Welcome to another decade of “As Your World Changes” about adjusting to vision loss using technology, plus a few other topics.
I started this blog in 2007 to reclaim my authoring skills, including the essential tasks of writing and editing. “Print disability” is not a handicap when spoken reading and writing are available and one has the time and stamina to build necessary skills. However, writing required a monumental amount of work, concentration, and frustration, because no technology is effectively accessible all the time.
After venting about limited local facilities to help my vision rehabilitation, I got serious and learned what I needed through podcasts and disability expos like CSUN. By 2008, I’d experimented with many assistive devices and settled on NVDA screen reader on Windows and the mobile Levelstar Icon (now defunct). Local iPhone service arrived in 2012, after a miserable experiment with an Android phone. My directory of services is called “Talking Assistive Technology”, available on this website.
After getting up to speed on assistive technology, my computing background led me to dig into the “science of accessibility” expounded in articles driven by troublesome use cases. Thrilled by the opportunity to vote for a wise man in 2008, on an accessible voting system, I wrote up my experience, later retracted. Invitations to professional venues led to several position papers.
For ten years, I’ve advocated for the local facilities I was denied, and now may be coming to town. Stay tuned!
The purpose of this ReBoot is to:
- clean up and organized still valid personal and professional observations,
- prepare to track the above mentioned local turn-around for people losing vision,
- keep up on WordPress techniques usable for my ‘YC OLLI Asks’ Lifelong Learning course website and ‘A Chip On Her Shoulder’ Fiction Writing portfolio
- stay inspired by blog visitors to a popular article to a recognized article ‘Grabbing My Identity Cane To Join the Culture of Disability’.
- maintain an interface between myself, as a computer scientist with vision loss, to computer scientists in industry and, especially, academia,
- expand on experiences for a fictional character in my other writing.
Below are posts organized by ‘Adjusting To Vision Loss’ human factors, ‘Getting Up To Speed with Assistive Technology’ to drive that adjustment, ‘Espousing On Assistive Technology and Accessibility’ to salve my professional desires, and ‘Becoming a Local Advocate for Living with Vision Loss’, plus a few posts that needed a home.
Warning: the blog is riddled with rotted links, to be fixed in time. As I now hang out with other retired active writers, I’m horrified at my wordy earlier posts. As the passion for vision-related topics waned and as my world changed, I’m now absorbed in the craft of writing.
Thanks for visiting this blog. Your comments are welcome. Let’s see where this phase takes me, my writing, and the local transformation we’re undertaking.
Learning to Live with Vision Loss
- Welcome!
- Five Tenets for Living with Low Vision
- Resources, support, and Reality Check for Macular Degenerates
- Aren’t We Vision Losers Lucky?
- Memory, Identity, and Comedy, with Susan Krieger
- Lessons From Twilight, a Memoir by Henry Grunwald
- Most popular blog article! Grabbing My Identity Cane To Join The Culture of Disability
- Thinking About Blindness, Safety, Risks Trade-offs
- Lessons from 2008
- The Pleasures of Audio Reading
- Resilience: Bouncing Back from Vision Loss
- Disablism: The Good, the Bad, and Maddening
Getting Up To Speed With Assistive Technology
- A Simple, Effective, Low-Cost Reading Application
- What’s a Print-Disabled Reader To Do? Bookshare!
- Seeing Through Google Book Search
- Mouse Hacks, Magnifiers, and Being Your Own System Integrator
- Help! I’m Being Updated To Death
- Look, Ma, No Screens! NVDA Is My New Screen Reader
- Learning To Write By Listening
- Virtual Stocking Stuffers for Vision Losers
- 2007 Review
- Listen Up! Strategies for Non visual Reading
- The Talking ATM Is My Dream Machine
- Crossing the RSS Divide: Making It Simpler
Expounding On Accessibility and Assistive Technology
Accessibility
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Computing Related
- Using The Curb Cuts Principle To Reboot Computing
- Grafting Accessibility Onto Computer Science Education
Grafting Accessibility: Webliography
- What If Accessibility Had a Capability Maturity Model?
- Cyber Learning and Learning Cyber: Lifelong ad Accessibility Experiences
- Beyond Universal Design: Multi-sensory Perspectives
- Will Computer Science Meet Accessibility in 2011?
- Retire CAPTCHA-Style Thinking Please
- Why Is Accessibility So Hard? Glad You Asked
Accessible Voting And Assessing Government Accessibility
I retract my voting zeal in deference to the Verified Voting argument requiring paper ballots. An unregulated and un-trustworthy votingregime is not worth privacy and independence of disable voters like me. Sad!
- e-voting = Moon Shot for Democracy?
- Accessible Voting Worked For Me, I Think
- Obama White House Almost On Target for Accessibility
- Stumbling Around White House and Recovery.Gov
- Stumbling Around GOV Websites
Becoming AA Local Activist
When I began losing vision to the point where I needed Rehabilitation, I scanned for centers of activity away from my home in Prescott AZ. State services were hard to find, not reacting on my time scale, and disconnected from the world I knew existed from pod casts and MDSupport. Eventually, I received orientation and mobility training in 2008 while I taught myself about assistive technology thanks to the CSUN Exhibit Halls, then meeting near LAX.
Living in a “rural” “best place to retire”meant that I performed self-rehabilitation for my vision loss. Existing “blind centers” had closed and vision rehabilitation specialists moved to Tucson due to lack of referrals. Device re-sellers and low vision specialists came to town intermittently. While I was able to afford technology and to learn on my own, I’ve realized too few other area Vision Losers could cope as well. I began a concerted effort to collect links to resources and deliver demos of “Talking Assistive Technology” to an intermittent seminar on “Confident Living With Low Vision”.
I hope to post more about the progress of a local grant at the Prescott Public Library, dubbed “You Too!”, launching in February 2018.
- Deprecated. Early directory of servicesConsolidating Links for Vision Losers Around Prescott AZ
- Plea for coordination and improvements Prescott Needs An Inclusive Disability Council
- Updated to 2016 Living Visually Impaired in Prescott AZ: The 2013 Story
- A rant Sandwich Board Signs Are Dangerous!
- Public service Assistive Technology and Vision Rehabilitation Directory Living Visually Impaired in Prescott AZ: The 2016 Story
Side Interests
- Need a Second Medical Opinion? Use the Controversy Discovery Engine
- Sputnik Boosted Our Lives!
- Honoree for Ada Lovelace Day: Pat Price for AccessibleWorld.orgn
- An Inimitable Woman: Helen Keller
- Honoree for Ad a Lovelace Day 2010: Wendy Chisholm
- A Blogger Treasure Walking No More
As Your World Changes 
A new local group formed this year
CatchTheVision.Life
dubbed “Low Vision Techies At Your service”.
We provide a progression from the Public Library accessibility training program
http://www.prescottlibrary.info/youtoo/
plus general advice on assistive technology and living with low vision.