Augury and reading chicken bones for profit...(was Pun-dirty...)

[John Esak]

> >Looked at SpeakUp.  Interesting.  The question is begged
> though--if you're
> >actually -fully- blind (John can still see -some- on good days), how are
> >you supposed to get to the point where you -do- install the software,
> >without having the software installed already?  That question is like the
> >chicken and the egg.
> >
> >mark->
> >
> >
> If I hadn't seen you mention your wife several times I would think that
> question came from a crusty old hermit who had no human contact. Few
> people, blind or otherwise, live in a vacuum. They have family, friends,
> acquaintances, or even paid consultants who can install software that
> they, for whatever reason, are not able to install themselves.
>
> You are correct though - the question is like the chicken and egg - it
> starts from a faulty premise :-)
>

Yes, you are both right. And you are both being very sensitive to a major
problem in this regard. The biggest drawback to blind programmers is the
need to get a sighted person to do just this little thing or that. It is
tantamount to being able to drive cross country except needing your wife to
drive across any bridges.... most frustrating.

The major packages with the help of Microsoft solve this problem, by coming
up in a mode where they can make use of MSAA (Microsoft Active
Accessibility) functionality so that the install starts reading the screen
to you immediately upon the autorun of the CD even though you don't have any
screen reader installed yet. If part of what you need is not installed on
your system... it has enough wave files and brains to tell you that, install
it for you, and tell you that you need to reboot to finish the rest of the
install.  It's all quite clever.

Yes, on good days (now calling them great, spectacular days) I can see a
little. Have had some sight for the past two weeks, don't know why. Don't
question these things anymore. :-) Although, I wouldn't call it "seeing".
All I get these days is an awareness of dark and darker shadows... Let's not
call it light perception (although that's what the docs call it), it's more
like "dark perception". I would have been very valuable on Babylon 5.

By the way, it is not only a great screen reader that helps blind people use
computers... it is keystrokes. Mark is especially adept at these... I am
getting to know them better. I know a girl who knows every single keystroke
for every single major app there is, including Windows itself on every
version. And I mean she knows them. Without any challenge at all she can fly
through finding and executing anything at all faster than Ken Brody can with
a mouse. No question. It is just mind-blowing.

Should any of you want to try something really cool that I'm sure 99% of you
don't know... Try this. Open Explorer and navigate to some directory with
lots of stuff in it. Assuming your cursor (the highlight bar in this case)
has focus in one of the panes, rapidly press the first few letters of a file
or folder you see below you. The highlight will jump directly to it. Cool,
huh?  Not knowing this tiny piece of info caused me months of painful
navigation in Windows. This functionality is true in almost all well written
trees and listboxes. Combine this with the keyboard functionality of being
able to open subfolders with the right arrow and close  them with the left
arrow and one can zoom around the file system with his/her eyes closed ...
providing the screen reader is fast and crisp. (Fast/crisp is more a
functionality of the speech synth being used. MS has a very good software
synth built in now called Eloquence. Some feel hardware synths are better,
though... but it's all what you get used to hearing.) Keyboard navigation
takes some getting used to... and its probably not something you'd learn
unless you _had_ to... but thank God, it's not impossible to get around the
computer without a mouse.

John