[Journalists] update on radio thing!

[Lynn Zelvin]

Since you now have a comfortable position that isn't going to present 
the same access difficulties and thus you can advance based on your 
skills and hard work, , maybe it will be a comfortable thing for you 
to pursue solutions to these access problems as a sort of 
project.  There's probably a story in it also. Easier to contemplate, 
perhaps, if it isn't standing in the way of your career.

Here are some of my rambling thoughts on access possibilities:

The pen someone mentioned has potential for small single-line 
displays. I've played with it. the problem for a blind person trying 
to use it to read is that you have no way to track a line. The pen 
needs to be run directly over the line of text. It would be 
interesting to see how it worked on a narrow display where you could 
use the top or bottom of the display to line up the pen. It would 
probably be worth talking to the developers of the pen to see what 
they think. When I saw it they were interested enough in a potential 
market outside the community of people with learning disabilities but 
I have a little vision  and had a very very hard time getting it to 
do anything useful.

I'm assuming these are single or two-line displays, but even if they 
had more lines, perhaps you could have someone build a guide that 
would help you position the pen.

I remember some years back that the World Blind Union put out a list 
of the top ten  products they would like to see developed for blind 
people worldwide. Most were not high tech, but one was some way to 
read numeric displays. so many  jobs require reading numbers off 
single line displays and access to these would seemingly be much 
simpler than the more complex task of accessing mixed material on a 
large display.  I wonder what ever happened with that.

This may be completely absurd, but I've heard of blind people using 
light detectors to identify money. There are two kinds of light 
detectors and one kind can be used to tell whether there is text on a 
piece of paper or if it's blank. Because it responds to the reflected 
light off the paper. that is the kind people were using to ID money. 
I'm wondering if it could be used accurately to id numbers off a 
simple display. Just tossing ideas around in my mind and musing out loud.

Of course, you could probably do it with an optacon but that brings 
up the question as to how we let the Optacon go obsolete as it is a 
device that has the potential to make many jobs accessible that 
aren't otherwise. Even if you were not the most adept optacon user, 
I'm guessing that you could learn to comfortably use it for such a 
limited purpose. The question for you would be how much money it was 
worth to procure a device that is still somewhat expensive to 
purchase used and which it might be difficult to get repaired if it 
were to stop working.

Another thought, and this might be something to pose at a place like 
Smith Kettlewell, is that it might be possible to just plain attach 
speech to these displays. I know people have managed to get at 
numeric displays in different sorts of commercial products such as 
music synthesizers and I know someone who was able to do the same 
with a commercial navigation device designed for use on boats. It 
most likely means creating an opening in the thing, like with a drill 
or saw or whatever is appropriate. That might have people at the 
station shuddering, but I think this is not a big deal for someone 
who knows what they are doing and it does sound like your boss has 
the right sense of adventure to take this on. I really am clueless 
about how they accomplish this but I know you need some kind of 
synthesizer to speak the output and I remember that somehow the old 
speech plus calculators were good for that purpose. If it gets that 
far I have a couple I'd be happy to donate for a good purpose.

\]Another place that works on this sort of solution is the Trace 
Research and Development Center somewhere in Wisconsin.


Really, if you found someone interested in exploring the 
possibilities with you. the results would not only to be to 
demonstrate what is possible but how ridiculous it is that this sort 
of output isn't built in. It's one of those things that would cost 
pennies if designed in from the start.

AS for the computer, I agree that the touch screen is not the issue. 
The issue is how accessible the software is.  I'd recommend getting 
screen reading software installed on the computer to see , first of 
all, how it works out of the box. I'd suggest trying WindowEyes and 
System Access as well as JAWS. One thing in particular that might be 
useful is that these two programs will speak as the mouse moves over 
things. This would allow you to kind of poke around on the touch 
screen, possibly with the help of a sighted co-worker to check out 
what information is accessible, regardless of whether there are 
keystrokes specifically tailored to get at the information.

I'm a little hazy about the question of remote access but I do know 
that you probably can't use the software that your boss uses. System 
access uses a different approach which might work just fine for you 
if the issue is getting access to more than one computer from a 
single work station. JAWS also has some kind of system for doing this 
built into newer versions and it's worth checking that out also. I 
would sincerely hope that the manufacturers of the screen readers and 
remote access software would work with you on this.

Lynn