[nfbcs] [program-l] Re: Communication with people who don't use screen readers

[Deborah Armstrong]

>Every single person at my school only knows how to work it using the mouse

Yep, and every single person outside of school in a work environment will be similarly handicapped. 

>If I had the right information, I could learn what I needed to do in a few days.

And you won't get the right information either. People don't know how to tell you what to do with the keyboard. As helpless as you are mousing, so are they keying! 

>If I had the right information about how to use it, I would be just fine.

The right information is what keystroke to press when, what happens onscreen when you press it, what all the visual-studio-specific terminology means, etc. I feel the same about horrid Office 365 which I have to use at work. But I know I and only I have the drive to track down that information, because the reality is that the rest of the world really doesn't care.

>The problem is that my professor thinks that it is not possible for me to work the program and that the cited way of doing things is better

It is. The sighted way is better because there are more sighted people doing it their way.

But the Prof is wrong that you can't do it. Don't prove him right by letting obstacles, like their inability to describe get in your way.

>I was able to find some things, but I had to search for ever for them in forums.

Steer clear of Linux then. I had to compile a new video driver recently so my sighted husband could watch TV on our home machine which runs Linux. I was tired of forums, sighted husbands, television and especially video drivers that refuse to compile. But you know what! When I got it all working and he said it looked beautiful it gave me such a lift. It was a tremendous honey-do, a way I could give back to him for all the little things he's repaired for me in the past.

We have to be willing to walk that extra mile at times, we just do!

I work with many disabled students, and one thing I see over and over is the fear of doing extra. Write down any piece of info you get that helps you better learn something. Ask questions of everyone; don't depend on info from one source.

For example, take just one task you can't figure out, and post a specific question about it to the list. I don't use visual studio, so for Office 365 I'd ask:
How do you get to the "share a link" tab using a screen reader after you use the context key on a file you've selected in One-Drive and next selected "more one-drive sharing options? I get a dialog box inside a browser that lets me enter email addresses but sighted people say there's an additional tab for sharing a link I can't figure out how to access.
that's a very specific issue I'm currently having with Office 365. Take one of your specific visual studio issues and ask for help on it.

>It also took weeks for me to get jaws on a computer at school even though they knew I was coming, and that didn't help.

I work for a college. It takes weeks to get most things done.  It's taken me years to get a magnifier permanently installed in our science center, and I have nine magnifiers in my office that still need to get installed around campus because of bureaucracy. How about your own laptop running NVDA? Do you really need the school to supply the computer and the screen reader? Just because it's your right doesn't make bureaucracy run more efficiently, I can tell you that from decades of experience.

You also said a sighted helper clicked on things and JAWS would only partly read them. Never, ever let someone just click on things for you. Not silently. Oh, they can click on them all they want, but your job is to always know what was clicked on, what happened. 

Don't let your anger get in the way of being flexible and doing whatever it takes, whether it's using NVDA, or a reader, or a volunteer or a different professor or even a different school to get to your goal.

--Debee