[stylist] Adventures in learning the Mac and braille

[April Brown]

Good morning,
  
      I don't want to tread on my friend's toes who writes the "Adventures in Low Vision" blog.  However, today is time for a post on "Adventures of the Hard of Hearing and Low Vision."

      I've been a computer geek for ten years.  Never paid attention to my hearing loss, though I did get a hearing aid, likely five or more years ago.  I thought VoiceOver should be easy to learn.  Insert hyena laugh, and every cartoon laugh you ever heard.

     I've been a reader all my life.  I have low memory due to brain damage a few decades ago.  Lost most of my memory.  I have little appreciation of shortcuts, as I can't comprehend them.  I thought learning braille wouldn't be likely.  I had to try anyway.  Insert hyena laugh, and every cartoon laugh you ever heard.

What happened?

Computer geeky: Yeah right.  What do those terms mean again?  Does anyone have a definition?  Yesterday, I had 1.5 hours to study VoiceOver again.  I took over an hour to get the nerve up to turn it on.  This after having been told no one has time to create, or even send a link, to a step by step Voice Over manual.  Guess what?  In that 30 minutes, I made a little progress using it in Pages. I'm leaving the Internet alone for a bit.  I've lost over 100 hours trying to figure out how to use it there.  At least in Pages I can now find the menu, and even change the font size.  Oh, and search and find.  I wrote out a step by step manual for what I succeeded on yesterday.

Reading braille?  I was too bored with the slowness of the online course.  I found the contracted braille, computer braille, and everything else I needed online.  I've been studying that as well.  Um, I'm about a year ahead of the course.  Oh, and I got my first braille book from the library to read last week.  I am excited.  I can now read again when my eye is too painful to hold open.  

I had tried the talking books.  Being partially deaf, and having comprehension of vocalization issues, they weren't working.  Unless I sat completely still, not even twiddling my thumbs to listen to the novels.  I don't have that kind of time!

April Brown

Writing dramatic adventure novels uncovering the myths we hide behind.