How many sighted people think the blinds use computers )was jaws speech recognition software)
- From: Yardbird <yardbird@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 24 May 2009 10:11:25 -0700
This may strike you as sad, or amusing, or both, depending on your mood at
the moment. My overall impression from all the fully sighted people to whom
I mention, say, that I Googled something, or read an article in the New York
Times Online, or hand them a sheet of printed material needed for a
particular situation like the medical visit to which, being a good patient,
I bring a list of my daily medications rather than lug along each time, to
each doctor, a bag containing five pharmacy bottles distinguished from each
other by means of rubber bands, scotch tape, masking tape, electrical tape
and combinations thereof, is a sort of mystified relief. I may be disabled
officially, according to the long white cane, but I'm not entirely blind,
which means to them able to see nothing at all. the truth about my visual
impairment is that it's from a retinal degeneration that's a kind of
cone-rod dystrophy, meaning the central vision that once allowed me to read,
or see peoples' faces, etc. is extinguish, but I still have a constantly
diminishing bit of far peripheral vision which, as sightlings know well,
might enable you to catch a basketball pass coming at you from the side but
wouldn't allow you to read the ball manufacturer's name and logo, say
Spalding,even if the ball were to stop spinning and coming at you and just
hang, mid-air, a few feet short . The natural inclination of a fully sighted
person at a hypothetical moment like that would be, of course, just to turn
their head a few degrees so they could see the ball sharp and clear using
their central retinal vision. Of course, if I were to do that, the ball
would completely disappear.
Such folks, usually having no idea of how the retina works, always guess
that however little remaining vision I might have, it must serve for reading
a computer screen and manipulating the computer with my hands, including
depending on the mouse for everything it's capable of doing. Sort of like a
case of Retinitis Pigmentosa that's down to narrow tunnel vision, but those
5 or 10 degrees of remaining central function have normal acuity that's
needed for what we mostly mean we're using when we say we're looking at
something.
I explain, as briefly as I can, that no, all I see in front of me is a
bray-blue blur with stuf moving around on it as the display changes in this
way or that, that I can tell is my computer monitor, and a black rectangle
in front of it on the desk that I know is my keyboard. Like most severely
low vision and totally blind people, I explain, I use a program known
generically as a screen reader. Mine is called Jaws. This sometimes elicits
a laugh moment during which we both chant the mysterious the shark is coming
music from the movie, establishing common ground that I've seen at least
something of the world as they themselves know it, breaking down some of
that barrier sighted people seem to feel that a blind person is completely
out of reach simply because they can't see you smile or frown or even see
you've come into the room, which often causes them a kind of paralyzing
panic. Which they quickly replace, in a venue like a restaurant, with what
they think will be the practical work-around of addressing all their
questions to your companion, should you be lucky or unlucky enough to have
one. What would he prefer to drink with that? Does he like broccoli?Would he
prefer the baked potato or the French Fries? To which a good friend will
always say "I don't know. Why don't you ask him yourself?""
But I digress, as is my wont. The minute I mention a screen reading program,
they see the U.S.S. Enterprise starship captain, say Captain Picard of the
second series, sitting back, in his big comfy captain's chair, ordering the
computer to make and send him up a cup of Earl Grey tea, hot, and
incidentally increase ship velocity to warp speed. If you've never seen
this,infer something else more easy to imagine other than visually. But it's
the sort of thing those people often refer to. "Oh," they say. "So you talk
to your computer and it does what you tell it to . Isn't it wonderful, all
this technology they've come up with these days?"
if I'm really put off by the way they say all this, sometimes ;; I lose my
cool and start wagging my head from side to side and singing Stevie
Wonder's "Isn't She Lovely."
Of course, politely boiling down how a screen reader works is about as
challenging, for me anyway, as explaining retinal degeneration, but there
you go. The very idea of a screen reader, for anyone who hasn't happened to
have seen one in use, is just not something that comes easily to mind
without a little education.
Just trying to get my fingers working with my first mug of coffee. Sort of a
pre-game warm-up.
Joel
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