[nabs-l] sort of disappointed

[Josh Kennedy]

Hi

Well I looked and looked and there are no blind catholic organizations 
in the United States. I found the association of blind catholics, but 
its in the United Kingdom and I surely cannot go there for meetings, at 
least not at this point.

I am also disappointed to report that after extensive searching the only 
catholic materials I can get in daisy format either daisy text or daisy 
audio is on bookshare nls and rfbd. But you have to be a member to join 
those. There are many public domain documents on the ewtn website which 
are just text or word documents. I don't think EWTN thought of blind 
people when they designed their site and their library. Here is what 
would be really cool.
1. there are public domain catholic bibles and catholic catechisms. the 
baltimore catechism 1901 and douay rheims bible are public domain 
materials. they may be older but they're certainly readable. But they 
are not in daisy format! It would be nice to have a blind catholics 
devision which would combine both ACB and nfb blind people who are 
catholics, interested in catholicism or whoever wants to join for 
curiosity sake. I haven't created a website in years though. I guess I 
could use ms-word to help me with that. And maybe we could have online 
bible study or catechism classes for people. I wonder if anybody in my 
parish would want to help or could help out with this? I think maybe 
I'll ask next time. I'm the only blind person in my parish. My wife 
doesn't go with me but I hope someday she will decide to. I do take my 
sighted son to church with me though.

Oh, for those who don't have word. if you want to use openoffice to make 
daisy books you can use vinux in a virtual machine it has openoffice 
writer its accessible in vinux right out of the box. just add the daisy 
plugin and off you go making daisy books. and you can copy and paste 
your books to and from windows and vinux with vmware tools just using 
copy and paste commands. I have word in windows. But converting ewtn 
library documents to daisy will be a big project. First I have to get 
familiar with how save as daisy works. Also for daisy audio microsoft 
anna or the acapela voices would be good for converting to daisy audio I 
think. So what do you guys think? There have to be more blind people who 
are catholic out there besides just me, perhaps my wife in the future 
well so far she's not catholic...

Josh