[optacon-l] Re: What the Optacon can do!
- From: "Mary Emerson" <maryemerson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <optacon-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2008 02:22:26 -0700
Catherine and list,
This topic has been discussed a number of times previously on this list. I
am re-sending the post I sent a couple months ago with a few additional
comments.
(beginning of post)
I have a laptop PC and I recently had a new hard drive installed. The PC's
configuration is unusual since everything built into it requires its own
drivers, including the sound and V.G.A. cards, card reader, mouse, CD, and
wireless. As usual, I used the optacon (R1D, regular lens, invert for
pre-Windows and normal mode for regular Windows screens) to partition and
format the hard drive and install Windows, which I've done on quite a few
machines. (The display is LCD, as is my monitor for the desktop PC.)
Although partitioning the hard drive and formatting it were fairly
straightforward, when Windows installation got to the point where the sound
card is tested, no sound came out, so I had to continue to use the optacon
for the additional step of installing each driver from its own folder and
its own installation program on the utilities CD that came with the laptop.
I must say it took my 30 years of optacon skill, and my 30 years as a
computer professional, to get this setup working. There is no way I could
have accomplished this without the optacon; some of the driver installations
took a lot of trial and error, due to quirks in the software, and, before I
got the V.G.A. display running, the screen resolution wasn't very high and
the screen image was hard to read because the print wasn't as bold as on a
normal screen or in most books. It was like reading very, very light print
because the threshold had to be adjusted almost to the max. At times it was
hard to find the OK or Yes buttons so I had to try different methods of
choosing them. This sort of thing isn't for the faint of heart, but it shows
the immense value of the optacon, especially for those of us who don't have
sighted help. For something like this, that takes days to do, where would a
patient sighted person be available these days? Figuring out what was
highlighted was also challenging before the video drivers were installed;
you couldn't tell what was highlighted, and sometimes it was almost
impossible to see the underlined letter such as the underlined O for OK.
Occasionally it was hard to figure out which window had focus, since
sometimes the background window looked more prominent than the foreground
which was on top of it; it was like having two books on top of each other
and seeing the outline of the bottom book while trying to read the top book.
(end of post)
Mary
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