A little bit of background on how I read my Emails

[gordon20]

Hi all!
I am feeling somewhat better than I did yesterday thank you so very very much for all your kind words and your prayers. Your kindness and support is very very much appreciated. I just wanted to give you a little background on my talking computer. For those of you who aren't familiar with talking computers for the blind, they are amazing! Tonight I had the privilage of showing one of the members I won't mention her name but I gave her a little insite on how it works when I type out a letter and I'll tell you she was amazed! It's amazing what technology is like these days I'll tell you! Now the voice program that I have is called jaws I can't quite remember what it stands for, but I'm sure a few members might know what it stands for. Any help? When I type out a letter it talks the letters out to me! It is incredible and you have to make sure that you put jaws to the speed that you want so in order to understand what it's saying, it's easy for you to read Emails and web sites. Some visually impaired people set their voices to a fast levil and boy I can hardly understand what it says sometimes! Almost reminds me of Ley Roy Van Dyke's The Octioneer and Hank Snow's I've Been Everywhere! LOL I just love talking computers it's simply amazing and I am so proud to have one. It's like a friend to me I'll tell you.
Will send a goodbye message before I leave tomorrow. God bless! Always your true friend and cowboy country fan, Gene Autry uh no I mean, Maheen!

------------------

[johnfowles]

I know of at least one other blind Lighthead who posts here and was very pleased to put him in touch via email with Maheen
that persone did once tell me what the acronym Jaws stood for but it took some determined googling to find it:-
In doing so came acros this statement
"If I'm currently using a dongle for my JAWS authorization"
which reminded me of somebody (Cathy's??) lovely misheard song title:-
"Long thin Dong"
there was no acronymical explanation at a main Jaws site:- http://www.rommes.org/computer/jaws.html
but eventually I found
"JAWS is an acronym for ...
Jamming And Warning System"
Actually I know JAWS is clever enough to say when it encounters a hyperlink for example and even say the name of a smilie!
But every time I think of a blind person using a computer and the internet my mind simply boggles. It is as Char will no
doubt agree hard enough to get started when you can scan a page to what is going on and what the page contains but having to
wait for evertything to be read out to you must take more patience than I think I have available.More to the point I finally got to see last night at our local cinema the most excellent film Ray about another of my
favou)rite artists Ray Charles (who I once saw 7 of 8 concerts he did on successive days at London's Hammersmith Odeon while earning much needed pocket money as a student selling Ice creams and program(me)s and was most impressed by Ray's mother whose advice and attitude was that he would after going blind at 7 have to do things for himself and he did so.
A fine inspiration for folk like Maheen to follow.
Yesterday for example I asked Maheen how could he tell one CD from another and he said his father was attaching Braille labels
(Lightfoot1 etc).Just like Ray Charles' wife who apparently stitched on a series of raised numbers on socks etc to indicate
to him correct colo(U)r matches. Something that highly impressed my dear wife Susan who then threatened to similarly code up my clothing !! So,when Maheen makes typos or spelling mistakes bear with him just as you do with my one finger speed typing that amuses the chat room participants no end right Brink?
John Fowles

[Auburn Annie]

quote:Originally posted by johnfowles:
... But every time I think of a blind person using a computer and the internet my mind simply boggles....

John,

I used to babysit for the younger siblings of a high school classmate of mine who was blind. He had a ham radio set-up and I'll never forget the day when I went looking for him to ask a question and found him up on the roof of his home adjusting the antenna! I nearly had a heart attack but of course it didn't bother him any - he couldn't see how high up he was.

[Cathy]

I'm the one Maheen was referring. We were talking on the phone, and all of the sudden, I started wondering how he manages to read IMs, e-mails and such, being completly visualy impaired. So, he gave me a demo. He showed me how his computer reads e-mail. I could hear it talking in the background.
Maheen is is great young man. He is very enthusiastic about older music, and it shows in his speech, so when he tells his computer to type something, he speaks into his mic and it types out word for word what he is saying, and that enthusiasm really shines through!
Maheen and I talked for an hour, and I was amazed at his knowledge of folk and country musicians from the 50s and 60s. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation.
John, when I hung up the phone, I immediately started wondering how Maheen tells one CD from another. I'm glad you explained it.
It amazes me how visually impaired people can manage so well. My great grandmother was completely blind for the last 10 years of her life. She managed to take care of herself quite well. She could tell her clothes apart just by the feel of them, could find her way from room to room, did her own housework and even wrote letters. She'd place a ruler on a sheet of paper and use it as a guide for each line.
She did do one thing that cracked us all up, though. We went to pick her up so she could spend the holidays at our place. In our family, all the girls, meaning mom and my sisters, pitched in to do the dishes after a meal, and Gram was no exception. She decided she was going to wash dishes. Lisa and I wiped and put them away amd Mom cleaned the stove and table, while all of us were singing three part harmony to You Are My Sunshine. Now, this was back in the late 1960s, right after the invention of Teflon, and Mom had recently purchased a set of Teflon bakeware. Teflon, if you remember correctly, had a slight rough feel to it. Gram was washing a cake pan and though the rough feel was food particles. She scoured that cake pan until it was shiny clean and didn't have a particle of Teflon left on it, all the while singing You Are My Sunshine to the top of her lungs. I will never forget that scene. Of course, none of us told her that she had just ruined Mom's new cake pan. She didn't need to know that. Mom just went out and bought one to replace it, and over the years, we often remember that day and still laugh about it.
Gram died the next summer, in 1969, at age 97. What an amazing woman she was.

Cathy http://www.cathycowette.com

Hello, I'm the other blind user of this board. I'm here in Phoenix. Some of you might remember a while back when I posted about a brailled copy of I Wish You Good Spaces that I had ordered, and I wondered what your thoughts on it were. This was back in September 2002, shortly after Gord's entrence into hospital. They've really improved the voice technology to be able to speak and have it type out what you want, but I don't need that personally. I am able to type fifty words a minute. Everybody asks if I have a braille keyboard, but if they really thought about it that much, they'd realize that after typing that fast, do they really look at their keyboard when their fingers are going that fast? This here is a standard keyboard. Oh, JAWS stands for Job Access With Speech. If you'd like to investigate the program, and even download a demo to play around with, go to www.FreedomScientific.com
and explore that site. They sell other products as well. Another good site to check out, if you're curious about how the visually impaired use technology is www.ACBRadio.org
and go to on demand, then Main Menu. I've done several reviews for that show, so search down the huge page and find my name. Click on the show's date, and then use the B key in Winamp to skip the segments until you here my presentation. There is a lot there, so you could spend hundreds of hours exploring.