voting Without Viewing? Yes, but It’s so Slow!

I decided that since the Help America vote act had encumbered quite a view million $$$ for fancy electronic equipment with accessible extension, I would take my chances to vote as independently as possible this round. Here’s the story of early voting in an Arizona primary. Vision Losers might use this experience to evaluate their own voting options. Other citizens and technologists will learn how electronic voting works for one tech savvy Vision Loser.

First, let me say that, as an informed computer scientist, I do not for one nanosecond believe the odds are very high that my voting precinct actually got a correct tally of votes, including mine. I voted on a setup from the infamous Diebold, now renamed to Premiere Election, Systems. There’s just no way any independent assurance organization can reasonably test a black box version of software and hardware, let alone all the combinations of diverse local ballot designs multiple configurations of the setup, and inevitable versions of evolving software. And that’s not worrying about human error by voting board personnel, malicious people, or silly policies like Ohio’s sleep-over procedures. Business ideology has trumped common sense democracy for Americans, unlike Australia and other countries that adopt an open approach.

Nevertheless, I wanted my independence and to force myself through the best possible preparation. A few months ago, I paid a visit to the Yavapai county recorder’s Office for a personal trial on a mock ballot so I would be familiar with the equipment. I was reasonably impressed with the audio system, very enthusiastic about the personnel who welcomed the opportunity to try out their audio setup, and comfortable about working the equipment rather than asking someone to read and mark my ballot. I knew the actual voting would be slow and that I needed to do my homework on candidates and races so I could concentrate on the voting act itself.

I was pleased to find a nice little primary coming up in September with early voting several weeks ahead. One primary race is especially important in Arizona district No. 1, to replace rep. Rick Renzi who was indicted on 35 counts of fraud and other bad stuff. With a senator as presumptive Presidential candidate and a 40% voting record, Poor representation of this region for months especially annoys me as economic and social policies have consequences I had not foreseen as I grapple with my own rehabilitation and my family’s future. Both major parties had a good slate of 4 or 5 candidates with experience relative to a highly diverse region of Indian reservations, small cities, and lots of open space.

I made my choice of party and candidate for Congress and began to look for the other races of interest. There were few contests so I assumed the ballot would be a piece of cake. Actually, I had some trouble figuring out the full set of races. I used VoteSmart, the AZ clean elections site, the county listing of candidates, Arizona Republic and Daily Courier candidate blurbs, even Wikipedia. A sample ballot arrived just before my trip to the polling place, but my reader and I were confused about a long list of write-in lines.

So, as much prepared as I could be, I entered the county office lobby and asked to vote using the audio system. I think I was the first to request this as a flurry of calls upstairs quickly produced an access card to a screen protected by side blinders and the headset and keypad I had used in my previous experiment. Oh, and most important was a chair.

To summarize the audio voting process, you click the appropriate numbered buttons to advance through races, making and confirming choices while hearing the race titles, constraints and candidate names through headphones. There is nothing visual happening. I listened to the instructions and tried to adjust the volume to match both a synthetic voice announcement of races and human recorded reading of candidate names, using female voices. Occasionally, other customers and voters in a noisy lobby overcame the headset ear pads. The input device was a simple phone keypad with larger sized keys, comfortably held in my lap.

I moved quickly through my choice for the congressional and legislative races. Then things became unfamiliar with more races for county offices and state supreme Court seats all with only a write-in option. Not having any choice, I kept hitting 6 to next race, 9 to confirm my under-voting for continuation to next race. At one point , my attention drifted and I seemed to be in a loop of hitting next without actually having races announce, maybe between district, county, and state races.

After a while I got bored and tried an actual write-in, “gump” sounded good at the moment, and was easy to type although tedious to spell and confirm. Then I got serious and canceled out of write-in. In successive races for supreme court seats, the synthetic voice seemed to be getting faster, and very high pitched. Now, I can listen to really fast voices on my reading appliances. But by the end of what seemed like 50 races, I couldn’t understand the voice. Nor could I remember how to get the main menu or adjust voices. I was stuck, hoping the end would come before I fell asleep at the keypad. Finally, the printer attached to the side clattered and the voice trailed off into oblivion. My nearly trance state lifted and I called for the attendant to complete the session.

Had I actually accomplished my voting goals? I think so as the early races that mattered seemed to be OK, but since I lost control in the middle and was pretty confused toward the end, I can only hope nothing invalidated those early race clicks. This whole process took about 30 minutes, long enough I had to wake up my driver to leave . I reported my troubles to the poll assistants but left unsure we understood the cause of my loop and voice speed-up. My guess is that the speed up started when I hit the relevant key during my write-in fumbling and the modes got confused as I skipped through further write-in choices.

I had hoped this experience could be recommended to others, but, alas, I fear those less adept at computer interactions might not find the humor in the loop and could freak out with babbling voices. I will vote again this way in November but next time pay lots more attention to the exit, speed, and volume options. Everybody has a limit to attention and energy to put into this voting exercise. Half an hour for a handful of races and an enormous number of later vacuous choices is a dubious way of getting the job done.

Another lesson for next time is to seriously invest more effort into learning about picking candidates. I hope to find more help from the SunSounds state audio assistance radio system or locate better candidate description materials. For example, the AZ Clean elections brochure that arrived in the mail was organized by race, then district, then party, then candidate which was beyond my patience to scan or anybody else’s willingness to read to me only the district No. 1 choices on pages 4, 39, and so on. Perhaps voting early beats preparation of more candidate comparisons and recommendations from organizations like league of women voters. Perhaps my “domain knowledge” of elections and state offices made my Google and dog pile searches susceptible to donate Now organizations. Certainly, I have not yet found a good source of advice directed to people like me voting blind for the first time. What I really want is a web page duplicating the ballot, divided into levels of government, with attached very short bios and links to longer histories, position statements, and reputable sources of candidate comparisons. The HTML and hypertext structuring are important as PDF is hard to use by audio and often loses the content structure when converted to a text stream. It might also be nice to have a candidate-a-day RSS feed to make the information more digestible in smaller chunks.

I would recommend to others considering using an audio or visually assisted voting workstation to request a trial. Yes, that means taking up time from election board workers, but I found them helpful, friendly, and interested in feedback. Anybody who can handle a bank ATM via audio should be ready to try out the system. However, someone with hearing problems might not be able to adjust the equipment to their needs in a noisy environment. The long-time blind who readily adapt to new devices should appreciate the new-found independence. However, new Vision Losers are faced with lot of work to master both the information gathering and the audio assisted voting process.

My biggest warning is the time commitment to survive the rigors of a long ballot. Had I wanted to actually write in a lot of names, I would have been there until closing time. With so few voters like me, there seems little data to accumulate experience for a warning label, but this is a practical constraint. Voters need to know how much time to ask of their drivers. With more voters using the assistive workstation, there would be a long wait just to get your chance. I suppose I could have asked for assistance during my loops and voice accelerations, but I just wanted to get out of write-in hell. Far more instructional time could be required for first time users of the audio assistance, especially if the equipment balks at start up or printing. And, what happens if a voter gives up during a voting session or nearly goes into a trance, as happened to me? Of course, there are other disabilities more complex than vision, such as strength and mobility, for using different input devices.

Getting a bit more technical, in my earlier visit for a trial, we discussed the need for a simulator for voter training using the audible equipment. I’d appreciate knowing if this exists anywhere. Since the user interaction is by phone keypad, a simulator with a mock ballot, as in my trial, could service widespread people if they knew the voting system designated for them. This could be done by phone or be a downloaded or web 2.0 app, something even I could write if I knew the rules. I could have called up and learned the instructions in the quiet of my home, memorized my way out when I hit a snag, and also reported problems back to the ballot designers and equipment vendors. Had I known about the write-in race survivor test, I’m not sure I would have followed through an actual vote. Those suffering from synthetic voice shock could at least determine whether they wanted to try to and were able to interpret the race announcements and instructions.

While the overall interaction of voting with only audio is really pretty easy, clearly the keypad needs a separate HELP key and RESTORE DEFAULTS action. Maybe these were available, but I was so deep into figuring out how to reach the end of the ballot, I was not interested in finding the escape button. More seriously, as a software testing expert and veteran system breaker, I really would like to replicate my experiences with the next-race loop and accelerating voice problems. It would be too irreverent and silly for a 65 year old lady to whiz around a county office building crowing that I’d broken the system, lookee, the computer is in a really bad state. No, I really appreciated the professionalism and help of the voting staff, but, well, I think I did break something and wish it could be reported and corrected.

So, why don’t I, a formerly reputable software professional try to do more? Well, first, with only two years of legal blindness I am still a learner in the assistive technology world. But more seriously, getting on my high horse, this whole system is an affront to U.S. citizenry. In my previous post, I equated electronic voting with two mixed metaphors, a “moon shot for democracy” and “extreme voting”, like a sporting challenge.

Just as sputnik shocked the U.S. into action for education in science, just as a catastrophe on the moon in 1969 would have undermined U.S. Self-confidence, just as the later space shuttles failures signaled a decline in space travel prowess, a definitive failure in our voting system undermines our feeling of living in a democracy. Yet, there is every sign that our voting system continues to be bungled, in the names of fancier technology and free enterprise. In my mind, the quest for a technological solution is a doable, long term project but only if committed to the technologists with expertise and freedom to question the safety of every step in the process, test each component down to its core against its specifications, simulate to exhaustion, and finally rely on combined community acceptance of safety to launch. In many ways, a rocket system is easier to design because it works with and against the continuous laws of physics, whereas a voting system works on discrete math and with and against the laws of human capabilities and differences. The security quality of human interactions with system is another dimension of complexity, but the bottom line is that voting systems cannot be black box. Discrete systems must be subjected to inductive reasoning applied to the code, hardware, user scenarios, with a huge dose of version control. Experimental software engineering has established the efficacy of software inspection, especially performed early and often using multiple viewpoints from varieties of expertise. Asking a weak testing regime to accept the assurance of vendors of proprietary systems, even against clear signs of fallibility, is like delivering a rocket to the pad, asking the astronauts to jump on, and not telling mission control how the rocket will behave.

My other metaphor of extreme voting is based on both user and developer experience. it is a lot to ask voting equipment vendors to produce extensions to service all ranges of human differences, including those considered disabilities. I was amazed the keypad and audio system worked as well as it did. Indeed, I might ask why spend all that money on fancy visual interfaces when audio will do, except for hearing impaired people. Users like me are forced into extreme and unknown conditions like long ballots read by unfamiliar voices marked by never before touched keypads. Please accept my invitation to use a bank ATM by audio to get a feeling for this experience. My current ATM transaction time is about a minute by knowing the exact sequence of key clicks, but at first I had little idea of the menu structures or the confirmation, cancellation, and selection instructions held in mind. Voting by audio is a similar experience.

To sum up, even though I had prepared myself well, I fell into a mess of write-in races which cause me to either mishandle the keypad input or to find an actual flaw in the system. In either case, the unpredictability of the long ballot and time required to work through it present, not insurmountable, but discomfiting conditions of voting independently. But I survived, and will continue to vote this way in the big election in November. I will also work hard in perhaps better information conditions to identify the races and candidates where I really care about my vote. I certainly do not want to leave wondering if I have voted for the right guy.

References for Voting without Vision

1. Previous post on extreme Voting and a Moon Shot for Democracy
2. California Secretary of State appraisal of voting system security and accessibility
3. Concerns of computer scientists about electronic voting systems
4. Audio version of this post

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

Need a second medical opinion? Try the Controversy Discovery Engine.

This post offers a way of searching for more diverse and analytic results using a simple web form interface to Google. This approach is especially useful when you are looking for a second opinion, evidence, or authorities on topics like we sometimes face with vision loss. It can also make querying and searching more efficient for our weary fingers by slicing off less useful results from searches. Please give it a try and let me know if it improves your searching.

First, some background. My recent Retinal Specialist appointment provoked my curiosity as my Myopic Macular Degeneration (MMD) seems to have stabilized. I have been wondering about origins and distributions of this condition, as I have only met other MMD people on the more comprehensive Macular Degeneration mdsupport.org earlier post. There’s always a sliver of hope for improvement, possibly from research driven out of the U.S. by stem cell policies. And, always, looms the now effective intervention of repair surgery or injections for retinal detachments or so-called “wet” conditions.

Time to update myself, so I go to Google and find the usual results for the query "myopic macular degeneration". Top results are mostly generic overviews "MMD is related to AMD", but I also find a lengthy Myopic Manual.

Fourteen years of searching has taught me I might need to go quite fa r down the Google results list to get into more in-depth discussions. I really wanted to know about the controversies, debates, arguments, and even spats in the related field of ophthalmology, genetics, nutrition etc. So, why not just add the word "controversy" to the query. Indeed, I see different results, but why stop there? Speaking linguistically, and assuming Google is fairly literal, I might want to use variations such as "controversial" or "controversies". Then the thesaurus adds synonyms such as "debate", "argument", "disagreement", and many more, each with variants. Now, I also want supporting material so I might ask for "evidence”, “proof”, “hypotheses”, “opinion” and all these variants. This is a lot of decision making on synonyms and support and variant, typing each and saving for reading those interesting results.

Primarily, I am getting deeper and faster into the subject matter. Is there a better way to query Google to achieve these goals? Well, yes, as I tried 5 years ago and dubbed the Controversy Discovery Engine. Go ahead and try it. Type your query into the search box, choose a controversy synonym, optionally select a kind of support, and hit the button. Your embellished query will be sent to Google, asking for 50 results. That’s all there is to it. You might or might not get better results than your hand-crafted queries but at least you now have a lot of packaged queries with just a few extra clicks.

Why do I claim this approach often works better? Well, driven by curiosity, I performed an empirical study on "Do Search Engines Suppress Controversy?" that was published in First Monday January 2004 online. Now, it’s not that search engines or search engineers have political agendas, but rather just an effect of the link popularity strategy that makes Google search work so well. The web splits into an Organizational web which links the promoters, explainers, and associations for a topic apart from the Analytic Web that includes scholarly papers, blogs, white papers, individuals, etc. The Organizations link among each other and people link to organizations more than the Analytic Web pages are linked to from the Organizational Web or within the Analytic Web. This pushes controversies down the list of search results. Usually controversies are hard to name in queries and you need to know the controversy exists by some name to query for it.

For example, one controversial aspect of Albert Einstein was whether the first wife he dumped had contributed rather more to his research career than was acknowledged. Query for "Albert Einstein AND Mileva Maric" and, voila, the controversy is revealed in various levels of details and with arguments on both sides of the story. Bet you didn’t know that! Using a synonym for controversy raises pages that discuss his personal life and produce the names, like Serbian physicist Mileva Maric, for additional searches. This particular revelation ebbs and flows with the tide of publications on his work and life. So, our approach is to use the language of human endeavors that involve research and the give-and-take of the intellectual marketplace to morph our searches more into the Analytic Web.

More seriously, for medical conditions, people facing surgical decisions want all and the most authoritative information they can get as fast as it can be found. So we offer the Controversy Discovery Engine as a kind of “second opinion” information seeker. Please provide feedback and suggestions to slger123@gmail.com. This web page may also be modified for similar uses with appropriate link and acknowledgement. If you’re intrigued with this topic, which won me the proverbial 15 minutes of fame in the blogosphere, read the paper and its five examples: St. John’s Wort, female astronauts, Albert Einstein, Belize, and distance learning. For the real search gurus, the software instrument used in this experiment, dubbed twURL, is available for licensing.

For visually impaired readers, here is a bit more advice. The web page has four form elements with the search query edit box at the top and submit button at the bottom and two list boxes with multi-selection in between for synonyms and support. You can multi-select from the list or select NONE as the last list item. Remember to turn on the virtual buffer in a screen reader to type in the query and select from the lists. Using sight, you might want to pump up the text size using your browser, e.g. Control + in Firefox. If you use this page a lot and know how to edit HTML, save the page and customize its style to your taste.

So, nothing to lose and possibly lots to gain, check out the Controversy Discovery Engine at http://apodder.org/ControversyDiscoveryEngine.html and let me know how it works for you.

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.

Is there a Killer App for Accessibility?

Is there a “killer app” for accessibility?

This post speculates about alternative changed futures for accessibility, such as cost-busting open source developments; self-voicing interactions; over riding inaccessibility by proxy web servers; a screenless, voiced, menu-driven PDA; and higher level software design practices.

First, I digress to tell you about a cool utility that invoked the serendipity behind this posting. Blind Cool Tech has a podcast, Jan. 1 2008, on a “You tube to iPod converter”. I haven’t used Youtube.com much since the videos appear to my partial sight as white blobs with some hand waving going on. Last week, I began to rethink my intellectual aversion to mindless drivel I feared populated Youtube and affronted my blindness sensibilities. The NYTimes had a piece on “Big Think”, a Youtube for eggheads that promised a variety of magazine-style videos of the ilk that interested me, namely politics and economics, reminiscent of the university-based video series at research

Wow, this little piece of software Youtube to iPod converter really delivers and opened up a new way for me to get useful web information. The use case is: copy the URL for a video that interests you, the link you would click to invoke the viewer; paste the link into the accessible converter; choose a file name and location; choose the format type mp3; click “download and convert”; wait a while; listen to the mp3 or your PC or send it on to a digital player, in my case my Bookport from aph.org. With a bit of imagination and patience, you can mentally fill in the video and also have a version to replay or bookmark. Moral of this digression: once again podcasts from the blind community open new worlds for us new vision losers needing accessible software to stay in the mainstream. Thank you, blind cool tech podcaster Brandon Heinrich! Check out my page of Youtube converted videos on eyesight-related topics.

By sheer luck, the first You Tube search I chose was the term “screen reader” and it turned up a provocative demo and discussion:

University of Washington Research: Screen Reader in a Browser by Professor Richard Ladner and graduate student Jeffrey P Bigham in the Web Insight project at cs.washingting .edu

Briefly, this experimental work addresses the problems of costly screen readers and the need for on-the-fly retrieval of web information by blind users away from their familiar screen readers. The proposed solution is a browser adaptation adding a script that redirects web pages to a so-called proxy server that converts the structure of the page, known as its document object, to text and descriptions that are returned to the browser as speech. This is pretty much what a desktop screen reader does, only now the reader and speech functions are remote. Of course, there are a gazillion problems and limits to this architecture but it appears to work sufficiently reliably and rapidly to achieve the social goals of its name, “Web Anywhere”. This research project, funded by the National Science Foundation, has also used the above architecture to modify web pages to add ALT tags from link texts, OCR of the image, and social networking tagging of images. Not only is the technology very clever, but also the work is based on observations of how blind users use the web and on a growing appreciation of the complexity and often atrocious design of web pages and use of AJAX technology that frustrate visually impaired web users, no matter the power of their screen readers or magnifiers or their skills.

As a former employee of funding agency NSF, a reviewer of dozens of proposals, a Principal Investigator in my sighted days on Computer Security education using animation, let me tell you this U. Washington project is a great investment of taxpayer funds. The work is innovative, well portrayed for outreach at at webinsight.cs.washington.edu, addressing monumentally important global and social issues, and helping to bring about a better educated and motivated generation of developers and technology advocates on accessibility issues.
Now, is this proxy-based architecture the killer app for web accessibility? Possibly, with widespread support of IT departments and developers, but the project sets it goals more modestly as “Web Everywhere” for transient web uses and possibly more broadly to address the cost of current screen reader solutions. Maybe the proxy-based approach can be expanded to other uses in demonstrations and experiments on a range of accessibility problems.

In one sense, a no-cost screen reader provides a way of breaking up the current market hierarchy, which one might unfortunately describe as a cartel of disability vendors and service providers. Yes, the premier screen readers sell for $1000 which seems justifiable by the relatively small market, the few million U.S. and international English-speaking PC users who are blind and on the rehab grid. Some, like Blind Confidential blogger, blink, and industry insider suggest the assistive technology industry is doing fine financially, able to afford more R&D and QA, and attractive to foreign investors. Like any segment of the computer industry, buyers become comfortable with the licensing, personalities, training, upgrade policies, and help lines so therefore resist change. In the case of the $1k products, buyers are more likely not individuals but rather rehabilitation and disability organizations with a mandate to provide user support through a chain of trained technical, health, and pedagogical professionals. A screen reader like the free, open source nvda will shake up the industry segment as more users find it suitable for their needs, as I have written about in“Look ma, no screens! NVDA is my reader” posting . With broader acceptance of open source as a reliable and effective mode of software enterprise, as nvda co-develops with other flexible open source office and browser products, as energetic developers fan out to other accessibility projects, well, nvda might well be the killer app of cost and evolution.

However, in a more radical sense, I argue that the screen reader model itself is badly flawed and that also technical accessibility alone is inadequate to resolve the needs of blind web users.

The value of a universal screen reader is that it can do something useful for most applications by dredging out fundamental information flowing through the operating system about an application’s controls and its users’ actions. But another model of software is so-called “self voicing” where the application maintains a focus system that tracks the user’s actions and provides its own reactions through a “speech channel”, providing at least equivalent information to an external screen reader. Such a model can do even better by providing flexible information about the context of a user event and preferences. A button might respond upon focus with “Delete”, or “Delete the marked podcasts in the table”, or repeat the relevant section of the user manual, or elaborate a description of the use case, such as “first, mark the podcasts to delete, and here’s how to mark, then press this button, and confirm the deletions, after which the podcast files will be off your disk unless you download them by another name”. Self-voicing as speech technology is implemented by many applications that allow choice of voice, setting speed, and even variation of voices matched to uses, e.g. the original message in an email reply. More significantly, self-voicing puts the responsibility for usability of the application directly on a developer to provide consistent, coherent, and useful explanations of each possible user interaction. Further, this information is useful both to the end user and to testing professionals who can check that the operation is doing what it says, only what it should, and in the proper context of the application’s use cases. Ditto, a tech writer working with a developer can make an application far more usable and maintainable in the long run. So, we claim, that a kind of killer app development practice would be the shift of responsibility away from screen readers onto self-voicing applications, including operating systems, where development processes will be improved. We base our claims on personal experience developing a self-voicing podcatcher, @Podder, for partially sighted users using a speech channel of copying text to the clipboard to be read by external text-to-speech applications. Another self-voicing application is Kurzweil 1000 for scanning and document management, and employing the nicest spell checker around.

We have argued in “Are missing, muddled use cases the cause of web inaccessibility?” posting that the main culprit in web usability is not technical accessibility but the way use cases are represented, tangled, and obscured by links as well as graphics and widgets on web pages. A use case describes a sequence of actions performed to meet a spcific goal, such as “register on a website” or “archive email messages”. Use cases not only lay out actions but also provide the rationale, the consequences, constraints, and error recovery procedures for interactions. Our claim is that software developers, both desktop and web application developers, force all users, sighted or blind, to infer the use cases from the page contents and layouts, often embellished with links, such as blog rolls, to enhance social interaction and increase search engine rankings. Reports such as those from the Web Insight project and the Neilsen Norman report “Beyond ALT text” describe in gory detail the frustrations and failures of visually impaired users struggling with their screen readers and magnifiers and braile displays to overcome the practice of poor use case representation as they try to keep up with sighted users in gaining information from and performing consumerism within the constellation of current web sites. While I certainly believe that web accessibility activists are important to removing barriers and biases, the larger improvement will come when websites are designed and clearly presented to achieve their use cases, for the benefit of all those who gain from better website usage. This is already occurring with re-engineering for mobile devices where failure to activate a use case or have available the appropriate use case is especially apparent, and, seemingly, not really that hard to achieve.

Finally, what about the marvelous mobile devices such as the fully voiced, menu-driven LevelStar Icon and APH Braille Plus Mobile Manager? After 8 months of Icon addiction, I firmly believe that, cost aside, this form of computer is far superior to conventionalL Internet usage for the activities it supports, mainly email, RSS management, browsing, and access to Bookshare.org resources. for example, I can consume the news I want in about an hour from NYTimes, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Arizona Republic, CNN, InsiderHigherEd, CNET, and a host of blogs. And that’s BEFORE getting up in the morning. No more waiting for web pages to load on a news website, browsing through categories on information that don’t interest me, and bypassing advertisements. Additionally, I am surprised at how often I use the Icon’s “Mighty Mo” embedded browser by wireless rather than open up the laptap to bring up Firefox and fend off all my update anxious packages and firewall warnings. Yes, life with the Icon is “living big”. the Icon is mainly part of the trend toward phones and wireless devices, but just happens to be developed by people who know what visually impaired users need and want.

Maybe, somewhere out there is a wondrous software package that will dramatically boos the productivity and comfort of visually impaired computer users. With some assurance, we can recognize an upcoming generation of open source oriented developers seasoned by traditional assistive technology and adept at both project organization and current software tools. Funders and support organizations can look ahead to utilization of their innovations and improvements. But maybe the core problem is much harder, as we claim, a disconnect in “computational thinking” between software designers who have found their way through models and user-oriented analysis and those web designers stuck at the token and speechless GUI level of browsers and web pages. Empirical researchers on accessibility are starting to witness and understand the fragility of users caught between artifacts designed for sighted users and clumsy, superhuman emulating tools such as screen readers and magnifiers while the proper responsibility for accessibility falls on developers who have yet to appreciate the power of readily available speech channels along side graphical user interfaces.

What do others think? Is their a “killer app” for accessibility? Comment on this blog at http://asyourworldchanges.wordpress.com, “As Your World Changes” blog or email to slger123@gmail.com.

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”

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

Memory, Identity, and Comedy: Conversations with author Susan Krieger

"Things No Longer There: A Memoir of Losing Sight and Finding Vision", by Dr. Susan Krieger, published by University of Wisconsin Press, is a great introduction to personal facets of vision loss. Better yet, audio interviews with the author delve further into memory, identity, and comedy as well as the technology of living with and writing about our condition. Podcasting brought the author and I into correspondence and acquaintance that has really enhanced my transition, as well as proven my claim that the podcasting media is especially great for Vision Losers. An accessible version of the book is available, as described on the author’s website, along with spoken sample chapters.

In this posting, I offer my own personal observations on some of the topics discussed in the audio interviews, often raised by the interviewers and listeners. This posting fits in with other "As Your World Changes" entries: Bookshare.org as an excellent source of reading materials; screen and text readers and other assistive technology enabling writing while blind; grousing about availability of accessible reading materials on the web and from publishers; and the evolution of a Vision Loser’s philosophy of safety, energy, relationships, appreciation, and support.

Driving! Really?

SK tells about a pre-dawn bird-watching trip involving a dark road. On every Vision Loser’s agenda is that disturbing question about "hanging up the keys to the car". When, why, how, and who makes you do it. Like SK, I had night-time experiences when the road kept disappearing. I once spent an afternoon practicing my way back home from an upcoming evening party held about 4 miles from town, on a winding road. I made it back OK with the only real terror on a bypass within a mile of home. For me, today, not driving remains a real limit, in a town without public transit, a taxi company where the dispatcher is also a driver, and two teenagers with busy schedules and heads in other worlds. It haunts me that I cannot remember the last time I drove, probably just a routine return from downtown but during a winter stretch (February 2006) when I was never sure that I could get back up slippery or foggy hills to home. It was a relief when I finally figured out I had quit driving, but font memories still come back about starting for a get-away drive without having a target and, in my younger days, cross-country trips.

Reality and Identity — what is your inner vision?

SK speaks eloquently in her book and interviews about the reality that emerges in accepting, or rejecting, the identity of being blind, or visually impaired, or however one chooses to term the condition. For SK, the identity is one among many in a lifetime of personal relationships and a scholarly . career. As one interview caller notes, vision loss, is in many ways, just another life change, much as you are not the same person as in high school, progressive vision loss is just another set of forces that yield reasons for a person to grow and understand more about herself and her world. The appeal of SK’s book and interview persona lies in her direct embracing of the transition and changed reality, using writing as an instrument of "processing that loss".

I’ve adopted "Vision Loser" as my identity because it is such a blunt recognition that surfaces the "Loser" model in our society, a force to counteract in my mind and actions. My sense of identity is clouded by several years of covering up my condition during a period of employment where I felt being out as visually impaired would harm me. My colleagues were steeped in aviation, the military, and religious intensity of Mormonism and evangelical Christianity, none of which project compassion toward a feminist, unmarried, ambiguously parenting, curiosity-driven, techno-oriented crone-like woman. I had no specific conditions to request for A.D.A. accommodations, just turn off the damned bright overhead lights, let me set the cursor size on then classroom projector computer, and don’t ask me to flip burgers at the college’s picnic. In my last semester, as I engaged my students in projects to produce an assistive software package (@Podder podcatcher), I began to realize I’d been expending more energy coping with and covering up my condition than I was getting work done. I also figured out students were having extra trouble reading my writing when I couldn’t see that I hadn’t erased the white board before writing on it again, duh. My take-away from is that the adaptations required for keeping me productive were so utterly trivial, and probably beneficial to others of a certain age, that the stress of covering up wasn’t worth it. As SK notes from teaching a course of "Women and Disability", it’s possible to become amazingly adept at covering up, a skill which can backfire when differences become viewed as deficiencies, while also being a skill one can use later to help others feel comfortable with your disability. I fear that covering up invoked a "loser" or archetypal Victim mind-set requiring, for me, extra effort to overcome.

Work, energy, time — where does it go?

SK rei-iterates through her interviews and vignettes in the book that maintaining productivity during vision loss is really hard work — new skills to acquire, updating oneself as new technologies come along, under constant vigilance for safety. So, true, a lazy Vision Loser must be a real pain for self and family.

SK’s description of being hit by a car is so scary I cannot reread it. I take an evening walk along a lightly traveled housing cul de sac where I can avoid cars but silent, fast-moving bicycles on the downhill are teaching me to listen for the whiz of their tires. Ditto, quiet hybrid cars can sneak out of the haze of my vision. But the beauty of this walk is the freedom of movement that comes from retained vision to see sidewalks, muscle memory of curb height, trust in a smooth pavement, and lack of obstacles. These allow me to walk briskly, freely, youthfully, and with release of energy after a day’s hesitant navigation around objects in my house or or wherever. It almost feels like flying. However, I sometimes find myself offering a friendly nod to a back
hoe tractor I thought was a tall person, walking
up a pile of gravel wondering why the sidewalk was headed down, unable to recognize any other walkers by name (except for the gregarious Jack), jumping in surprise and zig-zagging the wrong way when encountering other walkers, stepping on small dogs and once cutting in on a baby stroller. Safety is so ever-present a part of reality consumes energy beyond my prior imagination.

As a fan of Dr. Moira Gunn’s Tech Nation show, I was delighted by the techie content of her interview with SK. How great to hear about cutting-and-pasting text by ear not eye, using audio to edit writing, fighting with PDF accessibility, sensitizing someone like Moira Gunn to how the blind read and work, and SK’s activism to expand access to electronic versions of publications. This is a singularly great interview about technology uses in transition to vision loss.

SK provides a compelling way of looking at the common question of whether our other senses become stronger as vision fades. The key changes occur in the mind, finding alternative ways of working, learning to double check for mistakes, etc. True, the other senses get used more as new scripts for work are created by our minds, practiced and debugged, over-riding vision dependent ways of working. But the locus of change is in the mind, or brain, rather than sense organs.

SK and a caller discuss the "slowing down" effect, perhaps we might call it a benefit, of vision loss. Especially when we think of vision loss as concurrent with aging, "working more slowly" is more concrete, pressing, and real for Vision Losers. I actually think not in terms of minutes or hours consumed by tasks, but some form of fictional energy units associated with time spent on a task, number of mistakes made then caught then corrected, worry about consequences of mistakes, degree to which my fingers and photo-receptors are being worked, and when my internal battery is going to reach the 20% level beyond which I get "tired and cranky" as well as more error-prone.

Seeing, Not Seeing, and Thinking you are seeing


SK speaks of the newly found enjoyment of seeing large things, like succulent plants and mountains and sunsets. Retained vision has a focus and quality of its own, not only because it highlights the loss but also offers genuine pleasure. Memory of landscapes and events decades past represent sources of distress for SK, e.g., a summer camp for youth that seems to have vanished into a housing development. In conjunction with vision loss, memory can fill in gaps and guide where and how one looks at surroundings. But memory in conjunction with vision loss raises another dilemma: is the thing I remember no longer there or am I just unable to recognize or see it from vision causes?

I recently retraced a short hiking trail with a visitor. With my vision I could follow the path but was constantly thrown off balance by "moguls" or drops in level for drainage or natural ground slopes. With the steadying arm of my companion trained to guide me, the walk was much as I had last felt, maybe 4 years ago. I see the trees and butte above in silhouette, dark outlines with little detail, but the enclosure of tall pines and the familiarity of the trail filled my senses. On each turn of the trail, I knew what was coming next and how far we had to go (up about 700 feet, around the back of the butte, then down). This particular morning brought two additional pleasures of weather and sound. A light rain cooled the walk, lasted only a few minutes, just as I had predicted, and symbolized the rainy so-called "monsoon" season of Arizona high desert. Also, a climber had scaled the butte and regaled the entire slope with flute music and Indian-like calls, somewhat eerie and reminders of reported sacred connotations of this Thumb Butte. On the far side of the mountain, the trail passed a clump of what looked like fire-damaged pines. My companion and I argued a bit as to the source, fire damage which he, but not I, could see, and pine bark beetle, which I remembered had devastated this region. We settled on probably both as causes of this particular defoliation. With SK’s images of place, I think back a month later to the role of memory in this little jaunt. I wonder if this would also happen at Mt. Katahdin, Monadnock, the Smokies, Lynn Canal, Galapagos, Mustang Island, or other places I’ve visited, sometimes with high frequency. Recent trips to new places, e.g., Tombstone or the Tucson Desert Museum, invoke a different sense, because I can enjoy the ambiance but do not really know what I have missed. Traveling with poorer vision is definitely different, but hardly less pleasurable, except for concern about contributions to a companion’s traveling experience.

Well, there is so much more stimulated by the book and interviews of Susan Krieger. This comparison of experiences is, for me, far more than just a past-time as I find her articulations of perception, feeling, and modes of operation so help me identify and clarify my own. Thanks for this book, Susan, and I look forward to more tales and advice in the next writings.

Reference website and podcasts

1. 
   "Things No Longer There" book website
   . Includes information on accessible versions of the text. This books is available on Bookshare.org.

2. 
   Tech Nation with Dr. Moira Gunn on itConver