Re: reading books
- From: Sharlene Wills <tenagra@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: optacon-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2007 13:00:24 -0800 (PST)
Call me naive, folks, but I remember the first time I
came across a typo in a printed book (using the
Optacon, of course) I thought, at first, that I had
misread the word. I went back over it several times
(even "scrubbing" as my Optacon teacher called it) but
the typo remained, so I finally concluded that books
in print have errors, too! Wow! What an eye-opener,
so to speak. Now I deplore the slippage in both
brammar and spelling, and I really wonder if, as has
been projected in many SF stories, books might yet
become extinct and the spoken word take over again.
Oh, and my first book, read with my trusty Optacon,
was a treatise on Japanese tea ceremonies. It was
fascinating, but I didn't realize that, to some
extent, at least, the Optacon can help you recognize
pictures, so I missed out on those. Later, of course,
and, to this day, I even look at pictures with it and
find thatt, if a diagram or picture isn't too
complicated, I can get a good sense of its make-up.
Sharlene.
--- maryemerson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> 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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