260525qfb17097x6c938529ad3bcdc6@mail.gmail.com>
	<fc8eb2b1001261234l3ccca8bdxb0cd3a24b448fd93@mail.gmail.com>
	<4383d01d1001261415g53546a94v237317c44a57eda@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <5096b4731001261814l4677ec48mb2d9019e53beca35@mail.gmail.com>

Hi, Beth,
  Go to Options menu, Braille Options, and check whether your
preferred reading grade is grade 2. Setting this option should allow
you to read all types of documents in grade 2 braille. When you edit
Microsoft Word or other types of text documents, though, I think you
do have to use computer braille; that's just one limitation of the
Braille Note. Hope this helps!
   Katie


On 1/26/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
> I"ll give that one a try.
>
> On 1/26/10, Nathan Clark <troubleclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Beth
>> Go to options, l for language and hit e for english. Make sure you do
>> this when you are in a file.
>> Nathan
>>
>> On 1/26/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I"m using a QT model, sorry.  All that is checked.
>>> Beth
>>>
>>> On 1/25/10, Jordan Richardson <lilrichie411 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Beth,
>>>> In the options menu on the BrailleNote there's an option that says
>>>> "grade
>>>> of
>>>> braille for keyboard entry."  Did you try just going to that and
>>>> selecting
>>>> grade 2?  Also, when converting to "Microsoft Word," simply do an "s"
>>>> cord
>>>> for save and then "x" with backspace until you find "create a microsoft
>>>> word
>>>> file."
>>>> Tell me if this helps.
>>>> Jordan
>>>>
>>>> 2010/1/25 Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>>
>>>>> That's one suggestion, but I have to have them in Microsoft Word so I
>>>>> can transfer the words I write from BrailleNote to computer and sync
>>>>> them up so I can write anything and everything I need to write on my
>>>>> BrailleNote and then turn it all in on my computer.
>>>>> Beth
>>>>>
>>>>> On 1/25/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>>>> > Go to the Keyword Setup Options menu and make sure the format new
>>>>> documents
>>>>> > are in (I forget the exact wording) is Braille Document keyword type.
>>>>> >
>>>>> > Serena
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> > ----- Original Message -----
>>>>> > From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>>> > To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>>> > Sent: Monday, January 25, 2010 3:35 PM
>>>>> > Subject: [nabs-l] BrailleNote questions
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> >> Hi, guys.  I have some BrailleNote question.  Every time I go and
>>>>> >> open
>>>>> >> a
>>>>> >> file, it comes out in computer braille and I want it to remain in
>>>>> >> Grade
>>>>> >> II/contracted English U.S.A. Braille.  How do I keep the language
>>>>> >> consistent so it doesn't keep changing on me?  Every time I open a
>>>>> >> document, this happens, and it drives me nuts!  Any answers would be
>>>>> good.
>>>>> >> Beth
>>>>> >>
>>>>> >> _______________________________________________
>>>>> >> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> >> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> >> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> >> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
>>>>> >> for
>>>>> >> nabs-l:
>>>>> >>
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net
>>>>> >>
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> > _______________________________________________
>>>>> > nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> > nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> > To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> > nabs-l:
>>>>> >
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>>>  >
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>>
>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/lilrichie411%40gmail.com
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Jordan Richardson
>>>> 2nd Vice President, Minnesota Association of Blind Students
>>>> lilrichie411 at gmail.com
>>>> "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
>>>> --Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/troubleclark%40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bunnykatie6%40gmail.com
>


From blackbyrdfly at gmail.com  Wed Jan 27 02:52:17 2010
From: blackbyrdfly at gmail.com (Jamie Principato)
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:52:17 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Need More Of You On Twitter - Washington Seminar
	Resources
In-Reply-To: <695ace541001261433m19d4bb8ewcf25c9afcb56843c@mail.gmail.com>
References: <695ace541001261433m19d4bb8ewcf25c9afcb56843c@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <63af025c1001261852r5a8c6b1maa1aaea4cb3a986b@mail.gmail.com>

Just as a side-note to the fantastic wealth of information in Mika's
original e-mail, if you want a more convenient, accessible, and ultimately
very enjoyable way of using Twitter, you can download a twitter client
called Qwitter that will allow you to post messages to twitter and read your
tweets from anywhere on your computer. No windows to navigate to, no website
to mess around with. You just do everything you'd normally need to go to the
website for from anywhere, inside any program, with a few simple,
easy-to-learn keystrokes. Qwitter interfaces with your screen reader, and if
you don't have a screen reader (or if it crashes or something) it will
automatically start using SAPI. It's really a great program, and it makes
tweeting a lot less of a hassle and a lot more fun, and pretty soon you'll
be able to access Facebook and Solona (a captcha solver) via Qwitter as
well.

If you want to check it out, you can find details and the download at
Qwitter-client.net

So go get Qwitter, and start using Twitter!

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 5:33 PM, Mika Pyyhkala <pyyhkala at gmail.com> wrote:

> Good Afternoon,
>
> This message is being sent to both the national and Massachusetts student
> lists.
>
> First, we need a lot more of you to join the Twitter social networking
> service.  This can be done at:
> http://twitter.com/signup
>
> The reason we need a lot more of us on Twitter, among other things, is
> so that when someone is trying to advocate that a company or
> organization increase accessibility or otherwise end a discriminatory
> practice, that we have large numbers of people expressing support for
> that.  This is often done by each person sending, what they call in
> Twitter lingo, an at reply to the organization.  It essentially means
> you are sending a somewhat public message to the organization.  Its
> also important that we create buzz on the internet about our upcoming
> Washington seminar events.
>
> I wanted to also bring to your attention a number of Twitter resources
> relating to the 2010 Washington Seminar and related weekend events
> that have recently been created.
>
> A hashtag of
> #NFBWS10
> has been set up for the event.  A hashtag is simply a way of
> categorizing mesages regarding a topic.  You enter the above hashtag
> in your Twitter post or tweet, and then someone can search on that
> hashtag to get more information and related posts or tweets about
> whatever it is the tag is about.  Anyone can read these so tagged
> tweets or posts at the web page:
> http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23nfbws10
>
> For example you might tweet:
> "Making last minute appointments for California's #nfbws10 legislative
> meetings."
>
> In the above example on the Twitter service someone can click on the
> #NFBWS10
> which would appear in the system as a link and find related posts.
> You might think that some posts like the above are mundane and boring,
> and maybe on some level they might be, but they show internet buzz and
> chatter is building about the event.  They also connect people who may
> be going to the event or who may be reading about it for the first
> time.
>
> Many of our representatives in Congress are also on Twitter, and we
> can create tweets or posts linking their Twitter accounts to ours when
> we meet with them to highlight our legislative issues.  Also many of
> the organizations that will address the NABS conference on Sunday are
> on Twitter, and this is a quick way to ask them questions, give them
> feedback, etc.
>
> The NFB of Massachusetts has also set up a Twitter list (lists are a
> new feature in Twitter) for those attending the event.  The list is
> located at
> http://twitter.com/nfbma/nfbws10
> Someone can go to this web page and both see who will be attending, as
> well as read the posts (tweets) of the attendees.  Note that when
> accessing the list, people will see all Tweets not just those with the
> hashtag.  The list could also be used for networking or other efforts.
>
> Finally I've set up a shortened URL that points directly at the NFB
> 2010 Washington Seminar official web page agenda:
> http://bit.ly/nfbws10
> (note the above is all in lower case and unlike most of the other
> resources noted in this message it is case sensitive, again all lower
> case)
> This provides a short web page address that you can easily remember,
> and give to people who may need to access fact sheets, or the agenda.
> You may also want to put this short web address in some of your
> Twitter posts or tweets.
>
> NABS has a Twitter page which you can read and follow at:
> http://twitter.com/nabslink
>
> In conclusion, the most important thing you can do is begin
> participating in these social networks such as Twitter and Facebook in
> order to move our agenda forward, as well as educate your own networks
> of contacts about what we are doing.  On top of that, you may well
> find other interesting uses for these web sites.  Once you join the
> sites, you will pick up jargon like hashtags, trending topics, at
> replys, status updates, and soon be an expert in such things.  Email
> while still widely used is ever so gradually (depending on what group
> we are talking about) being replaced by communication in more
> collaborative social networking services that essentially permit a 1
> to many conversation and interaction.  In some newer conferences, for
> example, tweets are used to solicit questions from the audience, and
> also to give the event a sort of presence on the internet.
>
> Thanks to those of you who who have already gotten involved in
> creating buzz about Washington Seminar on Twitter and other social
> networks.  I look forward to seeing many of you this weekend, and
> remember its still really not too late to make plans to attend if you
> find you are able to do so at the last minute.
>
> The weekend is a fun event like a mid year convention, and of course
> you can experience all Washington DC has to offer while visiting.
>
> Best,
> Mika Pyyhkala
> President
> National Federation of the Blind of Massachusetts
> pyyhkala at gmail.com
> http://twitter.com/pyyhkala
> http://twitter.com/nfbma
> http://twitter.com/nfb_voice
> http://twitter.com/nabslink
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/blackbyrdfly%40gmail.com
>

From nabs.president at gmail.com  Wed Jan 27 04:43:09 2010
From: nabs.president at gmail.com (Arielle Silverman)
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:43:09 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Going Out of Town
Message-ID: <85ff10071001262043k45f05798j9ec09ca15f52994f@mail.gmail.com>

Dear NABS members,

I am leaving town tomorrow to attend an academic conference and I will
be going directly from the conference to the Washington Seminar on
Saturday. I may not have Internet access while I am away, so if you
have any pressing questions regarding Washington Seminar, please call
me at
602-502-2255

I look forward to seeing everyone Sunday!

Arielle

-- 
Arielle Silverman
President, National Association of Blind Students
Phone:  602-502-2255
Email:
nabs.president at gmail.com
Website:
www.nabslink.org


From blackbyrdfly at gmail.com  Wed Jan 27 06:38:39 2010
From: blackbyrdfly at gmail.com (Jamie Principato)
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 01:38:39 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] New THOUGHT PROVOKER #153- My Sister's Keeper
In-Reply-To: <A83E64C4FF1F4E86B7447F73EF7C43C0@RobertLesliePC>
References: <8CC6834711B8BD4-2CBC-EC6A@webmail-m039.sysops.aol.com>
	<83A491737391464484E741CB17C7CF5A@Gateway>
	<409c235c1001201853k68e04b28y2fa5b57ea69656ed@mail.gmail.com>
	<28A06EC8-D37B-4CD0-8209-2806629904E5@gmail.com>
	<000601ca9ec2$0f3ed320$2f01a8c0@myhome.westell.com>
	<24C1C1EB-75F0-4875-8261-4AB0AC565CC4@gmail.com>
	<A83E64C4FF1F4E86B7447F73EF7C43C0@RobertLesliePC>
Message-ID: <63af025c1001262238p32515582j3e30affe1ce9497a@mail.gmail.com>

My thoughts here might ruffle some feathers, but in that thought provoker, I
personally think everyone was a bit out of line. J.C. for deciding that he's
his sister's bodyguard (though most brothers have that in them if they're
close with their sisters, blind or not), the punk for playing the prank in
the first place, Rhoda's friend with the guide dog for also deciding it's
her business to get involved in something that is purely between Rhoda and
her brother, and finally, Rhoda for not speaking up for herself at all
throughout the whole thing and just passively going along with what her
brother was doing.

I think that when it comes to being treated and respected as capable
individuals who can handle ourselves, the burdon is on us as much as (if not
more than) it is on the sighted would-be bodyguards trying to "protect" us.
If we're just going to be passive and go-with-the-flow the way society seems
to expect us to be, then a) no one is going to see us as capable of standing
up for ourselves, and b) no one is going to realize that we even want to
stand up for ourselves because we aren't even standing up to them! I think
that in order to show others that we can handle ourselves in bullying (and
other) situations, we need to demonstrate our competence, confidence, and
willingness to speak up for ourselves and be heard. We can't be door mats to
be walked on.

At the same time, though, there's a fine line to tow between being confident
and being an arrogant jerk. If someone is trying to go out of their way to
help you out, tell them what you *really* think about it and what you'd
rather they do, but let the know at least that you understand why they feel
the need to help and that they're not trying to be in the way.

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 7:48 PM, Robert Leslie Newman <newmanrl at cox.net>wrote:

> NABS Listers
> RE: My Sister's Keeper
>
>
>
> THOUGHT PROVOKER #153 is by a guest author. The issue is, how does a blind
> person deal with a sighted person that feels you, the blind person is
> needing protection and can't handle a bully? If you have not read the
> PROVOKER, it follows.  Recall that I collect responses and post them upon
> my
> web site for all the WWW to read and learn from and that URL is-
> Http://thoughtprovoker.info  If you wish to receive THOUGHT PROVOKERS sent
> directly to you, just write me and ask, at-  newmanrl at cox.net
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> THOUGHT PROVOKER 153
>
> MY SISTER'S KEEPER
>
>
>
> By Guest Author
>
> David Lafleche
>
>
>
>  Vito stopped when he noticed J.C. sitting at a desk near the stairwell.
> "Hey, J.C.! Everybody's getting together for a pickup game at the ballpark.
> Wanna come?"
>
>  "No time," J.C. answered. "I need to stay here."
>
>  "Hall Monitor?" Vito wondered. "What's up with that?"
>
>  "You know the rumors," J.C. explained. "Some girls have complained about
> guys hanging out too close to their locker room, fooling around. And right
> now, Rhoda is in there with her friend Mandy. They can't see if some guy is
> looking for trouble, so I'm pretty much on guard duty."
>
>  "What, they can't spare a girl to do that?"
>
>  "No, they're too busy. Besides, that's my sister in there, and I want to
> make sure nobody hits up on her."
>
>  Just then, Rhoda and Mandy came out of the locker room. Mandy had her dog,
> Beartrap. Rhoda had her cane. But neither of them could have been prepared
> for what happened next. As the girls entered the corridor, a string, unseen
> to anyone, shot across. Having no time to react, Rhoda tripped over it,
> sprawling on the floor. She was sore, but unharmed. Mandy and Beartrap
> reacted angrily. Rhoda was confused. "What in the world was that?!" she
> asked.
>
>  Beartrap barked loudly, and pawed at a nearby door, apparently the source
> of the string. "I'll tell you what it was!" J.C. growled as he opened the
> door. "It was HIM!"
>
>  Brian, a teammate of his on the baseball team, had been in the janitor's
> closet, waiting for the right moment for his prank. J.C. grabbed him by the
> collar, slamming him into the wall.
>
>  "What do you think you're doing, you punk!" he shouted. "I knew you were
> behind all those pranks, and now I've got proof!"
>
>  "Oh, come on, J.C., lighten up!" Brian pleaded lamely. "I was just having
> a
> little fun!"
>
>  "You call that 'fun'? You could have killed her!"
>
>  "Ah, she'll get over it. But I suppose this means I'm suspended from the
> baseball team?"
>
>  "Oh, more than you bargained for, punk! I'm going downtown and pressing
> assault charges! I'll need you there, Rhoda. Mandy, do you want to come?"
>
>  "I guess so," Rhoda replied. "But it will have to wait till school's
> over."
>
>  "Dude, aren't you being a little harsh?" Vito asked.
>
>  "No way," J.C. insisted. "To pull a stunt like that on a blind person,
> especially my own sister, is the lowest of the low. This punk needs to get
> the message."
>
>  Surprisingly, Mandy also took exception to this, though for her own
> reasons. "Excuse me, Mister Laval, O hero of the defenseless! Who asked
> you?
> Rhoda doesn't need your help! She can fight her own battles! Tell him,
> Rhoda!"
>
>
> Robert Leslie Newman
> Author of THOUGHT PROVOKER
> http://www.thoughtprovoker.info
> Thought Is The First Step To Beyond
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/blackbyrdfly%40gmail.com
>

From djdrocks4ever at gmail.com  Wed Jan 27 08:23:07 2010
From: djdrocks4ever at gmail.com (David Dunphy)
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 03:23:07 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Need More Of You On Twitter - Washington
	SeminarResources
References: <695ace541001261433m19d4bb8ewcf25c9afcb56843c@mail.gmail.com>
	<e5a820711001261730n4de9b42h147327f5b8864428@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <586DC7A0C589409DA71CFF3ADED38BD7@radio360usa>

Well, I personally am not going to Washington, but if I can help using my 
twitter or station to get any sort of info out, let me know.
Twitter is
djdrocks
>From David

*****
Tired of listening to the same old stations playing the same old songs over 
and over again?
Then check out an internet radio station with plenty of interesting 
programming. Visit the home of Radio360 Where Variety Matters Most at
http://www.radio360.us
Check it out you won't be disappointed 


__________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 4808 (20100126) __________

The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.

http://www.eset.com





From aphelps at BISM.org  Wed Jan 27 14:05:56 2010
From: aphelps at BISM.org (Amy Phelps)
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:05:56 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] BrailleNote questions
In-Reply-To: <fc8eb2b1001261234l3ccca8bdxb0cd3a24b448fd93@mail.gmail.com>
References: <4b5e006d.0807c00a.1c5a.ffffc0c2@mx.google.com><003f01ca9e0a$1cd73d50$0201a8c0@Serene><4383d01d1001251612k6be7a64tdc53c16ab0006531@mail.gmail.com><ca301f5e1001252005g49cd4d20md6fcb29fcf128391@mail.gmail.com><4383d01d1001260525qfb17097x6c938529ad3bcdc6@mail.gmail.com>
	<fc8eb2b1001261234l3ccca8bdxb0cd3a24b448fd93@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <144BBD32E57C5045B736FBC8D447D0EC026AEB11@blindmail.BISM.COM>

Nathan, Denzel is trying to get in touch with you about the student
seminar. Will you please get in touch with him. Thanks Amy 

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Nathan Clark
Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 3:34 PM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] BrailleNote questions

Beth
Go to options, l for language and hit e for english. Make sure you do
this when you are in a file.
Nathan

On 1/26/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
> I"m using a QT model, sorry.  All that is checked.
> Beth
>
> On 1/25/10, Jordan Richardson <lilrichie411 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Beth,
>> In the options menu on the BrailleNote there's an option that says
"grade
>> of
>> braille for keyboard entry."  Did you try just going to that and
selecting
>> grade 2?  Also, when converting to "Microsoft Word," simply do an "s"
cord
>> for save and then "x" with backspace until you find "create a
microsoft
>> word
>> file."
>> Tell me if this helps.
>> Jordan
>>
>> 2010/1/25 Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>
>>> That's one suggestion, but I have to have them in Microsoft Word so
I
>>> can transfer the words I write from BrailleNote to computer and sync
>>> them up so I can write anything and everything I need to write on my
>>> BrailleNote and then turn it all in on my computer.
>>> Beth
>>>
>>> On 1/25/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>> > Go to the Keyword Setup Options menu and make sure the format new
>>> documents
>>> > are in (I forget the exact wording) is Braille Document keyword
type.
>>> >
>>> > Serena
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > ----- Original Message -----
>>> > From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>> > To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>> > Sent: Monday, January 25, 2010 3:35 PM
>>> > Subject: [nabs-l] BrailleNote questions
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >> Hi, guys.  I have some BrailleNote question.  Every time I go and
open
>>> >> a
>>> >> file, it comes out in computer braille and I want it to remain in
>>> >> Grade
>>> >> II/contracted English U.S.A. Braille.  How do I keep the language
>>> >> consistent so it doesn't keep changing on me?  Every time I open
a
>>> >> document, this happens, and it drives me nuts!  Any answers would
be
>>> good.
>>> >> Beth
>>> >>
>>> >> _______________________________________________
>>> >> nabs-l mailing list
>>> >> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> >> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> >> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
for
>>> >> nabs-l:
>>> >>
>>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40ve
rizon.net
>>> >>
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > _______________________________________________
>>> > nabs-l mailing list
>>> > nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> > To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
for
>>> > nabs-l:
>>> >
>>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%
40gmail.com
>>>  >
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
for
>>> nabs-l:
>>>
>>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/lilrichie411%40g
mail.com
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Jordan Richardson
>> 2nd Vice President, Minnesota Association of Blind Students
>> lilrichie411 at gmail.com
>> "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
>> --Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%
40gmail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
>
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/troubleclark%40g
mail.com
>

_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/aphelps%40bism.o
rg



From alexandera.castillo at gmail.com  Wed Jan 27 14:28:57 2010
From: alexandera.castillo at gmail.com (Alexander Castillo)
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:28:57 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Debra Kendrick's article on Gov David Paterson
Message-ID: <e7c236691001270628o2c2da289n65833c9dd811c807@mail.gmail.com>

Hi list, Debra Kendrick, in reference to Governor Paterson of NY"s
upbringing writes “it sounds to me like being perceived as
> sighted was more important to the family than
> getting the best education possible." Having heard Governor Paterson speak in person about this issue in particular at the NY State convention this October, I can say that this might be a misinterpretation of the goals of Governor Paterson’s, family. The article is correct in stating that his family moved so that the Governor could receive an education which was equal to that of his peers, but it lacks to mention that this also meant
 That he would be somewhat isolated from the technology and
innovations which his peers grew up being very familiar with. His
family had a choice between raising a blind child with extremely low
opportunities for a healthy and successful life, and raising a healthy
child with the opportunities to be successful in spite of his
blindness. They chose the ladder and so far, they have proven to have
made the correct decision.

Personally, I would love to see someone in a high public profile
position who possesses the abilities often positively stereotyped with
the blind, being a magnificent Braille reader, the ability to
understand speech at over 350 words a minute, impeccable travel
skills, knowledge of every accessible device known to exist, but these
 are stereotypes, perhaps not negative ones like the meek and feeble
blind person, or the blind person who has superhuman abilities to make
up for their lack of sight, and these stereotypes are not inclusive of
those people who are blind, and have found different methods of
adapting to the world around  them.

Let’s also consider that this is a person who has achieved a good
level of success, and who has mastered certain tasks and techniques
which have helped him adapt and function in a career where typically,
there are very few other blind individuals working in. How likely is
it that he will change his methods of interacting with the world at
this point of his life? He is not a computer programmer, or an IT
expert, or someone who may have easily been guided to use those tools
which we would today consider crucial for being a successful person
who happens to be blind. He has done great with a Telephone and a
couple of office workers. I am not saying that he couldn’t do much
more, I am saying that he’s done a lot, and again, it has not been in
light of his blindness, or because of his blindness that he has been
successful, it has been in spite of his blindness that he has done so.


Thank you,
Alex Castillo


From hope.paulos at maine.edu  Wed Jan 27 16:15:35 2010
From: hope.paulos at maine.edu (Hope Paulos)
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 11:15:35 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Need More Of You On Twitter -
	WashingtonSeminarResources
References: <695ace541001261433m19d4bb8ewcf25c9afcb56843c@mail.gmail.com><e5a820711001261730n4de9b42h147327f5b8864428@mail.gmail.com>
	<586DC7A0C589409DA71CFF3ADED38BD7@radio360usa>
Message-ID: <3954FDA2E0294BA585FB51FD380651A1@Hope>

Same here. My twitter name is:
Fidelco4Ever
The name is case sensitive.
Hope Paulos
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Dunphy" <djdrocks4ever at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 27, 2010 3:23 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Need More Of You On Twitter - 
WashingtonSeminarResources


> Well, I personally am not going to Washington, but if I can help using my 
> twitter or station to get any sort of info out, let me know.
> Twitter is
> djdrocks
>>From David
>
> *****
> Tired of listening to the same old stations playing the same old songs 
> over and over again?
> Then check out an internet radio station with plenty of interesting 
> programming. Visit the home of Radio360 Where Variety Matters Most at
> http://www.radio360.us
> Check it out you won't be disappointed
>
> __________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus 
> signature database 4808 (20100126) __________
>
> The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.
>
> http://www.eset.com
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/hope.paulos%40maine.edu 



From loneblindjedi at samobile.net  Wed Jan 27 16:29:18 2010
From: loneblindjedi at samobile.net (Jedi)
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 11:29:18 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] New THOUGHT PROVOKER #153- My Sister's Keeper
Message-ID: <20100127162918.28558.82240@web2.serotek.com>

My feathers aren't ruffled. I'm glad you brought some of these issues 
up because yes, it is our responsibility to make our needs felt and our 
voioices heard.

To add to what you're saying, I think it's also important for us to 
understand that we don't have to fall in line with people's good 
charity just to make them feel more comfortable. It's okay to say "Hey, 
i'm doing okay but thinks for your concern." Or, sometimes, it's 
important to say "I don't like it when people grab me. I'd rather take 
your arm/follow you/be left alone (whatever your preference)."

I think it's hard for us sometimes because we're trying to do the best 
we can in a really awkward situation whether it's a sighted person 
trying to protect us, a sighted person trying to escort us, a sighted 
person thinking they would understand us better if they had our 
ophthalmological history in their hot little hands. We're trying to 
balance doing right by them, doing right by ourselves, meeting 
expectations of courtesy set by both the blind and sighted communities, 
and do it all while keeping our cool in a very short span of time. It's 
stressful, and i don't think we often give recognition to how stressful 
that can be, especially when we're expected by both the blind and 
sighted to make the perfect impression and do it as often as possible.

One of the things I've had to learn this last quarter is that trying to 
be an ambassador for the blind community 24/7 will burn you out. There 
is something to be said for setting the best impression possible 
because, unfortunately, minorities are judged on the actions of one. On 
the other hand, trying to get it right all the time will burn you out 
and it can feel dehumanizing sometimes. I think it's okay to recognize 
that and set a balance that's right for each of us individually. For 
me, setting that balance means letting sighted people know when I'm not 
interested in educating them, letting them know that I'd rather keep 
medical information private until we get to know each other, and 
letting them know that I understand where they're coming from but would 
rather have the agency over my own self to do what I need done which 
includes deciding when I need help, from whom, and how.

so while Robert's thought provoker doesn't address these issues 
directly, I think that the bullying experience is just one example of 
the interactions we have with the sighted on a regular basis. What's 
tough is trying to educate the sighted when they figure they know more 
about life as a blind person than you do. That's another issue that 
might be worth tackling on list if anyone wants a go.

Respectfully,
Jedi


Original message:
> My thoughts here might ruffle some feathers, but in that thought provoker, I
> personally think everyone was a bit out of line. J.C. for deciding that he's
> his sister's bodyguard (though most brothers have that in them if they're
> close with their sisters, blind or not), the punk for playing the prank in
> the first place, Rhoda's friend with the guide dog for also deciding it's
> her business to get involved in something that is purely between Rhoda and
> her brother, and finally, Rhoda for not speaking up for herself at all
> throughout the whole thing and just passively going along with what her
> brother was doing.

> I think that when it comes to being treated and respected as capable
> individuals who can handle ourselves, the burdon is on us as much as (if not
> more than) it is on the sighted would-be bodyguards trying to "protect" us.
> If we're just going to be passive and go-with-the-flow the way society seems
> to expect us to be, then a) no one is going to see us as capable of standing
> up for ourselves, and b) no one is going to realize that we even want to
> stand up for ourselves because we aren't even standing up to them! I think
> that in order to show others that we can handle ourselves in bullying (and
> other) situations, we need to demonstrate our competence, confidence, and
> willingness to speak up for ourselves and be heard. We can't be door mats to
> be walked on.

> At the same time, though, there's a fine line to tow between being confident
> and being an arrogant jerk. If someone is trying to go out of their way to
> help you out, tell them what you *really* think about it and what you'd
> rather they do, but let the know at least that you understand why they feel
> the need to help and that they're not trying to be in the way.

> On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 7:48 PM, Robert Leslie Newman <newmanrl at cox.net>wrote:

>> NABS Listers
>> RE: My Sister's Keeper



>> THOUGHT PROVOKER #153 is by a guest author. The issue is, how does a blind
>> person deal with a sighted person that feels you, the blind person is
>> needing protection and can't handle a bully? If you have not read the
>> PROVOKER, it follows.  Recall that I collect responses and post them upon
>> my
>> web site for all the WWW to read and learn from and that URL is-
>> Http://thoughtprovoker.info  If you wish to receive THOUGHT PROVOKERS sent
>> directly to you, just write me and ask, at-  newmanrl at cox.net







>> THOUGHT PROVOKER 153

>> MY SISTER'S KEEPER



>> By Guest Author

>> David Lafleche



>>  Vito stopped when he noticed J.C. sitting at a desk near the stairwell.
>> "Hey, J.C.! Everybody's getting together for a pickup game at the ballpark.
>> Wanna come?"

>>  "No time," J.C. answered. "I need to stay here."

>>  "Hall Monitor?" Vito wondered. "What's up with that?"

>>  "You know the rumors," J.C. explained. "Some girls have complained about
>> guys hanging out too close to their locker room, fooling around. And right
>> now, Rhoda is in there with her friend Mandy. They can't see if some guy is
>> looking for trouble, so I'm pretty much on guard duty."

>>  "What, they can't spare a girl to do that?"

>>  "No, they're too busy. Besides, that's my sister in there, and I want to
>> make sure nobody hits up on her."

>>  Just then, Rhoda and Mandy came out of the locker room. Mandy had her dog,
>> Beartrap. Rhoda had her cane. But neither of them could have been prepared
>> for what happened next. As the girls entered the corridor, a string, unseen
>> to anyone, shot across. Having no time to react, Rhoda tripped over it,
>> sprawling on the floor. She was sore, but unharmed. Mandy and Beartrap
>> reacted angrily. Rhoda was confused. "What in the world was that?!" she
>> asked.

>>  Beartrap barked loudly, and pawed at a nearby door, apparently the source
>> of the string. "I'll tell you what it was!" J.C. growled as he opened the
>> door. "It was HIM!"

>>  Brian, a teammate of his on the baseball team, had been in the janitor's
>> closet, waiting for the right moment for his prank. J.C. grabbed him by the
>> collar, slamming him into the wall.

>>  "What do you think you're doing, you punk!" he shouted. "I knew you were
>> behind all those pranks, and now I've got proof!"

>>  "Oh, come on, J.C., lighten up!" Brian pleaded lamely. "I was just having
>> a
>> little fun!"

>>  "You call that 'fun'? You could have killed her!"

>>  "Ah, she'll get over it. But I suppose this means I'm suspended from the
>> baseball team?"

>>  "Oh, more than you bargained for, punk! I'm going downtown and pressing
>> assault charges! I'll need you there, Rhoda. Mandy, do you want to come?"

>>  "I guess so," Rhoda replied. "But it will have to wait till school's
>> over."

>>  "Dude, aren't you being a little harsh?" Vito asked.

>>  "No way," J.C. insisted. "To pull a stunt like that on a blind person,
>> especially my own sister, is the lowest of the low. This punk needs to get
>> the message."

>>  Surprisingly, Mandy also took exception to this, though for her own
>> reasons. "Excuse me, Mister Laval, O hero of the defenseless! Who asked
>> you?
>> Rhoda doesn't need your help! She can fight her own battles! Tell him,
>> Rhoda!"


>> Robert Leslie Newman
>> Author of THOUGHT PROVOKER
>> http://www.thoughtprovoker.info
>> Thought Is The First Step To Beyond




>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:

>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/blackbyrdfly%40gmail.com

> _______________________________________________
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From loneblindjedi at samobile.net  Wed Jan 27 16:46:44 2010
From: loneblindjedi at samobile.net (Jedi)
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 11:46:44 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Debra Kendrick's article on Gov David Paterson
Message-ID: <20100127164644.28558.76465@web2.serotek.com>

Alex,

I agree with you, and I suspect that debra would also agree, that David 
paterson has accomplished a great deal given the current climate 
concerning blindness. Unfortunately, the fact that he hasn't got 
blindness skills is starting to confirm the public image of blindness. 
debra mentions articles in which sighted commentators are starting to 
blame his blindness for various political mishaps and bad decisions on 
his part. Some of them, as exemplified in the two Saturday night Live 
skits featuring the Governor, make fun of him and his blindness and I 
suspect that there's some truth in what they're saying. That may be 
unpleasant to hear, but humor doesn't come from thin air. Usually, 
blindness humor comes from lack of information, fear, and often 
observations of blind people who seem not to be well oriented to life 
in general. I'm not saying that Paterson is disoriented to life in 
general, but it is fair to say that his lack of blindness skills may 
cause him to appear less oriented in public than his sighted colleagues.

Debra also mentions his rather conservative stance in disability 
politics. Interesting enough Helen Keller was, like Paterson, very 
liberal on most issues but very conservative in disability politics. In 
Paterson's case, I suspect that his stoic upbringing caused his 
conservatism: if I can do it without special treatment of any kind, so 
can they. Unfortunately, from what I've read, Paterson seems to have 
confused special treatment with access to very unique skill sets and 
opportunities for access to ppublic environments Ironically, it's these 
opportunities for access which make us able to compete equally with the 
nondisabled and blindness skills are one example of that.

I have also heard references made by Paterson about his childhood. I 
think he recognizes that he missed out on opportunities that many other 
blind people have had. I think to some extent, he understands that he, 
in an effort to avoid looking different or helpless, lost out. Surely, 
his parents did the best they could with the information and blindness 
resources they had at the time. Maybe they wanted him to pass as much 
as possible so he wouldn't be negatively associated with a minority 
class and thus lose opportunities as a result. Keep in mind that 
Paterson's parents (and even Paterson himself) grew up in an era when 
Black people also tried to pass because being Black meant less 
opportunity. It still does. I suspect that living as members of a 
heavily stereotyped minority class informed their opinion on how 
Paterson's blindness ought to have been dealt with.

I think these are the concerns that debra brings to the conversation 
about david Paterson, and in my opinion, her points are well taken.

Respectfully,
Jedi

.
Original message:
> Hi list, Debra Kendrick, in reference to Governor Paterson of NY"s
> upbringing writes “it sounds to me like being perceived as
>> sighted was more important to the family than
>> getting the best education possible." Having heard Governor Paterson 
>> speak in person about this issue in particular at the NY State 
>> convention this October, I can say that this might be a 
>> misinterpretation of the goals of Governor Paterson’s, family. The 
>> article is correct in stating that his family moved so that the 
>> Governor could receive an education which was equal to that of his 
>> peers, but it lacks to mention that this also meant
>  That he would be somewhat isolated from the technology and
> innovations which his peers grew up being very familiar with. His
> family had a choice between raising a blind child with extremely low
> opportunities for a healthy and successful life, and raising a healthy
> child with the opportunities to be successful in spite of his
> blindness. They chose the ladder and so far, they have proven to have
> made the correct decision.

> Personally, I would love to see someone in a high public profile
> position who possesses the abilities often positively stereotyped with
> the blind, being a magnificent Braille reader, the ability to
> understand speech at over 350 words a minute, impeccable travel
> skills, knowledge of every accessible device known to exist, but these
>  are stereotypes, perhaps not negative ones like the meek and feeble
> blind person, or the blind person who has superhuman abilities to make
> up for their lack of sight, and these stereotypes are not inclusive of
> those people who are blind, and have found different methods of
> adapting to the world around  them.

> Let’s also consider that this is a person who has achieved a good
> level of success, and who has mastered certain tasks and techniques
> which have helped him adapt and function in a career where typically,
> there are very few other blind individuals working in. How likely is
> it that he will change his methods of interacting with the world at
> this point of his life? He is not a computer programmer, or an IT
> expert, or someone who may have easily been guided to use those tools
> which we would today consider crucial for being a successful person
> who happens to be blind. He has done great with a Telephone and a
> couple of office workers. I am not saying that he couldn’t do much
> more, I am saying that he’s done a lot, and again, it has not been in
> light of his blindness, or because of his blindness that he has been
> successful, it has been in spite of his blindness that he has done so.


> Thank you,
> Alex Castillo

> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40samobile.net

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From serenacucco at verizon.net  Wed Jan 27 19:14:38 2010
From: serenacucco at verizon.net (Serena)
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:14:38 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] New THOUGHT PROVOKER #153- My Sister's Keeper
References: <8CC6834711B8BD4-2CBC-EC6A@webmail-m039.sysops.aol.com><83A491737391464484E741CB17C7CF5A@Gateway><409c235c1001201853k68e04b28y2fa5b57ea69656ed@mail.gmail.com><28A06EC8-D37B-4CD0-8209-2806629904E5@gmail.com><000601ca9ec2$0f3ed320$2f01a8c0@myhome.westell.com><24C1C1EB-75F0-4875-8261-4AB0AC565CC4@gmail.com><A83E64C4FF1F4E86B7447F73EF7C43C0@RobertLesliePC>
	<63af025c1001262238p32515582j3e30affe1ce9497a@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <009901ca9f84$f84a2a70$0201a8c0@Serene>

My thaughts here might also ruffle some feathers ...

Of course, blind people don't need body guards and can handle bullying. 
Having said that, if I were getting bullied, I'd really appreciate my 
brother, other relative, or best friend telling that jerk to knock it off! 
Not because I'm blind, but I guess, it's simply my personality.  I'd always 
certainly stand up for a friend of mine if he/she were getting bullied, 
whether he/she is sighted, blind, deaf, etc.  Therefore, I'm sure my friends 
would do anything to stop some jerk from bullying or overprotecting me, 
simply cuz they believe what the bully or well-meaning sighted person is 
doing is wrong!  I previously told a story on this list about when my friend 
Anthony stopped a well-meaning but ignorant sighted person from physically 
guiding me somewhere, without even saying anything to me.  Anthony didn't 
stop him/her cuz he thaught I needed a body guard or couldn't have stood up 
for myself, but because he was shocked at what he was about to witness and 
believed it just wasn't right!

Serena


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jamie Principato" <blackbyrdfly at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 27, 2010 1:38 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] New THOUGHT PROVOKER #153- My Sister's Keeper


> My thoughts here might ruffle some feathers, but in that thought provoker, 
> I
> personally think everyone was a bit out of line. J.C. for deciding that 
> he's
> his sister's bodyguard (though most brothers have that in them if they're
> close with their sisters, blind or not), the punk for playing the prank in
> the first place, Rhoda's friend with the guide dog for also deciding it's
> her business to get involved in something that is purely between Rhoda and
> her brother, and finally, Rhoda for not speaking up for herself at all
> throughout the whole thing and just passively going along with what her
> brother was doing.
>
> I think that when it comes to being treated and respected as capable
> individuals who can handle ourselves, the burdon is on us as much as (if 
> not
> more than) it is on the sighted would-be bodyguards trying to "protect" 
> us.
> If we're just going to be passive and go-with-the-flow the way society 
> seems
> to expect us to be, then a) no one is going to see us as capable of 
> standing
> up for ourselves, and b) no one is going to realize that we even want to
> stand up for ourselves because we aren't even standing up to them! I think
> that in order to show others that we can handle ourselves in bullying (and
> other) situations, we need to demonstrate our competence, confidence, and
> willingness to speak up for ourselves and be heard. We can't be door mats 
> to
> be walked on.
>
> At the same time, though, there's a fine line to tow between being 
> confident
> and being an arrogant jerk. If someone is trying to go out of their way to
> help you out, tell them what you *really* think about it and what you'd
> rather they do, but let the know at least that you understand why they 
> feel
> the need to help and that they're not trying to be in the way.
>
> On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 7:48 PM, Robert Leslie Newman 
> <newmanrl at cox.net>wrote:
>
>> NABS Listers
>> RE: My Sister's Keeper
>>
>>
>>
>> THOUGHT PROVOKER #153 is by a guest author. The issue is, how does a 
>> blind
>> person deal with a sighted person that feels you, the blind person is
>> needing protection and can't handle a bully? If you have not read the
>> PROVOKER, it follows.  Recall that I collect responses and post them upon
>> my
>> web site for all the WWW to read and learn from and that URL is-
>> Http://thoughtprovoker.info  If you wish to receive THOUGHT PROVOKERS 
>> sent
>> directly to you, just write me and ask, at-  newmanrl at cox.net
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> THOUGHT PROVOKER 153
>>
>> MY SISTER'S KEEPER
>>
>>
>>
>> By Guest Author
>>
>> David Lafleche
>>
>>
>>
>>  Vito stopped when he noticed J.C. sitting at a desk near the stairwell.
>> "Hey, J.C.! Everybody's getting together for a pickup game at the 
>> ballpark.
>> Wanna come?"
>>
>>  "No time," J.C. answered. "I need to stay here."
>>
>>  "Hall Monitor?" Vito wondered. "What's up with that?"
>>
>>  "You know the rumors," J.C. explained. "Some girls have complained about
>> guys hanging out too close to their locker room, fooling around. And 
>> right
>> now, Rhoda is in there with her friend Mandy. They can't see if some guy 
>> is
>> looking for trouble, so I'm pretty much on guard duty."
>>
>>  "What, they can't spare a girl to do that?"
>>
>>  "No, they're too busy. Besides, that's my sister in there, and I want to
>> make sure nobody hits up on her."
>>
>>  Just then, Rhoda and Mandy came out of the locker room. Mandy had her 
>> dog,
>> Beartrap. Rhoda had her cane. But neither of them could have been 
>> prepared
>> for what happened next. As the girls entered the corridor, a string, 
>> unseen
>> to anyone, shot across. Having no time to react, Rhoda tripped over it,
>> sprawling on the floor. She was sore, but unharmed. Mandy and Beartrap
>> reacted angrily. Rhoda was confused. "What in the world was that?!" she
>> asked.
>>
>>  Beartrap barked loudly, and pawed at a nearby door, apparently the 
>> source
>> of the string. "I'll tell you what it was!" J.C. growled as he opened the
>> door. "It was HIM!"
>>
>>  Brian, a teammate of his on the baseball team, had been in the janitor's
>> closet, waiting for the right moment for his prank. J.C. grabbed him by 
>> the
>> collar, slamming him into the wall.
>>
>>  "What do you think you're doing, you punk!" he shouted. "I knew you were
>> behind all those pranks, and now I've got proof!"
>>
>>  "Oh, come on, J.C., lighten up!" Brian pleaded lamely. "I was just 
>> having
>> a
>> little fun!"
>>
>>  "You call that 'fun'? You could have killed her!"
>>
>>  "Ah, she'll get over it. But I suppose this means I'm suspended from the
>> baseball team?"
>>
>>  "Oh, more than you bargained for, punk! I'm going downtown and pressing
>> assault charges! I'll need you there, Rhoda. Mandy, do you want to come?"
>>
>>  "I guess so," Rhoda replied. "But it will have to wait till school's
>> over."
>>
>>  "Dude, aren't you being a little harsh?" Vito asked.
>>
>>  "No way," J.C. insisted. "To pull a stunt like that on a blind person,
>> especially my own sister, is the lowest of the low. This punk needs to 
>> get
>> the message."
>>
>>  Surprisingly, Mandy also took exception to this, though for her own
>> reasons. "Excuse me, Mister Laval, O hero of the defenseless! Who asked
>> you?
>> Rhoda doesn't need your help! She can fight her own battles! Tell him,
>> Rhoda!"
>>
>>
>> Robert Leslie Newman
>> Author of THOUGHT PROVOKER
>> http://www.thoughtprovoker.info
>> Thought Is The First Step To Beyond
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/blackbyrdfly%40gmail.com
>>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net 



From troubleclark at gmail.com  Wed Jan 27 21:25:13 2010
From: troubleclark at gmail.com (Nathan Clark)
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:25:13 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] BrailleNote questions
In-Reply-To: <144BBD32E57C5045B736FBC8D447D0EC026AEB11@blindmail.BISM.COM>
References: <4b5e006d.0807c00a.1c5a.ffffc0c2@mx.google.com>
	<003f01ca9e0a$1cd73d50$0201a8c0@Serene>
	<4383d01d1001251612k6be7a64tdc53c16ab0006531@mail.gmail.com>
	<ca301f5e1001252005g49cd4d20md6fcb29fcf128391@mail.gmail.com>
	<4383d01d1001260525qfb17097x6c938529ad3bcdc6@mail.gmail.com>
	<fc8eb2b1001261234l3ccca8bdxb0cd3a24b448fd93@mail.gmail.com>
	<144BBD32E57C5045B736FBC8D447D0EC026AEB11@blindmail.BISM.COM>
Message-ID: <fc8eb2b1001271325v466da76cr2cec4cf93a1fbfed@mail.gmail.com>

Well I think that I am not going to the student seminare meeting.


On 1/27/10, Amy Phelps <aphelps at bism.org> wrote:
> Nathan, Denzel is trying to get in touch with you about the student
> seminar. Will you please get in touch with him. Thanks Amy
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
> Behalf Of Nathan Clark
> Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 3:34 PM
> To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
> Subject: Re: [nabs-l] BrailleNote questions
>
> Beth
> Go to options, l for language and hit e for english. Make sure you do
> this when you are in a file.
> Nathan
>
> On 1/26/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I"m using a QT model, sorry.  All that is checked.
>> Beth
>>
>> On 1/25/10, Jordan Richardson <lilrichie411 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Beth,
>>> In the options menu on the BrailleNote there's an option that says
> "grade
>>> of
>>> braille for keyboard entry."  Did you try just going to that and
> selecting
>>> grade 2?  Also, when converting to "Microsoft Word," simply do an "s"
> cord
>>> for save and then "x" with backspace until you find "create a
> microsoft
>>> word
>>> file."
>>> Tell me if this helps.
>>> Jordan
>>>
>>> 2010/1/25 Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>
>>>> That's one suggestion, but I have to have them in Microsoft Word so
> I
>>>> can transfer the words I write from BrailleNote to computer and sync
>>>> them up so I can write anything and everything I need to write on my
>>>> BrailleNote and then turn it all in on my computer.
>>>> Beth
>>>>
>>>> On 1/25/10, Serena <serenacucco at verizon.net> wrote:
>>>> > Go to the Keyword Setup Options menu and make sure the format new
>>>> documents
>>>> > are in (I forget the exact wording) is Braille Document keyword
> type.
>>>> >
>>>> > Serena
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> > ----- Original Message -----
>>>> > From: "Beth" <thebluesisloose at gmail.com>
>>>> > To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>>>> > Sent: Monday, January 25, 2010 3:35 PM
>>>> > Subject: [nabs-l] BrailleNote questions
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> >> Hi, guys.  I have some BrailleNote question.  Every time I go and
> open
>>>> >> a
>>>> >> file, it comes out in computer braille and I want it to remain in
>>>> >> Grade
>>>> >> II/contracted English U.S.A. Braille.  How do I keep the language
>>>> >> consistent so it doesn't keep changing on me?  Every time I open
> a
>>>> >> document, this happens, and it drives me nuts!  Any answers would
> be
>>>> good.
>>>> >> Beth
>>>> >>
>>>> >> _______________________________________________
>>>> >> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> >> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> >> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> >> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
> for
>>>> >> nabs-l:
>>>> >>
>>>>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40ve
> rizon.net
>>>> >>
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> > _______________________________________________
>>>> > nabs-l mailing list
>>>> > nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> > To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
> for
>>>> > nabs-l:
>>>> >
>>>>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%
> 40gmail.com
>>>>  >
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
> for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>>
>>>>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/lilrichie411%40g
> mail.com
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Jordan Richardson
>>> 2nd Vice President, Minnesota Association of Blind Students
>>> lilrichie411 at gmail.com
>>> "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
>>> --Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>> nabs-l:
>>>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%
> 40gmail.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/troubleclark%40g
> mail.com
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/aphelps%40bism.o
> rg
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/troubleclark%40gmail.com
>


From kc2992a at student.american.edu  Thu Jan 28 00:24:19 2010
From: kc2992a at student.american.edu (Katy Carroll)
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:24:19 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Going Out of Town
In-Reply-To: <85ff10071001262043k45f05798j9ec09ca15f52994f@mail.gmail.com>
References: <85ff10071001262043k45f05798j9ec09ca15f52994f@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <2fdbeb321001271624t3e2e8p2bb154abbd2e71be@mail.gmail.com>

Hi guys,

My name is Kate and I am on the board of the New York NFB Student Division.
I am going to be at Washington Seminar. one of my sighted friends wants to
tag along with us on the Hill, since he graduated from my university and has
worked in lobbying. Anyway, he is from Florida so I figured he would like to
be with that delegation, rather than the one from New York. Problem is, I
don't know anyone from Florida NFB, so I was wondering if anyone from
Florida was on this list who wouldn't mind meeting up and maybe letting my
friend hang out with them on Tuesday.
I will be at Sunday's events, so we could meet up in person, so this isn't
so impersonal.

Sincerely,

Kate Carroll

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 11:43 PM, Arielle Silverman <
nabs.president at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear NABS members,
>
> I am leaving town tomorrow to attend an academic conference and I will
> be going directly from the conference to the Washington Seminar on
> Saturday. I may not have Internet access while I am away, so if you
> have any pressing questions regarding Washington Seminar, please call
> me at
> 602-502-2255
>
> I look forward to seeing everyone Sunday!
>
> Arielle
>
> --
> Arielle Silverman
> President, National Association of Blind Students
> Phone:  602-502-2255
> Email:
> nabs.president at gmail.com
> Website:
> www.nabslink.org
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/kc2992a%40student.american.edu
>



-- 
Kathryn CARROLL
American University
631 521 3018

From enews at codefactory.info  Thu Jan 28 02:40:45 2010
From: enews at codefactory.info (Code Factory News (no reply))
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:40:45 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Mobile Speak 4, Now Available
Message-ID: <auto-000137150248@mailfront1.g2host.com>


Logo Code Factory


Caroline Ragot - Marketing Director
<mailto:marketing at codefactory.es>marketing at codefactory.es

Mobile Speak 4


Mobile Speak 4, Now Available!




Cross Platform, Touch, Multi Voice and Ready for the Next Generation




Terrassa (Barcelona), Spain, January 27, 2010

Today, Code Factory introduced Mobile Speak 4, a 
revolutionary screen reader for anyone who wishes 
to enhance his/her use of a mobile phone. Are you 
ready to experience the most advanced screen 
reader ever released for mobile phones? Mobile 
Speak 4 is Cross Platform: you can move your 
license between Symbian and Windows Mobile 
phones. Mobile Speak 4 is Touch: you can use 
touch screen phones such as the Nokia N97, the 
HTC Touch Pro 2 and many others, with traditional 
keyboard shortcuts as well as touchscreen 
gestures and commands. Mobile Speak 4 is Multi 
Voice: you get three high quality voices from 
Acapela or Loquendo for the price of one. Mobile 
Speak 4 is Ready for the Next Generation: you 
won't be left behind with old technology, since 
Mobile Speak 4 supports the latest devices 
running on the latest operating systems, Windows 
Mobile 6.5 and Symbian S60 5th Edition.

“The mobile phone market is changing rapidly. 
Mobile Speak 4 is Code Factory’s answer to the 
future of accessibility. Mobile Speak 4 is 
everything our users have been waiting for, it 
will take you to another level of experience, and 
I can tell you, you will never look back.” 
explains Eduard Sánchez, Code Factory's CEO. 
“Mobile Speak 4 is one year of hard work. Mobile 
Speak 4 is fifteen dedicated people working full 
time for you. Mobile Speak 4 sets new and higher 
standards for accessibility. Mobile Speak 4 is revolutionary”.

On Symbian, Mobile Speak 4 also brings support 
for <http://www.quickoffice.com/>Quickword to 
edit and read documents by character, word, 
sentence or paragraph, as well as for 
<http://www.fring.com/default.asp>Fring to make 
voip calls and chat on instant messaging. On 
Windows Mobile, Mobile Speak 4 brings new 
Internet Explorer support which will allow you to 
navigate by headings, links, forms, etc. as well 
as search for text, and even add bookmarks to web 
pages. More features can also be expected; such 
as a backlight option to save battery power, the 
possibility to stop Mobile Speak while reading, a 
privacy mode to use the phone with a locked static background image, and more.

Among the new supported phones are: the Nokia 
N97, Nokia N97 mini, Nokia 5230, Nokia 5530, 
Nokia 5730, Nokia 5800, Nokia 6710 Navigator, 
Nokia 6720, Nokia 6730, Nokia 6790, Nokia E52, 
Nokia E72, Nokia N86, HTC Touch Pro 2, HTC Touch 
2, HTC Touch Diamond 2, AT&T Titl 2, AT&T Pure, 
AT&T HP iPAQ Glisten, HP iPAQ Data Messenger, 
Sprint Samsung Intrepid, Samsung Omnia Pro B7610, 
Samsung Omnia Pro B7330, Acer beTouch E101, and 
Sony Ericsson Xperia x1. To consult the full list 
of supported devices, visit 
<http://www.codefactory.es/en/phoneslist.asp?id=342>http://www.codefactory.es/en/phoneslist.asp?id=342 


Download Mobile Speak 4 at 
<http://www.codefactory.es/en/downloads.asp?id=347>http://www.codefactory.es/en/downloads.asp?id=347 
and try it for 30 days for free. Everyone can try 
it, new users as well as existing users who have 
already used a version, whether full or trial, of 
a past version of Mobile Speak. To learn more 
visit 
<http://www.codefactory.es/en/page.asp?id=402>http://www.codefactory.es/en/page.asp?id=402

If you are already a user of Mobile Speak and 
wish to upgrade to Mobile Speak 4, contact your 
distributor to purchase an upgrade license. In 
addition to all the improvements and new features 
of Mobile Speak 4, if you purchase an upgrade to 
Mobile Speak 4, you will also get Mobile 
Magnifier, Mobile DAISY Player, Color Recognizer 
and the Games for free! To consult the complete 
list of Code Factory’s official distributors, 
visit 
<http://www.codefactory.es/en/page.asp?id=351>http://www.codefactory.es/en/page.asp?id=351 


To learn how to install Mobile Speak 4 for the 
first time, follow the instructions at 
<http://www.codefactory.es/descargas/family_4/MS4_Manual_WM.html#_Toc252273670>http://www.codefactory.es/descargas/family_4/MS4_Manual_WM.html#_Toc252273670 
for Windows Mobile, and 
<http://www.codefactory.es/descargas/family_4/MS4_Manual_Symbian.html#_Toc252274141>http://www.codefactory.es/descargas/family_4/MS4_Manual_Symbian.html#_Toc252274141 
for Symbian.

If upgrading from a previous version of Mobile 
Speak, make sure to FIRST UNINSTALL all the Code 
Factory packages you have installed and then 
RESTART the device. For more information, follow 
the instructions at 
<http://www.codefactory.es/descargas/family_4/MS4_Manual_WM.html#_Toc252273675>http://www.codefactory.es/descargas/family_4/MS4_Manual_WM.html#_Toc252273675 
for Windows Mobile, and 
<http://www.codefactory.es/descargas/family_4/MS4_Manual_Symbian.html#_Toc252274144>http://www.codefactory.es/descargas/family_4/MS4_Manual_Symbian.html#_Toc252274144 
for Symbian

To read the full instructions to upgrade to 
Mobile Speak 4 from a previous version of Mobile 
Speak, visit 
<http://www.codefactory.es/descargas/family_4/MS4_Manual_WM.html#_Toc252273683>http://www.codefactory.es/descargas/family_4/MS4_Manual_WM.html#_Toc252273683 
for Windows Mobile, and 
<http://www.codefactory.es/descargas/family_4/MS4_Manual_Symbian.html#_Toc252274147>http://www.codefactory.es/descargas/family_4/MS4_Manual_Symbian.html#_Toc252274147 
for Symbian.

To learn more about Mobile Speak 4 
visit 
<http://www.codefactory.es/en/products.asp?id=318>http://www.codefactory.es/en/products.asp?id=318, 
to hear it in action, listen to some audio demos 
at 
<http://www.codefactory.es/en/audio.asp?id=103#family_0>http://www.codefactory.es/en/audio.asp?id=103#family_0 


For a comprehensive list of changes from Mobile 
Speak Pocket and Smartphone v2.1 to Mobile Speak 
v4.0 for Windows Mobile visit 
<http://www.codefactory.es/en/products.asp?id=407#newWM>http://www.codefactory.es/en/products.asp?id=407#newWM 


For a comprehensive list of changes from Mobile 
Speak for Symbian phones v3.82 to Mobile Speak 
v4.0 for Symbian visit 
<http://www.codefactory.es/en/products.asp?id=407#newSymbian>http://www.codefactory.es/en/products.asp?id=407#newSymbian 



About Code Factory

Founded in 1998 and headquartered in Terrassa 
(Barcelona), Spain, Code Factory is the global 
leader committed to the development of products 
designed to eliminate barriers to the 
accessibility of mobile technology for the blind 
and visually impaired. Today, Code Factory is the 
leading provider of screen readers, screen 
magnifiers, and Braille interfaces for the widest 
range of mainstream mobile devices. Among Code 
Factory's customers are well known organizations 
for the blind such as ONCE, and carriers such as 
AT&T, Bouygues Telecom, SFR, TIM and Vodafone. 
Code Factory has also built strong partnerships 
with mainstream multinational companies like RIM, 
Nokia, Microsoft, and Hewlett Packard as well as 
leading assistive technology companies such as 
HumanWare, Optelec and Sendero Group.

For more information, feel free to contact Code Factory S.L.:


Code Factory, S.L., Rambla d'Egara 148 2-2, 08221 Terrassa (Barcelona)
<http://www.codefactory.cat/helpdesk/>HelpDesk, www.codefactory.es
Code Factory, S.L. - 2010

From mike at mello.com  Thu Jan 28 05:45:26 2010
From: mike at mello.com (Mike Mello)
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:45:26 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Selling my Book Sense XT. $375.00
Message-ID: <20100128054527.74BAB130DEA@smtprelay02.hostedemail.com>

Hello:
I am selling my Book Sense XT with case and 8gb sd card for $375.00.
This unit is almost $500 new. Please contact me off list for more information. I will ship for free or bring the unit to Washington Seminar next week.
Thanks.
Mike Mello
mike at mello.com
208-301-0565

Michael J. Mello

mike at mello.com

(208) 301-0565


From dsmithnfb at gmail.com  Thu Jan 28 07:34:04 2010
From: dsmithnfb at gmail.com (Darian Smith)
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:34:04 -0800
Subject: [nabs-l] Fwd: [Nfbc-info] Petition to Get NBC to cover Paralympic
	Games as they do Olympic Games
In-Reply-To: <7F806542433E48C18B80E851055BE91E@lm>
References: <7F806542433E48C18B80E851055BE91E@lm>
Message-ID: <409c235c1001272334w727b63dbu79ad262e3e675fc8@mail.gmail.com>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Lisamaria Martinez, NOMC" <lmartinez217 at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 09:44:48 -0800
Subject: [Nfbc-info] Petition to Get NBC to cover Paralympic Games as
they do Olympic Games
To: NFB of California List <nfbc-info at nfbnet.org>

Petition to Get NBC to cover Paralympic Games as they do Olympic GamesHello,

I think this is a worthy petition for all to sign. I was the 1225th
person to sign it. Disabled athletes deserve just as much attention as
able-bodied athletes.

So, check it out.

Subject: Petition to Get NBC to cover Paralympic Games as they do Olympic Games


Petition to Get NBC to cover Paralympics Games as they do Olympic Games


Sign the petition in the following link so we can be well on our way
to getting the coverage we need!

http://www.petitiononline.com/USOCTV/petition.html

PLEASE take the time to sign this petition and pass it along to
everyone you know






Rachel M. Reitz M.A. CRC, CTRS

Rehabilitation Counselor

Southern Arizona Association for the Visually Impaired (SAAVI)

3767 East Grant Road

Tucson, AZ  85716

520 795.1331 x242

Fax: 520 795.1336

rreitz at saavi.us

www.saavi.us


_______________________________________________
Nfbc-info mailing list
Nfbc-info at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nfbc-info_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for Nfbc-info:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nfbc-info_nfbnet.org/dsmithnfb%40gmail.com



-- 
Darian Smith
Skype: The_Blind_Truth
Windows Live: Lightningrod2010 at live.com
The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate
individuals into the field of blindness education, and we need your
help!   To Get Involved  go to:
www.TeachBlindStudents.org





I think this is a very worthwhile think to support, for much the same
reasons as the below comments state.  I don't know about you guys, but
I'm in!

 Darian


From iamantonio at cox.net  Thu Jan 28 15:09:41 2010
From: iamantonio at cox.net (Antonio M. Guimaraes)
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2010 10:09:41 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Cyting NLS Material
Message-ID: <5386237F31F34E96AC253168D0E00A49@userf9b4fa60eb>

Hi all,

How do you cite an NLS recording, since it has no page numbers? 

I am working with three books off of bard, and believe they are nearly useless for research purposes.

Antonio Guimaraes

If an infinite number of rednecks riding in an infinite number of pickup trucks fire an infinite number of shotgun rounds at an infinite number of highway signs, they will eventually produce all the world's great literary works in Braille.

Shop online and support the NFB of RI at no additional cost to you.
http://www.givebackamerica.com/charity.php?b=169 
Givebackamerica.org, America's Online Charity Shopping Mall 

From pajohns1 at vt.edu  Thu Jan 28 15:50:31 2010
From: pajohns1 at vt.edu (pajohns1 at vt.edu)
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2010 10:50:31 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Cyting NLS Material
References: <5386237F31F34E96AC253168D0E00A49@userf9b4fa60eb>
Message-ID: <C43C7BD390434F68A1B94857EE7015C9@useripvq7z5u3t>

Antonio,

        If you paraphrase the quote then (at least in APA) including a page 
number is not required.  For the reference list any information not provided 
on the recording should be available either at the NLS site or cross 
checking the Amazon site.

Patrick


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Antonio M. Guimaraes" <iamantonio at cox.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 28, 2010 10:09 AM
Subject: [nabs-l] Cyting NLS Material


> Hi all,
>
> How do you cite an NLS recording, since it has no page numbers?
>
> I am working with three books off of bard, and believe they are nearly 
> useless for research purposes.
>
> Antonio Guimaraes
>
> If an infinite number of rednecks riding in an infinite number of pickup 
> trucks fire an infinite number of shotgun rounds at an infinite number of 
> highway signs, they will eventually produce all the world's great literary 
> works in Braille.
>
> Shop online and support the NFB of RI at no additional cost to you.
> http://www.givebackamerica.com/charity.php?b=169
> Givebackamerica.org, America's Online Charity Shopping Mall
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/pajohns1%40vt.edu 



From commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net  Thu Jan 28 16:00:10 2010
From: commanderlumpy2003 at earthlink.net (Kevin Wassmer)
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:00:10 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] a new social networking site
Message-ID: <D5B3A7086063424A8C119825B8236D2E@kevin9ee0841f6>

Hello folks. I want to tell you about a new social networking site. It is a site for blind people. I haven't looked at intirely yet. But I have heard about it on My Telespace. It is called blinknatons. The web site is
http://www.blinknation.com I will talk to you later.    

From darrell.shandrow at gmail.com  Thu Jan 28 16:33:46 2010
From: darrell.shandrow at gmail.com (Darrell Shandrow)
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:33:46 -0700
Subject: [nabs-l] a new social networking site
In-Reply-To: <D5B3A7086063424A8C119825B8236D2E@kevin9ee0841f6>
References: <D5B3A7086063424A8C119825B8236D2E@kevin9ee0841f6>
Message-ID: <B3FF257AD99447828C8AD76DB066063C@DarrellPC>

Hello Kevin,

I don't really like the use of the term "blink" in this scenario. Now, if it
were BlindNation, I'd be all for it.
 

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Kevin Wassmer
Sent: Thursday, January 28, 2010 9:00 AM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Cc: apink792003 at yahoo.com; hands at googlegroups.com
Subject: [nabs-l] a new social networking site

Hello folks. I want to tell you about a new social networking site. It is a
site for blind people. I haven't looked at intirely yet. But I have heard
about it on My Telespace. It is called blinknatons. The web site is
http://www.blinknation.com I will talk to you later.    
_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/darrell.shandrow%40g
mail.com



From bunnykatie6 at gmail.com  Fri Jan 29 02:14:36 2010
From: bunnykatie6 at gmail.com (Katie Wang)
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:14:36 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Internet Explorer 8 and JAWS 10
Message-ID: <5096b4731001281814i5ac5f9b3sf61427cc6fd68f61@mail.gmail.com>

Hi, all,
  Has anyone upgraded your web browser to Internet explorer 8 while
still running JAWS 10? Does the new version of IE work smoothly? I
would like to upgrade my web browser soon but am not planning to
purchase a JAWS upgrade at this point, so I would appreciate to hear
about any bugs/problems you have encountered in terms of
accessibility. Thanks!
   Katie


From serenacucco at verizon.net  Fri Jan 29 02:30:13 2010
From: serenacucco at verizon.net (Serena)
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:30:13 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Cyting NLS Material
References: <5386237F31F34E96AC253168D0E00A49@userf9b4fa60eb>
Message-ID: <004301caa08a$fc81daa0$0201a8c0@Serene>

Use a reader to find the page numbers in the print book.

Serena


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Antonio M. Guimaraes" <iamantonio at cox.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 28, 2010 10:09 AM
Subject: [nabs-l] Cyting NLS Material


> Hi all,
>
> How do you cite an NLS recording, since it has no page numbers?
>
> I am working with three books off of bard, and believe they are nearly 
> useless for research purposes.
>
> Antonio Guimaraes
>
> If an infinite number of rednecks riding in an infinite number of pickup 
> trucks fire an infinite number of shotgun rounds at an infinite number of 
> highway signs, they will eventually produce all the world's great literary 
> works in Braille.
>
> Shop online and support the NFB of RI at no additional cost to you.
> http://www.givebackamerica.com/charity.php?b=169
> Givebackamerica.org, America's Online Charity Shopping Mall
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net 



From marsha.drenth at gmail.com  Fri Jan 29 02:52:54 2010
From: marsha.drenth at gmail.com (Marsha Drenth)
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:52:54 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Washington Seminar
Message-ID: <auto-000137073321@mailfront2.g2host.com>


Are you attending the 2010 Washington Seminar?  Are you a guide dog 
user?  Are you interested in becoming a guide dog user?

Well, you're in luck, because for the first time the National 
Association of Guide Dog users (NAGDU) will have a table at 
Washington Seminar!   Stop by for  information about NAGDU, state 
affiliates, our email list, and much more.   If this will be your 
first Washington Seminar, we can help you and your pup learn the best 
tips and tricks for surviving the seminar. If you're unable to swing 
by the table, there will be several NAGDU division board members in 
attendance over the week, so please come and find us!

NAGDU looks forward to meeting you at Washington Seminar!

For any further questions, please contact Marsha Drenth by email: 
marsha.drenth at gmail.com



__________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus 
signature database 4815 (20100128) __________

The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.

<http://www.eset.com>http://www.eset.com


From JFreeh at nfb.org  Fri Jan 29 02:58:12 2010
From: JFreeh at nfb.org (Freeh,
	Jessica)
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:58:12 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] National Federation of the Blind Commends Apple for
 Including VoiceOver on iPad
Message-ID: <auto-000137073628@mailfront2.g2host.com>


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE



CONTACT:

Chris Danielsen

Director of Public Relations

National Federation of the Blind

(410) 659-9314, extension 2330

(410) 262-1281 (Cell)

<mailto:cdanielsen at nfb.org>cdanielsen at nfb.org




National Federation of the Blind Commends Apple
for Including VoiceOver on iPad



Baltimore, Maryland (January 28, 2010): The National Federation of 
the Blind, the nation's leading consumer organization of blind 
persons, today commended Apple Inc., for including its VoiceOver 
application on its latest device, the iPad, which was unveiled 
yesterday.  VoiceOver is a screen access application that uses 
text-to-speech technology in conjunction with the device's 
touch-screen interface so that blind people can independently operate 
the device.  VoiceOver is also integrated into Apple's Mac operating 
system and is included on the iPhone 3GS and recent models of the iPod Touch.



Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, 
said: "The National Federation of the Blind commends Apple for 
including the VoiceOver screen access application on its 
highly-anticipated new device, the iPad.  Blind consumers, like our 
sighted friends and colleagues, will be able to share in the 
experience of using this new device from the moment we take it out of 
the box.  By integrating accessibility into its products, Apple is 
setting an example that we believe the rest of the electronics 
industry should follow.  Furthermore, the fact that Apple has 
successfully integrated a screen access solution with its 
touch-screen technology demonstrates that touch screens need not be a 
barrier to the use of electronic devices by the blind."



On September 22, 2009, the National Federation of the Blind presented 
Apple with a special award to honor the company for making the iPhone 
accessible.







###




About the National Federation of the Blind

With more than 50,000 members, the National Federation of the Blind 
is the largest and most influential membership organization of blind 
people in the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = 
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />United States.   The 
NFB improves blind people's lives through advocacy, education, 
research, technology, and programs encouraging independence and 
self-confidence.  It is the leading force in the blindness field 
today and the voice of the nation's blind.  In January 2004 the NFB 
opened the National Federation of the Blind Jernigan Institute, the 
first research and training center in the United States for the blind 
led by the blind.




__________ Information from ESET Smart Security, version of virus 
signature database 4815 (20100128) __________

The message was checked by ESET Smart Security.

<http://www.eset.com>http://www.eset.com

From JFreeh at nfb.org  Fri Jan 29 03:04:59 2010
From: JFreeh at nfb.org (Freeh,
	Jessica)
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:04:59 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Senators Dodd and McCain Introduce Blind Persons Return to
 Work Act
Message-ID: <auto-000137335094@mailfront1.g2host.com>


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE



CONTACT:

Chris Danielsen

Director of Public Relations

National Federation of the Blind

(410) 659-9314, extension 2330

(410) 262-1281 (Cell)

<mailto:cdanielsen at nfb.org>cdanielsen at nfb.org




Senators Dodd and McCain Introduce
Blind Persons Return to Work Act




National Federation of the Blind Applauds a Common Sense
Work Incentive for Blind Social Security Beneficiaries



Washington, D.C. (January 28, 2010): Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) 
and Senator John McCain (R-AZ) today introduced the Blind Persons 
Return to Work Act of 2010 (S. 2962), which will allow blind 
Americans to more easily transition from Social Security 
beneficiaries to income-earning, productive members of the workforce.



Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), a program meant to 
provide disabled Americans with financial support, actually 
discourages blind people from seeking employment by placing a limit 
on how much money they can earn.  This bipartisan bill replaces the 
monthly earnings limit with a gradual phase-out, allowing blind 
beneficiaries to systematically replace benefits with earned income.



Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, 
said: "The National Federation of the Blind applauds Senators Dodd 
and McCain, both longtime champions of the blind and other Americans 
with disabilities, for advancing this wise proposal to reform SSDI so 
it encourages blind beneficiaries to reach their full employment 
potential rather than discouraging them from becoming 
independent.  Blind people want to work, and with the right training 
and opportunity, we can hold any job to which we aspire.  Yet because 
of misconceptions about blindness and flawed work incentives in the 
SSDI program, 70 percent of working age blind people are unemployed 
or underemployed.  We are confident that the Blind Persons Return to 
Work Act will reduce the fear of termination of benefits resulting 
from an earnings limit and encourage blind people to join the workforce."



"Blind Americans deserve the opportunity to enter or advance in the 
workplace without their financial security being threatened by some 
arbitrary limit," said Senator Dodd.  "We can encourage blind people 
to take advantage of their independence without punishing them for 
working.  This bipartisan legislation will protect millions of 
Americans from the risk of losing their benefits and will increase 
the productivity of our workforce."



"Blind Americans who want to work should not be discouraged from 
pursuing employment," added Senator McCain.  "The current SSDI 
program creates government dependency and limits achievement among 
blind people.  The proposed reform will enable blind Americans to 
fully reach their potential in the workforce and reduce the overall 
number of federal beneficiaries, saving tax dollars for every American."



This legislation joins its House companion bill, H.R. 886, introduced 
by John Lewis (D-GA) earlier this year.





###




About the National Federation of the Blind

With more than 50,000 members, the National Federation of the Blind 
is the largest and most influential membership organization of blind 
people in the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = 
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />United States.  The 
NFB improves blind people's lives through advocacy, education, 
research, technology, and programs encouraging independence and 
self-confidence.  It is the leading force in the blindness field 
today and the voice of the nation's blind.  In January 2004 the NFB 
opened the National Federation of the Blind Jernigan Institute, the 
first research and training center in the United States for the blind 
led by the blind.




From skittlesfreak69 at gmail.com  Fri Jan 29 03:40:46 2010
From: skittlesfreak69 at gmail.com (Karrie Kinstetter)
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:40:46 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Internet Explorer 8 and JAWS 10
In-Reply-To: <5096b4731001281814i5ac5f9b3sf61427cc6fd68f61@mail.gmail.com>
References: <5096b4731001281814i5ac5f9b3sf61427cc6fd68f61@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <026a01caa094$d88a59b0$899f0d10$@com>

Katie,
I'm using internet explorer 8 with jaws 10 right now. It works quite well so
I'd recommend upgrading to it.

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Katie Wang
Sent: Thursday, January 28, 2010 8:15 PM
To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
Subject: [nabs-l] Internet Explorer 8 and JAWS 10

Hi, all,
  Has anyone upgraded your web browser to Internet explorer 8 while
still running JAWS 10? Does the new version of IE work smoothly? I
would like to upgrade my web browser soon but am not planning to
purchase a JAWS upgrade at this point, so I would appreciate to hear
about any bugs/problems you have encountered in terms of
accessibility. Thanks!
   Katie

_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/skittlesfreak69%40gm
ail.com



From jackson.dezman at gmail.com  Fri Jan 29 15:58:05 2010
From: jackson.dezman at gmail.com (Dezman Jackson)
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:58:05 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Internet Explorer 8 and JAWS 10
References: <5096b4731001281814i5ac5f9b3sf61427cc6fd68f61@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <071309D4360E431A8239914F8F73F047@Dezman>

Katie,

I've found that it works fine.

Dezman
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Katie Wang" <bunnykatie6 at gmail.com>
To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 28, 2010 8:14 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] Internet Explorer 8 and JAWS 10


> Hi, all,
>  Has anyone upgraded your web browser to Internet explorer 8 while
> still running JAWS 10? Does the new version of IE work smoothly? I
> would like to upgrade my web browser soon but am not planning to
> purchase a JAWS upgrade at this point, so I would appreciate to hear
> about any bugs/problems you have encountered in terms of
> accessibility. Thanks!
>   Katie
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jackson.dezman%40gmail.com
> 



From tealbloodworth at gmail.com  Fri Jan 29 18:44:09 2010
From: tealbloodworth at gmail.com (Teal Bloodworth)
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:44:09 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Internet Explorer 8 and JAWS 10
References: <5096b4731001281814i5ac5f9b3sf61427cc6fd68f61@mail.gmail.com>
	<071309D4360E431A8239914F8F73F047@Dezman>
Message-ID: <684A38A2E7F447C997BE6D3C5BEA4B0C@teal6e6857f643>

yeah i havent had any problems either

            -Teal
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dezman Jackson" <jackson.dezman at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 29, 2010 9:58 AM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Internet Explorer 8 and JAWS 10


> Katie,
>
> I've found that it works fine.
>
> Dezman
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Katie Wang" <bunnykatie6 at gmail.com>
> To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Thursday, January 28, 2010 8:14 PM
> Subject: [nabs-l] Internet Explorer 8 and JAWS 10
>
>
>> Hi, all,
>>  Has anyone upgraded your web browser to Internet explorer 8 while
>> still running JAWS 10? Does the new version of IE work smoothly? I
>> would like to upgrade my web browser soon but am not planning to
>> purchase a JAWS upgrade at this point, so I would appreciate to hear
>> about any bugs/problems you have encountered in terms of
>> accessibility. Thanks!
>>   Katie
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/jackson.dezman%40gmail.com
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/tealbloodworth%40gmail.com 


From blackbyrdfly at gmail.com  Fri Jan 29 21:44:54 2010
From: blackbyrdfly at gmail.com (Jamie Principato)
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:44:54 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] PRS Transmitters, HELP!!!
Message-ID: <63af025c1001291344j48c50be2w42823a80194e6b@mail.gmail.com>

Hi there,

I'm a student at Florida State University. One of my professors this
semester is employing the use of PRS (personal response something-or-other)
transmitters for answering pop-quiz questions in class. These are little
handheld devices that students use to electronically and instantly submit
their answer to the professor in class. They're handy little devices, and I
think it's great that technology is being brought into the classrooms in
college, but it is my understanding that they are inaccessible. You need to
be able to see the screen to log in and use them, even if you managed to
memorize what every single button is for, and as a blind student, I can't do
that.

I've had professors use these in the past, and every time, an alternative
was offered to me since the professor understood that the device was
inaccessible. I would usually either approach my professor and simply tell
him my answer and he'd write it down, or I would type it and e-mail it to
him (the latter only when there was internet in the classroom or lecture
hall). This time, however, my professor does not want to cooperate. He
insists that I find a way to use the PRS transmitter, and when I contacted
my university's Disability Resource Center, they told me I should be able to
do it as well, but I can't figure out what they expect me to do. I don't
think it's right or fair for me to rely on another student to log me in and
select answers for me.

I was wondering if anyone else has had to use PRS transmitters in their
classes, and if so, how did you do it?

Thanks for the help, and please write back soon. I've already missed
pop-quizzes, so this is becoming a pressing matter.

Thanks,

-Jamie

From brileyp at gmail.com  Sat Jan 30 02:02:48 2010
From: brileyp at gmail.com (Briley Pollard)
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 2010 20:02:48 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] PRS Transmitters, HELP!!!
In-Reply-To: <63af025c1001291344j48c50be2w42823a80194e6b@mail.gmail.com>
References: <63af025c1001291344j48c50be2w42823a80194e6b@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CDFAB41E-98D1-4EE3-AE63-44E5FDDB3701@gmail.com>

Hey!

I did have this problem my freshman year. I ended up having to file a 504 complaint. The National Office was a great help to me with this. Submit your issue in writing first to disability services, explaining in detail why these devices are not accessible. You have the right to EQUAL access to materials, and having someone do the work for you isn't equal access. If disability services refuses to respond, go up the chain of command. If this is not effective, you can file a 504 complaint as I had to do for my speech class.

Hope this is helpful.

Briley
On Jan 29, 2010, at 3:44 PM, Jamie Principato wrote:

> Hi there,
> 
> I'm a student at Florida State University. One of my professors this
> semester is employing the use of PRS (personal response something-or-other)
> transmitters for answering pop-quiz questions in class. These are little
> handheld devices that students use to electronically and instantly submit
> their answer to the professor in class. They're handy little devices, and I
> think it's great that technology is being brought into the classrooms in
> college, but it is my understanding that they are inaccessible. You need to
> be able to see the screen to log in and use them, even if you managed to
> memorize what every single button is for, and as a blind student, I can't do
> that.
> 
> I've had professors use these in the past, and every time, an alternative
> was offered to me since the professor understood that the device was
> inaccessible. I would usually either approach my professor and simply tell
> him my answer and he'd write it down, or I would type it and e-mail it to
> him (the latter only when there was internet in the classroom or lecture
> hall). This time, however, my professor does not want to cooperate. He
> insists that I find a way to use the PRS transmitter, and when I contacted
> my university's Disability Resource Center, they told me I should be able to
> do it as well, but I can't figure out what they expect me to do. I don't
> think it's right or fair for me to rely on another student to log me in and
> select answers for me.
> 
> I was wondering if anyone else has had to use PRS transmitters in their
> classes, and if so, how did you do it?
> 
> Thanks for the help, and please write back soon. I've already missed
> pop-quizzes, so this is becoming a pressing matter.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -Jamie
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com



From blackbyrdfly at gmail.com  Sat Jan 30 02:45:42 2010
From: blackbyrdfly at gmail.com (Jamie Principato)
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 2010 21:45:42 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] PRS Transmitters, HELP!!!
In-Reply-To: <CDFAB41E-98D1-4EE3-AE63-44E5FDDB3701@gmail.com>
References: <63af025c1001291344j48c50be2w42823a80194e6b@mail.gmail.com>
	<CDFAB41E-98D1-4EE3-AE63-44E5FDDB3701@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <63af025c1001291845j79007bf3y2b285abf7bce4b29@mail.gmail.com>

On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 9:02 PM, Briley Pollard <brileyp at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hey!
>
> I did have this problem my freshman year. I ended up having to file a 504
> complaint. The National Office was a great help to me with this. Submit your
> issue in writing first to disability services, explaining in detail why
> these devices are not accessible. You have the right to EQUAL access to
> materials, and having someone do the work for you isn't equal access. If
> disability services refuses to respond, go up the chain of command. If this
> is not effective, you can file a 504 complaint as I had to do for my speech
> class.
>
> Hope this is helpful.
>
> Briley
> On Jan 29, 2010, at 3:44 PM, Jamie Principato wrote:
>
> > Hi there,
> >
> > I'm a student at Florida State University. One of my professors this
> > semester is employing the use of PRS (personal response
> something-or-other)
> > transmitters for answering pop-quiz questions in class. These are little
> > handheld devices that students use to electronically and instantly submit
> > their answer to the professor in class. They're handy little devices, and
> I
> > think it's great that technology is being brought into the classrooms in
> > college, but it is my understanding that they are inaccessible. You need
> to
> > be able to see the screen to log in and use them, even if you managed to
> > memorize what every single button is for, and as a blind student, I can't
> do
> > that.
> >
> > I've had professors use these in the past, and every time, an alternative
> > was offered to me since the professor understood that the device was
> > inaccessible. I would usually either approach my professor and simply
> tell
> > him my answer and he'd write it down, or I would type it and e-mail it to
> > him (the latter only when there was internet in the classroom or lecture
> > hall). This time, however, my professor does not want to cooperate. He
> > insists that I find a way to use the PRS transmitter, and when I
> contacted
> > my university's Disability Resource Center, they told me I should be able
> to
> > do it as well, but I can't figure out what they expect me to do. I don't
> > think it's right or fair for me to rely on another student to log me in
> and
> > select answers for me.
> >
> > I was wondering if anyone else has had to use PRS transmitters in their
> > classes, and if so, how did you do it?
> >
> > Thanks for the help, and please write back soon. I've already missed
> > pop-quizzes, so this is becoming a pressing matter.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > -Jamie
> > _______________________________________________
> > nabs-l mailing list
> > nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> > To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> >
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
>
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/blackbyrdfly%40gmail.com
>

From iamantonio at cox.net  Sat Jan 30 03:07:03 2010
From: iamantonio at cox.net (Antonio M. Guimaraes)
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:07:03 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Cyting NLS Material
References: <5386237F31F34E96AC253168D0E00A49@userf9b4fa60eb>
	<004301caa08a$fc81daa0$0201a8c0@Serene>
Message-ID: <750A52C6CD90492283D1A8569CE9EE2B@userf9b4fa60eb>

Hello Serena,

I think I found a solution to the NLS book issue, but to assume I have the 
time and money to find the book, hire a reader, find the relevant text on 
the print book, I would have  no time to do the writing itself.

I might as well only work with books off of a library, one I can check out, 
scan, and have page numbers for.

That might take me 4 hours at minimum for one or two citations. I'll take 
alternative workable ways that may take me 10 minutes max.
.

I found the following on the purdue site:

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/10/

Electronic Books
Electronic books may include books found on personal websites, databases, or 
even in audio form. Use the following format if the book you are using is 
only provided in a digital format or is difficult to find in print. If the 
work is not directly available online or must be purchased, use "Available 
from," rather than "Retrieved from," and point readers to where they can 
find it.

De Huff, E. W. Taytay's tales: Traditional Pueblo Indian tales. Retrieved 
from http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/dehuff/taytay/
taytay.html

Davis, J. Familiar birdsongs of the Northwest. Available from 
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=1-
9780931686108-0



I realize the usefulness of readers, but they are not always the answer to 
every blind person't every reading need, right Mike Freeman?

Antonio Guimaraes

If an infinite number of rednecks riding in an infinite number of pickup 
trucks fire an infinite number of shotgun rounds at an infinite number of 
highway signs, they will eventually produce all the world's great literary 
works in Braille.

Shop online and support the NFB of RI at no additional cost to you.
http://www.givebackamerica.com/charity.php?b=169
Givebackamerica.org, America's Online Charity Shopping Mall
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Serena" <serenacucco at verizon.net>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 28, 2010 9:30 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Cyting NLS Material


> Use a reader to find the page numbers in the print book.
>
> Serena
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Antonio M. Guimaraes" <iamantonio at cox.net>
> To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Thursday, January 28, 2010 10:09 AM
> Subject: [nabs-l] Cyting NLS Material
>
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> How do you cite an NLS recording, since it has no page numbers?
>>
>> I am working with three books off of bard, and believe they are nearly 
>> useless for research purposes.
>>
>> Antonio Guimaraes
>>
>> If an infinite number of rednecks riding in an infinite number of pickup 
>> trucks fire an infinite number of shotgun rounds at an infinite number of 
>> highway signs, they will eventually produce all the world's great 
>> literary works in Braille.
>>
>> Shop online and support the NFB of RI at no additional cost to you.
>> http://www.givebackamerica.com/charity.php?b=169
>> Givebackamerica.org, America's Online Charity Shopping Mall
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/serenacucco%40verizon.net
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/iamantonio%40cox.net 



From iamantonio at cox.net  Sat Jan 30 03:09:44 2010
From: iamantonio at cox.net (Antonio M. Guimaraes)
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:09:44 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] PRS Transmitters, HELP!!!
References: <63af025c1001291344j48c50be2w42823a80194e6b@mail.gmail.com>
	<CDFAB41E-98D1-4EE3-AE63-44E5FDDB3701@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <9969FE87904040D08B3C69BF3A71BD0E@userf9b4fa60eb>

Briley,

How does one file a 504 complaint. Who does one go to to complete such a 
complaint?

Antonio Guimaraes

If an infinite number of rednecks riding in an infinite number of pickup 
trucks fire an infinite number of shotgun rounds at an infinite number of 
highway signs, they will eventually produce all the world's great literary 
works in Braille.

Shop online and support the NFB of RI at no additional cost to you.
http://www.givebackamerica.com/charity.php?b=169
Givebackamerica.org, America's Online Charity Shopping Mall
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Briley Pollard" <brileyp at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 29, 2010 9:02 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] PRS Transmitters, HELP!!!


> Hey!
>
> I did have this problem my freshman year. I ended up having to file a 504 
> complaint. The National Office was a great help to me with this. Submit 
> your issue in writing first to disability services, explaining in detail 
> why these devices are not accessible. You have the right to EQUAL access 
> to materials, and having someone do the work for you isn't equal access. 
> If disability services refuses to respond, go up the chain of command. If 
> this is not effective, you can file a 504 complaint as I had to do for my 
> speech class.
>
> Hope this is helpful.
>
> Briley
> On Jan 29, 2010, at 3:44 PM, Jamie Principato wrote:
>
>> Hi there,
>>
>> I'm a student at Florida State University. One of my professors this
>> semester is employing the use of PRS (personal response 
>> something-or-other)
>> transmitters for answering pop-quiz questions in class. These are little
>> handheld devices that students use to electronically and instantly submit
>> their answer to the professor in class. They're handy little devices, and 
>> I
>> think it's great that technology is being brought into the classrooms in
>> college, but it is my understanding that they are inaccessible. You need 
>> to
>> be able to see the screen to log in and use them, even if you managed to
>> memorize what every single button is for, and as a blind student, I can't 
>> do
>> that.
>>
>> I've had professors use these in the past, and every time, an alternative
>> was offered to me since the professor understood that the device was
>> inaccessible. I would usually either approach my professor and simply 
>> tell
>> him my answer and he'd write it down, or I would type it and e-mail it to
>> him (the latter only when there was internet in the classroom or lecture
>> hall). This time, however, my professor does not want to cooperate. He
>> insists that I find a way to use the PRS transmitter, and when I 
>> contacted
>> my university's Disability Resource Center, they told me I should be able 
>> to
>> do it as well, but I can't figure out what they expect me to do. I don't
>> think it's right or fair for me to rely on another student to log me in 
>> and
>> select answers for me.
>>
>> I was wondering if anyone else has had to use PRS transmitters in their
>> classes, and if so, how did you do it?
>>
>> Thanks for the help, and please write back soon. I've already missed
>> pop-quizzes, so this is becoming a pressing matter.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> -Jamie
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
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From hope.paulos at maine.edu  Sat Jan 30 03:18:43 2010
From: hope.paulos at maine.edu (Hope Paulos)
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:18:43 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] PRS Transmitters, HELP!!!
References: <63af025c1001291344j48c50be2w42823a80194e6b@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <F8285B007E6C430AB9E39C09D03433B4@Hope>

Honestly, I'd continue fighting the issue. I've never used a prs devices; 
however, perhaps you need to demonstrate the inaccessibility of the devices. 
That way they see your issues  first hand.
HTH
Hope and Beignet ----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jamie Principato" <blackbyrdfly at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 29, 2010 4:44 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] PRS Transmitters, HELP!!!


> Hi there,
>
> I'm a student at Florida State University. One of my professors this
> semester is employing the use of PRS (personal response 
> something-or-other)
> transmitters for answering pop-quiz questions in class. These are little
> handheld devices that students use to electronically and instantly submit
> their answer to the professor in class. They're handy little devices, and 
> I
> think it's great that technology is being brought into the classrooms in
> college, but it is my understanding that they are inaccessible. You need 
> to
> be able to see the screen to log in and use them, even if you managed to
> memorize what every single button is for, and as a blind student, I can't 
> do
> that.
>
> I've had professors use these in the past, and every time, an alternative
> was offered to me since the professor understood that the device was
> inaccessible. I would usually either approach my professor and simply tell
> him my answer and he'd write it down, or I would type it and e-mail it to
> him (the latter only when there was internet in the classroom or lecture
> hall). This time, however, my professor does not want to cooperate. He
> insists that I find a way to use the PRS transmitter, and when I contacted
> my university's Disability Resource Center, they told me I should be able 
> to
> do it as well, but I can't figure out what they expect me to do. I don't
> think it's right or fair for me to rely on another student to log me in 
> and
> select answers for me.
>
> I was wondering if anyone else has had to use PRS transmitters in their
> classes, and if so, how did you do it?
>
> Thanks for the help, and please write back soon. I've already missed
> pop-quizzes, so this is becoming a pressing matter.
>
> Thanks,
>
> -Jamie
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/hope.paulos%40maine.edu 



From thebluesisloose at gmail.com  Sat Jan 30 03:33:11 2010
From: thebluesisloose at gmail.com (Beth)
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:33:11 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] PRS Transmitters, HELP!!!
In-Reply-To: <63af025c1001291845j79007bf3y2b285abf7bce4b29@mail.gmail.com>
References: <63af025c1001291344j48c50be2w42823a80194e6b@mail.gmail.com>
	<CDFAB41E-98D1-4EE3-AE63-44E5FDDB3701@gmail.com>
	<63af025c1001291845j79007bf3y2b285abf7bce4b29@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4383d01d1001291933m51298820x752f4e675dffee30@mail.gmail.com>

I think I might have to file several 504 complaints, but how do I do
that?  This might be helpful for Jamie as well.
Beth

On 1/29/10, Jamie Principato <blackbyrdfly at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 9:02 PM, Briley Pollard <brileyp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hey!
>>
>> I did have this problem my freshman year. I ended up having to file a 504
>> complaint. The National Office was a great help to me with this. Submit
>> your
>> issue in writing first to disability services, explaining in detail why
>> these devices are not accessible. You have the right to EQUAL access to
>> materials, and having someone do the work for you isn't equal access. If
>> disability services refuses to respond, go up the chain of command. If
>> this
>> is not effective, you can file a 504 complaint as I had to do for my
>> speech
>> class.
>>
>> Hope this is helpful.
>>
>> Briley
>> On Jan 29, 2010, at 3:44 PM, Jamie Principato wrote:
>>
>> > Hi there,
>> >
>> > I'm a student at Florida State University. One of my professors this
>> > semester is employing the use of PRS (personal response
>> something-or-other)
>> > transmitters for answering pop-quiz questions in class. These are little
>> > handheld devices that students use to electronically and instantly
>> > submit
>> > their answer to the professor in class. They're handy little devices,
>> > and
>> I
>> > think it's great that technology is being brought into the classrooms in
>> > college, but it is my understanding that they are inaccessible. You need
>> to
>> > be able to see the screen to log in and use them, even if you managed to
>> > memorize what every single button is for, and as a blind student, I
>> > can't
>> do
>> > that.
>> >
>> > I've had professors use these in the past, and every time, an
>> > alternative
>> > was offered to me since the professor understood that the device was
>> > inaccessible. I would usually either approach my professor and simply
>> tell
>> > him my answer and he'd write it down, or I would type it and e-mail it
>> > to
>> > him (the latter only when there was internet in the classroom or lecture
>> > hall). This time, however, my professor does not want to cooperate. He
>> > insists that I find a way to use the PRS transmitter, and when I
>> contacted
>> > my university's Disability Resource Center, they told me I should be
>> > able
>> to
>> > do it as well, but I can't figure out what they expect me to do. I don't
>> > think it's right or fair for me to rely on another student to log me in
>> and
>> > select answers for me.
>> >
>> > I was wondering if anyone else has had to use PRS transmitters in their
>> > classes, and if so, how did you do it?
>> >
>> > Thanks for the help, and please write back soon. I've already missed
>> > pop-quizzes, so this is becoming a pressing matter.
>> >
>> > Thanks,
>> >
>> > -Jamie
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > nabs-l mailing list
>> > nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> > http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> > To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>> >
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/brileyp%40gmail.com
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>> nabs-l:
>>
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/blackbyrdfly%40gmail.com
>>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/thebluesisloose%40gmail.com
>


From sarah.jevnikar at utoronto.ca  Sat Jan 30 04:11:07 2010
From: sarah.jevnikar at utoronto.ca (Sarah Jevnikar)
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 2010 23:11:07 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Need Help About Baroque Pieces
In-Reply-To: <983421.21523.qm@web62401.mail.re1.yahoo.com>
References: <983421.21523.qm@web62401.mail.re1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <001201caa162$3f81ab50$be8501f0$@jevnikar@utoronto.ca>

Hi,
Do you need the audio or the Braille?

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Winy Kwany
Sent: Monday, January 25, 2010 10:15 AM
To: braillem at topica.com; blind-musicians at yahoogroups.com;
goodfeel at freelists.org; ddots-l at freelists.org;
braille-music-chat at yahoogroups.com; nabs-l at nfbnet.org
Subject: [nabs-l] Need Help About Baroque Pieces

Hi all,
I need your help. My Listening teacher asks me to find several most
important baroque pieces. They are the most popular ones, ranging from opera
to organ
music. They will be used for analysis, assignments and exams. Would you
check whether you have those pieces in your collection? Would you send the
BRF's
to me? I don't mind to emboss the whole volume as long as it includes piece
that I need. 
I attach title of pieces with this message. There are numbers and page
numbers indications based on table of content of the book. Please ignore it
and
just pay atention to the titles.
Please send the files off list to my email:
winy_kwany at yahoo.com
I look forward to hearing from you very soon. Many thanks.
Winy.



      

_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/sarah.jevnikar%40uto
ronto.ca



From CDanielsen at nfb.org  Sat Jan 30 06:46:33 2010
From: CDanielsen at nfb.org (Danielsen, Chris)
Date: Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:46:33 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida to receive
 Distinguished Legislative Service Award at Washington Seminar
Message-ID: <auto-000137244507@mailfront2.g2host.com>

Dear Fellow Federationists:<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = 
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />



As you know, our Washington Seminar is fast approaching.  On 
Wednesday, February 3, it is extremely important that you attend the 
5:00 p.m. meeting because we will have a special 
guest.  Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida will 
receive a Distinguished Legislative Service Award for her leadership 
in securing funding for the Digital Talking Book program of the 
Library of Congress. Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz is a 
subcommittee chairperson and Chief Deputy Whip in the United States 
House of Representatives. Please make a point to attend this meeting 
and express your sincere appreciation for all that she has done to 
create opportunity for blind Americans.  Congresswoman Wasserman 
Schultz is also a cosponsor of the Blind Persons Return to Work Act 
and the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act, and we believe that she 
will soon sign on as a cosponsor of the Technology Bill of Rights for 
the Blind.  Please join us in honoring this great supporter and 
friend of America's blind.



If you're not already in Washington on Wednesday but live in the 
District or in Virginia or Maryland, please make an effort to be at 
the Holiday Inn Capitol, 550 C Street SW, to attend this special 
presentation.  If you live in Maryland or can get to the National 
Center for the Blind in Baltimore, there will be transportation on 
Wednesday afternoon to the Holiday Inn Capitol for this important 
gathering.  If you would like to utilize this transportation option, 
please contact Scott White by calling (410) 659-9314, extension 2231, 
or e-mailing <mailto:swhite at nfb.org>swhite at nfb.org.  Please let Scott 
know by the close of business on Monday, February 1, if you plan to 
use this transportation option.  Transportation will leave the 
National Center for the Blind promptly at 2:45 p.m. and return to the 
Center at approximately 8 p.m.  Please be sure to arrive at the 
Center no later than 2:30 p.m. so that the van(s) can depart on 
time.  If you will already be at Washington Seminar, please make a 
point of being in the Columbia Room at 5 p.m.  The gathering will 
last until approximately 6:30 p.m.  I hope to see you in Washington.



Sincerely:



Chris Danielsen


From info at michaelhingson.com  Sat Jan 30 13:33:31 2010
From: info at michaelhingson.com (Michael Hingson)
Date: Sat, 30 Jan 2010 07:33:31 -0600
Subject: [nabs-l] KNFB Reader Mobile at Washington Seminar
Message-ID: <auto-000137526994@mailfront1.g2host.com>

Greetings all,

Once again this year the NFB and The Michael Hingson Group, INC. will be
demonstrating and selling the KnfbReader Mobile at the Washington seminar.
We have plenty of units to sell on hand.  Because of the seminar we will be
offering a special Washington Seminar price from January 31, 2010 through
February 12, 2010.  Any order received during this time can be made at these
special prices.

The Integrated KnfbReader Mobile including a Nokia N82, the KnfbReader
Mobile software and either Talks or MobileSpeak will be reduced in price
from $1,595 to $1,495.  The KnfbReader Mobile including a Nokia N86,
KnfbReader Mobile software and either Talks or MobileSpeak will be reduced
in price from $1,770 to $1,620.  If you cannot attend the seminar but wish
to order a Reader please contact Michael Hingson at (415) 827-4084 or via
email at info at michaelhingson.com.

During the Washington seminar we will be showing the KnfbReader Mobile
including some of the new features which will be released in an upcoming
version of the software.  The features include a color identifier, a new
leveling function to assist in keeping the camera properly oriented over the
reading surface, and we will discuss how Braille displays can now be driven
by the Reader.

Demonstrations will be held in the Mars room Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and I
believe Wednesday at 1:30PM to 4PM.  Also, a table will be set up in the
lobby of the Holiday Inn, the NFB head quarters hotel where you can purchase
a KnfbReader of your own.  The address of the hotel is Holiday Inn Capital,
550 C. St. SW Washington, DC 20024.

On Thursday, February 4, from 4PM to 7PM we also will be conducting
demonstrations of the KnfbReader at the Philadelphia office of the NFB of
Pennsylvania.  The Location of the Chestnut Place Building, where the NFB
offices are housed, is, 42 S. 15th Street, 17th Floor Conference Room,
Philadelphia, PA 19102.  This building is located on the west side of 15th
Street near Chestnut. Street.  All are invited but asked to please confirm
by calling Michael Hingson in advance.

Finally, we shall be holding demonstrations of the KnfbReader Mobile in
Columbia South Carolina on February 9, from 2PM to 5PM at the offices of the
NFB of South Carolina.  Again, all are invited but asked to call Mike
Hingson in advance.

There is lots more to talk about at the sessions mentioned above.  We hope
to see you there.  Come see why the KnfbReader Mobile continues to be a
major force in improving independence for all blind persons.  Come see how
you can also go totally globally mobile.


Cordially,


Michael Hingson


The Michael Hingson Group, INC.
      "Speaking with Vision"
                  Michael Hingson, President
                          (415) 827-4084
                    info at michaelhingson.com
                    www.michaelhingson.com


for info on the new KNFB Reader Mobile, visit:
http://knfbreader.michaelhingson.com



From iamantonio at cox.net  Sat Jan 30 17:12:40 2010
From: iamantonio at cox.net (Antonio M. Guimaraes)
Date: Sat, 30 Jan 2010 12:12:40 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Need Help About Baroque Pieces
References: <983421.21523.qm@web62401.mail.re1.yahoo.com>
	<001201caa162$3f81ab50$be8501f0$@jevnikar@utoronto.ca>
Message-ID: <40C33ECD48584208B2A455D51B3B5999@userf9b4fa60eb>

Sounds like Wimy needs the braille, from the reference to .brf's in the 
original message.

Antonio Guimaraes

If an infinite number of rednecks riding in an infinite number of pickup 
trucks fire an infinite number of shotgun rounds at an infinite number of 
highway signs, they will eventually produce all the world's great literary 
works in Braille.

Shop online and support the NFB of RI at no additional cost to you.
http://www.givebackamerica.com/charity.php?b=169
Givebackamerica.org, America's Online Charity Shopping Mall
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Sarah Jevnikar" <sarah.jevnikar at utoronto.ca>
To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 29, 2010 11:11 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Need Help About Baroque Pieces


> Hi,
> Do you need the audio or the Braille?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On 
> Behalf
> Of Winy Kwany
> Sent: Monday, January 25, 2010 10:15 AM
> To: braillem at topica.com; blind-musicians at yahoogroups.com;
> goodfeel at freelists.org; ddots-l at freelists.org;
> braille-music-chat at yahoogroups.com; nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> Subject: [nabs-l] Need Help About Baroque Pieces
>
> Hi all,
> I need your help. My Listening teacher asks me to find several most
> important baroque pieces. They are the most popular ones, ranging from 
> opera
> to organ
> music. They will be used for analysis, assignments and exams. Would you
> check whether you have those pieces in your collection? Would you send the
> BRF's
> to me? I don't mind to emboss the whole volume as long as it includes 
> piece
> that I need.
> I attach title of pieces with this message. There are numbers and page
> numbers indications based on table of content of the book. Please ignore 
> it
> and
> just pay atention to the titles.
> Please send the files off list to my email:
> winy_kwany at yahoo.com
> I look forward to hearing from you very soon. Many thanks.
> Winy.
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/sarah.jevnikar%40uto
> ronto.ca
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/iamantonio%40cox.net 



From bookwormahb at earthlink.net  Sun Jan 31 03:32:07 2010
From: bookwormahb at earthlink.net (bookwormahb at earthlink.net)
Date: Sat, 30 Jan 2010 22:32:07 -0500 (EST)
Subject: [nabs-l] PRS Transmitters, HELP!!!
Message-ID: <11348135.1264908727833.JavaMail.root@wamui-cynical.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

Jamie,

Hope has some good advice.  Keep fighting; demonstrate the inaccessibility of the device.  
You might have to drop the class since you cannot take the quizzes and you'll get a bad grade.  But either way keep at it.  If the DSs doesn't get it and offer a solution, go up the chain of command.  Write a letter to the head of that department.  Also go to the Dean of the school your professor teaches in and bring this to their attention.  The professor should accomodate you.  Finally file a complaint if nothing is resolved in the university.

Ashley

-----Original Message-----
>From: Hope Paulos <hope.paulos at maine.edu>
>Sent: Jan 29, 2010 10:18 PM
>To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>Subject: Re: [nabs-l] PRS Transmitters, HELP!!!
>
>Honestly, I'd continue fighting the issue. I've never used a prs devices; 
>however, perhaps you need to demonstrate the inaccessibility of the devices. 
>That way they see your issues  first hand.
>HTH
>Hope and Beignet ----- Original Message ----- 
>From: "Jamie Principato" <blackbyrdfly at gmail.com>
>To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
><nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
>Sent: Friday, January 29, 2010 4:44 PM
>Subject: [nabs-l] PRS Transmitters, HELP!!!
>
>
>> Hi there,
>>
>> I'm a student at Florida State University. One of my professors this
>> semester is employing the use of PRS (personal response 
>> something-or-other)
>> transmitters for answering pop-quiz questions in class. These are little
>> handheld devices that students use to electronically and instantly submit
>> their answer to the professor in class. They're handy little devices, and 
>> I
>> think it's great that technology is being brought into the classrooms in
>> college, but it is my understanding that they are inaccessible. You need 
>> to
>> be able to see the screen to log in and use them, even if you managed to
>> memorize what every single button is for, and as a blind student, I can't 
>> do
>> that.
>>
>> I've had professors use these in the past, and every time, an alternative
>> was offered to me since the professor understood that the device was
>> inaccessible. I would usually either approach my professor and simply tell
>> him my answer and he'd write it down, or I would type it and e-mail it to
>> him (the latter only when there was internet in the classroom or lecture
>> hall). This time, however, my professor does not want to cooperate. He
>> insists that I find a way to use the PRS transmitter, and when I contacted
>> my university's Disability Resource Center, they told me I should be able 
>> to
>> do it as well, but I can't figure out what they expect me to do. I don't
>> think it's right or fair for me to rely on another student to log me in 
>> and
>> select answers for me.
>>
>> I was wondering if anyone else has had to use PRS transmitters in their
>> classes, and if so, how did you do it?
>>
>> Thanks for the help, and please write back soon. I've already missed
>> pop-quizzes, so this is becoming a pressing matter.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> -Jamie
>> _______________________________________________
>> nabs-l mailing list
>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
>> nabs-l:
>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/hope.paulos%40maine.edu 
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>nabs-l mailing list
>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for nabs-l:
>http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/bookwormahb%40earthlink.net


Merry Christmas and Happy New Year


From iamantonio at cox.net  Sun Jan 31 15:43:47 2010
From: iamantonio at cox.net (Antonio M. Guimaraes)
Date: Sun, 31 Jan 2010 10:43:47 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] Fw: Judge Rules Disabled Can Use Devices During Bar Exam -
	News Story - KTVU San Francisco
Message-ID: <93956D2FE65041E1BC7F0B99846BA52A@userf9b4fa60eb>




http://www.ktvu.com/news/22382839/detail.html