Shepherdized!

02:59 pm - Kindle 2

How many years have people with print disabilities been working together to make Bookshare what it is? How many titles are currently on Bookshare? Why does something like the following have to be inaccessible?

At Amazon, weve always been obsessed with selection, and we know that even the best reading device would be useless without the books you want to read. Today, the Kindle Store has more than 230,000 books, including 103 of the 110 New York Times Best Sellers, plus top newspapers, magazines, and blogs. We added over 40,000 new titles in just the last three months. Our vision for Kindle is to have every book ever printed, in any language, all available in under 60 seconds.

11:58 pm - Assistive Technology shipping

I just received a mass email about training on the Optelec BC640, which is the bluetooth display I'd love to own one day. In fact, VR tried to order this display for me back when we started hearing about it in the summer of 2006. VR went so far as to pay for the thing (or at least to send an authorization to Vision Cue, the distributors for Optelec displays at that time--I don't know if they still are). This was just before I started my 1L year..

As the weeks passed, I became concerned. I wanted the braille display for law school. I knew it would increase my efficiency. So we called the company, and they said it would be shipping in October, 2006. OK, I thought. This isn't perfect, but I really want this particular display, so it's worth waiting for.

October came and went. I was then assured the display would arrive shortly after the first of the year.

Finally, I spoke with someone at Vision Cue who said it would ship by March. I asked if he was sure about this, and he admitted he wasn't. So VR cancelled the order, and I now have a Focus 40, which doesn't have all the fancy bells and whistles, but which could actually be purchased when I needed a display.

Anyway, back to that mass email I mentioned. Here's an excerpt:

Since Optelec began shipping this 6th generation of Alva Braille displays within the United States in June 2008, customers have been experiencing the feature-rich functionality present within this state-of-the-art, wireless Braille solution.

10:03 pm - My N82; Yani's exploits

Sorry I'm not on LJ much these days.

I got my Nolia N82 with the KNFB Reader. I just did something to it and now it won't talk or turn off, and I can't get the battery out. Have to find a pair of eyes at work to help me out if I can't deal with the battery. I can't wait to get everything up and running on that phone. I hope it will work with my BrailleConnect. With the Reader, GPS, and a braille display, I can rule the universe.

Work this week was...Well, we are all still recovering from the retreat. I wish it had been over Memorial Day weekend, as it apparently has been in years past. I needed a day off. But we're havvingsome sort of happy hour thing in the middle of the day tomorrow. It's kind of sad that I can't get excited about that because I need to get stuff finished.

Oh, and my dog can take her harness off.

It all started when the handle got stuck under a seat. She wriggled out of it, and I guess that gave her an idea. A few days ago (or maybe it was only yesterday--it's been a long week), I came home to grab something and left her harness on. I knew she thought I should take it off since we were home, but I needed to leave right away. While I was getting ready to go back to work, I heard a weird scuffling sound that I absently noted was generated by Yani. "That's odd," thought some little detached part of my brain. I told it to shut up so we could get back to work. mI went to the door and called Yani, who promptly appeared sans harness, wagging her tail. I had a moment of panic when I realized I wasn't sure where she'd left the harness. Then, I remembered I live in a shoebox, so it was easy to find.

06:19 am - Thoughts on the BrailleConnect 12

My BrailleConnect is now working with my Moto Q. It's not perfect: Mobile Speak disables braille if I don't touch the phone or display for a minute or so; writing in grade 2 causes all kinds of unfortunate things to happen; and entering Mobile Speak's Braille Settings dialog totally crashes the phone. (Code Factory is aware of most of these issues, and I'm optimistic that they will be solved soon.) But the devices are talking to each other. And if I set it to computer braille and use my ThinkOutside keyboard for input, I have a nifty little note-taking system.

( click for my ramblings on the design of the BC12. )

I'm glad to see a number of wireless braille displays on the market. Now that I have my Focus, I know that I'd have a really hard time going back to just speech on the computer. Editing things is so much quicker because I can press a cursor routing button to instantly get to a mistake, as opposed to using the arrow keys to navigate by word or character. Also, certain things are more comprehensible to me when I'm reading braille. It makes studying in noisy coffee shops a lot easier, and I really like to use braille when I'm working with clients (more on that in another post, maybe). I want to get a bigger wireless display at some point, but that purchase is definitely going to have to wait. For now, though, I have a quiet, compact note-taking solution with my Q, the ThinkOutside keyboard, and the BrailleConnect 12. I think I'm going to love the ability to wear braille on a belt.

01:03 pm - More cell phone talk

OK, so my extraordinarily nonscientific poll seems to suggest a correlation between experience with braille and not using thumbs for typing. But as all good statisticians know, correlation does not imply causation. It makes sense to me that most people who are looking at the screen would choose to use their thumbs, since they can, in fact, see the screen that way. And it seems that most (but not all--see the poll and the comments on the entry) people who don't use the screen use their index fingers, because our fingers play a larger role in how we perceive the world.

Aaaanyway, a new company, BeaconSys, Inc, is developing products for blind-types to use on cell phones. They're currently working on a currency identifier, a barcode reader, and a commute planner. Cool stuff!

Lastly, cell phones can apparently disturb your sleep. I'm thinking the advice about not leaving the phone on the bedside table at night is good.

10:23 am - Braille displays on the Moto Q9H

Sorry to leave you all hanging like that! (grin) I'm going to post the instructions for pairing the Q9H with a braille display. I assume this will work for other models of the Q, but you know what they say about assuming... ( Read more... ) They say they are going to add this to the manual soon.

02:55 pm - I found a Braille Display

I decided to go with the BrailleConnect 12 for my phone. It's apparently on backorder.

When I was talking to the products specialist, this exchange occurred:

Me: Do the BrailleConnect displays have thumbkeys?

PS: Yes they do. Except the thumb keys are on the sides of the display, and you operate them with your fingers, not your thumbs.

Me: So...it doesn't have thumb keys.

Ps: ... No. But it has a joystick.

Which I think, on the 12, will be just as good as thumbkeys since I can touch the joystick with a thumb no matter where I am on the display.

I'm all excited about braille I can wear on a belt. Also, it wakes up when the phone rings and displays caller ID info. How cool is that?

03:46 am - "I do not think it means what you think it means."

OK, I should be asleep. I mean, I really, really should be asleep. But instead, I'm looking at braille displays on the internet.

I just sprung for a Moto Q Global (I was eligible for a ridiculously good price as an upgrade through AT&T) and Mobile Speak (well, I haven't actually done the springing for that yet, but I think it will happen tomorrow). All told, I spent (or, rather, will have spent) less than $200 for an accessible smartphone.

Funny thing...I didn't actually realize the significance of this while I was shopping. I was too busy going, "Cool! Moto Q for cheap! Who cares if it's refurb?" But later, it dawned on me how amazing this really is. I mean, even just two or three years ago, you could pay close to $1000 to get a fully accessible cell phone/PDA. And here I got it for less than...less than...Oh, I don't know. Less than something that costs $200.

And I said, I can't let that continue. I need braille on this thing.

( Read more... )

03:35 am - Victor Stream and System Access

There's a brand knew update for the Victor Reader Stream. One of its cool features is that if you subscribe to Serotek's System Access, you can download content onto the Stream. I tried the System Access screenreader over the summer, and I got a free 30-day trial of System Access Mobile. Fortunately for me, the trial period doesn't start until you actually log in for the first time. So now, I have System Access Mobile for 29 more days.

Why is this cool? Because there are some radio dramas I'd been wanting to check out (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!!!), and there are hundreds of movies with video description. Disconcertingly, the Stream puts these on the "talking books" bookshelf, , with my Library of Congress stuff...shrug. But at least they're there. I'm in the middle of the described version of The Simpsons Movie right now. (The sound quality is fair and seems to be better on some movies than others. The files are also DRM-protected. I saw this particular movie for the first time over christmas with my nephew doing his best to give good descriptions. He did a great job, and the DVS (or whatever you call the generic version of that) is only better because they had a chance to write out the script.)

Honestly, when I saw this System Access Mobile thing, I decided I didn't want to try it out, since it seemed to be oversimplified for technophobes. But...but...this is...you know...kind of cool! I mean, I can have all of these movies on my Stream! (Well, there's a limit of 12 movies at one time, but still...). I mean, I like using main-stream services and all that. But I also like having these movies on my Stream!

So for all you Stream-types, I recommend signing up for the free Serotek trial. When I did it, I didn't have to give a credit card or anything.

This page apparently has the instructions:

http://help.samobile.net/VRStreamSync.html

01:29 am - NLS Download Pilot

Somebody at HW Canada must be putting in some weird hours--I just got my authorization key to play NLS books on my stream. Thank you, industrious soul.

There's a decent amount of SF--I downloaded a book by John Scalzi and some "Year's Best" anthologies, as well as some issues of Analog. I also downloaded "My Eyes Have a Cold Nose," and because I need something to read that won't cause me to think too much (my brain is still sore and tender after the accounting final), I downloaded Robin McKinley's Beauty to re-read.

10:07 am - Stream Update

Well, good news. Apparently, the problems I was having with the "random" mode were due to operator error. Don't know how I made that happen, since what I did is apparently not something the machine is supposed to do...(shrug). But now, it will shuffle all of the elements in my "music" bookshelf, just like it's supposed to. More good news: The USB feature works with my Sandisk Cruzer. I was trying card readers before (the kinds that only have one slot, so it wasn't that it was being confused by the fact that there was more than one drive). I really, really wanted the card readers to work on the USB port because I have two 8gb compactflash cards, and it would be quite nice to use those on the Stream. Ah well. At least some flash drives do work. A note about the music bookshelf: I don't think you can tell it to shuffle *some* of the items (unless you're me, and you make it do this accidentally because of the way you have with technology). But it will independently shuffle the items on each media source. So if, for example, you're me, and you don't want your gospel music shuffled at the same time as your Tegan and Sara, you need to put one group of songs on the USB source (or, of course, on another SD card). One last thing I wish I could change: I'd like the capability to navigate between folders on the "text files" bookshelf. It basically presents all the files to you in one ginormous list.

10:25 pm - Victor Reader Stream: Initial Thoughts

Just got it today--I'm still figuring it out.

( Pros and cons. )
So, basically, there's a lot of potential. But I think I might by a Book Port II if it's out by the time I working again.

02:31 pm - Why Kurzweil?

I now have K1000 on my laptop. (The DSS office can get me an edited copy of my accounting book in Kurzweil format. The law school bought a copy of the software last year (I actually didn't ask for it and in fact told them I didn't need it, but...). Apparently, they did install it on one of the lab machines, but they then removed it later. Possibly because I didn't use it...possibly because I didn't know it was on one of the machines. Anyway, it's now on my laptop.) I want to know what's so great about this software. I imagine I'll figure out how to change some of the settings--I've barely had time to open the program. But so far, all I know is that it suppresses JFW and then wants me to interact with it in a weird way. I've heard that its OCR quality is not as good as Abbyy or OmniPage, and it produces documents in a proprietary format (which, after all, is why I had to put it on my computer to begin with).

So, K1000 users, what makes this software great? Is it easy to suppress the speech? (I tried, but then JFW wasn't working either, and it was unfortunate...I'll try again here in a bit.) In short, is there a reason I shouldn't resent its presence on my already crowded hard drive?

To clarify, based on what I've heard, it's not a bad program. I just don't see why I should need it in addition to the tools I have now. I have heard that it can do some nifty things as far as studying goes, but...I just don't see the overall attraction.

11:24 pm - JFW weirdness

So, does your screen reader occasionally say things that make no sense to you at all? Mine does. Today's had to be the strangest by far. (There was that one time a few years ago when it started saying the time every 60 seconds, but this was worse.)

This was even funnier because I told one of the women at work, "Wow! I can't concentrate! My computer's talking."

She naturally pointed out that my computer was *always* talking.

Well, today, something must have been up with my TextAloud icon, because JFW kept repeating part of the name of the icon. So it kept saying over and over (and this is written so you JAWS-users should hear pretty much what I heard today):

oo, oo, oo, TextAlou, oo, oo

Seriously.

Except the pauses were a bit longer.

(For those without screen readers, "TextAlou" is pronounced "TextAloo,," so it makes a catchy rhyme, and it's kind of rhythmic.)

It was doing this about every 30 seconds or so. Fortunately, rebooting solved the problem.

In more important (but less amusing) news, Glazie is much, much better today! She seems to be putting her full weight on the foot.

Current Mood: amused

03:53 pm - New Toy!

I just got my brand-spanking-new braille display. It's not one of the super-cool blluetooth ones that can also serve as braille displays for your phone and your PdA and your guide dog. But it's definitely good for what I need. It's a Focus 40 from FreedomScientific. And boy, did it get here fast! I gave up on the BC-640--I'm not sure if it's distributed by Optelec, VisionCue, or Santa's Elves. I think it's that last one. I'm pretty sure the BC-640 is mythical. So...anyway, I gave up on it sometime last month, and I have the Focus in my hot little hands right now.

And let me tell you all what the coolest thing is about this display: I can devote lots of time to learning how to use it, which means I have a legitimate reason to avoid doing my work! It doesn't get any better than this, folks.

Current Mood: happy