Synthetic Voice Shock Reverberates Across the Divides!

As I communicate with other persons with progressive vision loss, I often sense a quite negative reaction to synthetic, or so-called ‘robotic’, voices that enable reading digital materials and interfacing with computers. Indeed, that’s how I felt a few years ago. Let’s call this reaction "synthetic voice shock" as in:

• I cannot understand that voice!!!
• The voice is so inhuman, inexpressive, robotic, unpleasant!
• How could I possibly benefit from using anything that hard to listen to?
• If that’s how the blind read, I am definitely not ready to take that step.

Conversely, those long experienced with screen readers and reading appliances may be surprised at these adverse reactions to the text-to-speech technology they listen to many hours a day. They know the clear benefits of such voices, rarely experience difficult understandability, exploit voice regularity and adjustability, and innovate better ways of "living big" in the sighted world, to quote the LevelStar motto.

Synthetic voice reactions appear to criss-cross many so-called divides: digital, generational, disability, and developer. The free WebAnywhere is the latest example with a robotic voice that must be overcome in order to gain the possible benefits of its wide dissemination. Other examples are talking ATM centers and accessible audio for voting machines. The NVDA installation and default voice can repel even sighted individuals who could benefit from a free screen reader as a web page accessibility checker or a way to learn about the audio assistive mode. Bookshare illustrates book reading potential by a robotic, rather than natural, voice. Developers of these tools seen the synthetic voice as a means to gain the benefits of their tools while users not accustomed to speech-enabled hardware and software run the other way at the unfriendliness and additional stress of learning an auditory rather than visual sensory practice.

This is especially unfortunate when people losing vision may turn to magnifiers that can only improve spot reading, when extra hours and energy are spent twiddling fonts then working line by line through displayed text, when mobile devices are not explored, when pleasures of book reading and quality of information from news are reduced.

I would like to turn this posting into messages directed at developers, Vision Losers, caretakers, and rehab personnel.

To Vision Losers who could benefit sooner or later

Please be patient and separate voice quality from reading opportunities when you evaluate potential assistive technology.

The robotic voice you encounter with screen readers is used because it is fast and flexible and widely accepted by the blind community. But there do exist better natural voices that can be used for reading books, news, and much more. While these voices seem initially offensive, synthetic voices are actually one of the great wonders of technology by opening the audio world to the blind and gradually becoming common in telephony and help desks.

As one with Myopic Macular Degeneration forced to break away from visual dependency and embrace audio information, I testify it takes a little patience and self-training and then you hear past these voices and your brain naturally absorbs the underlying content. Of course, desperation from print disability is a great motivator! Once overcoming the resistance to synthetic voices, a whole new world of spoken content becomes available using innovative devices sold primarily to younger generations of educated blind persons. Freed of the struggle to read and write using defective eyesight, there is enormous power to absorb an unbelievable amount of high quality materials. As a technologist myself, I made this passage quickly and really enjoyed the learning challenge, which has made me into an evangelist for the audio world of assistive technology.

If you have low vision training available, ask about learning to listen through synthetic speech. For the rest of our networked lives, synthetic voices may be as important as eccentric viewing and using contrast to manage objects.

So, when you encounter one of these voices, maybe think of them as another rite of passage to remain fully engaged with the world. Also, please consider how we can help others with partial sight. With innovations from web anywhere and free screen readers, like NVDA, there could be many more low cost speaking devices available world wide.

To Those developing reading tools with Text-to-Speech

Do not expect that all users of your technology will be converts from within the visually impaired communities familiar with TTS. Provide a voice tuned in pitch and speed and simplicity for starters to achieve the necessary intelligibility and sufficient pleasantness. Suggest that better voices are also available and show how to achieve their use.

It’s tough to spent development effort on such a mundane matter as the voice, but technology adoption lessons show that it only takes a small bit of discouragement to ruin a user’s experience and send a tool they could really use straight into their recycle bin. Demos and warnings could be added to specifically address Synthetic Voice Shock and show off the awesome benefits to be gained. The choice of a freely available voice is a perfectly rational design decision but may indicate a lack of sensitivity to the needs of those newly losing vision forced to learn not only the mechanics of a tool but also how to lis en to this foreign speech.

To Sighted persons helping Vision Losers

You should be tech savvy enough to separate out the voice interface from the core of the tool you might be evaluating for a family member or demonstration. Remember the recipient of the installed software will be facing both synthetic voice shock and possibly dependency on the tool as well as long learning curve. Somehow, you need to make the argument that the voice is a help not a hindrance. Of course, you need to be able to understand the voice yourself, perhaps translate its idiosyncrasies, and tune its pitch and speed. A synthetic voice is a killer software parameter.

You may need to seek out better speech options, even outlay a few bucks to upgrade to premium voices or a low cost tool. Amortizing $100 for voice interface over the lifetime hours of listening to valuable materials, maintaining an independent life style, and expanding communication makes voices such a great bargain.

And, who knows, many of the voice-enabled apps may help your own time shifting, multi-tasking, mobile life styles.

To Rehab Trainers

From the meager amount of rehab available to me, the issue of Synthetic Voice Shock is not addressed at all. Eccentric viewing, the principles of contrast for managing objects, a host of useful independent living gadgets, font choices, etc. are traditional modules in standard rehab programs. Perhaps it would be good to have a simple lesson listening to pleasant natural voices combined with more rough menu readers just to show it can be done. Listening to synthetic voices should not be treated like torture but rather like a rite of passage to gain the benefits brought by assistive technology vendors and already widely accepted in the visually impaired communities. Indeed, inability to conquer Synthetic Voice Shock might be considered a disability in itself.

As I have personally experienced, it must be especially difficult to handle Vision Losers with constantly changing eyesight and a mixed bag of residual abilities. It could be very difficult to tell Vision Losers they might fare better reading like a totally blind person. But when it comes to computer technology, that step into the audio world can both reduce stress of struggling to see poorly in a world geared toward hyperactive visually oriented youngsters, especially when print disability opens the flow of quality reading materials, often ahead of the technology curve for sighted people.

The most useful training I can imagine is a session reading an article from AARP or sports Illustrated or New York times editorial copied into a version of TextAloud, or similar application, with premium voices. Close those eyes and just relax and listen and imagine doing that anywhere, in any bodily position, with a daily routine of desirable reading materials. To demonstrate the screen reader aspect, the much maligned Microsoft sam in Narrator can quickly show how menus, windows, and file lists can be traversed by reading and key strokes. The takeaway of such a session should be that there are other, perhaps eventually better, ways of reading print materials and interacting with computers than struggling with deteriorating vision, assuming hearing is sufficient.

In summary, more attention should be paid to the pattern of adverse reactions of Vision Losers unfamiliar with the benefits of the synthetic speech interaction that enables so many assistive tools and interfaces.

References on Synthetic Voice Shock

1. Wikipedia on Synthetic Speech. Technical and historical, back to 1939 Worlds Fair.
2. Wired for Speech, research and book by Clifford Nass. Experiments with effects of gender, ethnicity, personality in perception of synthetic speech.
3. Audio demonstrations using synthetic speech
4. NosillaCast podcaster Allison Sheridan interviewing her macular degenerate mother on her new reading device. Everyzing is a general search engine for audio, as in podcasts.
5. Example of a blog with natural synthetic speech reading. Warning: Political!
6. Google for ’systhetic voice online demo’ for examples across the synthetic voice marketplace. Most will download as WAY files.
7. The following products illustrate Synthetic Voice Shock.
   • NVDA Screen Reader with eSpeak default voice. Our NVDA Quick start shows voice switching.
   • Bookshare.org demo. As of July 2008, this voice is harder to follow than those available on the APH BookPort or LevelStar Icon where we listen to books or the Victor Reader Stream with an even better, if too quiet, voice. Alternatively books may be converted to mp3 files using software like TextAloud.
   • TextAloud from nexstup.com starts with native Windows voices but may be upgraded to premium voices, illustrated on the website.
   • Totally voice-driven LevelStar Icon PDA. Synthetic voice reads all menus, email, web pages, RSS articles as well as books and news from Bookshare. Check out the demo podcasts.
   • Web Anywhere from U. Washington reads web pages starting from a synthetic voice. Listen for a few minutes and give it a chance.
8. Podcast Interview with ‘As Your World Changes’ blog author covering many issues of audio assistive technology
9. Audio reading of this posting in male and female voices

Hyperlinks considered Harmful! On to structured Reading.

This post visits topics heavy on web technology, with troubles well beyond vision loss. The previous blog post describes my current reading regime with print disability and technology adaptations. I find common ground with an article in the summer 2008 Atlantic Monthly and assorted blog commentaries bemoaning information overload and discomfort induced by chronic web use. I draw on some related resources from my audio channels of interviews and reviews. The central question is how our plastic brains are reprogrammed by our reading technologies, emphasizing the stresses and joys we find operating in a tug-of-war over what controls our reading lives.

The July-august Atlantic Monthly features an article that asks "Does Google Make Us stupid?" . This title suggests an excursion into declining abilities of critical analysis. Rather, the discussion is the gnawing sense that the structure of interactive media combined with pressures to assimilate lots of online information is actually changing not only reading habits but also brain structure. I found this thesis fascinating from my own experience of deliberately rebuilding my reading life and knowing my brain was re-wiring itself for auditory rather than visual input of words and written thoughts. This is pretty profound stuff.

Ugh, the article’s title itself is kind of stupid, a touch by an editor rather than the article’s author. Indeed, Google is described as a monument to measurement technology in attempting to achieve the best all-around responsiveness to user queries, up to trying to read minds as represented by query histories. That’s a worthy game and has changed the world but is not the crux of the article. The key idea is that a hyperlink from a web page you are reading is not only a reference but a propellant toward action, as Carr describes its effect. In the context of technology that encourages multitasking, impulsiveness, and need to be interlocked with others on myriad networks, hyperlinks could be considered harmful. Note: my hyperlink references are at the bottom of this post.

The phrase ‘XX considered harmful’ is a tradition in computer science, canonized by the late E. W. Dijkstra in a 1968 article where XX was ‘goto’, a programming construct. He argued that the goto statement in languages like the then dominant FORTRAN caused unnecessary errors and difficulties in reasoning about programs. Somebody tracing through the flow of code would encounter a goto then need to branch their thinking into the continuation of line-by-line code flow as well as taking up where the goto said to go. The problem was also at the other end, when reading code, you had little way of knowing what other code might jump there under unknown conditions. This generated a decade of articles and result that showed both theoretically and practically, very few occasions required a literal goto, that more attention to the algorithm led to code better organized using loops, cases, and exceptions. For example, a well designed loop could be replaced by a logic description of the changes made, no matter how the iteration was accomplished. After the ruckus died down, there were improvements in languages, practices, and pedagogy called the age of Structured Programming.

My question here is whether the complaints against the goto and the hyperlink are a useful analogy. Suppose I put a link here to the Atlantic Monthly online website. You might be tempted to stop reading my article right here in order to get to the original context. That’s perfectly legitimate, but will you return to my thought stream or continue branching from the magazine article? or start a whole new thread of interest? Can you hold all the branching structure of your day’s reading in your brain and browser history? This is a cognitive dilemma for both reader and writer, stemming from a simple html element. Our scholastic training to cite sources and to help the reader use hypertext technology to reach the source in an instant causes some grief for all of us.

Carr and others are saying that hyperlink-driven reading is making it more difficult for them to read longer articles in printed or online form and even reducing their ability to read books. Is this a genuine loss of some cognitive ability? or is it just a change in reading habits? In either case, is the effect reversible? As some blog comments suggest, maybe there are other reasons for the expressed discomfort, like burn-out, aging, or natural shifts of interest.

This discussion hit home for me for several reasons. I was a student of hypertext theory in previous career incarnations in the 1980s. Questions then were about types of links, e.g. clarifying, refining, challenging,… To cite one major example, Robert E. Horn elaborated numerous models of hyperlink for different kinds of documentation and uses. Design theorist Horst Rittel evolved the concept of issue-based information systems to address ‘wicked problems’, characterizing difficult social problems requiring intense collaborative analysis. This truly was the golden age of structured Hypertext before the WWW came along and offered goto style hyperlinks to everybody.

For my new reading style using a screen reader, hyperlinks are more often annoyances, as advertising, navigation’s, privacy notices, and 100s of links I never plan to click but must traverse or avoid in order to get to the content of a web page. This means hyperlinks consume personal energy, which may be a partial cause of current reading discomfort. Every inline hyperlink is a decision point - go there? do that now? or later? abandon this article? If we made all these decisions consciously, we would feel even more the personal energy drain. I have learned how loss of visual acuity forces more attention toward energy management to accomplish most reading tasks and to overcome inevitable errors.

Since I went through a period of several months of painful reading, I have a tremendous appreciation for the reading technology I can now use effectively, as discussed in my article on ‘tools, Materials, and strategies for Non-visual reading’. I really did almost lose it, not from attention but from sensory change. I still marvel that my brain can interpret the sounds coming from a synthetic voice and absorb the content as fully as I used to visually, or at least I think so. Wow, a synthetic voice is just a data file and algorithm, but what a difference these make to the print-disabled world!

As I rebuilt my reading skills, I have come to visualize my reading content as mostly a tree of subjects and articles, retrieved primarily by RSS, and represented in text and mp3 files. If I count in a half dozen daily newspapers retrieved by a pipeline of blind services, every day yields easily over 1000 articles, cached or retrieved by wireless. Reading this way, maybe 50 articles a day, is a very well controlled process because the temptation to take a hyperlink is very rare. In other words, my RSS client and News stand control me while I control my web browser. Although my ICON PDA supports hyperlink activation, my decisions are simpler without a browser. Do I read this article or not, based on title and context in the tree? do I read politics blogs now, later, or skip for a while? Which topics are sufficiently intriguing to switch into browsing mode for searching and exploration? When the tree gets disorganized or its retrieval profile changes, how do I reorganize the branches? all this helps reduce context switching and clicking through regions of inactivity. My non-visual reading regime seems to be much more structured than formerly, more focused on textual content than on links and relationships.

Yet, when my Icon Mobile Manager required a 2 week trip for repairs, I rather welcomed the respite from those 1000s of articles. I had to get my news the old-fashioned way, by airwaves on TV or radio, or by visiting websites. I was amazed at how much work I had to put in to set up the feeds and patterns I had evolved over a year with my Icon assistive technology. Upon return home of the Icon, I trimmed out a few feeds that seemed redundant or left over from previous interests, but mainly I place more time limits on my article reading. It also helps to have the Democratic party race out of the way.

Rregarding books, I do tend to skip around much more than in the past. Because I have a rich library of book files to choose from, I am evolving new interests and Reading patterns. I don’t need to feel bad about not finishing a book as it can still reside on my memory card in an out of the way folder. As to concentration, most of my reading is insomniac style or on the road or for book clubs. Hey, maybe that’s what carr and others need is a social book club with a list of questions for reading and discussion — Do guys do that?

Ok, I am starting to ramble here. I have suggested the analogy between ‘goto considered harmful’ and ‘hyperlink considered harmful’. My reading program with controlled separation of RSS delivered material from freestyle web browsing could be dubbed ‘Partially Structured Reading’.I share, indeed I just know, that my brain has adapted to the forced changes of print-disabled reading styles by evolving its own techniques for decision-making, context-switching, and stack management. In my view hyperlinks cause two forms of harm. First, they encourage divergence without the convergence and summarizing techniques that enabled overcoming the analogous ill effects of the goto statement. Second, the current hyperlink HTML element that simultaneously expands and binds the web is a primitive instrument that cannot be used for serious thought without imposing some of the rigor of early hypertext theories, e.g. the purpose of the link.

I’d like to bring up a few more references on this topic from my audio channels and personal experience:.

• Former Microsoft executive Linda Stone has laid out our syndrome of ‘continuous, partial attention’ in a fascinating podcast. She asks the fundamental question: do you really want to live that way?

• A book on ‘distraction’, as interviewed by the wise Diane Rehm on WAMU, details a reform program for teaching attention skills in k-12 to enable a transition from pure information greed to appreciation of facts and policies, e.g. those faced in health care and basic civics.

• Another book on my wish list, mentioned in the Atlantic Monthly article, is ‘Proust and the squid’ by Maryanne wolf. As interviewed on Brain science, points out that reading is not natural but rather highly contextual in culture and the current technology, whether stone tablets or networks. Scientifically, a lot is going on to show how the brain is truly plastic, evolved to rewire for different styles of processing information.

• The ultimate brain deconstruction exercise is that of neuroscientist Jill B. Taylor who witnessed the dissolution of her cognitive and physical abilities during a left brain stroke. She then used her right brain sensitivity to guide her rehabilitation, taking this further to remolding her personality. A wild-ass theory I conceived from her description of the limbic system, the so-called reptilian brain, is that perhaps hyperlinks trigger a fight or flight response that might underlie the discomfort of web surfing - every hyperlink suggests a danger or defensive curiosity, lurking at the end of link. The good news she suggests is that these autonomic responses only lack 90 seconds, after which the more rational or familiar emotional thinking is in control. She reminds us that humans might consider themselves as thinking beins with feelings but rather we are primarily feeling processors which think some times.

• My monthly book club chose ‘The Uncommon Reader’ by British playwright Alan Bennett. This novella traces the Queen’s life style changes from a chance encounter with a mobile reading van, through selections and borrowings of an increased number and variety of reading materials under the tutelage of a Human resource (servant) Norman and the interventions of MBA style queen handler sir Kevin. As the Queen becomes more intrigued with common lives, her relationships with her Duties and supporters changes, discomfiting many whom she interrogates about their reading preferences. Eventually her reading turns into extended reflection expressed in writing and, upsetting everything, a full blown urge to compose a book. While humorous, the novella asks many more serious questions. How does anybody gain or lose in total life experiences from their reading patterns? what does it mean to one’s colleagues to have an active reading program, and also be open about it? To oneself, what are my selection criteria for books, characters, plots? Is reading books an optional life activity or an ingrained part of one’s personality and character? would this royal opsimath enjoy wikipedia and Google?

what these studies lack, I suggest, is investigation into the non-visual ways of working, based in visual memories, alternative styles of work, and so-called assistive tools.

References with Hyperlinks

Here come the hyperlinks!

1. ‘Does Google Make Us stupid?’ by Nicholas carr in July-August 2008 Atlantic Monthly online
2. Nicholas carr’s blog ‘rough type’
3. As Your world changes blog posting on ‘tools, Materials, and strategies for non-visual reading’, posted June 15 2008>
4. Robert E. Horn’s work on Hypertext theory
5. Wicked Problems and Issue-based Information Systems from Wikipedia
6. ‘considered harmful’ background in Wikipedia
7. Interview on ‘distraction and democracy’ by Diane Rehm on June 8 2008 for book ‘Distracted: The Erosion of Attention’ by Maggie Jackson.
8. ‘Proust and the Squid’ book by Maryanne Wolf as reviewed by Ginger Campbell on Brain science Podcast #24 and #29
9. Podcast speech by Linda stone on ‘continuous partial attention’
10. ‘My Stroke of Insight’ by neuroscientist Jill B. Taylor
11. Novella ‘The ncommon Reader’ by Alan Bennett, available on bookshare.org
12. Shrink Rap Radio Live #10 psychologists’ reflection
13. opsimath definition - one who learns late in life

    Synthetic speech reading of this post

Listen up! Technology, Materials, and strategy for non-Visual Reading

This post describes how this vision Loser reads on a daily basis. sighted readers of this blog should gain some insight into alternative ways technology delivers what you read visually on printed pages or screens. Those now in transition with vision loss can get a snapshot of a specific combination of reading technology, web delivery systems, and kinds of reading materials.

I consider myself an effective reader at this point in my vision loss. Three years ago I would have had no way of describing how I would be reading now. Partially, this was from the inability to know how my sensory apparatus would be working. For the record, I see pages where the text is mostly smudges. Computer screens have reasonably clear outlines with text that can be enlarged on a monitor or text size setting but remains often more like those irritating CAPTCHA boxes, all wobbly and sliced up. Partial sight can be minimally used by magnification, contrast, and eccentric viewing but for any reasonable way of consuming information, one must step over into the audio world. That means a screen reader or self-voiced reading devices, all using synthetic speech. After 2 years of hard work, a lot of technology evaluation, and countless hours of practice, the audio world now seems natural. I have no problem reconciling myself with this way of reading for the rest of my life, trusting that my hearing and hands will not give out on me.

Another reason I would not have been able to predict how I read now, in 2008, is that several products I use constantly had yet to be invented in 2005. Processing power, miniaturization, wireless, and blind-driven inventiveness have produced a stable of devices that complement the PC (or MAC, whatever).

• The Levels tar Icon is a screen-less Linux hand-held that reads all its menus and text as I cycle through email, news, and web content. The Mobile Manager hand-held fits into a docking station with keyboard and augmented speakers, power, and ports. I use the Icon for email by pop3 from gmail, occasional recordings,RSS feeds of news and podcasts, web browser, and special access to books and newspapers.
• The American Printing House for the blind book port is another hand-held box with its only user interface a keypad, requiring ear buds or external speakers. Its memory card is loaded from a PC with books, mp3 files, and text. The book port is designed for easy navigation through books and its file systems. Like the Icon, it can also record memos. The APH book port is currently available only used, as the upgrade is having manufacturing problems. I use the book port primarily for books and lengthy synthetic spoken versions of files. A competitor Humanware victor reader stream offers similar reading capabilities, but I have never become comfortable with its navigation techniques, primarily just not my way of working.
• The latest marvel of reading technology is the > Kurzweil NFB reader that has shrunk the scanner-OCR-reader architecture onto the Nokia N82 platform. well, it could be used also to make phone calls if attached to a phone service. This little guy is great for on-the-fly reading like room service menus, TSA notices stuffed in your luggage, mail, and printed pages lying around. one of the greatest frustrations of print disability is the difficulty of performing normal inter-human transactions where a sighted person hands you a business card or information sheet or agenda and you need that information to take the next step toward your goal. Another frustration is the profusion of junk materials surrounding the little piece of critical action, like amount to pay on a bill, but that’s where family members can be called upon. The KNFB Reader illustrates Kurzweil’s mantra that exponentiality dominates lineariy , urging us to think about potentially using far more computing power to overcome our neural deficiencies.
• The NVDA screen reader , discussed in earlier posting on selection of NVDA , is my PC work horse. It shows amazingly high quality and functionality for a young product, deriving from its free, open source origins driven by a generation of blind tech savvy developers and users seeking an alternative to the proprietary screen readers forged into the rehab-industrial complex. Note: I donate to NVAccess. Unless you need specialized scripts for complex or barely accessible products, such as many enterprise data management systems, NVDA will do well, especially in conjunction with Mozilla products.
• Another supporting tool necessary for full reading is the Kurzweil 1000 for simplifying and managing scanners, which may have inaccessible and photo-oriented interface managers. Scanned material for submission to a service like Bookshare.org requires considerable editing that is well supported in K1000. I used the K1000 for general editing and spell checking as well as scanner management. Note that the K1000 has its own nice self-voicing practice to assist its operations and editing.

So, that’s all new technology I’ve learned in the past 2 years, ranging from my Identity cane to a suite of talking devices.

What about the representation of the reading materials and where to they come from?

Of course, we are all familiar with humanly recorded audio books, basically a long stream of bits, possibly with some embedded strings that reader technology can identify as section or information markers. The blindnd-serving organizations like NLS (National Library service) has long provided human narrators, recording media, reading tools, and a library coordinated distribution system. I personally have not tapped into this because the NLS format has only recently become available on the Icon, and, besides, I have a little problem with its paperwork to get myself certified. audible.com is the commercial system integrated with book port and soon the Icon, but I have yet to find the book that compels me to subscribe.

The core technology for representing reading materials is XML, for extended markup Language, in the family of HTML for web pages. Text files have human or automatically added tags, like <title>,which the reader tool interprets for the user, which could be another computer or a human. A special version, DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) is the interchange format for books. I get most of my books from bookshare.org which uses a copyright exemption to allows volunteers and publishers to contribute texts for distribution to members certified with a print disability who agree not to distribute further, but with free choice of reading tools and locations of materials. For me, this meant I could rebuild my personal library faster than I could donate or throw away my printed books.

The beauty of the bookshare distribution system was immeasurably enhanced by the Icon’s integration of a book search and download capability. If I hear about a New York Times best seller , a classic or a Reader’s choice, I can pull up the Icon book search by title or author, automatically log on to bookshare, download the book, if available, and start reading — in about a minute! Of course, if the book is not available, I can look for an audio at the public library or a commercial service or get a printed copy to scan. Indeed, I am now contributing books selected by my monthly AAUW book club, which takes several hours of work as I learn to expedite scanning and editing with the Kurzweil 1000 system. But it’s gratifying to know this process offers good readings to thousands more people like me. I carry my entire library on my easy reading Book Port categorized as Fiction, Biography, etc. and can also search these books in full text format. This pipeline of easily retrieved and stored books has truly broadened my reading choices with more than enough entertainment, enlightenment, and information.

What about all those mass scanned book collections by Google, amazon, Microsoft, etc.? And those PDF e-books? too bad, most of these are not available to me, or very hard to use. The popular Gutenberg and Google book search do provide out-of-copyright materials, but I personally rarely need these. And, as I commented in post on “seeing through Google book search” , I am limited in my research by the image-only presentation of pages from a book search. While PDF is a nearly universal viewable distribution format, the adobe Acrobat reader is always changing its read out loud capabilities, insists on updating itself every use, and generally makes me feel out of sorts, like “when good technologies go bad”, with apologies to the adobe co-founder who was my grad school office mate. PDF accessibility is such a mixed bag, I just convert all PDF files to TXT and live with what I can get out of the results using the Icon, book port, or screen reader. My pet peeve is the need to convert PDF newsletters into TXT when the content could just as well been delivered as the more easily readable HTML. Like many other people, I thought I could buy an ebook and apply a synthetic voice reader but this mode of distribution is verboten by DRM (Digital Rights Management).

Whew, this is getting long, as I inventory my reading experience, but here some the happier parts.

As my vision faded so I could no longer read newsprint comfortably, I kept my NY Times subscription to retain access to the website. I learned to find the sections of interest, like Editorials and business, and navigate a link path while reading the articles I wanted by the Text Aloud browser toolbar. Ouch, was this cumbersome! Now, I use the NFB Newswire newspaper delivery service offered in the bookshare membership and facilitated by the Icon News Stand application. With one “get new issues” click, I have not only the NY times, but also wall street Journal, Washington Post, San Francisco chronicle, economist, New Yorker, and more. All are structured for reading by publication, issue, section, title, and text. this means I can scan and selectively reads 100s of pages of newsprint in a half hour, an unpredictable benefit of print disability. Of course, there’s a down side to news reading in that my local newspaper uses a convoluted content management system that seems to split every article into paragraphs that intertwine with advertisements and obituaries. Luckily, there is an RSS that delivers titles and a city feed that offers more official news, but I have yet to find a way to keep up on local events, even using the radio. This is one of the gaping holes in the information infrastructure for print disabled readers. I avidly track Jon Udell’s blog on strategies for Internet citizens for improving community networked information.

Along the lines of the DAISY representation for books is the RSS (real simple syndication) format for feeds that deliver articles and podcasts. This is the key technology for the rest of most of my reading, with over 80 feeds in my Icon RSS client. These bring CNN, Inside Higher Ed, science daily, slate, and many more magazine and news headline style materials. These are complemented by my evolved collection of news, recreational, and technical podcasts. While I really do not know what I am missing, I am thoroughly comfortable that I am keeping up with technology trends through itconversations.com with its interviews with innovators, technation, IEEE spectrum, etc. Rarely is a podcasts a time-waster and I feel myself obligated to listen to keep up. Similarly, a judicious selection of blogs help me track what’s going on in my areas of interest, including accessibility, podcasting media, and, especially this year,politics.

Two cool things about RSS are the ability to hierarchically structure feeds and to exchange feeds among readers. If you want mine, here’s susan’s reading sources , a file that can be imported into your choice of RSS reader or cribbed from in a text editor. Since all navigation in the Icon RSS reader is within a tree, I have a hierarchy of News into general, technology, Politics, and science categories, then further in places into trees of blog or other special content. Since feed updating is time consuming, maybe half an hour, the tree structure allows updating only a single feed or group of feeds, e.g. if I need a politics fix late on a Tuesday primary day. Of course, I also have several mailing lists with associated folders in the Icon email client, keeping up on mdsupport.org,book port, bookshare, NVDA, and icon user discussion lists.

How progressive are these reading tools? I have been an Internet user since around 1970s. Indeed I found myself on the mailing list of the very first spam message 30 years ago. I subscribed to and made some embarrassing posts in Usenet groups and mailing lists in the 1980s and 1990s and had my first web page around 1993. To me, this surfeit of information is a natural progression. However, when my beloved Icon had to go to the shop for repair, I realized how important were the advances of the past year. I found the web-based RSS readers clumsy and never did get any setup comparable to my Icon trees, menus, and quick read articles.

To be provocative, I estimate my reading productivity now, compared to a few years ago, as about 10:1 in retrieving content available via Internet, wireless, RSS and other clients. Once retrieved, I feel about a 10:1 gain in ability to scan, filter, selectively read or listen to the content. Of course, I cannot get everything I need and occasionally rev up the Icon or PC firefox web browser for searching and surfing. I’ll discuss my feelings about information overload and reading habits and brain plasticity in the companion post on “Hyperlinks considered Harmful”.

One of the greatest benefits of exploiting vision loss and using these reading tools is that advertising fades into the noise. Given the current economic model for most information services, this makes me a lousy consumer. Well, too bad, I really would like to kick in for a low-cost subscription, say $10, but do not have that opportunity. I’d like to pay $3 for each book I read with funds to the author and publisher, like is occurring for music. But my guilt is assuaged by taking every opportunity to tell in person and virtually about resources I like in hopes that enough people will click the ad links and buy the resources directly. And, much as I love my reading tools, losing vision is costly, nearly $10k for the above tools.

so, you still fully sighted readers should now have a sense of how one vision Loser has replenished her reading vessels with forms of content, like DAISY, and tools that you never heard of and would consider primitive compared to iPhones and quicktime. But, if my claim of 10:1 increased retrieval and 10:1 improved reading hold true, this step over into the audio world is hardly a loss of reading capability. Limited access to certain kinds of material are offset by opportunities to access special content not available to the sighted world, like the bookshare library and the NFB NewsLine.

For those losing vision, as I have for three years, I urge you to begin tapping into this audio world sooner than your denial and hopes might lead you. Try using a free screen reader and audio conversion tools and get used to gaining more information by audio whenever you feel discomfort with your eyeballs glued to your screens. I hope this article assures you there are many ways to adapt your reading styles to meet your needs, and even to find gains you never dreamed of. You might visit a disability services department at a local university or an assistive technology demo exhibit hall. But beware, that the rehab and disability services personnel are themselves grappling with technology learning curves and are locked into vendor distribution practices that lag behind some of the tools I advocate in this blog. A good starting point, whatever your level of sightedness, are the user stories in nextup.com text to speech blog

For More Information on Assistive Technology

• collection of podcasts on non-visual reading tools featuring the Levelstar Icon training materials plus a variety of demos ranging from the KNFBReader at a restaurant to talking alarm clocks.
• Additional assistive technology reports appear regularly on ACB Radio Main Menu
• AFB Access World magazine reviews a variety of tools in text format
• our recordings of screen reading and synthetic voices illustrate the Icon and NVDA readers, plus demonstrations of browsing and writing
• ‘Singing DECTalk’ mash-ups of synthetic voices

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Learning to Write By Listening

One reason for starting this blog was to regain my writing skills. This post describes my personal techniques for writing while using a screen reader and other assistive tools. A suite of recorded mp3 files illustrate some steps in rewriting and expanding the previous post on Identity Cane.

Most of this post assumes a state of experience comparable to mine three years ago before I became print-disabled. It was hard then to know what questions to ask to prepare myself. I bumbled through using the TextAloud reading application which enabled me to write well enough while I could control the lighting around my PC and begin to experiment with alternative screen reader packages. Unfortunately, I had some truly humbling experiences trying to edit rapidly at review panel meetings with overhead lights bearing down, voices all around, and a formidable web-based panel review system. Following the edict "Do no harm" I recognized a challenge of physical, cognitive, and technological dimensions. I had to admit I was professionally incompetent when it came to writing, ouch!

The basic questions?

• What are my accuracy versus speed trade-offs? And, how do I manage them?
• What tools do I need? And, how do I teach them to myself?
• How must I change my writing style? What are the new rules of ‘writing by ear’

If you are not sure how this writing process is working, listen to me writing some text using the NVDA screen reader.

The Accuracy Versus Speed Tradeoff is intrinsic to writing. How fast do you record your thoughts, accepting some level of typing and expression errors, with separate clean-up edits and rewrites? If I type very fast, I make more errors but am better able to record the thoughts and even establish a "flow" mental state. Writing more slowly allows corrections of wording, punctuation, and spelling but risks loss of thread and discouragement from a feeling of slowed progress.

Writing and editing are very different cognitive tasks complicated by operating primarily in listening mode. The input and output parts of the brain must operate together. A document filled with typos is pure agony to correct, causing a cascade of further errors and often destroying the structure of the whole document. One twitch in a edit can remove more than a letter, even a line, sentence, or paragraph. In "computational thinking" terms, the trade-off is to design the interactions of two concurrent processes that interleave events and actions to produce a document with an optimal amount of errors to be removed by even more processing involving editing tools.
I tried several drafting techniques. Writing in long hand notes, outlines, and snippets had worked for 40 years but I could no longer read my hand-writing. Recording into my Icon PDA helped organize my thoughts and extract some pithy phrases from my brain. As my memory has improved to take over former vision-intensive tasks, I have found it possible to mentally compose a paragraph at a time then hold it together long enough to type into the word processor.

What are tools for writing by ear?

Writing without looking requires several tools, with my choices discussed below:

• Compositional, for typing, formatting as needed, and editing
• Spell checker, possibly a style or grammar checker
• Previewer to present the written results as they will be read by sighted, partially sighted, and blind readers
• Speech tools to read while typing and editing, as well as presentation of the written result
• Voices to capture alternative audio presentations of written results, as well as feedback on style and tone

My personal process is:

• Compose in mostly text with minimal HTML markup using Windows NotePad;
• Use the NVDA screen reader for key and word echo, with punctuation announcement off then on;
• Copy text into the K1000 tool, applying its fabulous spell checker, listen for errors and speaking flaws using its self-voicing reader, and copy back to Notepad;
• Listen in several voices, including both female and male, for flaws and nuance of style;
• Preview in a browser, Mozilla Firefox,to grasp whatever I can see on a large screen and to check links;
• Copy into wordpress blog editor.

The obviously best choice for writing is the word processor most

familiar to the writer. However, criteria may change as vision degrades. The spell checker may not have visible choices and may not announce its fields to a screen reader. Excess interface elements and functionality can get in the way. Upgrades and transition to a new computer may demand new software purchases. After years of Microsoft Word and Netscape HTML Composer, I finally settled on the combination of Windows Notepad and Kurzweil 1000. The trickiest feature of the ubiquitous Notepad is "word wrap" for lines with veray few other ways for a writer to screw up a document. Since I write HTML for my website and blog, using Notepad avoid temptations of fancy pages by not using WYSIWYG. Also Notepad never nags for licenses discount deals, and upgrades,

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On the upscale side, I needed a scanner manager for books and Other printed stuff. The Kurzweil education Systems 1000 offers not only scanner wrappers but also several word processor features. One is a beautiful spell checker to read context, spell the word,offer alternatives all using its own self-voiced interface. Listen to me and the K1000 spell checker. I also like having a reader with alternative word pronunciation, pausing, and punctuating. However, I occasionally lost text due to lock-up and unpredictable file operations, so I opted for the universal, simple Notepad for composition.

As discussed in NVDA screen reader choice posting, I do not use the conventional expensive screen readers in favor of a free, open source wonder the I expect to rule the future of assistive technology. NVDA allows me to switch among voices, choose key and word echo, and degree of punctuation announced.

Writing and reading by listening has surprising consequences. First, it strongly differentiates sighted readers from those listening who will probably not hear the colon you use to start a list of clauses separated by semi-colons. Second documents must be read multiple times, with and also without punctuation announcements. It is difficult to concentrate on the sentences when every comma, quotation, and dash is read. And it is necessary to hear every apostrophe and other punctuation to locate extraneous as well as missing items.

Another suite of editing tools are synthetic voices, which may come as a surprise to many sighted as well as newly unsighted writers and readers. Synthetic voices have dictionaries of pronunciations but inevitably screw up in certain contexts. Is that "Dr." a street or an educational degree title? Is "St. Louis" the city with a saint or a street? is 2 the numeral like two spelled out or too as in also? No matter your screen reader settings and data, your readers may differ. Well, some of this can be tweaked but generally my attitude has been to just live with quirks.

Synthetic voices offer an even more powerful editing feature unknown to most sighted writers. The excellent researcher Clifford Nass" "Wired for Speech" tell how our brains react differently to gender, ethnic, age, personality, and other features of synthetic voices. Even if we know the voice is only a data file, we still confer more authority to male voices and react negatively to perceived aggressive female voices. This allows editors with synthetic voices to identify phrases with a tone that might be perceived as weak, over-bearing, age-related, or introverted. Don’t believe me? Listen to examples of male and female voices.

Note to sighted writers: you might also find these techniques assistive for finding typos, checking style, and evaluating the forcefulness of your writing. Nothing says you have to be visually impaired to try writing by listening.

Changes in Style with vision loss

When I write my blog, I must address both sighted and unsighted readers. Sighted people see a dull page of text, while people listening to the page or using magnifiers or contrast themes may react differently to a posting on a myriad of textual, graphical, and audible facets. Much of this out of my control as I cannot see the appearance of my pages in your browser, nor do I know if you are listening in a browser or an RSS client. Also, your speech settings, if any, may differ from mine in speed, dictionary, gender and more. .

A very insightful article on writing for accessibility points out the ill effects of complex sentence structures, reliance on punctuation, expectations of emphasis, and unawareness of the span of settings possible on the end users side.
Now, in my technical and business writing days, I was the "queen of convoluted sentences". I just never understood what was wrong with sub-sentences (as long as the sentence parsed ok); rather, I thought it a mark of quality. Whoops, there I did it again. I used a parenthetical phrase that might not be read with parentheses around it. And I relied on a semi-colon to separate sentences. Sorry about that, I’m working hard on this. But, there I made another mistake. I used a contraction which synthetic voices have trouble pronouncing “I’m” when I could say "I am". Abbreviations are also problematic. Should I say ER or E.R. or "Emergency Room’? This is giving me a headache.

The strongest lesson about compensating for vision loss is that ‘Complexity really hurts’. Overly complex things, whether physical or informational, cause accidents and invoke recovery methods. All this wastes precious physical energy. It is easy to be discourage when tasks that could be performed before vision loss are now too expensive in energy or time. But, conversely, I can now see complexity for what is, usually bad design. And, on the brighter side, once the source of complexity is identified, there may be a work-around, a simplification, or a suggestion for a better design. All this conscious adjustment of expression practices may actually be good training for aging more gracefully. Sigh.

Recordings to Illustrate Writing by Listening

The following recordings accompany this posting. Mp3 files may download or launch a player, depending on your browser and computer settings.

1. 
   Listen to me writing shows the screen reader speaking text in Notepad as written and revised.

2. 
   Spell checking and listening in K1000

3. 
   Listening in several synthetic voices for gender and other differences

4. Audio version of this and other posts

Grabbing my Identity Cane to Join the Culture of Disability

I am just coming off 2 months of travel to events in differing capacities as professional reviewer, accessibility spokesperson, disability consumer, and general traveler. After two years of legal blindness, I am still feeling like an immigrant in a new culture. I retain strong memories of my past ways of work and interpersonal interaction, but I am now beginning to understand the culture of disability. This transition has been marked by my adoption of the Identity Cane as a frequent companion as I navigate my hazy world.

The Identity Cane is a slim white cane intended not for robust walking assistance but rather to let others know its carriers are visually impaired. There are a few issues here.

First, consider robustness of the instrument. Mine, costing about $20, folds nicely and is quite light. It is good for poking at curbs and sidewalk spots that look like holes or ridges. But it is not for tapping or waving, as would be learned in a mobility training regime. One tangle with a fire hydrant or bicycle and this pole will be a pile of sticks. However, compared to other physical gadgets that seem to break for no reason, this fold-up item is holding up well.

The Identity Cane is meant to be a signal to passersby, service people, and new acquaintances that you have vision difficulties where they might help you. The other day, at an intersection, another street crosser seeing my cane just stated loudly "ok, time to cross", not knowing whether I could see him or how much help I needed. Airport personnel are alert to the cane to offer assistance to find elevators or check-in counters. A white cane can also gain more polite and helpful responses when you ask a stranger "where is the Saint Michael Hotel?" while standing directly in front of its sign.

However, this little pole is no badge of invincibility. Drivers on cell phones are just as likely to run over you whatever you are carrying, although the cane can be waved to possibly attract attention. Airport T.S.A. check-ins are variable, with some monitors wanting to stuff your cane onto the conveyor or into a box or frisk for objects planted on the blind lady. To my surprise, nobody ever asked when I went through security with my soon-to-expire Drivers License in one hand and a white cane in the other. A cane can help remind flight attendants you might need extra help but it might also enlist an unwanted wheel chair rather than a walking escort, if needed at all.

For me, the Identity Cane is an important reminder that I am partially sighted. I do not use it on my exercise walks along a regular route, but elsewhere it tells me "slow down, watch out for decorative stones that might send me to the Emergency Room, look for exit doors that might set off sirens, remember I can ask for help, never take a short-cut, generally behave like a person who cannot see everything".

Yes, it was really hard to get used to carrying the cane as an Identity. What if people think I am blind? Well, duh, Susan, remember your priorities - safety is paramount, energy is consumed by covering up, and relationships are hard enough without the ambiguity of a disability.

But it is not really that simple to clarify the cane’s meaning if you are partially sighted. Having covered up my condition for 5 years with an uncomfortable employment situation, I became very good at navigating and acting normal. Except when I tripped or ran into something. Then I looked clumsy. Or when I skipped an event that was hard to handle for transportation or dining reasons,, I appeared unsociable or shirking. This is getting into more aspects of the culture of disability, where adopting the cane is an admission of vocational difference, a more than symbolic transformation of identity that demands organizational change in work or community groups.

Since low vision is a relatively rare occurrence condition the Identity Cane is a strong signal in the noise of everyday life. Never in my career had I seen a blind woman at a professional event, so my cane carrying at recent working gigs has probably been most unusual for other attendees. That is especially good for computing professionals to remind them that low vision is not just for their grandparents but also is part of the working conditions for someone performing the same tasks as them. If only it could also raise their curiosity to learn more about assistive technology, the afflictions of their students, the A.D.A. regulations they wish away, and the prevalence of accessibility issues.

For me, the Identity Cane is a badge of education, not only within my profession but also in the community that suffers from lack of low vision services. Visually impaired people may appear less often in public leading to a circle of ignorance. City fathers think "we do not need to pay for accessible street crossing when nobody blind wants to cross" — but no sane blind person would risk their life at the intersection. This makes the Identity Cane a symbol of activism as well as a protective measure.

In summary, the cane used only for Identity is a strong force for overcoming vision adjustment resistance, personally, professionally, and for the wider public.

Here is an example product description of an Identity Cane from Lighthouse San Francisco

Note: in the U.K. the general term is “Symbol Cane” . See also Podcasts discussing and illustrating functional white cane use for mobility

Hear me stumble — web accessibility observations

This posting lists several good and bad examples of web accessibility and usability situations in an instructive sense, including recorded sessions of this intrepid logger guiding her web page readers.

Background Postings and Standards

• WAI-aria proposals for accessible-rich web next generation technologies;
• webaxe accessibility blog for typical accessibility engineering principles;
• SXSW Interactive Media conference presentation’s> on accessibility issues and enterprise approaches
• Previous posting: “are Missing, Muddle Use cases the cause of much web inaccessibility

recurring Problems that are easily fixed

1. Problem: useless links click Here — huh, for what?
   

   
   The unfortunate user must expend extra energy to read surrounding context to find what the click is for. This mistake usually indicates poor communication skills and lack of testing using a screen reader. variations include: Learn More, read more, and the especially illuminating here. similarly, a document may be identified then followed by its type a line like PDF or HTML or size 5 MB. >
   

   
   Recommendation: Page content writers should read out loud the list of links by screen reader or by eye scanning and assure clarity where each link leads. And there is no excuse for not using a screen reader with the nvda, free, open source, easily installed screen reader .

2. Problem: blog postings blocked by links — when good blogs go bad.
   

   
   conventional web layouts contain site navigation, rolls of links to related content, meta data about site and author, news, etc. screen readers follow a left upper corner, top, left, order that forces reading or bypassing links to reach actual page content, which sighted readers look for in the middle of a page. a repeat visitor rarely has interest in these links. blog and other content management systems usually provide a choice of page layout Reading a links-first blog format takes up screen reader time, even with a jump to heading. More disastrously, an RSS client often receives all the links on a text version of a posting, taking a minute or more to read before content, making some blogs effectively unbearable in RSS format.
   

   
   Recommendation: Design pages and choose layouts to favor quick access to recurring content, placing honorific stuff right and below what your main page matter.

   
   

   
   Examples: two of my favorite tech blogs, Good example: Jon Udell blog and Bad example: Phil windley’s technometria.

3. Problem: Learning the structure of a page — it’s the headings, stupid!
   

   
   we all know to sprinkle headings through our documents to break into and describe sections, even applying this to bills and forms. for a screen reader user, headings provide the primary way of moving among sections, often preceded by an exploratory “heading tour” to identify the page sections ahead. without sections, the screen reader’s finer detail units are links, lists, and paragraphs, but this rapidly degenerates into interminable tabs and keystrokes like taking steps into a cave without knowing where the path will lead. conversely, a well-sectioned document also broken into pages can be very rapidly browsed with a screen reader, perhaps even faster than a scrolling sighted reader. can cover graphics and font styles. Chunks of text can be skipped for more detailed reading later. Nothing substitutes for having a sense of the page’s structure in outline form.
   

   
   Recommendation: Make sure all page sections are well described by HTML H1, H2, H3,… headings with informative descriptions. Now, is that so hard?
   

   
   Example’s href=”http://sxsw.com”> Good example: sxsw.com program organized by days and topic’s> and Good Example: browsing wai-aria documentation

4. Problem: switchingfrom browser to an external app — .txt imprisoned in .doc or .pdf
   

   
   Browsers are now integrated with external applications like Microsoft word or adobe PDF. but that meanss a screen reader user must first launch that app, and, of course, MS OFFICE is not free! reading the document involves a different set of keystrokes and conventions with PDF often losing any previous document structure. Ironically, frequently, the document being read is little more than text any way! This vision Loser simply saves DOC or PDF and then strips the document down to TXT for reading in Notepad or on an external reader like APH Bookport or Levelstar Icon. With gratitude, another path is google search “View as HTML” and HTML save As in mobile gmail. This argument also applies to mail attachment — imprisoning text memos in a WORD format attachment requires a lot of extra work by a visually impaired recipient, and “click on attachment” is often a security risk.
   

   
   Recommendation: Web authors should save a version of a document as HTML and Make that a primary link, offering a PDF for portability (that’s the P in PDF). HTML is the document format that literate web writers should be using, e.g. to exploit hyperlinks, and not at all the private domain of web designers and New Media or IT departments. Strictly speaking any PDF should be produced in accessible format for extensive reading.

More complicated web accessibility Problems

1. Problem: Locked out of the chat room — social Media Overkill.
   

   
   recently, one of my favorite podcasters started live chat sessions with call-in. I wanted to ask a question and join in so showed up at the web page at the appointed time, having pre-registered and browsed the site the day before. Uh, oh, I couldn’t find an entry point, didn’t even know what I was looking for. worse yet, an audio had started playing - was that the current session? No, it was prerecorded, drowning out my screen reader with no way of silencing the cacophony. Eeventually I waded through a ton of links to other shows, popular podcasters, special offers and found a PLAY button. Now, all this with a screen reader contending with an audio discussion, and then the text chat was completely inaccessible to the screen reader. well, that podcaster lost a fan’s admiration for choosing BlogTalkRadion as a meeting place uncomfortable for me. The key problem was that the main purpose — to bring people together — was obscured by the now socially acceptable business practice of trying to draw attention to other podcasts and \shows - current, popular, categories, rated, which we term “social media over-kill”.
   The irony is that the blind and visually impaired communities have superior chat facilities, as exemplified by accessible world.org, built on Talking communities supporting happily chatting friends of Bookshare book club meetings.

   
   Recommendation: when choosing a hosting service, check out its accessibility policy, not just how free it might be, if you want to retain your whole audience and its respect. service providers, please write and follow an accessibility policy and stress its use to service users. service providers, content management system designers, and designer assistants all have a great social responsibility - and opportunity - to be inclusive and to educate service users.

2. Problem: Muddled, missing, mixed use cases — accessibility and mobility needs are met together.
   

   
   consider if you know exactly the book you want to buy at amazon or another big web seller. a trip into amazon takes you through myriad departments of other types of products, offers Recommendations, specials, bundles, and even a chance to become a reseller yourself. but all I wanted to do was get that one book into my cart! Well, luckily, limited screen space on phones and PDA’s is leading to overhauls of web sites to alternatives that offer simple and straight paths to the most common goals for impatient, on-the-go users. contrast clutter full scale amazon.com with accessible, mobile amazon.com . Now, not all of Amazon is on the accessible alternative, and they don’t tell you what’s missing, e.g. changing an email address in profile.
   

   
   Recommendation: web designers can take the opportunity to produce an accessible version of a site along with a mobile-friendly or mobile-optimized version. and don’t forget to tell screen reader users with a non-intrusive link at the top of the page to the alternative. and, save the specials and Recommendations until after the sale.

3. Problem: forms take forever to fill out and an error can be costly, causing form-o-phobia.
   

   
   It’s not just me, the usability literature notes something like 5 times longer for visually impaired form-fillers than sighted users. problems include: identifying required versus optional and what actually goes in a field; non-standard formats for dates, social security numbers, phone numbers; unpredictability of length of forms; time-outs and site failures; and difficulty finding the notification of errors or requirements for verifications. Then there are all those registration “opportunities”, without explanation of benefits of registering, without acknowledgment of the pain to be incurred. No thanks, no forms please.
   Is there a better way? Maybe, as suggested by Jon Udell’s article on batch form-filling for civilians suggesting the use of text strings completed by simple editing and input to an API or query processor. geez, this is so brilliant!

   Recommendation: web designers should take every care to label all fields clearly and acknowledge the time and pain of a visually impaired user. If possible, watch one of us use your form until you cannot stand the pain any longer. and recognize the difference in skill levels and experience and tenacity of a broad audience. forms are where you capture or lose a client. and, don’t even think of putting a graphic only CAPTCHA at the end at risk of eternal damnation. On the other side, visually impaired users need to practice form-filling and accept it as a necessary evil that could ruin your day. We all need to look for better ways, like Jon Udell’s text line suggestion.

Personal Observations and Grand Claims

With a year’s experience using a screen reader, I am still a novice and use articles like this to apportion responsibility for failures
to accomplish web tasks. With a 4-decade career in computing paralleling the lifetime of the Internet, I am acutely aware of many sources of failures: selection, training, and skill level with software, like browsers and screen readers; network and workstation architectures that dictate performance; application requirements analysis and design, as in web 2.0 interactions; educational backgrounds and career motivations of web designers; human proclivity toward ascribing beauty to color and graphics I can no longer appreciate; the levels of personal, team, and enterprise processes that influence application usability; the immense costs of maintenance and upgrade of websites; and now, the structure of the assistive technology industry, the many human factors of accessibility, and the social resistance to disability issues. Mainly I am trying to take responsibility for building my skills to remain productive in society, and especially to pass along technology lessons to other Vision Losers.

Rarely am I completely stymied but far too often the energy required is the limiting factor. I use the “minimum of 5 times ” rule to estimate effort required for a task, based on memory of past trials. Often, just the thought of the work involved deters me from trying a web site, like registering and then facing a CAPTCHA, maybe putting off to a future idle day. Flippantly, I wish all young web designers would test their web sites during a bout with the flu, so they might appreciate the effects of reduced energy on every click and key stroke.

A second observation is how much the web is overly populated with extremely complex web sites, exacerbated by the trend to social media linking. Every link bypassed in a blog or information page is a decrement in energy available for reading, navigating, information seeking, and transactions. Web designers often seem to cram too many functions onto pages and fail to identify the primary use cases and prioritize for screen reader users. I am delighted at the trend toward mobile friendly pages as very helpful in countering complexity and offering redesign opportunities.

In recent discussions with web accessibility practitioners I sometimes found myself thinking as the beggarly, or maybe miserly,old lady who could not shell out $1000 for an industry standard screen reader like Jaws or Window Eyes and got stuck with a third world open source software tool. There is some truth in the monetary argument as I fail to fall into the social services classes: veteran, worker, job seeker, student, or poverty level. But I have also made a technical choice in screen reader, nvda, based on confidence in its developers, satisfaction with its early capabilities, ease of use and installation, and belief in the efficacy of the open source model of development. I also am concerned at a shaky industry chain of developers, screen reader vendors, and rehab organizations that will soon be coming under more international pressure as a free screen reader takes hold in other countries, perhaps with easy adaptability for local languages and web conventions. I cheer for the Australian Torvalds of assistive technology.

Finally, I find myself moving away from the PC and browser with increasing use of the Levelstar Icon PDA. News comes from the NFB Newsline to Bookshare to the Icon’s Newstand without a visit to a slow website. Blogs and feeds bring more news from CNN, USAToday, CNET, and many political and professional organizations — again obviating a browser session in favor of RSS. And the Icon’s little browser often suffices for comfortably reading search results, pages, and blogs not embroiled in Javascript/AJAX interfaces.

Ok, hear me stumble! Listen to recorded sessions.

Here are two recorded sessions of screen reader uses at Amazon and Fidelity. The Amazon demo follows me through the process of getting a pre-selected book into the cart, using the newer accessible and the classic websites. The Fidelity example shows an exploration of a website that has its whole enterprise mapped into menus.

Consolidating links for Vision Losers in Prescott Arizona

Unlike the other essays in this blog, the current post is a link to a resource page about a local community. I have often been frustrated at finding information about events and services, occasionally learning valuable tidbits first from my walking companion, Jack and his dog pack.

My hope is that other Vision Loser’s in the Prescott area will find useful items and that community members will contribute to this resource.

The Vision Loser’s Guide to Prescott Arizona lists local social services, RSS feeds, and pointers to state and national organizations.

2007Summary and on to 2008

This posting provides a summary of “As Your World Changes” major subjects and web links in 2007 and a preview of topics in the works for 2008.

Recommended Software experience reports

• an open source screen reader nvda previous post, “Look ma, no screens!”
• FileDir replacement for Windows Explorer from Jamal Mazrui
• TextAloud, reader and mp3 converter from nextup.com. Previous post TextAloud, a simple, low cost reader
• Handy peripherals Previouse Post on “Mouse Hacks” and Being Your own system integrator
• Sample synthetic voices in TextAloud reading earlier posts

Next topics: “What is emacspeak?”; “Any benefits from Microsoft Word DAISY output?”; “Conquering gmail”; “Google your past from your desktop”, “Will speech recognition save my wrists and thumbs?”

People, Organizations and Services

• nvaccess.org, nonprofit developers of assistive technology
• mdsupport.org, information and community for macular degenerates from Previous Post: Resources, Support, and Reality Check for Macular Degenerates
• Bookshare.org, “Technology for Society” with affiliated Friends of Bookshare.org book clubs and chat room discussed in previous post “what’s a vision loser to do? Bookshare!
• Great series of software resources and reviews ACB Radio.org Main Menu , AFB Access World, Accessible World.org , <a and Blind Cool Tech.com ,Accessible Software
• apodder.org, distributor of @Podder, an “easy viewing” podcast collector and Library of podcasts on eyesight-related topics using the Podzinger.com audio search service

Topics in progress: Great vision assistance technologists: Bookport, Literacy, Icon; “Why should I join a blindness organization?” ??”; “Grrrr, becoming a community activist!”

Philosophy and Analysis

• Book Reviews of Vision Losers: “Twilight, a memoir by Henry Grunwald and “Conversations with author Susan Krieger
• Previous Post “Aren’t we Vision Losers Lucky?” on podcasts and modern technology
• Previous post “A Guiding Philosophy for Vision Losers” Safety, Energy, Relationships, Appreciation, and Financial
• My take on accessibility and usability - big design challenges:
  • “Are Missing, muddled use cases the culprit?” posting,
  • “Seeing through Google Book Search” posting,
  • “Help, I’m being updated to death!” posting,
  • “e-voting = Extreme Voting, a Moon Shot for Democracy”

Topics in progress: “My brain on sound - re-wired for speech?”; “Continuing progress in accessibility and usability”; “Computational Thinking — living with more levels of abstraction”; “GTD, getting things done, non-visually”; “What disability teaches you, and others around you”

Virtual Stocking Stuffers for Vision Losers

To overcome my life-long tendency to emulate Scrooge at this time of the year, I am happy to share some pointers to gadgets, gear, and comfort items I have come to appreciate especially in my first full year of diminished vision.

Now, is this theme about stockings that are virtual or are the stuffers of a virtual kind? Both, really, these are things one might want to buy for oneself or for a Vision Loser family member or acquaintance. One thing I have learned is that cost is more than money. The overhead of making a purchase, tracking receipts and accounts, setting up a working version of something, and integrating it into my routine takes a precious commodity — physical and mental energy. Any gift that reduces energy load and doesn’t require disproportionately more energy to acquire and maintain is especially helpful to Vision Losers.

First, the “free” stuff, meaning worth a trial and consideration for investing learning time. I have written about the nvAccess, an open source screen reader nvda project based in Australia. This remains my mainstay for reading text and navigating screens, getting better all the time. This organization is also a great place for an end-of-year donation as are other vision-assisting organizations like mdSupport.org, information and community for macular degenerates.

Based on interviews and recommendations within the blind community, as heard on ACB Radio Main Menu, Accessible World, <a and Blind Cool Tech, I am starting to use vision-avoiding software FileDir and TextPal from Jamall Mazrui, a Microsoft-oriented developer. Downloadable FileDir sets up easily with a gazillion shortcuts and menu entries that expand and provide an alternative model for Windows Explorer, notably tagging files and directions as opposed to extending selections, talking responses to actions, and conversion to text of PDF, DOC, and other less speaking applications. Accessible Software has other utilities to try.

What every Vision Loser learning to type with reduced vision needs is a really good spelling checker that reads mis-spelled words, suggestions, and context. Kurzweil 1000 has by far the best checker but that’s $1000 software, which also supports easy document scanning. Since I use the absolute minimalist Windows Notepad for most typing, exactly because it doesn’t have extra tricky functionality, I am asking my Santa for a stand-alone spelling checker just like K1000 - please, please, please. A neat feature of Google, as related on the Google blog, topic “accessibility” is its ability to correct proper nouns you might hear but cannot spell, giving the most popular spelling on the web.

In the low-cost gift category are the Microsoft mouse models with magnifiers, especially the larger one with extra buttons for assigning functions, as discussed in our early post on “Mouse Hacks”. Don’t forge to strip this gift of its hard plastic cover which can stymie just about any human let alone someone who can’t see where to poke a sharp instrument. Avoid a trip to the emergency war.

For the beginner Vision Loser and a great all-around bargain is TextAloud for nextup.com to read saved documents or text copied to a clipboard, also converting to mp3 files for digital player listening. With a few checks in your browser menus, you can have a TextAloud toolbar to read pages with an added bonus of of zoom buttons. And don’t forget the premium voices that over-ride the robot-like Microsoft Sam, Mary, and Mike. In fact, if your gift recipient likes to listen to long-playing materials or is picky about voices, you can assemble a small choir of Neospeech, Reals peak, Nuance, Cepstral and other voices at about $30 each. Except for Cepstral, which had license problems, these voices work nicely with nvda screen reader and the documents it reads out.

A surprisingly useful piece of equipment is an external keyboard. Plug in its USB receiver, recline before the warm fireplace, and practice your screen reading skills, like “speed browsing”. Once you have unglued your eyes from a screen, your versatility of skills can promote more degrees of comfort than you might imagine. These full-sized keyboards are available for <$100 from most consumer stores, but it helps to add in a lap board and maybe a wrist rest as faster fingers and a different posture can put a lot of load on thumbs and wrists. Safety-first says my guiding philosophy (previous post) and no need to invite the secondary disability of repetitive strain injuries.

The world of so-called Independent Living Aids has some amazing stuff. I use more than I had expected a little sensor and voiced reader that tells me the color of clothes, so I less often pack mis-matched blue and black for a trip. It’s cute, saying “blue” in kind of a tentative voice, requiring a good window of natural sunlight, and, unfortunately, failing to tell me when I leave home with a sweater on wrong side out. My next consumer goals are lables for just about everything and a system for finding the stuff I mis-place.

If your Vision Loser has reached the certifiable level of print disability, congratulations, memberships in Bookshare.org is available at $75 + a trip to eye doctor for the certification. 35,000 books, many recent best sellers and a host of disability-related texts, await someone who needs to expand or replace physical book collections. A voiced reader is needed, on PC or hand-held. Bookshare will be expanding rapidly as a provider under U.S. Department of Education grant funds of textbooks to print-disabled students across the U.S. within limits of student eligibility and publisher constraints. Moreover, a constellation of book clubs is now starting up at Friends of Bookshare chat room. Bookshare propagates the National Federation of the Blind Newsline to deliver newspapers right to your doorstep.

Switching over to hand-held reading appliances, new this year is the Victor Reader Stream from Humanware. I prefer the Bookport from American Publishing House for the Blind which is unfortunately out of stock until components are available for the next major release. The Stream, like the Bookport, is about the size of a pack of cards, with content loaded onto its storage card from a PC, then reading text with a synthetic voice. Digital Talking Books from Bookshare. podcasts, other mp3 files and all kinds of memos can be copied to the Stream and annotated using its voice recorder. Of course, just like the teens get for gifts, there’re all kinds of accessory ear bud’s, mini-speakers, even incorporated into pillows (hint, hint!).

Way up the ladder of costs is the remarkable Icon PDA from Levelstar at $1400 + optional promised $400 docking station. Integrated with Bookshare, working well with a home wireless network, and containing fully functional email, browser, and RSS/podcast clients, the Icon is with this Vision Loser hours a day. In fact, my newspapers are delivered without getting out of bed, along with a first pass at email, podcasts, and many mailing lists. I suppose my TV still works, if I could find the remote, but the Icon provides most of the news I used to get from papers and magazines and TV. In fact, my favorite radio and TV shows , Lehrer news hour and WAMU Diane Rehm, are available in podcast format. And the speed of reading using the Icon is amazing, with no page flipping, and, of course, no need to recycle piles of paper. I would not put the Icon into the hands of someone yet to become comfortable with synthesized voices, but there’s no need for learning a screen reader with an Icon, because there is no screen, only voiced menus. And Le`velstar provides an exceptional set of podcast tutorials, including upgrade changes.

And I, this geeky Vision Loser, offer a free podcatcher, @Podder from apodder.org. While other podcatchers, like on the Icon, provide convenient download and, listen, and throw away podcasts, @Podder supports collections of podcasts on hobbies, news, whatever someone might think worth collecting to listen to later, for reference or repeat enjoyment. In fact, this blog is sprinkled with web pages of podcasts from a growing library of over 2000 podcasts on eyesight-related topics. For the more advanced listener, here are OPML files if you want to track accessibility progress or listen into the lively blind community podcasts and blogs eyesigh related blogs and podcast. Use Podzinger audio search to find podcasts of specif eyesight topics.

But, for all the good cheer my geeky devices bring me, my immediate geographical community is disappointing. There is only one bus, making mainly the mall route hourly. A community center was built within walking distance of my home but without even a sidewalk, requiring a stretch of walking next to traffic in a bike lane. The only mobility trainer in the county is booked for months, so I cannot get the training I need for more comfortable and safe traveling. The local newspaper is a loss for website browsing, not available on Newsline, limiting my awareness of local events. Ok, the U.S. has such wealth, but skewed priorities against disability, a bitter lesson for the newly disabled. At least, next year I will be back on a level playing field for health insurance with Medicare. If only one of the vacant over-priced houses in my neighborhood could be converted to social services, then independent Vision Losers, with many more Baby Boomers soon to have failing eyesight, could make the transition more gracefuly, safely,, and productively. A lump of coal to those who cannot see the value of taxes as investments in the younger, the older, and the differently abled. And a heap more coal to the many who don’t realize this basic truth: “Designing for the disabled produces better products for all” because the disabled expose the design flaws and suggest solutions the “fully abled” would not think of.

Please visit @Podder collected podcasts on eyesight topics for a broad sampling of the news, reviews, personal revelations, and activist actions of trickle-down helpfulness from the blind community.

Lessons from “Twilight”, a memoir by Henry Grunwald

This eloquent memoir precedes our current computing pre-occupations, making a case for the advances we consider in our previous posting ‘Aren’t we Vision Losers lucky?’. The book includes the author’s description of his diagnosis, treatments, and emotional responses along the way. Chapter 2 has a fascinating section on blindness as seen in mythology and literature, identifying our patron Saint Lucy.  This book is especially cathartic for a vision loser asking ‘do I feel or act like that?’ or ‘wow, he expresses my sensations so well. And that makes me feel better to share that feeling.’

Grunwald developed full blown wet macular degeneration  after his retirement from Editor-in-chief of Time Magazine and a distinguished career including ambassador to Austria. He wrote his memoir of his vision losing experience in the late 1990s following a well-received article published in the New Yorker in 1996. His short eloquent book is available on Bookshare.org, scanned by this blogger.

In Chapter 10, Grunwald sums up the life-changing effects of gradually losing his eyesight. Hope for a cure never left him, but reality about the permanence of his condition forced him to come to terms with it. Bouts of anger exploded in throwing unreadable magazines across the room. And his family never fully realized the extent  of his loss  until his journalistic report. He frankly describes the concurrent effects of his aging, and realizing its progress, intermingled with losing vision.

His descriptions of emotional turmoil express  my feelings, as well. I often throw a fit of exasperation when sorting out the junk mail, especially when looking for something important like health insurance.    Since my condition is caused by lifelong progressive myopic degeneration, I feel somewhat smugly exempt from the age-related label but know in my heart that  whitening hair and the slowing gait of a cautious Vision Loser combine to enhance the impression of aging in others and in myself. Hope, which I have never been given by doctors still brims up in me when I hear of progress in stem cell therapies. I spoke once to my retinal specialist about becoming a subject of a clinical trial, and he chuckled  as he informed me that no matching patients as myopic as I could be found for a trial population. Now, it takes a lot to get a grin, let alone a chuckle, from a sober retinal guy, so I gave up on that idea.

Grunwald expresses well what a profound life experience is vision loss, a force for change that brings us to a level of capability  and adjustment to age-related factors we might have otherwise just passed through without conscious awareness of  the changes or their effects. I personally would not have developed my guiding 5  level philosophy that has helped me sort out not only contemporary but also lifelong feelings. For example, as  Grunwald expresses, we develop a keen appreciation of those things we can see. I  often feel my greatest loss is not seeing smiles, simple accepted personal experiences which I never appreciated, and especially relish in the rare moments I catch one on a loved one’s face falling in the right spectrum of light. I also find myself more aware of my own smile and offer it to others as a conscious gift not as a reflex, whether they recognize my awareness or not.

Grunwald wasn’t a ‘computer guy’ like us, but he often describes his love-hate relationship with his magnifiers. They are both aids and symbols of loss and regain of power. His electronics use was, in the 1990s, the early days of recorded books and text to speech.   I wonder how this highly literate spirit would react to podcasts, ATT Natural voices, and  reading technologies we enjoy now, more than a decade after the vision loss transition he describes. A man of letters and printed text would surely appreciate the experiences with digital and spoken materials, even at a cost of intervening synthetic manipulation and complexity.

I bought  ‘Twilight’ well before I was into any noticeable level of print disability, was not ‘out’ to many colleagues,  just experimenting with MDSupport.or  community. Listening now to a book I can not read but know I need helped me gather both courage and humor from a wise older spirit.

Happily, there is a book interview with Diane Rehm on her WAMU radio show, an inspirational personality encouraging ‘intelligent and civil conversation’. This interview stimulated an open letter from the National Federation of the Blind raising issues about Grunwald’s openness about his visual difficulties and how that attracts negative images of blindness in the press. The letter writer considered him as a suffering soul who would benefit from more integration with blindness organizations like NFB, taking advantage of its valuable Newsline service, then on phone and now available on Bookshare. Actually the book, more so than n the interview, describes interactions with Lighthouse and New York City -based doctors. Listening again to the interview, I sense in Grunwald’s European-accented voice, more world weariness of a life-long journalist, uncomfortable about discussing personal feelings, and not fully conveying the sense of adventure, learning, and self-mockery apparent in the full book.

Belated thanks, Mr. Grunwald.

REFERENCES on Henry Grunwald and ‘Twilight’

• Amazon Book description and several reviews
• Available for members at Bookshare Library
• Interview with Henry Grunwald on WAMU Diane Rehm Show may require Real Player to listen. Archives on November 16, 1999. Diane Rehm show is now a podcast with great news and author interviews.
• Open Letter to Henry Grunwald from NFB
• Obituary for Henry Grunwald, requires registration
• Related post ‘Conversations with author Susan Krieger’
• Related post ‘This Vision Loser’s Guides for Living with Vision Loss’, and
• Related post ‘Aren’t we Vision Losers Lucky?’
• Audio version of this post

Revised to add audio link on July 21 2008