[lbo-talk] Services for the blind?

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Fri Nov 19 12:27:31 PST 2004


Isn't it true that they use formats to discourage sighted people from taking advantage of them? Michael Perelman

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I don't know. What media do you mean?

On the other hand, it might also be a by-product of the fact that organizations for the blind tend to be pretty insulary, in their `own' world so to speak. So these organization have their own vendors and have developed their own approaches. When I did an oral history at UCB, the tapes were transcribed into a very off-band text format, but I think that was because the woman who did the transcriptions was blind and had her own computer set up with some kind of custom speech to text system.

If you have examples, let me known. My best friend is a blind guy in Biophysics and teaches chemistry at CalPoly. He is constantly dissing the blind, blind organizations, politics of the blind, etc. He used to do a great voice imitation of Rose Resnick, Lighthouse for the Blind...

When Dennis F was in Berkeley, it used to be yearly tradition for me to go over to his place and try to figure out how to get some card or thing or other to work on his computer.

Finally Dennis found a guy in the electronic engineering department at Cal who knew about all these different systems and he installed his own stuff and got it to work. Screen readers are a real pain in the ass to use because Windoze system uses pull down menus and sideways extensions and all kind of visual or graphic clues that are impossible to translate. When computers were command line oriented it was easy, but ever since gui's became dominant, its been a headache. I tried to convince D he should switch over to a unix style system, but he didn't want to learn a whole new system and be even more isolated. But I did manage to get him to download and install Lynx, which is a text based web browser.

CG



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