Great, great points. Your lawsuit will take at least 2 years to get off the ground if you can even find a lawyer desperate enough to take a case with the possibility of such a low return on time, effort, and especially attorneys fees. You need to complete your assignments now and filing a lawsuit will mean you will undoubtedly have to drop out of school since the educational institution you're attending isn't meeting all your special needs, right? This of course means you can't graduate. Oh yeah, then there's that little thing with the possibility of any computer sciences graduate being called as a witness against your claims. If you plan on suing your school's DSS department, I'm sure they can generate plenty of disabled students who have in fact graduated, which of course will direct all attention to you who can't seem to get this done because DSS is supposedly not meeting your needs.
Please, please get this lawsuit mentality out of your heads. It is always easier said than done. Unless you've got at the very least 45,000 at your disposal as well as a rock freakin solid discrimination suit, you are wasting your time. Remember, if you lose you get to pay the school's attorney's fees--they won't just forget the whole thing. Many lawsuits, if not most, end in settlements, which means you've managed to talk things through and come to an agreement. Why not skip the middleman and find a middle ground for you and the disabled student services. There are of course many simpletons around that feel violence and lawsuits are the only way to resolve issues. These people haven't a clue as to what goes into their uneducated and extremely silly opinions and notions of the working world, but they voice them as if life were as easy as their silly and down right stupid statements. I don't mean you Chris H.
Sana is right, talk, to, your, professor. In fact, since he is a computer sciences professor, he might just be very interested in learning what the computer world is like for a blind person. If you can't demonstrate your assistive technology in person, then send him an MP3 file demonstrating how you do your work. Heck, call him and demonstrate over the phone. For one algebra professor I took in my brailed math problems and asked her to pick any homework problem randomly, and I read my problems off to her in order to demonstrate my ability to solve the math problems. There is always a way!
Matthew---- Original Message ----- From: "Sina Bahram" <sbahram@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2007 6:36 AM Subject: RE: Story Boards
Wouldn't want to go about it in a sensible way, would we?100 times out of 100, I have found the DSS office, and not the professor, tobe the most ignorant of both the intention, and even the letter of, ADA, 508, etc. This can be likened to Microsoft caring more about accessibility than the AT companies, for example.I think that a lot of these situations can be resolved by simply talking tothe professor in their office hours or on the phone and explaining the process by which you can translate your internal knowledge into externalrepresentations of that knowledge. Discussions involving lawyers tend to becounterproductive at best, and costly over an amazing amount of time, at worst. Not to mention, you are simply feeding the already ridiculous stereotype that all blind folks are going to sue you if you do even one thing wrong. This is an unhealthy, unproductive, and amazingly all around bad idea.The entirety of Chris's technical suggestions were quite excellent; however,and I urge you to follow them. Good luck Take care, Sina ________________________________ From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx[mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Chris HofstaderSent: Wednesday, October 10, 2007 8:38 AM To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: RE: Story Boards Hi Marvin, Drawing tools have taken a back seat in the development priorities at the commercial AT companies. We had a contractor (Will Pearson) working on aaudio version of Visio that used 3D sound for us at FS a bunch of years ago.When I moved on, FS shit canned Will and killed the project. One way to story board a project would be to make your "slides" using html itself. The pages you make will not be fully functional but, rather, describe the contents of the page when it is finally completed. This will provide a set of pages that your instructor can view in any order that he prefers and will contain all of the information you need to use to develop the stories for your ultimate project. Another approach would be to do it using the MS Word Outline mode (View/Outline in Word 2003, I haven't used it in 2007 yet so I can't tell you how to get it in that version). The Word outliner creates kind of a tree view of information which can be up to 12 (I think) levels deep. The person reading the document can set the depth she wants to view so, for instance, they can read the Heading 1 information to get a "big picture"overview of the information and, using the outliner button bar, or a number of different useful keystrokes, they can drill down further. This creates ahierarchical view of your story board which can be corrected to jump fromtopic to topic under different headings by using the Word hyperlink feature (I know this works with JAWS but haven't tried it with Window-Eyes or SystemAccess). Another approach would be to use PowerPoint slides in a logical, albeit hierarchical manner. It has been a long time since I did anything interesting with PowerPoint but, if I remember correctly, you can includehyperlinks that will let the reader jump from one slide to another in a lesssequential order. I find it easiest to create PowerPoint slides using the MS Word outliner - items at level 1 will translate to PP slide titles and those at level 2 or higher become PP bullets. Once you have your outlinedone in Word, you can go to File/Send To/PowerPoint and it will create yourPP slides for you and open PP to the top slide. From there, you can edit the slides to add things like hyperlinks and such to spiff up your presentation. I know that editing PP slides can be done pretty well withJAWS as I've done it myself but I have been told that it works pretty nicelywith Window-Eyes but have no hands on experience with it so can't speak to its usability. I'm sure there are other tools that a blink can use to accomplish such atask but I haven't tried any and cannot remember what other people have toldme over the years as my caffeine levels haven't reached the point where I can function at full capacity. If your instructor doesn't like any of the above accessible solutions, Irecommend you get hold of a Braille embosser or Perkins Brailler and make a whole lot of pages in Braille. Do not add any printed information and turn in the project using only Braille and tactile graphics ( has a nice program for doing this). If the instructor complains, tell him that it was the onlyaccessible solution he hadn't rejected yet and that you will deal with theOffice of the Dean of Students to try to help you negotiate a solution thatwill work for you and the instructor.If your instructor does not allow you to use a technique that is accessibletypically colleges have an office of disability affairs and, if not, theydefinitely have a Dean of Students. People in these departments are usually quite helpful and aware of ADA and, if your college gets Federal money (most do), 508 as well. No one wants a discrimination lawsuit and, if it comes to a point where you and your instructor reach a point at which negotiation no longer provides either of you with any satisfaction, your lawyer's office isthe next stop. You can write to me privately or call me on Skype if you want to discuss this further. Enjoy, cdh ________________________________ From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of marvin hunkin Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2007 12:00 AM To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Story Boards Hi. doing a project for my website development course. now, part of the requirements says that i need to create a story board to represent what content is to be displayed on each page. Now sighted students, would draw navigation and story board diagrams. now, had to do this in word tables and tried html. but my lecturer is still not happy with what i have come up with.now, just wondering, is there any software, that might be able to representthe story boards for the four websites that i am developing for this semester. any tips, tricks, or any other similar experiences. let me know, if anyone been in the same position.unfortunately the guy who did start to develop an accessible text to speech drawing software, got his phd, and did not complete the project and still inlimbo. he got to the third user tests, and then nicked off. he did this at Burkely University in Callifornia and the product was to be called Intercommunication Draw 2.okay, can you help out or give suggestions or how to resolve these problems?cheers Marvin. ________________________________ Join Lavalife for free. 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