reading books
- From: <maryemerson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <optacon-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2007 02:58:53 -0800
Hi all,
I've read full-length books, and when I was a technical writer, I was
responsible for writing a couple manuals that included pictures of command
syntax, and a few flow charts, and a couple books that had pages and pages
of computer screen shots. I had to go through these books and manually read
the syntax diagrams and other stuff to be sure all the lines connected. But
I missed a couple places, and I remember a couple errors that I didn't know
about until the book was printed, and sighted colleagues overlooked when
they glanced through the book before sending the camera-ready copy to the
printers across the country in Mechanicsburg. I never would have been able
to work on these books without the optacon.
I had at least one interview with an individual who applied for a technical
writing job; he was recently blinded, didn't know braille, and although he
had a scientific background, couldn't answer when I asked him how he would
proof read his books, since he relied only on speech synthesizers. At the
time, the optacon was still in production, and he had just obtained one and
was working with it. I urged him to increase his proficiency because he
wouldn't be able to do quality work without at least some optacon skill.
I've noticed that people who work with braille or the optacon can write much
better and spell much better than those who rely only on speech. In fact, we
seem to be much more careful than many sighted people.
For example, I recall the final version of IBM's version of DOS, in which
one of the manuals included a poorly written note from an employee to the
technical writer; the note was written by somebody who hadn't learned
English very well, and the content could have been summarized in one concise
sentence, but it was overlooked in the final draft. More recently: A few
months ago, I found quite a few errors in a recently published book, and it
had supposedly been proof-read quite thoroughly. I notice this more and more
as people rely on spell checkers and less on human effort.
Mary
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