Greetings. As we get ever closer to game 2 in the NBA Finals, I'd like to offer up my theory on why the Mavericks will win it all.
Granted, Dirk, Stack, Harris, Avery and the rest are the best around at what they do; granted, the Mavs have depth; granted they have proven that they can match up against any sort of setup any team has (go back and consider the teams leading up to the Finals); we've got all that as sound sports reasoning as to why the Mavericks will win the Finals. However, my reasoning is a lot simpler than all that. They'll win because I'm not living there anymore.
In 1999, when the Stars won the Stanley Cup, I was in Colorado getting training at the Colorado Center for the Blind. Now, I'm in Austin at a new job, and I think they'll win. As for the Cowboys, when they won their 3 Superbowls, well, I was growing up in Dallas at the time, so that doesn't count. Besides, I was still in high school. I'm counting the time after high school graduation, :)
And anyway, even though my personal theory might seem flemsy, which it very well might be, consider the sports reasoning mentioned above, and that balances it out. Hey, I had to offer up my own spin on this. After all, one of the Dallas teams is that close to winning another championship! And it couldn't have come to a better or more deserving team. I can't think of a better cap to a 60 and 22 season, much less to a team that's never won it before. I just wish I were still in Dallas to witness the chaos and all the stuff that surrounds an NBA Finals series. Then again, I might jinks them if I were.
One more thing: if the Mavs do win it all and bring another championship to Dallas, hopefully that will help reduce the Dallas sports bias that has hung around the past number of years. It seems like whenever a Dallas team is good or in a playoff run, there is some sort of bias among the media where the particular team is not mentioned as much as the competitive team. Or, that they are looked down upon, for whatever reason. Perhaps its because JFK was shot here, but that was more than 40 years ago. I don't know where the bias comes from, but I hope that it goes away soon. Dallas really has some great tallent which deserves attention. If you need further proof of a bias against Dallas, consider the number of Cowboys that have gotten into the NFL's Hall of Fame during the Superbowl, verses those that have been up for consideration.
Anyway, go Mavs!
Sunday, June 11
Saturday, June 10
Austin Cab Company and the Blind
The Austin Chronicle
Friday, June 09, 2006
Blind Leading the Sighted: Yellow Cab of Austin has become an employment option for people who are visually impaired
By R.U. STEINBERG
King the dog may be the eyes, but not the ears for his owner, Denime Sadler, a Yellow Cab call center worker who can answer phones and communicate with
cabbies as well as any sighted person. photo by Jana Birchum
Ever wonder what it's really like at a taxicab company? If you're old enough to remember the TV series Taxi, you can probably imagine Louie De Palma in
his cage, barking out orders to Reiger, Nardo, and the others.
If you never watched Taxi, it's just as well because that kind of cab company is history. Over at Yellow Cab of Austin, they use computers with mapping
and geo-positioning software to track customers and drivers. The garage is immaculate, with seven bays, and they have their own body repair shop. The only
one barking - well, he barks once in a while - is King, the seeing eye dog. No surprise, since five of the current 25 or so call-center staff members are
visually impaired.
Louie would be positively livid. But not Tomas Smith, who, as communications manager at Yellow Cab, manages the call center and computer equipment. "One
of our guiding principles is that we be an active participant in the community," says Smith, who has been in the cab business since 1978 (the year Taxi
premiered on TV).
A little over a year ago, Smith received an unannounced visit from Denime Sadler, who has been completely blind since age 7. "I had no idea he was coming.
I didn't have any want ads in the paper. But he decided that I needed to hire a blind man to answer telephones," Smith said. He convinced me he could get
help from the Department of Assistive and Rehabilitative Services. ... My intuition was he could handle the stress and excel. So I hired him."
Sadler, who prefers to say he is a person who doesn't have "physical sight," moved to Austin in 2004 from Mississippi where he had been attending college.
"I had a friend here already, but it was a rocky start. My first service animal and I were in an accident with a tow truck. Although we both survived,
the dog had to retire. But from tragedy came triumph: I got help from the state and a job here." Sadler says he got the idea for working at the cab company
because Capitol Metro contracts with Yellow Cab to provide transportation for people with disabilities. "I kept asking the cab drivers if there were any
openings here, and one day they suggested I check it out myself."
Sadler said he recently helped form a coalition to help increase public awareness about issues for people without physical sight. "The blind need to be
taught they can be independent and businesses need to be shown we can work just as well - if not better - than 'normal people.' Our unemployment rate is
70 to 80%, which is a disaster."
How hard is it to integrate people with disabilities into the workforce? Employers may complain about all the difficulties associated with the Americans
with Disabilities Act, but a recent study by Cornell University says one of the obstacles to hiring people with disabilities is the negative attitude of
supervisors and co-workers. Smith says he's spoken with people in state government, as well as with area-employment specialists about what Yellow Cab has
done. "The toughest thing is to come to the realization that there really isn't a difference between a sighted and unsighted person. We all have our shortcomings,
abilities, and disabilities. Once you can shed the prejudice, you'll find a body of very willing, able, and motivated workers."
Smith said Yellow Cab had to make sure door handles had levers. The company also had to mark the bathroom doors with braille, make sure nothing was protruding
into hallways, and install screen-reading software called Job Access With Speech (JAWS) on call-center computers. "Fortunately, we were already moving
into a new building that was ADA compliant," Smith said.
Chad Nezat, who has been visually impaired since birth, came to Yellow Cab in July 2005 after being laid off from his previous job. "Computer people at
some companies don't like messing with JAWS or claim it has security issues. Then there are times when JAWS doesn't always work - that's been my experience
with other customer-service jobs."
Unlike many of his sighted co-workers, Nezat has been touch-typing since the fourth grade and was ready to work with Yellow Cab's computer system. "Most
blind people
learn how to type from an early age because we have to communicate in written form," he said. Everyone may not realize it, but all computer keyboards are
"braille," Smith added. "If you look at the 'F' and 'J' keys, there are little raised areas - that's basically all they need to get oriented."
Hugo Sanchez, who has only worked at Yellow Cab for a short time, also brings a skill some of his sighted co-workers don't have: He is bilingual. "Speaking
Spanish is not only a good asset for me, I also think it will help generate revenue for the company, because we can provide something for a segment of
the population that might not get served otherwise." Sanchez, who at age 44 is the most senior of the visually-impaired staff members, says there are more
opportunities for younger people with visual impairment today than there used to be. When he is not working, he is a proud father of four (his oldest is
in the Marines), a ham-radio operator, and plays on the Austin Blackhawks, a world championship-winning baseball team for people with visual impairments.
(For more information, visit the
National Beep Baseball Association).
Although other businesses have been blind to Yellow Cab's success thus far, Smith is happy to report that the Yellow Cab franchises in San Antonio and Houston
are also working toward hiring people who are visually impaired.
"When we went into this, it was a learning curve. None of us had ever done it, but I got help from Ed Browning at DARS. Our San Antonio branch is currently
moving forward with implementing the hiring of blind call-takers, and Houston is not far behind. And there's been an added bonus. We had to make a pretty
big technical jump from old, dumb monochrome terminals to modern PCs so we could install the JAWS software. We liked the PCs so much better that we moved
all of our software to them. Now, all of our call-takers have access to the new map software. This has helped the entire company."
--Despite negative recommendations by both City Staff and Urban Transportation Commission, Austin City Council has approved the Roy's Yellow merger. Some
"African" companies may apply for the newly created franchise and Austin Cab will receive twenty new permits. We may have a few jobs, but we will have
fewer options with respect to transportation until the new franchise comes to fruition.
Friday, June 09, 2006
Blind Leading the Sighted: Yellow Cab of Austin has become an employment option for people who are visually impaired
By R.U. STEINBERG
King the dog may be the eyes, but not the ears for his owner, Denime Sadler, a Yellow Cab call center worker who can answer phones and communicate with
cabbies as well as any sighted person. photo by Jana Birchum
Ever wonder what it's really like at a taxicab company? If you're old enough to remember the TV series Taxi, you can probably imagine Louie De Palma in
his cage, barking out orders to Reiger, Nardo, and the others.
If you never watched Taxi, it's just as well because that kind of cab company is history. Over at Yellow Cab of Austin, they use computers with mapping
and geo-positioning software to track customers and drivers. The garage is immaculate, with seven bays, and they have their own body repair shop. The only
one barking - well, he barks once in a while - is King, the seeing eye dog. No surprise, since five of the current 25 or so call-center staff members are
visually impaired.
Louie would be positively livid. But not Tomas Smith, who, as communications manager at Yellow Cab, manages the call center and computer equipment. "One
of our guiding principles is that we be an active participant in the community," says Smith, who has been in the cab business since 1978 (the year Taxi
premiered on TV).
A little over a year ago, Smith received an unannounced visit from Denime Sadler, who has been completely blind since age 7. "I had no idea he was coming.
I didn't have any want ads in the paper. But he decided that I needed to hire a blind man to answer telephones," Smith said. He convinced me he could get
help from the Department of Assistive and Rehabilitative Services. ... My intuition was he could handle the stress and excel. So I hired him."
Sadler, who prefers to say he is a person who doesn't have "physical sight," moved to Austin in 2004 from Mississippi where he had been attending college.
"I had a friend here already, but it was a rocky start. My first service animal and I were in an accident with a tow truck. Although we both survived,
the dog had to retire. But from tragedy came triumph: I got help from the state and a job here." Sadler says he got the idea for working at the cab company
because Capitol Metro contracts with Yellow Cab to provide transportation for people with disabilities. "I kept asking the cab drivers if there were any
openings here, and one day they suggested I check it out myself."
Sadler said he recently helped form a coalition to help increase public awareness about issues for people without physical sight. "The blind need to be
taught they can be independent and businesses need to be shown we can work just as well - if not better - than 'normal people.' Our unemployment rate is
70 to 80%, which is a disaster."
How hard is it to integrate people with disabilities into the workforce? Employers may complain about all the difficulties associated with the Americans
with Disabilities Act, but a recent study by Cornell University says one of the obstacles to hiring people with disabilities is the negative attitude of
supervisors and co-workers. Smith says he's spoken with people in state government, as well as with area-employment specialists about what Yellow Cab has
done. "The toughest thing is to come to the realization that there really isn't a difference between a sighted and unsighted person. We all have our shortcomings,
abilities, and disabilities. Once you can shed the prejudice, you'll find a body of very willing, able, and motivated workers."
Smith said Yellow Cab had to make sure door handles had levers. The company also had to mark the bathroom doors with braille, make sure nothing was protruding
into hallways, and install screen-reading software called Job Access With Speech (JAWS) on call-center computers. "Fortunately, we were already moving
into a new building that was ADA compliant," Smith said.
Chad Nezat, who has been visually impaired since birth, came to Yellow Cab in July 2005 after being laid off from his previous job. "Computer people at
some companies don't like messing with JAWS or claim it has security issues. Then there are times when JAWS doesn't always work - that's been my experience
with other customer-service jobs."
Unlike many of his sighted co-workers, Nezat has been touch-typing since the fourth grade and was ready to work with Yellow Cab's computer system. "Most
blind people
learn how to type from an early age because we have to communicate in written form," he said. Everyone may not realize it, but all computer keyboards are
"braille," Smith added. "If you look at the 'F' and 'J' keys, there are little raised areas - that's basically all they need to get oriented."
Hugo Sanchez, who has only worked at Yellow Cab for a short time, also brings a skill some of his sighted co-workers don't have: He is bilingual. "Speaking
Spanish is not only a good asset for me, I also think it will help generate revenue for the company, because we can provide something for a segment of
the population that might not get served otherwise." Sanchez, who at age 44 is the most senior of the visually-impaired staff members, says there are more
opportunities for younger people with visual impairment today than there used to be. When he is not working, he is a proud father of four (his oldest is
in the Marines), a ham-radio operator, and plays on the Austin Blackhawks, a world championship-winning baseball team for people with visual impairments.
(For more information, visit the
National Beep Baseball Association).
Although other businesses have been blind to Yellow Cab's success thus far, Smith is happy to report that the Yellow Cab franchises in San Antonio and Houston
are also working toward hiring people who are visually impaired.
"When we went into this, it was a learning curve. None of us had ever done it, but I got help from Ed Browning at DARS. Our San Antonio branch is currently
moving forward with implementing the hiring of blind call-takers, and Houston is not far behind. And there's been an added bonus. We had to make a pretty
big technical jump from old, dumb monochrome terminals to modern PCs so we could install the JAWS software. We liked the PCs so much better that we moved
all of our software to them. Now, all of our call-takers have access to the new map software. This has helped the entire company."
--Despite negative recommendations by both City Staff and Urban Transportation Commission, Austin City Council has approved the Roy's Yellow merger. Some
"African" companies may apply for the newly created franchise and Austin Cab will receive twenty new permits. We may have a few jobs, but we will have
fewer options with respect to transportation until the new franchise comes to fruition.
A New and Bizarre Net station
Greetings. Below is information on a new and interesting Internet broadcasting station. Remember earlier I was talking about mental photo albums? Well, this station takes that to a new level, combining sound effects and creating chaotic results. When I listen to it, I can imagine a dog attacking a car, then the car's alarm goes off, and the dog starts whining. You too can get these same images, and many others like it, by tuning in below. The addresses given are not links, since you will need to paste them into your media player's open location dialog. Write privately or through the public comments feature if you would like instructions on how to do this. Enjoy.
What is FX Radio? Well, it's a concept that Derek Lane and I came up
with last summer when we were both rather bored.
Basically, it's the result of what happens when you load three
instances of winamp equipped with crossfaders, then load a whole ton
of high quality sound effects libraries into each winamp, making
sure, of course, that everything is randomized.
The sequence of events that can happen as a result of this are
rather strange, and many interesting things can happen to your mind
as a result of listening to the random combinations of odd things that occur.
Have you ever seen a bird driving a car under water, all the while
being shot at by a telephone? Or, perhaps, little kids playing in
underwater construction sites? How about frogs that make things
explode, sheep making things blow up, or machine guns blasting
through a calm cafe, all the while everyone seems to be oblivious to
the fact that they are being shot at, and, in fact, don't seem to
mind very much?
All these things can and have been known to happen on FX Radio, all
sound effects, all the time, 24 hours a day!
To tune in, you will need a streaming media player compatible with
AAC+ streaming, such as Winamp (5.1 or higher, except 5.22 which has
a bug that breaks AAC streams), VLC Mediaplayer, or Foobar 2000.
If you have a compatible player, go to one of the following addresses:
shoutcast:
http://fx.pdaudio.net:80
icecast:
http://tbrn.net:8888/fx.aac
Note: If you are using the Thompson mp3 pro decoder for Winamp, the
shoutcast stream will not work unless it is disabled. The icecast
feed will, however, since the .aac extention will not be passed off
to the mp3 pro decoder.
The bandwidth is low enough such that you can listen with either a
dial-up or broadband connection. Either way, you'll still get the
same great quality that AAC+ streaming provides.
Also, as the shoutcast server is on port 80, this means you can
listen to FX Radio behind any proxy server that only allows access
to http, such as universities and other institutions. Yes, a nice
distraction during class might be good, don't you think?
Why not freak out your friends, classmates or co-workers while
you're at it? Maybe all of the above?
Close your eyes, put on some headphones, tune in, and get ready for
a very strange, and altogether different experience!
It's FX Radio! No, really?
What is FX Radio? Well, it's a concept that Derek Lane and I came up
with last summer when we were both rather bored.
Basically, it's the result of what happens when you load three
instances of winamp equipped with crossfaders, then load a whole ton
of high quality sound effects libraries into each winamp, making
sure, of course, that everything is randomized.
The sequence of events that can happen as a result of this are
rather strange, and many interesting things can happen to your mind
as a result of listening to the random combinations of odd things that occur.
Have you ever seen a bird driving a car under water, all the while
being shot at by a telephone? Or, perhaps, little kids playing in
underwater construction sites? How about frogs that make things
explode, sheep making things blow up, or machine guns blasting
through a calm cafe, all the while everyone seems to be oblivious to
the fact that they are being shot at, and, in fact, don't seem to
mind very much?
All these things can and have been known to happen on FX Radio, all
sound effects, all the time, 24 hours a day!
To tune in, you will need a streaming media player compatible with
AAC+ streaming, such as Winamp (5.1 or higher, except 5.22 which has
a bug that breaks AAC streams), VLC Mediaplayer, or Foobar 2000.
If you have a compatible player, go to one of the following addresses:
shoutcast:
http://fx.pdaudio.net:80
icecast:
http://tbrn.net:8888/fx.aac
Note: If you are using the Thompson mp3 pro decoder for Winamp, the
shoutcast stream will not work unless it is disabled. The icecast
feed will, however, since the .aac extention will not be passed off
to the mp3 pro decoder.
The bandwidth is low enough such that you can listen with either a
dial-up or broadband connection. Either way, you'll still get the
same great quality that AAC+ streaming provides.
Also, as the shoutcast server is on port 80, this means you can
listen to FX Radio behind any proxy server that only allows access
to http, such as universities and other institutions. Yes, a nice
distraction during class might be good, don't you think?
Why not freak out your friends, classmates or co-workers while
you're at it? Maybe all of the above?
Close your eyes, put on some headphones, tune in, and get ready for
a very strange, and altogether different experience!
It's FX Radio! No, really?
Mental Photo Album
Greetings. Its kind of unusual for me to be this coherent on a Saturday morning, since I'm usually barely awake or catching up on sleep. Make no mistake, after this is posted, I'll probably head back to bed. However, I felt somewhat reflective earlier and thought I'd submit this.
I was reading over the blog entries for my friend from Houston One Graham's View, looking for a particular link he had put up some time ago, and getting caught up in the memories.
I'm sure some blind people have photo albums, but by their nature, photo albums don't seem like the kinds of things that a blind person could get something out of. Oh sure, I'll probably have the obligatory album at some point, with pictures of myself and hopefully my family in them. However, for me at least, I get more enjoyment out of reading about things rather than looking at them. Besides, when you read something, you can create your own picture in your mind of how you think it should look, rather than the way it might actually look in the photo. As I was reading over the entries for OGV, I was remembering.
Though he hasn't made an entry in about 2 months, due to his new full time job no doubt (and I certainly know how that goes; I feel fortunate making these weekend posts as it is), it was cool reading over his past entries. That's a trip down memory lane, as they say, to read over entries from as much as a year ago and read what was happening and what people thought at the time. Indeed, the same emotions well up in me if I read over my own blog entries, remembering the highs an lows of a given time period.
So, in closing, even though I might not have a photo album, I think I've got something better in this blog. I have no idea how many people might read this on a daily or weekly basis. While that information might be neat to know at some point, that's not why I write this blog. No, I write it to chronicle my life and things I think are interesting. Hopefully they are interesting for the reader as much as they are to me. And, I suppose, I also chronicle them for myself, so I can go back and read a written record of what happened at certain points.
Quite reflective for this time of day, :) Well, I've got a couple of other ideas for posts later today or tomorrow. We'll see what develops until then. For now though, enjoy reading this blog or any other blog and going through that mental photo album.
I was reading over the blog entries for my friend from Houston One Graham's View, looking for a particular link he had put up some time ago, and getting caught up in the memories.
I'm sure some blind people have photo albums, but by their nature, photo albums don't seem like the kinds of things that a blind person could get something out of. Oh sure, I'll probably have the obligatory album at some point, with pictures of myself and hopefully my family in them. However, for me at least, I get more enjoyment out of reading about things rather than looking at them. Besides, when you read something, you can create your own picture in your mind of how you think it should look, rather than the way it might actually look in the photo. As I was reading over the entries for OGV, I was remembering.
Though he hasn't made an entry in about 2 months, due to his new full time job no doubt (and I certainly know how that goes; I feel fortunate making these weekend posts as it is), it was cool reading over his past entries. That's a trip down memory lane, as they say, to read over entries from as much as a year ago and read what was happening and what people thought at the time. Indeed, the same emotions well up in me if I read over my own blog entries, remembering the highs an lows of a given time period.
So, in closing, even though I might not have a photo album, I think I've got something better in this blog. I have no idea how many people might read this on a daily or weekly basis. While that information might be neat to know at some point, that's not why I write this blog. No, I write it to chronicle my life and things I think are interesting. Hopefully they are interesting for the reader as much as they are to me. And, I suppose, I also chronicle them for myself, so I can go back and read a written record of what happened at certain points.
Quite reflective for this time of day, :) Well, I've got a couple of other ideas for posts later today or tomorrow. We'll see what develops until then. For now though, enjoy reading this blog or any other blog and going through that mental photo album.
Friday, June 9
Hadley Web Seminar on Employment
Greetings. I received the following announcement via email. Please excuse any formatting errors. Enjoy.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 7, 2006
CONTACT:
The Hadley School for the Blind
(800) 323-4238
Best-Selling Author to Give Web Seminar on Employment Richard Nelson
Bolles, author of the best-selling job-hunting book in history, "2006:
What Color is Your Parachute?" will participate in
Seminars@Hadley,
a
series of Internet lectures hosted by The Hadley School for the Blind,
at 3:30 p.m. Central Time, Thursday, June 15. Participants can listen to
Mr. Bolles field questions on finding a successful career, disabilities
in the workplace and connecting to your spiritual life.
This seminar is free, but registration is required for this interactive
seminar. To register, go to
http://www.hadley.edu/seminar/
and follow
the "Registration" link. You will receive a confirmation e-mail
containing instructions to log in to the seminar. Please note
registration will only be taken online, and not by phone.
The 2006 edition of "What Color Is Your Parachute?" addresses finding
meaningful work and discovering your life's mission. His motivation for
the book was to make job information easily accessible.
Born in Milwaukee, Mr. Bolles is hailed as "America's top career expert"
by Modern Maturity Magazine, and "the one responsible for the
renaissance of the career counseling profession in the United States
over the past decade" by Money Magazine. He has sold more than 8 million
books. The Library of Congress recently placed "Parachute" on its list
of "25 books that have shaped readers lives" throughout history. The
only other living author on that list is Maya Angelou.
Technical requirements to participate in the seminar are:
For Windows: Windows98, ME, 2K, XP or 2003 (XP recommended) system,
Pentium 3 500 MHz or better CPU, 512 MB RAM, Internet Explorer 6 or
FireFox, JavaScript and cookies enabled in the browser, 56K or faster
Internet connection (broadband recommended), full duplex audio device,
speakers, and microphone (optional).
For Macintosh: Mac OS 10.3 system or later, 512 MB Ram, Safari or
FireFox browser, JavaScript and cookies enabled in the browser, 56 K or
faster Internet connection (broadband recommended), full duplex audio
device, speakers, and microphone (optional).
Editor's Note: The Hadley School for the Blind is the single largest
worldwide distance educator of blind and visually impaired people. Since
its founding by William Hadley and Dr. E.V.L. Brown in 1920, all of
Hadley's distance education courses have been provided free of charge.
Today, the school serves more than 10,000 students annually in all 50
states and 100 countries. Hadley relies on contributions from
individuals, foundations and corporations to fund its programs. Visit us
on the Web at
www.hadley.edu
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 7, 2006
CONTACT:
The Hadley School for the Blind
(800) 323-4238
Best-Selling Author to Give Web Seminar on Employment Richard Nelson
Bolles, author of the best-selling job-hunting book in history, "2006:
What Color is Your Parachute?" will participate in
Seminars@Hadley,
a
series of Internet lectures hosted by The Hadley School for the Blind,
at 3:30 p.m. Central Time, Thursday, June 15. Participants can listen to
Mr. Bolles field questions on finding a successful career, disabilities
in the workplace and connecting to your spiritual life.
This seminar is free, but registration is required for this interactive
seminar. To register, go to
http://www.hadley.edu/seminar/
and follow
the "Registration" link. You will receive a confirmation e-mail
containing instructions to log in to the seminar. Please note
registration will only be taken online, and not by phone.
The 2006 edition of "What Color Is Your Parachute?" addresses finding
meaningful work and discovering your life's mission. His motivation for
the book was to make job information easily accessible.
Born in Milwaukee, Mr. Bolles is hailed as "America's top career expert"
by Modern Maturity Magazine, and "the one responsible for the
renaissance of the career counseling profession in the United States
over the past decade" by Money Magazine. He has sold more than 8 million
books. The Library of Congress recently placed "Parachute" on its list
of "25 books that have shaped readers lives" throughout history. The
only other living author on that list is Maya Angelou.
Technical requirements to participate in the seminar are:
For Windows: Windows98, ME, 2K, XP or 2003 (XP recommended) system,
Pentium 3 500 MHz or better CPU, 512 MB RAM, Internet Explorer 6 or
FireFox, JavaScript and cookies enabled in the browser, 56K or faster
Internet connection (broadband recommended), full duplex audio device,
speakers, and microphone (optional).
For Macintosh: Mac OS 10.3 system or later, 512 MB Ram, Safari or
FireFox browser, JavaScript and cookies enabled in the browser, 56 K or
faster Internet connection (broadband recommended), full duplex audio
device, speakers, and microphone (optional).
Editor's Note: The Hadley School for the Blind is the single largest
worldwide distance educator of blind and visually impaired people. Since
its founding by William Hadley and Dr. E.V.L. Brown in 1920, all of
Hadley's distance education courses have been provided free of charge.
Today, the school serves more than 10,000 students annually in all 50
states and 100 countries. Hadley relies on contributions from
individuals, foundations and corporations to fund its programs. Visit us
on the Web at
www.hadley.edu
Thursday, June 8
Article on Website Accessibility
Greetings. The following article only illustrates that we will continue to see problems with website accessibility until websites are accepted as a "place of public accommodation" as defined by the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990). Granted, the ADA came out before the Web, but if a website is not accessible/usable for me, then I'm being locked out and denied access to it. Even though there are many sites that might not seem like they would be of much concern to me as far as access goes, such as a photography site, Target is definitely not one of those. Read on and discover what's going on, why the blind are prevented from access to some sites, and what the future might hold. For the record, Southwest Airlines faced a similar situation several years ago, as far as their site not being accessible to the blind. In the end, the case was dismissed and there was no favorable result as far as accessibility.
May 08, 2006
(Computerworld) --
Bruce Sexton Jr. wants to be able to access the same Web content that anyone
else can. Because he can't, he now finds himself at the center of a
potentially
precedent-setting legal fight over Web site accessibility.
Bruce Sexton Jr.
Bruce Sexton Jr.
Sexton, who is legally blind, relies on software that reads his PC's screen
from left to right and top to bottom, skipping ahead when he uses
keyboard-based
shortcuts. When he visits Target Corp.'s Web site, a robotic voice announces
staccato-style the presence of alternative text to describe images of the
retailer's logo and its "Target dog" mascot.
But the screen-reader software doesn't read the weekly list of special
offers on Target's Web site, Sexton said. He can't tell whether the numbers
he hears
on other parts of the home page correspond to products, files or something
else. Deeper into the site, he doesn't know which item goes with which
price.
"It's difficult to find anything," Sexton said. As a result, he no longer
tries to buy goods from the Target site, which for a long time he couldn't
do
anyway because, he said, it required the use of a mouse.
Sexton has joined the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) as a plaintiff
in a lawsuit that charges Target with violating the federal Americans With
Disabilities
Act (ADA) and California's Unruh Civil Rights Act and Disabled Persons Act.
The lawsuit, scheduled for a hearing next month at U.S. District Court in
San Francisco, could have a broad impact because Target's site is hardly the
only
one that could be accused of having access barriers, according to attorneys
for the plaintiffs.
Web 2.0 Challenge
The move from text-based to visually oriented Web content has been tough on
the blind, and now there's a new threat on the horizon. The shift to dynamic
"Web 2.0" technology, which Gartner Inc. predicts will be pervasive by the
end of next year, could exacerbate the problem of inaccessible sites.
A Web 2.0 application might make use of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML
(AJAX) and Dynamic HTML to update information in a table without having to
refresh
an entire Web page. But screen readers, magnifiers and other assistive
technology may not know which parts of the page have changed unless
developers take
steps to make sure the tools can glean that information.
Jeff Bishop, an application systems analyst at the University of Arizona in
Tucson
Jeff Bishop, an application systems analyst at the University of Arizona in
Tucson
"It's very, very, very scary," said Jeff Bishop, an application systems
analyst at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "Before, so what? You had a
missing
[alternative-text] tag, but at least you knew there was an image. You could
click on it, and maybe you could figure out what it was. Now, you don't even
know where to click. You don't know how to interact."
Bishop, who is blind, and other advocates for people with disabilities
aren't expecting an immediate fix. "We want to make sure companies are at
least hearing
what our concerns are," he said. "I'm not looking for a solution tomorrow.
Even if it takes two years, that's fine with me, as long as I know they're
working
on it."
But it's unclear whether many companies are doing so.
IBM, joined by other vendors, is leading a dynamic accessible Web content
initiative within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). One proposal outlines
a
development syntax for mapping information about the elements of Web
applications to an operating system's accessibility API so screen readers
and other
assistive technology will know what has changed on a Web page. A second
proposal details the means for adding semantic role information to a Web
application
so screen readers can identify rich objects, such as menus and tab panels,
on pages.
But the proposals are still in draft form, and adoption remains uncertain.
The Mozilla Foundation added support for the technology starting with its
Firefox
1.5 browser. Microsoft Corp., however, has said its upcoming Internet
Explorer 7.0 release won't support it, and the company has made no
commitments for
future editions of the browser.
Gartner analyst Ray Valdes has found that Fortune 500 companies have a very
low level of awareness about making their public Web sites accessible. Most
haven't modified their Web design and production methods and aren't thinking
about fixing their current sites because they assume that doing so would be
too costly, he said. They also haven't bothered to buy tools that could help
them improve accessibility, Valdes said.
The W3C released accessibility guidelines for Web authoring tools more than
six years ago, and it isn't aware of a single product that is fully
compliant,
said Judy Brewer, director of the consortium's Web accessibility initiative.
But Brewer added that many of the newer authoring tools do have features
that
provide more support for producing accessible content. "And users should
demand even better," she said.
Slow Demand
There are also evaluation tools that can assess a Web site's accessibility.
One of the leading vendors of evaluation tools, Watchfire Corp., has no more
than 70 U.S.-based corporate customers and 30 international users, largely
from the governmental and financial sectors, for its enterprise-grade tool,
according to Mike Weider, the Waltham, Mass.-based company's chief
technology officer.
"We've long expected the accessibility market to grow more than it has. It
really hasn't taken off," Weider said. But the NFB-Target case could change
that,
he added.
The allegations made against Target by the NFB and Sexton have set the stage
for a court showdown that could finally clear up the murky legal question of
whether the ADA, which was enacted in 1990, before the dawn of the Internet
era, applies to Web sites.
The lawsuit claims that because Target's site is difficult if not impossible
for the blind to use, the retailer is denying them equal access to the goods
and services it provides to customers without disabilities. The NFB this
week plans to file a motion for a preliminary injunction, asking the court
to
order Target to make its Web site accessible promptly.
Target two weeks ago updated a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that the
laws in question don't apply to Web sites because they aren't "physical"
places
of public accommodation. The Minneapolis-based retailer further claimed that
applying the California statutes to its Web site, which is accessible to
consumers
countrywide, would violate the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Mazen Basrawi, a lawyer at Berkeley, Calif.-based Disability Rights
Advocates, a co-counsel for the plaintiffs, contended that the ADA applies
to any public
place where commercial activity occurs -- including Web sites. And even if
the law didn't provide such blanket coverage, it would apply to Target's
site
because
www.target.com
is integrated with the retailer's brick-and-mortar
stores, Basrawi said.
Secil Watson, senior vice president of customer experience for the Internet
services group at Wells Fargo & Co., said a good time for a company to think
about making its site accessible is when it's planning a major redesign.
It's "the right thing to do," she said.
San Francisco-based Wells Fargo four years ago began its accessibility push
for people who are blind or visually impaired by making improvements to its
most popular pages. But Watson said it was a major restructuring a year
later that produced the most critical improvement: template-based pages that
helped
to enforce design and development consistency. "What was good for the people
with disabilities was good for everybody," she said.
Wells Fargo used the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), but
Watson said the Web team didn't stop there. It added site-specific details
to
the more general WCAG directive and created a training document for the
company's designers and developers to apply to both internal and external
sites.
In addition, some of the bank's user-interface designers have been trained
in the use of screen readers so they can see the bank's external site from
the
perspective of a blind customer. "We're not just trying to make the site
accessible," Watson said. "We're trying to make it a decent experience."
Like other companies, Wells Fargo is interested in exploring the use of
DHTML and AJAX to create Web-based applications that could offer an even
better
online experience to end users. But Watson said that first the bank will
have to figure out how to make the new technologies accessible.
Finding the Time
Nate Koechley, a senior front-end engineer at Yahoo Inc., which has already
taken the AJAX and DHTML plunge, said learning to build accessibility
features
into applications developed with those technologies is mostly an issue of
finding enough time, given the intense, almost frantic atmosphere of Web
development.
"Preserving and enriching accessibility is just another constraint of Web
design and engineering," he said.
Koechley added that the development team at Yahoo has a great in-house
resource -- Victor Tsaran, the company's accessibility program manager, who
is blind
himself. "Now we can go over to his cube and say, 'Hey, does this work for
you? Check it out,' " Koechley said.
Mike Paciello, founder of The Paciello Group LLP, a Nashua, N.H.-based
consulting firm that works to enhance the accessibility of software, said he
is optimistic
that the process of making applications accessible won't lag with
technologies like AJAX and DHTML to the degree that it has with other
technologies in
the past.
"Technology that supports people with disabilities is so far behind," he
said. "Whenever they start to get caught up, they get thrown back another
five
steps. [But] with AJAX, I don't think it will be five steps back because we
already have a handle on it. We're probably one or two steps back."
For Paciello, the lack of a dynamic leader to raise awareness about the need
for increased accessibility remains the larger problem.
And there's still much more work to be done, according to advocates for
people with disabilities. Sexton, for one, said that he still can spend
hours trying
to figure out whether a Web site is just difficult to navigate or not
accessible at all.
"It's frustrates me to no end," he said, "and it makes me feel that I'm not
able to do something that everybody else can."
May 08, 2006
(Computerworld) --
Bruce Sexton Jr. wants to be able to access the same Web content that anyone
else can. Because he can't, he now finds himself at the center of a
potentially
precedent-setting legal fight over Web site accessibility.
Bruce Sexton Jr.
Bruce Sexton Jr.
Sexton, who is legally blind, relies on software that reads his PC's screen
from left to right and top to bottom, skipping ahead when he uses
keyboard-based
shortcuts. When he visits Target Corp.'s Web site, a robotic voice announces
staccato-style the presence of alternative text to describe images of the
retailer's logo and its "Target dog" mascot.
But the screen-reader software doesn't read the weekly list of special
offers on Target's Web site, Sexton said. He can't tell whether the numbers
he hears
on other parts of the home page correspond to products, files or something
else. Deeper into the site, he doesn't know which item goes with which
price.
"It's difficult to find anything," Sexton said. As a result, he no longer
tries to buy goods from the Target site, which for a long time he couldn't
do
anyway because, he said, it required the use of a mouse.
Sexton has joined the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) as a plaintiff
in a lawsuit that charges Target with violating the federal Americans With
Disabilities
Act (ADA) and California's Unruh Civil Rights Act and Disabled Persons Act.
The lawsuit, scheduled for a hearing next month at U.S. District Court in
San Francisco, could have a broad impact because Target's site is hardly the
only
one that could be accused of having access barriers, according to attorneys
for the plaintiffs.
Web 2.0 Challenge
The move from text-based to visually oriented Web content has been tough on
the blind, and now there's a new threat on the horizon. The shift to dynamic
"Web 2.0" technology, which Gartner Inc. predicts will be pervasive by the
end of next year, could exacerbate the problem of inaccessible sites.
A Web 2.0 application might make use of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML
(AJAX) and Dynamic HTML to update information in a table without having to
refresh
an entire Web page. But screen readers, magnifiers and other assistive
technology may not know which parts of the page have changed unless
developers take
steps to make sure the tools can glean that information.
Jeff Bishop, an application systems analyst at the University of Arizona in
Tucson
Jeff Bishop, an application systems analyst at the University of Arizona in
Tucson
"It's very, very, very scary," said Jeff Bishop, an application systems
analyst at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "Before, so what? You had a
missing
[alternative-text] tag, but at least you knew there was an image. You could
click on it, and maybe you could figure out what it was. Now, you don't even
know where to click. You don't know how to interact."
Bishop, who is blind, and other advocates for people with disabilities
aren't expecting an immediate fix. "We want to make sure companies are at
least hearing
what our concerns are," he said. "I'm not looking for a solution tomorrow.
Even if it takes two years, that's fine with me, as long as I know they're
working
on it."
But it's unclear whether many companies are doing so.
IBM, joined by other vendors, is leading a dynamic accessible Web content
initiative within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). One proposal outlines
a
development syntax for mapping information about the elements of Web
applications to an operating system's accessibility API so screen readers
and other
assistive technology will know what has changed on a Web page. A second
proposal details the means for adding semantic role information to a Web
application
so screen readers can identify rich objects, such as menus and tab panels,
on pages.
But the proposals are still in draft form, and adoption remains uncertain.
The Mozilla Foundation added support for the technology starting with its
Firefox
1.5 browser. Microsoft Corp., however, has said its upcoming Internet
Explorer 7.0 release won't support it, and the company has made no
commitments for
future editions of the browser.
Gartner analyst Ray Valdes has found that Fortune 500 companies have a very
low level of awareness about making their public Web sites accessible. Most
haven't modified their Web design and production methods and aren't thinking
about fixing their current sites because they assume that doing so would be
too costly, he said. They also haven't bothered to buy tools that could help
them improve accessibility, Valdes said.
The W3C released accessibility guidelines for Web authoring tools more than
six years ago, and it isn't aware of a single product that is fully
compliant,
said Judy Brewer, director of the consortium's Web accessibility initiative.
But Brewer added that many of the newer authoring tools do have features
that
provide more support for producing accessible content. "And users should
demand even better," she said.
Slow Demand
There are also evaluation tools that can assess a Web site's accessibility.
One of the leading vendors of evaluation tools, Watchfire Corp., has no more
than 70 U.S.-based corporate customers and 30 international users, largely
from the governmental and financial sectors, for its enterprise-grade tool,
according to Mike Weider, the Waltham, Mass.-based company's chief
technology officer.
"We've long expected the accessibility market to grow more than it has. It
really hasn't taken off," Weider said. But the NFB-Target case could change
that,
he added.
The allegations made against Target by the NFB and Sexton have set the stage
for a court showdown that could finally clear up the murky legal question of
whether the ADA, which was enacted in 1990, before the dawn of the Internet
era, applies to Web sites.
The lawsuit claims that because Target's site is difficult if not impossible
for the blind to use, the retailer is denying them equal access to the goods
and services it provides to customers without disabilities. The NFB this
week plans to file a motion for a preliminary injunction, asking the court
to
order Target to make its Web site accessible promptly.
Target two weeks ago updated a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that the
laws in question don't apply to Web sites because they aren't "physical"
places
of public accommodation. The Minneapolis-based retailer further claimed that
applying the California statutes to its Web site, which is accessible to
consumers
countrywide, would violate the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Mazen Basrawi, a lawyer at Berkeley, Calif.-based Disability Rights
Advocates, a co-counsel for the plaintiffs, contended that the ADA applies
to any public
place where commercial activity occurs -- including Web sites. And even if
the law didn't provide such blanket coverage, it would apply to Target's
site
because
www.target.com
is integrated with the retailer's brick-and-mortar
stores, Basrawi said.
Secil Watson, senior vice president of customer experience for the Internet
services group at Wells Fargo & Co., said a good time for a company to think
about making its site accessible is when it's planning a major redesign.
It's "the right thing to do," she said.
San Francisco-based Wells Fargo four years ago began its accessibility push
for people who are blind or visually impaired by making improvements to its
most popular pages. But Watson said it was a major restructuring a year
later that produced the most critical improvement: template-based pages that
helped
to enforce design and development consistency. "What was good for the people
with disabilities was good for everybody," she said.
Wells Fargo used the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), but
Watson said the Web team didn't stop there. It added site-specific details
to
the more general WCAG directive and created a training document for the
company's designers and developers to apply to both internal and external
sites.
In addition, some of the bank's user-interface designers have been trained
in the use of screen readers so they can see the bank's external site from
the
perspective of a blind customer. "We're not just trying to make the site
accessible," Watson said. "We're trying to make it a decent experience."
Like other companies, Wells Fargo is interested in exploring the use of
DHTML and AJAX to create Web-based applications that could offer an even
better
online experience to end users. But Watson said that first the bank will
have to figure out how to make the new technologies accessible.
Finding the Time
Nate Koechley, a senior front-end engineer at Yahoo Inc., which has already
taken the AJAX and DHTML plunge, said learning to build accessibility
features
into applications developed with those technologies is mostly an issue of
finding enough time, given the intense, almost frantic atmosphere of Web
development.
"Preserving and enriching accessibility is just another constraint of Web
design and engineering," he said.
Koechley added that the development team at Yahoo has a great in-house
resource -- Victor Tsaran, the company's accessibility program manager, who
is blind
himself. "Now we can go over to his cube and say, 'Hey, does this work for
you? Check it out,' " Koechley said.
Mike Paciello, founder of The Paciello Group LLP, a Nashua, N.H.-based
consulting firm that works to enhance the accessibility of software, said he
is optimistic
that the process of making applications accessible won't lag with
technologies like AJAX and DHTML to the degree that it has with other
technologies in
the past.
"Technology that supports people with disabilities is so far behind," he
said. "Whenever they start to get caught up, they get thrown back another
five
steps. [But] with AJAX, I don't think it will be five steps back because we
already have a handle on it. We're probably one or two steps back."
For Paciello, the lack of a dynamic leader to raise awareness about the need
for increased accessibility remains the larger problem.
And there's still much more work to be done, according to advocates for
people with disabilities. Sexton, for one, said that he still can spend
hours trying
to figure out whether a Web site is just difficult to navigate or not
accessible at all.
"It's frustrates me to no end," he said, "and it makes me feel that I'm not
able to do something that everybody else can."
Sunday, May 28
More Things Added to Newsline
Greetings. I've just discovered that the monthly magazine Diabetes Self Management and the daily newspaper the Dallas Morning News have both been added to the NFB Newsline service. Before I composed this post, I went to Book Share to see if both were there yet, and only the Dallas Morning News was listed. Still, these are good things for people with diabetes, or those who want to read/learn about Dallas for the coming convention. Or, as for me, those who want to read the Morning News that haven't had that chance before now!
Saturday, May 27
How to Write Good
Greetings. The following article presents writing well in a funny way, but consider the suggestions below the next time you have to compose an email message or write a report. Enjoy.
How to Write Good
Frank L. Visco
Vice-president and Senior Copywriter at USAdvertising.
My several years in the word game have learnt me several rules:
1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)
4. Employ the vernacular.
5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
8. Contractions aren't necessary.
9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
10. One should never generalize.
11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: ``I hate
quotations. Tell me what you know.''
12. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
13. Don't be redundant; don't more use words than necessary; it's highly
superfluous.
14. Profanity sucks.
15. Be more or less specific.
16. Understatement is always best.
17. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
20. The passive voice is to be avoided.
21. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
22. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
23. Who needs rhetorical questions?
How to Write Good
Frank L. Visco
Vice-president and Senior Copywriter at USAdvertising.
My several years in the word game have learnt me several rules:
1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)
4. Employ the vernacular.
5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
8. Contractions aren't necessary.
9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
10. One should never generalize.
11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: ``I hate
quotations. Tell me what you know.''
12. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
13. Don't be redundant; don't more use words than necessary; it's highly
superfluous.
14. Profanity sucks.
15. Be more or less specific.
16. Understatement is always best.
17. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
20. The passive voice is to be avoided.
21. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
22. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
23. Who needs rhetorical questions?
Monday, May 22
Facts About Texas
Greetings. Here's another post in the series on Dallas and Texas. For those that don't know, I'm getting the material from an National Federation of the Blind email list, in anticipation of its national convention the first week in July in Dallas. As always, please excuse any formatting errors. And, welcome to those from the Blind Confidential blog. Enjoy.
From the Texas Historical Commission:
Flags Over Texas
Six flags have flown over Texas: Spain, France, United Mexican States,
Confederate States of America, the Republic of Texas and the United States
of America,
with eight changes of government:
Country or Government
Dates
Spanish
1519-1685
French
1685-1690
Spanish
1690-1821
Mexican
1821-1836
Republic of Texas
1836-1845
United States
1845-1861
Confederate States
1861-1865
United States
1865-present
Natural and Man-made Wonders
The tidewater coastline of Texas stretches 624 miles along the Gulf of
Mexico and contains more than 600 historic shipwrecks.
The tallest point in Texas is Guadalupe Peak at 8,751 feet.
The Capitol in Austin, built of Texas pink granite, opened May 16, 1888. The
dome of the Capitol stands seven feet higher than that of the nation's
Capitol
in Washington, D.C.
The Governor's Mansion, built in 1856, is the oldest remaining public
building in downtown Austin.
The largest body of water completely within the boundaries of Texas is Sam
Rayburn Reservoir in East Texas, which covers 113,400 acres.
Texas has four national forests (Angelina, Davy Crockett, Sabine and Sam
Houston), two national parks (Big Bend and Guadalupe Mountains), one
national seashore
(Padre Island), one national preserve (the Big Thicket), two national
recreation areas (Amistad and Lake Meredith) and one national monument
(Alibates
Flint Quarries).
With more than 267,000 square miles, Texas is as large as all of New
England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois combined.
Archeology Fun Facts
The Spanish explorers and missionaries, who were the first Europeans to
enter Texas, often adopted Texas Indian names for rivers and other natural
features.
The Spaniards translated the place names into Spanish, and many of the
Indian origins for place-names have been lost. See our selection of
Texas place-names derived from Indian languages
as well as names that are associated with Indians or their activities.
. Native Americans did not use the bow and arrow until about 1,500 years
ago - earlier hunters used spears.
. The horse was introduced to American Indians by the Spaniards after 1500.
. Bison (or American buffalo) were hunted by Native Americans on foot long
before the horse was introduced into the New World.
. The Karankawa of the Texas coast spoke a language related to Indian
languages of the Caribbean region.
. Prehistoric tribes in Texas traded for turquoise and obsidian from New
Mexico, shell from the Pacific and Atlantic coasts and exotic stone from as
far
away as Minnesota.
. A stone quarry in Texas was used for millennia by inhabitants of the
southern Great Plains and is now a national monument - Alibates National
Monument
- in the Amarillo area.
buffalo pictograph
. In addition to projectile points (stone points for arrows and spears),
Native Americans used stone, bone and shell for knives, drills, axes, awls,
hoes
and grinding implements.
. Prehistoric people in Texas used plant fibers to make baskets, mats,
sandals and other useful objects. Well-preserved woven sandals have been
found by
archeologists in the dry rock shelters of southwestern Texas.
. Some of the most impressive prehistoric rock art in North America is found
in Texas - visitors can see excellent examples at Hueco Tanks and Seminole
Canyon State Historic Sites.
. Not all Native Americans lived in tipis. Many villagers lived in thatched
or adobe houses, and many nomadic groups lived in brush- or hide-covered
shelters
or rock shelters.
. Corn has been cultivated in Texas for at least 2,000 years. Beans and
squash were other staple foods of the early Texas agriculturalists.
. The accounts of early explorers help archeologists understand many sites.
Much that we know about the historic tribes of southern Texas comes from the
accounts of Cabeza de Vaca, who was shipwrecked on the Texas coast and
traveled through southern Texas and northern Mexico for eight years, from
1528 until
1536.
. The first black explorer in Texas was Esteban, a Moor who traveled with
Cabeza de Vaca.
monkey pictograph
. The Tigua tribe came to the El Paso area from New Mexico in the 1680s, and
some of their fields have been in continuous cultivation since that time.
. The Alamo is a Spanish mission and was the first mission established in
San Antonio, in 1718.
. The first ranches in Texas were the 18th-century Spanish mission ranches
along the San Antonio River, where mission Indians tended the livestock.
. As many as 90 percent of the recorded archeological sites in some areas of
Texas have been damaged or destroyed.
Early Inhabitants of Texas
About 10,000 B.C., the first Indians arrived in Texas. These ancient peoples
are called Paleo-Indians. They hunted mammoths and giant bison and other
animals
that later became extinct.
After 6,000 B.C., Indian lifeways changed, and archeologists call the time
in Texas from then to about A.D. 500 the Archaic Period. During this period
Indians
painted beautiful murals depicting human scenes and religious ceremonies on
cave walls in dry areas of West Texas.
The years from A.D. 500 to A.D. 1500 are called the Late Prehistoric Period.
Agricultural Indians domesticated some of our principal crops, including
cotton,
corn, beans, squash, tomatoes and potatoes. Burial and temple mounds of
these early farmers can be found in the piney woods of East Texas.
From the Texas Historical Commission:
Flags Over Texas
Six flags have flown over Texas: Spain, France, United Mexican States,
Confederate States of America, the Republic of Texas and the United States
of America,
with eight changes of government:
Country or Government
Dates
Spanish
1519-1685
French
1685-1690
Spanish
1690-1821
Mexican
1821-1836
Republic of Texas
1836-1845
United States
1845-1861
Confederate States
1861-1865
United States
1865-present
Natural and Man-made Wonders
The tidewater coastline of Texas stretches 624 miles along the Gulf of
Mexico and contains more than 600 historic shipwrecks.
The tallest point in Texas is Guadalupe Peak at 8,751 feet.
The Capitol in Austin, built of Texas pink granite, opened May 16, 1888. The
dome of the Capitol stands seven feet higher than that of the nation's
Capitol
in Washington, D.C.
The Governor's Mansion, built in 1856, is the oldest remaining public
building in downtown Austin.
The largest body of water completely within the boundaries of Texas is Sam
Rayburn Reservoir in East Texas, which covers 113,400 acres.
Texas has four national forests (Angelina, Davy Crockett, Sabine and Sam
Houston), two national parks (Big Bend and Guadalupe Mountains), one
national seashore
(Padre Island), one national preserve (the Big Thicket), two national
recreation areas (Amistad and Lake Meredith) and one national monument
(Alibates
Flint Quarries).
With more than 267,000 square miles, Texas is as large as all of New
England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois combined.
Archeology Fun Facts
The Spanish explorers and missionaries, who were the first Europeans to
enter Texas, often adopted Texas Indian names for rivers and other natural
features.
The Spaniards translated the place names into Spanish, and many of the
Indian origins for place-names have been lost. See our selection of
Texas place-names derived from Indian languages
as well as names that are associated with Indians or their activities.
. Native Americans did not use the bow and arrow until about 1,500 years
ago - earlier hunters used spears.
. The horse was introduced to American Indians by the Spaniards after 1500.
. Bison (or American buffalo) were hunted by Native Americans on foot long
before the horse was introduced into the New World.
. The Karankawa of the Texas coast spoke a language related to Indian
languages of the Caribbean region.
. Prehistoric tribes in Texas traded for turquoise and obsidian from New
Mexico, shell from the Pacific and Atlantic coasts and exotic stone from as
far
away as Minnesota.
. A stone quarry in Texas was used for millennia by inhabitants of the
southern Great Plains and is now a national monument - Alibates National
Monument
- in the Amarillo area.
buffalo pictograph
. In addition to projectile points (stone points for arrows and spears),
Native Americans used stone, bone and shell for knives, drills, axes, awls,
hoes
and grinding implements.
. Prehistoric people in Texas used plant fibers to make baskets, mats,
sandals and other useful objects. Well-preserved woven sandals have been
found by
archeologists in the dry rock shelters of southwestern Texas.
. Some of the most impressive prehistoric rock art in North America is found
in Texas - visitors can see excellent examples at Hueco Tanks and Seminole
Canyon State Historic Sites.
. Not all Native Americans lived in tipis. Many villagers lived in thatched
or adobe houses, and many nomadic groups lived in brush- or hide-covered
shelters
or rock shelters.
. Corn has been cultivated in Texas for at least 2,000 years. Beans and
squash were other staple foods of the early Texas agriculturalists.
. The accounts of early explorers help archeologists understand many sites.
Much that we know about the historic tribes of southern Texas comes from the
accounts of Cabeza de Vaca, who was shipwrecked on the Texas coast and
traveled through southern Texas and northern Mexico for eight years, from
1528 until
1536.
. The first black explorer in Texas was Esteban, a Moor who traveled with
Cabeza de Vaca.
monkey pictograph
. The Tigua tribe came to the El Paso area from New Mexico in the 1680s, and
some of their fields have been in continuous cultivation since that time.
. The Alamo is a Spanish mission and was the first mission established in
San Antonio, in 1718.
. The first ranches in Texas were the 18th-century Spanish mission ranches
along the San Antonio River, where mission Indians tended the livestock.
. As many as 90 percent of the recorded archeological sites in some areas of
Texas have been damaged or destroyed.
Early Inhabitants of Texas
About 10,000 B.C., the first Indians arrived in Texas. These ancient peoples
are called Paleo-Indians. They hunted mammoths and giant bison and other
animals
that later became extinct.
After 6,000 B.C., Indian lifeways changed, and archeologists call the time
in Texas from then to about A.D. 500 the Archaic Period. During this period
Indians
painted beautiful murals depicting human scenes and religious ceremonies on
cave walls in dry areas of West Texas.
The years from A.D. 500 to A.D. 1500 are called the Late Prehistoric Period.
Agricultural Indians domesticated some of our principal crops, including
cotton,
corn, beans, squash, tomatoes and potatoes. Burial and temple mounds of
these early farmers can be found in the piney woods of East Texas.
Saturday, May 20
Web-Braille is Back
Greetings. It was only a matter of time this would happen. Web-Braille is back!
Certain people and blogs have speculated on the demise of this service for the time it was down, and some have even put together a petition to bring Web-Braille back. Personally, I think that if this service was as popular as it was, and if enough people emailed the people at NLS expressing their concern that Web-Braille was down, it was only a matter of time before it was fully restored. Evidently, this happened, at least in part. We'll probably know the full story, or more of it, later in the summer when the conventions happen and the NLS people give their annual reports. Though I'm glad the service has returned, I still think that the Web-Braille saga in the last week or two will be a big topic/concern and likely be one of the first issues asked about after the NLS presentations at the conventions.
However, as the Google petition, to make their visual verification code accessible to the blind, got so much coverage and nearly 4800 people signed it, some people have started to think that petitions can solve a problem. Granted, this is just speculation on my part, but I think its valid. Anyway, I never looked at the Web-Braille petition numbers myself, nor did I sign it. Not because I don't support the service, far from it. As I said before, I didn't sign because I had a feeling that the service would be back if enough people emailed NLS, which apparently happened. Petitions, and law suits, have their places. I'm not so sure that Web-Braille deserved one, but that's just my opinion.
Anyway, you can read the text of the return of Web-Braille on the Blind Access Journal among others.
I have enjoyed reading Jonathan Mosen's thoughts on the whole situation, and his reflections and own experiences related to getting material in a specialized format, since he's in the United States from another country. Read his thoughts on the Mosen Explosion Blog. He's currently in a stage where he's putting up lots of news stories and links of different kinds, so you might need to search a little for his comments. One entry that comes to mind immediately is at around 3:30 PM on 5/19/06.
NLS has put some extra security measures in the Web-Braille system, but then again, we knew they would. Speaking realistically here and not with any sort of affiliation with anything implied, its getting harder and harder to exchange free stuff online without any sort of security or copyright concerns. Not that I'm complaining, but just stating fact.
So, go and get that Braille file book that you've wanted to get but couldn't!
Certain people and blogs have speculated on the demise of this service for the time it was down, and some have even put together a petition to bring Web-Braille back. Personally, I think that if this service was as popular as it was, and if enough people emailed the people at NLS expressing their concern that Web-Braille was down, it was only a matter of time before it was fully restored. Evidently, this happened, at least in part. We'll probably know the full story, or more of it, later in the summer when the conventions happen and the NLS people give their annual reports. Though I'm glad the service has returned, I still think that the Web-Braille saga in the last week or two will be a big topic/concern and likely be one of the first issues asked about after the NLS presentations at the conventions.
However, as the Google petition, to make their visual verification code accessible to the blind, got so much coverage and nearly 4800 people signed it, some people have started to think that petitions can solve a problem. Granted, this is just speculation on my part, but I think its valid. Anyway, I never looked at the Web-Braille petition numbers myself, nor did I sign it. Not because I don't support the service, far from it. As I said before, I didn't sign because I had a feeling that the service would be back if enough people emailed NLS, which apparently happened. Petitions, and law suits, have their places. I'm not so sure that Web-Braille deserved one, but that's just my opinion.
Anyway, you can read the text of the return of Web-Braille on the Blind Access Journal among others.
I have enjoyed reading Jonathan Mosen's thoughts on the whole situation, and his reflections and own experiences related to getting material in a specialized format, since he's in the United States from another country. Read his thoughts on the Mosen Explosion Blog. He's currently in a stage where he's putting up lots of news stories and links of different kinds, so you might need to search a little for his comments. One entry that comes to mind immediately is at around 3:30 PM on 5/19/06.
NLS has put some extra security measures in the Web-Braille system, but then again, we knew they would. Speaking realistically here and not with any sort of affiliation with anything implied, its getting harder and harder to exchange free stuff online without any sort of security or copyright concerns. Not that I'm complaining, but just stating fact.
So, go and get that Braille file book that you've wanted to get but couldn't!
Wednesday, May 17
Google SMS
Greetings. Well, now that I have a cell phone that I can access, I can do what I've always wanted to do, or at least have wanted to do for the past few years: send and receive text messages. So, I successfully signed up for a Google account earlier today. While I was poking around on the many parts of the Google empire, I came across its Google SMS service, where you can send text messages and search the web and get information with Google in the driver's seat. I thought I'd try it out and messaged "Dallas Mavericks" to 46645 (or Googl). Within a few seconds, I got a reply back in my phone's Inbox. When I opened it, there was the last game's score, where the game was played, and even stars around Dallas, I suppose to indicate the city of the team I searched for. Below all that, in a separate paragraph, was a listing of the next game at 9:30 Central time tonight.
For once in my life, I doubted Google, remembering that I saw the Mavs Spurs game on at 7 in a TV listing. When I turned on TNT though, sure enough, the announcers were talking about the game between Cleveland and Detroit. So Google was right, as always, :)
I've been looking for a way to get the scores for my favorite teams, since I'm now in Austin and not in my long time home town of Dallas, and all of the Dallas teams I'm interested in, or other teams, may not be reported on the local media; I can now get their scores. I can also get the weather for any city, stock quotes, news briefs, and much more.
If you're interested in the many services available to you with a text messaging or web enabled cell phone, then check out the list of services on Google Mobile. This will really help during football season for checking on those NFL or college teams I like. I'm still looking for a service that will automatically message me with the current scores, etc. So if anyone knows of such a thing, then let me know. That would eliminate the need to send a message out for the information. Regardless though, this Google SMS thing is a truly handy thing to have around!
For once in my life, I doubted Google, remembering that I saw the Mavs Spurs game on at 7 in a TV listing. When I turned on TNT though, sure enough, the announcers were talking about the game between Cleveland and Detroit. So Google was right, as always, :)
I've been looking for a way to get the scores for my favorite teams, since I'm now in Austin and not in my long time home town of Dallas, and all of the Dallas teams I'm interested in, or other teams, may not be reported on the local media; I can now get their scores. I can also get the weather for any city, stock quotes, news briefs, and much more.
If you're interested in the many services available to you with a text messaging or web enabled cell phone, then check out the list of services on Google Mobile. This will really help during football season for checking on those NFL or college teams I like. I'm still looking for a service that will automatically message me with the current scores, etc. So if anyone knows of such a thing, then let me know. That would eliminate the need to send a message out for the information. Regardless though, this Google SMS thing is a truly handy thing to have around!
Saturday, May 13
A Unique T-Shirt
Greetings. When listening to the best sports station in the world, in my humble opinion, Sports Radio 1310, The Ticket, from Dallas, the other day I heard an ad for their item of the month. Each month, they feature a different item, some that you would want to have and some you might not. Anyway, May's item is a Ticket T-shirt done in Braille. The Braille T-shirt is not new, but given that I never thought I'd have one from The Ticket is notable. Supposedly, the shirt says, "Sports radio 1310 The Ticket," in Braille. I'm not sure of this since, I'm wondering if a bunch of people at a guy talk/sports station can make proper braille. I've also heard, in the same ad, that there was raised print, which wouldn't qualify as braille exactly. Regardless, I took the plunge and should get my shirt any day now.
Incidentally, if you're interested in getting one of these shirts, while they last, you can order one from this secure web page.
I suppose this could fit in the series of posts on Dallas. So order your shirt, and show it off at convention with pride. If you're interested in exactly what goes on at The ticket, then click here to listen to The Ticket online. Enjoy.
Incidentally, if you're interested in getting one of these shirts, while they last, you can order one from this secure web page.
I suppose this could fit in the series of posts on Dallas. So order your shirt, and show it off at convention with pride. If you're interested in exactly what goes on at The ticket, then click here to listen to The Ticket online. Enjoy.
ATIA 2006 Archives Available
Did you miss the ATIA Conference in Orlando?
If you made it, did you miss some presentations due to scheduling conflicts?
Now you can access much of the valuable information shared at the ATIA
Conference through www.atiaonline.org
Event Title.........................ATIA 2006 Online Conference
Where.............................Online at www.atiaonline.org
- it's all online!
When?............................ Now! Your virtual booth will be live
through November 30, 2006.
The Cost? ........................Free access to over 50 presentations;
$49.00 for access to all archives
Over 100 hours of audio and video recordings were captured at the ATIA
(Assistive Technology Industry Association) conference held in Orlando this
past
January. ATIA partnered with OcuSource to create the www.atiaonline.org
website. The website, powered by OcuSource's subsidiary service LetsGoExpo online conferencing, brings recordings generated at the live conference to end
users unable to attend the live event held in Orlando. The site has audio
recordings, samplings of streamed video, documents and more.
List of archived presentations:
* A "Continuum of Learning" for Children Using AAC Systems
* AAC Intervention with Children and Adolescents: Getting Results!
* AAC Interventions for Communication Partners: Cross Cultural Applications
* Accessible E-Learning Demonstrations Using IMS Accessibility
Specifications
* Accessible Information Technology in Education: An Awareness Video
* Accessible Multimedia in E-books
* AGE Appropriate Services for Adolescent and Adult Communicators with
Severe- Profound Disabilities
* AT and UDL: Teaming Up to Meet the Needs of All Learners
* AT Consideration in the IEP: To Be or Not to Be
* AT Outcome Data Collection Tools--Platform Independent and Web-Based
* Avoiding the Pitfalls, Brick Walls, and Trees of Assistive Technology
* Blogging the Accessible Way
* Building Effective Campus-Based Teams with the ATSTAR Curriculum
* Building Interactive Classrooms Through Environmental Engineering and AAC
* Closing the Circuit: Building Accessible Modules from the Ground Up
* Developing a Universally Designed Curriculum: One Unit at a Time
* DISTANCE LEARNING: POLICIES AND PRACTICES THAT PROMOTE ACCESSIBLE DESIGN
* Expanding the Benefits of Cooperative Buying: Sharing What We've Learned
* Finding Their Bliss: Discovering Ways to Increase Active Participation
* Getting Started with School-based Data Collection on AT Strategies and
Tools
* Guidelines for Submitting Manuscripts to Assistive Technology Outcomes and
Benefits
* Implementing AAC in Acute Care Settings Beginning in Intensive Care
* Increasing Mean Length of Utterances on AAC: An Action Research Project
* Inside the Trainer's Studio
* Instructional Strategies for Using Video Magnifiers
* Integrating AAC Into Leisure and Learning
* Interpretype for Deaf and Deaf-Blind Communication
* Let's Play! Selecting Toys with Universal Design Features
* Low Tech Adaptations Across the Curriculum
* Mastering Microsoft Word
* Moving Students Forward
* Note Taking Strategies Using Technology for Students Who Are Visually
Impaired
* Organizing my Space
* Partner-Assisted Communication Strategies for Children Who Face Multiple
Challenges
* QIATConversations: 2006 Update
* Sorting through Symbol to Text Systems
* STFLS Meets Core Vocabulary for AAC Users: Supporting Language and
Literacy Through Start-to-Finish
* Supported Readings: Understanding Symbol Supports
* Switching to Talk - Not Just Talking Switches
* Tactual Literacy for Students with Severe Cognitive Challenges
* Teacher Use of Kidspiration with Elementary Students: Impact of Teacher
Training
* Technology in the Preschool Setting: The Impact of CollaborativeTraining
* The Assistive Technology Wheel for Young Children
* The C.O.A.S.T.: A Framework to Facilitate Assistive Technology and
Inclusion
* The Economics of Developing Assistive Technology: A Hypothetical Case
Study
* The True Power of Teaching with Technology
* The User Experience: Accessibility and Usability in the Online Environment
* Thinking Beyond AT in the Classroom Phase 2 of ILT Project
* Using Assistive Technology to Increase Undergraduate Student Engagement
* Using Technology to Enhance Literacy and Language Skills
* Using Written Assistive Technology Implementation Plans
* Video in the Classroom on a Shoestring Budget
* Visual Considerations for Individuals with Complex Communication Needs
Music Events Between July 1-7
Greetings. Here's another in the series on the Dallas area, this time on
music events that will be happening during the NFB convention. Enjoy.
Music Events Between July 1 and July 7:
07/01
Salsa Lessons
214-654-9595,
Escapade 2009 -
07/01
Kerry Daniel & Nitebeat
214-826-8104,
Balcony Club -
07/01
Reggae Vibes
214-742-4743,
Palm Beach Club -
07/01
80's Retro Music
214-939-0077,
Club Clearview -
07/02
Cool Down Sundays
214-742-4743,
Palm Beach Club -
07/03
Arthur Riddles
214-826-8104,
Balcony Club -
07/03
Daniel Pitzer
214-826-8104,
Balcony Club -
07/04
Southern Strums: Texas Edition
877-887-5902
Hilton Anatole, Room To Bbe Announced (location will be in convention
agenda)
07/05
B&B Chorus
214-821-3340,
Betwixt & Between -
07/06
Electric Campfire Acoustic...
214-747-4422,
Sons of Hermann Hall -
07/07
Merengue, Bachata, Salsa a...
214-654-9595,
Escapade 2009 -
Most popular bars in Dallas, according to AOL City Guide:
1. 8.0 Restaurant & Bar
2. Purgatory
3. Cowboys Red River
4. Monica's Aca y Alla
5. Venice Beach Teen Club
6. Gypsy Tea Room
7. Blue
8. The Capital Grille
9. Lizard Lounge
10. NOKIA Theatre Grand Prairie
11. Abacus
12. Cuba Libre Cafe
13. Fox and Hound English Pub & Grille
14. Velvet Hookah
15. Billy Bob's Texas
Friday, May 12
Email Posting
Greetings. When I first heard of posting via email, I never thought I'd get
into it as much as I am. I tried to set it up for my trip to Guatemala last
summer, but had some troubles. Now though, I'm able to post flawlessly,
aside from getting used to putting links in a different way in my messages.
Plus, there's the bonus of an automatic spell check from Outlook Express or
Outlook, instead of hoping a word is spelled correctly. I may even be able
to post like this at the national convention in a few weeks, but we'll have
to see. That would be cool though: to pound out a message and send it from
the hotel's Wi-Fi connection, while sitting and drinking my morning brew.
Anyway, posting like this beats trudging through forms mode and dealing with
the occasional, but sometimes frequent, stops and starts of JAWS. Give me
email posting any day!
Until later.
Getting Around the Metroplex
Greetings. For those going to the National federation of the Blind's
upcoming national convention in Dallas, or anyone else interested in the DFW
transportation scene, here's the scoop. This message originally appeared on
the NABS-L email list, a list for the NFB's student division. I'll post
other related messages about the Dallas area and the convention, as I get
them. For more information on the upcoming convention, refer to the NFB website (www.nfb.org/convent/conven06.htm). Enjoy.
Method 1: DART Light Rail
DART - Dallas Area Rapid Transit. Our extensive network of DART Rail,
Trinity Railway Express (TRE) and bus services moves more than 200,000
passengers per day across our 700-square-mile service area. We serve DFW
International
Airport and Fort Worth via the TRE. The DART Rail System provides fast,
convenient service to work, shopping and entertainment destinations in
Dallas, Garland, Plano and Richardson. Plus, our TRE commuter line links
DART customers to DFW International Airport and downtown Fort Worth(only an
hour away by TRE). Free parking is available at most rail stations, and all
are served by DART bus routes specially timed to make transfers between
buses and trains quick and easy. Whether you're headed to a concert, a
Dallas Mavericks or a Dallas Stars showdown, ride the TRE to all Monday
through Saturday events at American Airlines Center. Or ride DART Rail to
West End Station and catch the free special events shuttle bus. The TRE gets
you to and from DFW International Airport for a fraction of the cost of taxi
fare or long-term parking. Just take it to CentrePort/DFW
Airport Station and transfer to the DFW Airport bus serving airline
terminals.
Airport buses meet all trains, departing every 15 minutes Monday through
Saturday. There is no Sunday service. Airport bus service between the rail
station and the airport terminals is free.
DART operates local and express bus routes serving Addison, Carrollton,
Cockrell Hill, Dallas, Farmers Branch, Garland, Glenn Heights, Highland
Park, Irving,
Richardson, Rowlett, Plano and University Park.
To get going, call DART Customer Information at 214.979.1111. DART Day
Passes are your best transportation value. $2.50 for Local bus and rail,
which includes local bus, DART Rail and TRE service in Dallas County. $4.50
for Premium bus and rail, which includes express bus service and TRE service
to DFW Airport and Fort Worth. DART offers two basic, one-way fares: $1.25
for Local bus and rail service, $2.25 for Premium service, which includes
express bus service between downtown Dallas and free park & ride facilities
in Addison, Carrollton, Farmers Branch, Glenn Heights, Irving, Plano and
Rowlett.
TRE fares are in two zones: $1.25 one-way to all stops between downtown
Dallas and West Irving Station.
$2.25 between stations in Dallas County and Tarrant County.
Passes are sold in Ticket Vending Machines located at each rail station. Day
Passes can be purchased in advance by visiting the DART Store online (http://www.DARTStore.org).
Method 2: McKinney Ave Trolley
Visitors can ride McKinney Avenue's nostalgic trolley between Dallas' Arts
District and the McKinney Avenue Uptown neighborhood, enjoying the route's
eclectic
offering of antique shops, restaurants and clubs. The restored, historic,
vintage streetcars are also available for private events. Runs 7 days a week
10:00 am - 10:00 pm.
214-855-0006
Method 3: The M-Line
The historic M-Line Streetcar is FREE!
The M-Line Streetcar offers you a ride down McKinney Avenue, within walking
distance of the Dallas Museum of Art.
Whether you're eating lunch, shopping, browsing art or making a bus or rail
connection, the M-Line takes you there!
M-Line service operates 7 days a week every 15 minutes during peak and lunch
hours, every half hour off-peak hours and weekends between 7 a.m. and 10
p.m. weekdays, 10 a.m. and 10 p.m. Saturdays, and 12:30 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Sundays.
Method 4: Footmobile?
Response from Judy Dixon on Web-Braille
Here is the current NLS reply coming from Judy Dixon (Consumer Relations
Officer) in response to patron inquiries:
"Web-Braille has been removed from public access temporarily. We apologize
for the inconvenience that the removal of Web-Braille has caused. At this
time, it is not known how long Web-Braille will be unavailable but we have
every hope that the curtailment of the service will be short-lived. We are
making every effort to resume this service as soon as possible.
In the interim, all NLS-produced books and magazines are available in
hardcopy Braille from your Braille-lending library. If the status of
Web-Braille changes, information will be posted on the main Web-Braille
page."
More on Web-Braille
Greetings. Since the shutting down of Web-Braille, there have been several different rumors of why it has stopped. Some say that since there is no "digital rights management," like in Windows Media Player when trying to play certain kinds of copyrighted music from some sites, the books should not be viewed by people. Further, there is speculation that some of these Web-Braille books have been sent to other parts of the Internet, which I agree, violates policies of the program. I don't think it should be shut down just because of this though. There have been attempts to control this by other groups, like Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic, such as coding digital playback equipment to only work with RFB&D books. While it saddens me that we have to take such measures to protect materials, I'd rather have these measures in place instead of simply pulling the plug on a successful project as Web-Braille.
The other big rumor that I've seen/heard is that the director of the National Library Services for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS), Frank Kurt Cylke, thinks that only a few people will care about the shutting down of Web-Braille. I've seen this thought on a respectable blog, so please don't accuse me of undue speculation. At any rate, to show him otherwise, you can email him at fcyl@loc.gov, and tell him how much Web-Braille means, or has meant, to you. If he hears from many different people, then perhaps the program will be reinstated. There is talk of a petition from The Desert Skies Podcast (www.jeffbishop.net) to show how many people care about Web-Braille. Read more on the 5/11/06 entry.
As I said yesterday, if this decision is not reversed by the time of the summer conventions, then I pity the person, or persons, that have to go and give their annual reports to a room full of upset blind people.
Respectfully submitted.
Thursday, May 11
A Disturbing Development
Greetings. The following information is being circulated around the Internet, and I thought I'd do my part. Web Braille is no more. Read on for more. I know people that have used, and love, this service. I even considered using it a few times, though I never signed up. In a larger sense though, there's one less resource for blind people to use on the web for getting books and other information. Hopefully the NFB and ACB will jump on this pretty quick, if not at their summer conventions coming up shortly. You can be sure that serious questions will be asked of the NLS people when they go to the summer conventions of why this was done.
If you haven't heard yet, you will all probably be hearing from your patrons
very soon about the shutdown of Web-Braille. Any patron logging into the
Web-Braille site as of 5-10-06 is receiving the following message:
NLS: That All May Read
Web-braille notice
Because of technical and security difficulties, Web-Braille will be
unavailable in the near future. NLS regrets the inconvenience and will
provide further information as soon as possible.
For more information contact:
Judith Dixon
Consumer Relations Officer
If you haven't heard yet, you will all probably be hearing from your patrons
very soon about the shutdown of Web-Braille. Any patron logging into the
Web-Braille site as of 5-10-06 is receiving the following message:
NLS: That All May Read
Web-braille notice
Because of technical and security difficulties, Web-Braille will be
unavailable in the near future. NLS regrets the inconvenience and will
provide further information as soon as possible.
For more information contact:
Judith Dixon
Consumer Relations Officer
Tuesday, May 2
Rebuilding Begins
Greetings. For those that have not heard, or couldn't access, my latest audio post from last Friday, note the following: last week, my main hard drive decided to fail. When I took my computer to work, I learned this from one of my coworkers. I was able to go to a nearby computer store and get a new drive, 160 GB in size, and have it put in by said coworker. Yesterday, he was able to put the initial software on my computer, such as computer applications, drivers, JAWS, etc. I brought my computer home yesterday afternoon and have begun the lengthy process of rebuilding. This has happened to me before, in different circumstances and from different causes, about two years ago, so the process is a familiar one to me, though tedious. I say all this to say that: if you don't hear from me immediately, then don't be too concerned. I've got my email setup again, so I'll be able to respond that way again, which is good. After a week of not having access, when I pulled my email down from the ISP's server, I had 1100 messages, half of which were spam. On top of putting the initial stuff back on my system, I'm getting things ready for my parents, who are coming to see me this weekend from Dallas (they're back in the good old USA), so I'll be busy either way this week.
I'll write something more substantial when I have the time, :) Until then, ...
I'll write something more substantial when I have the time, :) Until then, ...
Friday, April 28
Saturday, April 22
New Portable Reading Machine Coming Soon
Greetings. Here's an article that has made it rounds of the email lists in recent days, and I thought I'd post it here. It talks about the upcoming Kurzweil NFB Reader, a portable reading machine you can carry in your pocket. The NFB plans to debut it this summer in Dallas at their annual convention, and hopefully, they'll have a few for people to buy. I've seen a demonstration of this device and it looks very promising and very cool. Enjoy, and as always, please excuse any formatting errors.
Kurzweil-NFB Reader: Device provides words to live by
By Frank D. Roylance
Baltimore Sun, April 14, 2006
Hand-held reader that can convert text into synthesized speech may increase
independence for the visually impaired
Not long ago, James Gashel was on Capitol Hill, waiting for a meeting to
start, when he realized that he needed some numbers from a chart he was
carrying.
That was a problem. Gashel is blind, and so was his companion. And the chart
was not in Braille. Gashel was reaching for his cell phone to call someone
at his office to retrieve the numbers, when his colleague stopped him. "Why
don't you try the reader?" he asked.
Of course.
Gashel, an executive at the National Federation for the Blind in Baltimore,
was carrying the world's first hand-held reading machine for the blind -
just developed by NFB in collaboration with Kurzweil Technologies Inc. of
Wellesley, Mass.
Combining a 5-megapixel digital camera with a personal digital assistant, or
PDA, the 13-ounce Kurzweil-NFB Reader converts digital images of text into
synthesized speech.
Gashel pulled out his reader, snapped a picture of the chart, "and within a
minute I had the numbers I wanted," he said. And he didn't have to bother
anyone else to get them.
Now in final field tests before its release for sale by Kurzweil this
summer, the device was officially unveiled last week at ceremonies at NFB
headquarters in South Baltimore. Thanks to the new reader, Gashel and 75
other blind product testers across the country are sorting through their own
mail, reading restaurant menus, identifying packages in the freezer by the
labels and discovering many other tasks they can now do without assistance.
It's liberating, Gashel said. "You start to think about your capabilities
differently."
In addition to many of the nation's 1.3 million blind people, he also
predicts a demand from older people with failing eyesight, and young people
with dyslexia or learning disabilities.
The NFB's collaboration with Kurzweil began more than 30 years ago, when
founder Ray Kurzweil, a pioneer of character recognition and text-to-speech
devices, came to the federation's offices, then in Washington.
He had developed the first Kurzweil Reading Machine. The size of an office
copier, it could scan a document and read it in a synthetic human voice.
"That was very revolutionary," Gashel said. Until then, blind people were
pretty much limited to live readers, or the limited number of publications
available on tape or records, or transcribed into Braille.
The Kurzweil reader was big and expensive - $50,000 each, Gashel said. It
couldn't read photocopied matter and it had problems with pages crowded with
pictures. But it was clearly a breakthrough. So the NFB bought six, and
began working with Kurzweil to improve them. "This was the first time an
inventor of a product had ever come directly to us," seeking input from the
blind in the development of an "access" machine, Gashel said.
Eventually, Kurzweil began to sell improved versions to schools, libraries
and rehabilitation agencies. But even though prices fell over the years, the
reader remained too costly for individuals.
Just as importantly, "There was always a need for something portable,"
Gashel said. By the mid-1990s, the advent of desktop computers and scanners
enabled Kurzweil to develop a PC-based reader - the Kurzweil 1000.
Character-recognition software was improving, too. And laptops made the
hardware required smaller. But one problem remained: "You would have to have
a scanner - it would be quite a bit of paraphernalia to carry about," Gashel
said.
Digital photography provided the needed breakthrough; that, and the
miniaturization of computer power in the PDA - the hand-held computer that
millions use to organize their lives. The Kurzweil-NFB Reader, which is
expected to cost less than $3,000, marries a small, 5-megapixel Canon camera
to an ASUS A730 PDA. They are wired together and held by a vinyl case about
6 inches by 3 inches by 2 1/2 inches. It's all operated with just nine
buttons, with voice prompts from a small speaker or through earphones.
Holding the device about 16 inches above a sheet of paper lying on a table,
Gashel lines up the shot. He is guided by a sort of audio viewfinder:
"Right, bottom edges are visible ... two degrees counterclockwise relative
to page."
The camera speaks in an oddly Eastern European male voice, but it's one
that's familiar and comfortable for people who use electronic readers.
Gashel pushes a button and the shutter clicks. A few seconds later, the
device is reading the release aloud, flawlessly.
Tests on a business card and an ATM receipt are rougher. The device misses
some lines of type, and mistakes some characters for others. But it does
better on a second try, "learning" as it goes along.
Had it been his own ATM slip, Gashel said, "I would have known what I
withdrew, and I'd know most of the information, even if it didn't hit it
right."
Many times, he said, "you're not going for perfect; you're going for 'What
is this?'"
Jim McCarthy, 39, director of governmental affairs at the federation, has
also been testing one of the readers. A new office arrangement has left him
without a nearby assistant, so something as simple as sorting through papers
on his desk becomes an issue.
"I'm probably 25 feet from the closest person," he said. It's not a big deal
to walk around the corner and ask someone to identify a piece of paper, "but
it seems like a waste of time."
The reader "allows people to sort pertinent documents in a way a lot of us
aren't accustomed to. That is pretty liberating," he said.
Lou Ann Blake, 46, a visually impaired research specialist at the
federation, has also been a test-driver. "I read the cooking directions on a
bag of pasta," she said. "It was plastic and I kinda had to flatten it out.
But it did quite well."
Videotape labels, bills, letters, 401(k) statements - it read them all.
"Some of the pronunciations it doesn't get quite right - legal terms, Latin
terms," she said. But "it's amazingly easy to use. I have a harder time
using the copy machine here sometimes."
But the key advance is the new device's portability, said John Pare, 47,
director of sponsored technical programs at the NFB, who started to lose his
sight at 35. "No matter where you are, you're constantly being handed
printed material," he said. "It's the way the world works. In restaurants,
the airport, hotels, at a conference."
The Kurzweil reader enables the blind to grab an image quickly, anywhere -
even in the dark - and "read" it themselves instead of relying on friends or
strangers to read the documents aloud.
"It's been very gratifying," Kurzweil said. "When we started this project
about four years ago, we weren't ... entirely sure to what extent we could
compensate for distortion in the images that would occur using a hand-held
camera."
Where a scanner provides a flat, uniform image and perfect lighting, the
hand-held digital camera would tilt and rotate relative to the page - then
the user would move and the lighting would be uneven. Worse, the pages of an
open book are curved, with portions at different distances from the camera.
"So we developed image enhancing software that takes this image and modifies
it to get rid of all those distortions," Kurzweil said. "And we had to fit
all this software [along with the character recognition program] into this
little computer."
But it worked. "We have 75 in the field, and hundreds very soon," he said.
"And the feedback from blind users is that it's having tremendous success."
If it does well, the federation could eventually profit. Gashel said the NFB
owns 40 percent of the rights to the technology. In the meantime, the
software will continue to be improved so that the device can read more
varied and complex material.
Kurzweil also predicts a time when a blind person will be able to enter a
room, snap a picture, and have the reader identify the types and locations
of lamps, tables, people and other items in the room.
Also, devices "will continue to get smaller over time," he said. Gashel
expects the gadget will be crammed into a cell phone some day. But Kurzweil
is thinking even smaller. "In five to seven years, the camera will pin on
your lapel and take pictures as you walk around," describing the scene as
you go, he said.
NFB chef and teacher Marie A. Cobb, 59, of Catonsville, who is visually
impaired, has been using the reader since January. She has her own hopes.
"What I'm looking for is the day when I can take it into a mall and have it
tell me the name of the stores, and the locations on those big directories.
I would love that," she said.
Kurzweil-NFB Reader: Device provides words to live by
By Frank D. Roylance
Baltimore Sun, April 14, 2006
Hand-held reader that can convert text into synthesized speech may increase
independence for the visually impaired
Not long ago, James Gashel was on Capitol Hill, waiting for a meeting to
start, when he realized that he needed some numbers from a chart he was
carrying.
That was a problem. Gashel is blind, and so was his companion. And the chart
was not in Braille. Gashel was reaching for his cell phone to call someone
at his office to retrieve the numbers, when his colleague stopped him. "Why
don't you try the reader?" he asked.
Of course.
Gashel, an executive at the National Federation for the Blind in Baltimore,
was carrying the world's first hand-held reading machine for the blind -
just developed by NFB in collaboration with Kurzweil Technologies Inc. of
Wellesley, Mass.
Combining a 5-megapixel digital camera with a personal digital assistant, or
PDA, the 13-ounce Kurzweil-NFB Reader converts digital images of text into
synthesized speech.
Gashel pulled out his reader, snapped a picture of the chart, "and within a
minute I had the numbers I wanted," he said. And he didn't have to bother
anyone else to get them.
Now in final field tests before its release for sale by Kurzweil this
summer, the device was officially unveiled last week at ceremonies at NFB
headquarters in South Baltimore. Thanks to the new reader, Gashel and 75
other blind product testers across the country are sorting through their own
mail, reading restaurant menus, identifying packages in the freezer by the
labels and discovering many other tasks they can now do without assistance.
It's liberating, Gashel said. "You start to think about your capabilities
differently."
In addition to many of the nation's 1.3 million blind people, he also
predicts a demand from older people with failing eyesight, and young people
with dyslexia or learning disabilities.
The NFB's collaboration with Kurzweil began more than 30 years ago, when
founder Ray Kurzweil, a pioneer of character recognition and text-to-speech
devices, came to the federation's offices, then in Washington.
He had developed the first Kurzweil Reading Machine. The size of an office
copier, it could scan a document and read it in a synthetic human voice.
"That was very revolutionary," Gashel said. Until then, blind people were
pretty much limited to live readers, or the limited number of publications
available on tape or records, or transcribed into Braille.
The Kurzweil reader was big and expensive - $50,000 each, Gashel said. It
couldn't read photocopied matter and it had problems with pages crowded with
pictures. But it was clearly a breakthrough. So the NFB bought six, and
began working with Kurzweil to improve them. "This was the first time an
inventor of a product had ever come directly to us," seeking input from the
blind in the development of an "access" machine, Gashel said.
Eventually, Kurzweil began to sell improved versions to schools, libraries
and rehabilitation agencies. But even though prices fell over the years, the
reader remained too costly for individuals.
Just as importantly, "There was always a need for something portable,"
Gashel said. By the mid-1990s, the advent of desktop computers and scanners
enabled Kurzweil to develop a PC-based reader - the Kurzweil 1000.
Character-recognition software was improving, too. And laptops made the
hardware required smaller. But one problem remained: "You would have to have
a scanner - it would be quite a bit of paraphernalia to carry about," Gashel
said.
Digital photography provided the needed breakthrough; that, and the
miniaturization of computer power in the PDA - the hand-held computer that
millions use to organize their lives. The Kurzweil-NFB Reader, which is
expected to cost less than $3,000, marries a small, 5-megapixel Canon camera
to an ASUS A730 PDA. They are wired together and held by a vinyl case about
6 inches by 3 inches by 2 1/2 inches. It's all operated with just nine
buttons, with voice prompts from a small speaker or through earphones.
Holding the device about 16 inches above a sheet of paper lying on a table,
Gashel lines up the shot. He is guided by a sort of audio viewfinder:
"Right, bottom edges are visible ... two degrees counterclockwise relative
to page."
The camera speaks in an oddly Eastern European male voice, but it's one
that's familiar and comfortable for people who use electronic readers.
Gashel pushes a button and the shutter clicks. A few seconds later, the
device is reading the release aloud, flawlessly.
Tests on a business card and an ATM receipt are rougher. The device misses
some lines of type, and mistakes some characters for others. But it does
better on a second try, "learning" as it goes along.
Had it been his own ATM slip, Gashel said, "I would have known what I
withdrew, and I'd know most of the information, even if it didn't hit it
right."
Many times, he said, "you're not going for perfect; you're going for 'What
is this?'"
Jim McCarthy, 39, director of governmental affairs at the federation, has
also been testing one of the readers. A new office arrangement has left him
without a nearby assistant, so something as simple as sorting through papers
on his desk becomes an issue.
"I'm probably 25 feet from the closest person," he said. It's not a big deal
to walk around the corner and ask someone to identify a piece of paper, "but
it seems like a waste of time."
The reader "allows people to sort pertinent documents in a way a lot of us
aren't accustomed to. That is pretty liberating," he said.
Lou Ann Blake, 46, a visually impaired research specialist at the
federation, has also been a test-driver. "I read the cooking directions on a
bag of pasta," she said. "It was plastic and I kinda had to flatten it out.
But it did quite well."
Videotape labels, bills, letters, 401(k) statements - it read them all.
"Some of the pronunciations it doesn't get quite right - legal terms, Latin
terms," she said. But "it's amazingly easy to use. I have a harder time
using the copy machine here sometimes."
But the key advance is the new device's portability, said John Pare, 47,
director of sponsored technical programs at the NFB, who started to lose his
sight at 35. "No matter where you are, you're constantly being handed
printed material," he said. "It's the way the world works. In restaurants,
the airport, hotels, at a conference."
The Kurzweil reader enables the blind to grab an image quickly, anywhere -
even in the dark - and "read" it themselves instead of relying on friends or
strangers to read the documents aloud.
"It's been very gratifying," Kurzweil said. "When we started this project
about four years ago, we weren't ... entirely sure to what extent we could
compensate for distortion in the images that would occur using a hand-held
camera."
Where a scanner provides a flat, uniform image and perfect lighting, the
hand-held digital camera would tilt and rotate relative to the page - then
the user would move and the lighting would be uneven. Worse, the pages of an
open book are curved, with portions at different distances from the camera.
"So we developed image enhancing software that takes this image and modifies
it to get rid of all those distortions," Kurzweil said. "And we had to fit
all this software [along with the character recognition program] into this
little computer."
But it worked. "We have 75 in the field, and hundreds very soon," he said.
"And the feedback from blind users is that it's having tremendous success."
If it does well, the federation could eventually profit. Gashel said the NFB
owns 40 percent of the rights to the technology. In the meantime, the
software will continue to be improved so that the device can read more
varied and complex material.
Kurzweil also predicts a time when a blind person will be able to enter a
room, snap a picture, and have the reader identify the types and locations
of lamps, tables, people and other items in the room.
Also, devices "will continue to get smaller over time," he said. Gashel
expects the gadget will be crammed into a cell phone some day. But Kurzweil
is thinking even smaller. "In five to seven years, the camera will pin on
your lapel and take pictures as you walk around," describing the scene as
you go, he said.
NFB chef and teacher Marie A. Cobb, 59, of Catonsville, who is visually
impaired, has been using the reader since January. She has her own hopes.
"What I'm looking for is the day when I can take it into a mall and have it
tell me the name of the stores, and the locations on those big directories.
I would love that," she said.
Saturday Cleaning
Greetings. Saturday has typically been the day that we (or most people anyway) clean our houses or places of living. So, here's a "clean up" of things that have happened from the past week, or thoughts I've missed in recent weeks.
Frequent shopper's cards. Many stores these days have the frequent shopper's cards, where they say it saves you money on things you buy every day. At some stores, you really do save money on things you buy often, however others you don't. I've got about 5 different cards like these on my keychain. Funny thing though, only about 2 or 3 of them are actually for stores in the Austin area. Well, yesterday I went to the neighborhood CVS Pharmacy to pick up my prescriptions. When I finally made it up to the pharmacy area, I had a few other items and was ready to pay for those along with the medications. The clerk asked if I had a CVS card, and I promptly pulled out my keychain, held it out to her with the cards spread out in a fan-fold fashion, and said, "Pick a card." She took the card, scanned it, and gave it back to me. She then gave me the updated total for money I owed her. Strangely, the second total I got was exactly the same, minus a few pennies, as the first total, before she scanned my card. As I was leaving with a friend, we chuckled about how these frequent shopper's cards don't seem to really save you any money anymore.
Overly helpful people. In recounting the story of paying my own taxes, I forgot to mention someone that tried to be helful to me. When I was walking up to the H&R Block place along the strip shopping center, a woman came running over to me. She was so intent on helping me that she tripped over my cane and took a spill on the sidewalk. I worried for a moment that my cane would break, since it got caught between her legs, but I then turned my attention to the woman on the ground. Our conversation went something like this:
Me: "Are you all right?"
Her: "Oooh, ah, ooh. Ouch, I'm not sure. My side hurts."
Me again: "Are you ok?"
Her: "No, well, ... I was coming over to help you. Are you ok?"
Me, standing and grinning at her: "Yes, I'm fine. Are you ok?"
Her: "Oooh, I'll be ok, ... I think."
I walked away, waited a few minutes to put distance between us, and then burst out laughing.
Throwing darts. There's a dart board in the cubicle area at work. This has been the subject of stress releaving activity, as well as down right fun. I know that blind people throw darts, I've done it before myself, but never with other blind people. So far, in my experience with this particular dart board, no one has gotten hit by flying darts, but I suppose its possible. The funniest thing is when one or two totally blind guy sstand off to the side, and critique a certain person's dart throwing skills and where the dart landed, just by the sound. One day, I thought my sides would split from laughing so hard. Well, the dart board has taken on new menaing, since while I was in training this past week, it was put to a new use: argument decider. I learned later that a couple of instructors got into an argument about who was going to teach a particular class, and they ultimately threw darts to decide the winner. The person who first hit the board would get the choice of classes. The day after this worthy competition happened, I talked with the winner about it, asking him how many darts he had to throw to hit the board, and he answered, "Two." Another funny incident with the dart board was when another instructor climbed up on top of the table behind the board, peeked over the top, and called out to the person throwing, "I'm over here. I'm above the board; now I'm below the board; now I'm above the board." I never thought that I would come across blind people with darts after I left college. There were a couple of guys down the hall from me in the dorm who had a board and darts. They weren't blind, but that didn't stop us from having hours of fun. In conclusion, I suppose darts can be used for: fun, stress releaving, and deciding arguments. Hmm, if I get good enough, I might put my dart throwing abilities on my resume, ..., or maybe not, :)
The Rapture. For those interested in the Left Behind series, you can listen to an interview with Jerry Jenkins about the upcoming book, "The Rapture." The book will be released on 06/06/06, and is the third in the pre-quel miniseries, about life before the rapture. This book focuses on the time leading up to, and the moment of, the rapture itself. It features many of the characters from the main series of 12 Left Behind books. If you want another sneak peek, you can read the first chapter or read more about the other books in the series at the Left Behind website.
That's about all for now. I'll write in a separate post about my training this past week and some observations and realizations. Until then.
Frequent shopper's cards. Many stores these days have the frequent shopper's cards, where they say it saves you money on things you buy every day. At some stores, you really do save money on things you buy often, however others you don't. I've got about 5 different cards like these on my keychain. Funny thing though, only about 2 or 3 of them are actually for stores in the Austin area. Well, yesterday I went to the neighborhood CVS Pharmacy to pick up my prescriptions. When I finally made it up to the pharmacy area, I had a few other items and was ready to pay for those along with the medications. The clerk asked if I had a CVS card, and I promptly pulled out my keychain, held it out to her with the cards spread out in a fan-fold fashion, and said, "Pick a card." She took the card, scanned it, and gave it back to me. She then gave me the updated total for money I owed her. Strangely, the second total I got was exactly the same, minus a few pennies, as the first total, before she scanned my card. As I was leaving with a friend, we chuckled about how these frequent shopper's cards don't seem to really save you any money anymore.
Overly helpful people. In recounting the story of paying my own taxes, I forgot to mention someone that tried to be helful to me. When I was walking up to the H&R Block place along the strip shopping center, a woman came running over to me. She was so intent on helping me that she tripped over my cane and took a spill on the sidewalk. I worried for a moment that my cane would break, since it got caught between her legs, but I then turned my attention to the woman on the ground. Our conversation went something like this:
Me: "Are you all right?"
Her: "Oooh, ah, ooh. Ouch, I'm not sure. My side hurts."
Me again: "Are you ok?"
Her: "No, well, ... I was coming over to help you. Are you ok?"
Me, standing and grinning at her: "Yes, I'm fine. Are you ok?"
Her: "Oooh, I'll be ok, ... I think."
I walked away, waited a few minutes to put distance between us, and then burst out laughing.
Throwing darts. There's a dart board in the cubicle area at work. This has been the subject of stress releaving activity, as well as down right fun. I know that blind people throw darts, I've done it before myself, but never with other blind people. So far, in my experience with this particular dart board, no one has gotten hit by flying darts, but I suppose its possible. The funniest thing is when one or two totally blind guy sstand off to the side, and critique a certain person's dart throwing skills and where the dart landed, just by the sound. One day, I thought my sides would split from laughing so hard. Well, the dart board has taken on new menaing, since while I was in training this past week, it was put to a new use: argument decider. I learned later that a couple of instructors got into an argument about who was going to teach a particular class, and they ultimately threw darts to decide the winner. The person who first hit the board would get the choice of classes. The day after this worthy competition happened, I talked with the winner about it, asking him how many darts he had to throw to hit the board, and he answered, "Two." Another funny incident with the dart board was when another instructor climbed up on top of the table behind the board, peeked over the top, and called out to the person throwing, "I'm over here. I'm above the board; now I'm below the board; now I'm above the board." I never thought that I would come across blind people with darts after I left college. There were a couple of guys down the hall from me in the dorm who had a board and darts. They weren't blind, but that didn't stop us from having hours of fun. In conclusion, I suppose darts can be used for: fun, stress releaving, and deciding arguments. Hmm, if I get good enough, I might put my dart throwing abilities on my resume, ..., or maybe not, :)
The Rapture. For those interested in the Left Behind series, you can listen to an interview with Jerry Jenkins about the upcoming book, "The Rapture." The book will be released on 06/06/06, and is the third in the pre-quel miniseries, about life before the rapture. This book focuses on the time leading up to, and the moment of, the rapture itself. It features many of the characters from the main series of 12 Left Behind books. If you want another sneak peek, you can read the first chapter or read more about the other books in the series at the Left Behind website.
That's about all for now. I'll write in a separate post about my training this past week and some observations and realizations. Until then.
Thursday, April 20
Whipping up food, fun, awareness for the blind
Greetings. Here's an article that appeared in the Austin American Statesman about a cooking competition that took place at the Criss Cole Rehabilitation Center, the state training center I work at, entitled, Whipping up food, fun, awareness for the blind. Though I didn't get to sample the food myself, since my lunch hour was shortened by the week long training, I've heard that the food was very good and the contestants did a great job. In fact, the two students that headed up the competition were featured on a local news program yesterday morning, as well as on the public radio station here in town. I'd say that's a good dayss work if you get coverage on three different media outlets. Granted not all of the media sources covered the story in the same way, but its still a good thing.
Wednesday, April 19
Mid Week Training Update
Greetings. Just a quick note to tell a little about my training this week. First off, the training is here in Austin among the massive complex of state government buildings. For my part, someone who is local and going to the training, verses coming in from out of town and staying in a motel all week, its been weird taking the bus to and from training, just like I do when working normally. It seems like two different worlds, going from putting my stuff in my cubical, checking email and voicemail, and then gathering the materials and going to the training location. Then, at the end of the day, returning to my cubical, leaving my materials, catching up on any missed messages, and then going home like I always do. I haven't thus far had to come in from out of town to training, even before my employment with the state, except on one occasion at a technology workshop last year. That truly felt like I was coming from out of town, since I was (driving with coworkers down from Dallas). This time though, and I suppose most of any further training I get, I'm commuting back and forth. Anyway, the whole thing is interesting. In addition, the fact that I come home to my own apartment and bed, instead of the sometimes good motel living space, is a bonus for me.
On another topic, the training itself is going well. Since it is training with the state, I had the option of requesting my materials in Braille, which I did. After I got the three big Braille volumes though on Monday, I found myself wanting the electronic version instead, since its much more portable than those three volumes. This morning, I did acquire the electronic version of much of the materials, which I loaded onto my Pac Mate note taker. Today, we were told to review some of the various laws affecting the blind and vision impaired. Instead of lugging those big volumes home to read for a few hours, I brought my notes and materials home on my note taker, which was much better. I've since changed my preference of media to electronic for future training classes.
Tomorrow should be interesting, since for the afternoon, we'll be going to a local mall and will navigate around. I say this will be interesting since most of my fellow trainees will be wearing blindfolds and using canes to get around. They had introductory lessons yesterday on cane use. But the first time lessons are different from going through a mall. Its probably mean to say, but this will be one of those times that I think to myself, "Ha ha, now you get to see how the other half lives."
I'm off to bed. I'll write more this weekend about the week's worth of training, or at least the highlights. Until then.
On another topic, the training itself is going well. Since it is training with the state, I had the option of requesting my materials in Braille, which I did. After I got the three big Braille volumes though on Monday, I found myself wanting the electronic version instead, since its much more portable than those three volumes. This morning, I did acquire the electronic version of much of the materials, which I loaded onto my Pac Mate note taker. Today, we were told to review some of the various laws affecting the blind and vision impaired. Instead of lugging those big volumes home to read for a few hours, I brought my notes and materials home on my note taker, which was much better. I've since changed my preference of media to electronic for future training classes.
Tomorrow should be interesting, since for the afternoon, we'll be going to a local mall and will navigate around. I say this will be interesting since most of my fellow trainees will be wearing blindfolds and using canes to get around. They had introductory lessons yesterday on cane use. But the first time lessons are different from going through a mall. Its probably mean to say, but this will be one of those times that I think to myself, "Ha ha, now you get to see how the other half lives."
I'm off to bed. I'll write more this weekend about the week's worth of training, or at least the highlights. Until then.
Saturday, April 15
Long Awaited Entry
Greetings. Well, this has probably been the longest amount of time between the last few entries, especially from April 1 to April 10. I hope to not have that lapse in time happen again, then again, going into this month, I had no idea that I'd only have done 3 entries by this point.
Anyway, a lot has happened in the last two weeks, which I'll attempt to summarize here.
First, a personal notable thing, I did my own taxes! Last year, I had a friend help me file, but this year, that wasn't an option since I'm in a new city and don't know that many people, or not well enough to ask for tax filing help. So, I went down to the H&R Block office near my complex and filed my taxes on my own. I'm not real tax or financially for that matter, oriented. So I was quite happy to just answer questions while the tax person filed them for me. And, as it happened, I walked away with a bigger refund this time around than I got last year, keeping in mind that last year I was still working part time. I'm guessing that the big refunds might disappear when tax time comes around again next year. Then again, you never know I suppose. Anyway, I had a great sense of satisfaction and pride when I left H&R, and the tax professional said to me, "Have a great year. See you next year."
Next, though many people might find this hard to believe, especially considering my lifestyle up until now, I've started exercising with a coworker of mine, where we get on his eliptical trainer on what we hope is a daily basis. We're still working some of the kinks out in this program. However, I am exercising more often than not during a week's time, and I can already tell a bit of a difference, in that my legs and feet don't hurt as quickly when I walk on some of my longer trips. Keeping in mind that since I haven't typically walked long distances; what's long to me might not be long to you. I don't have all of the "exercise" lifestyle figured out yet, but I'm working on it. I'm of the belief that when you start to exercise, you don't just change all of your habbits (including eating) over night and shed the pounds immediately. These things take time, and I'm not just talking about the exercise. So there's something that I never thought I'd write about, :)
After the exercise, we have typically sat around and talked for an hour or more. That has been neat as well, to get to know and exchange ideas and thoughts with a colleague and frowing friend.
I have another "cool feeling" report to offer. I went to downtown Austin today to the NFB chapter meeting. Afterward, I went to lunch with a group of people. After lunch, a student from the training center and I were walking to a nearby bus stop to catch the bus for the ride home. The cool feeling happened while we were walking to the stop. I must say here that I haven't been the best thus far at getting out and exploring Austin. What I know comes largely from where I was sent to and places I walked through while in blindfold training when I started. One of those areas happened to be the area I walked through with the student today. Anyway, she was asking me where we were going, exploring her surroundings with her cane, and telling me that she didn't know a lot about Austin and wasn't as experienced as I was in getting around. I grinned when she said this, since, well, read my last statement. Anyway, that was cool to be showing her the way to go to get back to the bus stop. I also took the opportunity to tell her interesting tidbits, such as the movie theater we passed by on our way down the block. On a previous trip down there, I had passed by that theater. I knew what it was since when I walked, or attempted to walk by, the theater, I found a long line of people waiting to get in, and several people told me what it was. I tried to ask them what they were waiting to see, but they didn't understand, or they were too worried about where I was going, which happens with sighted people, :)
I've been spending the past few hours looking at the various reward levels for my new bank credit card and calculating what I need to do in order to get a certain reward. That has been tedious, but fun, since until now, I haven't had a large enough income to qualify for many of these types of rewards. And, before anyone asks, I'm not going to overspend and get myself in trouble; I'm not that kind of person. Anyway, this is one more thing on the list of benefits of full time work: you can build up and obtain credit card rewards.
Looking ahead slightly, I have another round of Center, or perhaps its organizational, training coming up next week. I'm looking forward to that, since I'm mainly curious what its about. Also since I will be getting a whole volume, or two, of Braille materials. That will be neat, to actually get workshop materials in a medium I can read, instead of adding to my stack of hardly-read print stuff. Looking further ahead, it also looks like, from all indications, I'll be going to the NFB national convention this summer in Dallas. I'm looking forward to that as well, mainly since I didn't think I'd be able to go with my new job. However, since my employer has basically told us, "If you want to go, you can," I've answered with an enthusiastic, "Yes!" Kind of ironic that after several years, the NFB convention finally makes it back to Dallas, but I'm not living there anymore, grin.
Well, that's about all for now. I'll write again when I think of it or when I can, whatever comes first. Until then, ...
Anyway, a lot has happened in the last two weeks, which I'll attempt to summarize here.
First, a personal notable thing, I did my own taxes! Last year, I had a friend help me file, but this year, that wasn't an option since I'm in a new city and don't know that many people, or not well enough to ask for tax filing help. So, I went down to the H&R Block office near my complex and filed my taxes on my own. I'm not real tax or financially for that matter, oriented. So I was quite happy to just answer questions while the tax person filed them for me. And, as it happened, I walked away with a bigger refund this time around than I got last year, keeping in mind that last year I was still working part time. I'm guessing that the big refunds might disappear when tax time comes around again next year. Then again, you never know I suppose. Anyway, I had a great sense of satisfaction and pride when I left H&R, and the tax professional said to me, "Have a great year. See you next year."
Next, though many people might find this hard to believe, especially considering my lifestyle up until now, I've started exercising with a coworker of mine, where we get on his eliptical trainer on what we hope is a daily basis. We're still working some of the kinks out in this program. However, I am exercising more often than not during a week's time, and I can already tell a bit of a difference, in that my legs and feet don't hurt as quickly when I walk on some of my longer trips. Keeping in mind that since I haven't typically walked long distances; what's long to me might not be long to you. I don't have all of the "exercise" lifestyle figured out yet, but I'm working on it. I'm of the belief that when you start to exercise, you don't just change all of your habbits (including eating) over night and shed the pounds immediately. These things take time, and I'm not just talking about the exercise. So there's something that I never thought I'd write about, :)
After the exercise, we have typically sat around and talked for an hour or more. That has been neat as well, to get to know and exchange ideas and thoughts with a colleague and frowing friend.
I have another "cool feeling" report to offer. I went to downtown Austin today to the NFB chapter meeting. Afterward, I went to lunch with a group of people. After lunch, a student from the training center and I were walking to a nearby bus stop to catch the bus for the ride home. The cool feeling happened while we were walking to the stop. I must say here that I haven't been the best thus far at getting out and exploring Austin. What I know comes largely from where I was sent to and places I walked through while in blindfold training when I started. One of those areas happened to be the area I walked through with the student today. Anyway, she was asking me where we were going, exploring her surroundings with her cane, and telling me that she didn't know a lot about Austin and wasn't as experienced as I was in getting around. I grinned when she said this, since, well, read my last statement. Anyway, that was cool to be showing her the way to go to get back to the bus stop. I also took the opportunity to tell her interesting tidbits, such as the movie theater we passed by on our way down the block. On a previous trip down there, I had passed by that theater. I knew what it was since when I walked, or attempted to walk by, the theater, I found a long line of people waiting to get in, and several people told me what it was. I tried to ask them what they were waiting to see, but they didn't understand, or they were too worried about where I was going, which happens with sighted people, :)
I've been spending the past few hours looking at the various reward levels for my new bank credit card and calculating what I need to do in order to get a certain reward. That has been tedious, but fun, since until now, I haven't had a large enough income to qualify for many of these types of rewards. And, before anyone asks, I'm not going to overspend and get myself in trouble; I'm not that kind of person. Anyway, this is one more thing on the list of benefits of full time work: you can build up and obtain credit card rewards.
Looking ahead slightly, I have another round of Center, or perhaps its organizational, training coming up next week. I'm looking forward to that, since I'm mainly curious what its about. Also since I will be getting a whole volume, or two, of Braille materials. That will be neat, to actually get workshop materials in a medium I can read, instead of adding to my stack of hardly-read print stuff. Looking further ahead, it also looks like, from all indications, I'll be going to the NFB national convention this summer in Dallas. I'm looking forward to that as well, mainly since I didn't think I'd be able to go with my new job. However, since my employer has basically told us, "If you want to go, you can," I've answered with an enthusiastic, "Yes!" Kind of ironic that after several years, the NFB convention finally makes it back to Dallas, but I'm not living there anymore, grin.
Well, that's about all for now. I'll write again when I think of it or when I can, whatever comes first. Until then, ...
Tuesday, April 11
Want a Google Account?
Greetings. Though Google says that a workable solution to the visual/word verification problem they have won't be out until ate April, now you have the option of Signing up for a Google account on this secure web page. Note that there is now an option to listen to the characters in the verification graphic. Also note that this solution may not be completely full proof yet, since they're not officially supposed to have it ready until the end of the month. Case in point, I tried to play the audio clip and had problems. However, I know of another blind person that was able to successfully create their Google account. The good news is that Google is definitely working on a solution to their long standing issue. My only complaint is: why didn't they do it sooner? Then again, that's in the past. Hopefully, Google will now be a leader, instead of a follower, in accessibility issues.
Saturday, April 1
Article on NFB Newsline and Book Share
Greetings. The following article arrived in my Inbox a few days ago and I thought I'd share it here. For those interested, in the coming weeks and months, the Associated Press, the Austin American Statesman, and the Dallas Morning News will all be added to the Newsline collection of newspapers and also made available through Book Share. The Associated Press materials will be organized by state, and unlike the daily papers, it will be updated hourly! Read more to find out about this exciting service. Now you don't have any excuse for not reading a newspaper, since you can get it over the phone or online. I'm personally looking forward to reading the Dallas Morning News, since that's a paper that I've been wanting to read for some time now. The fact that I no longer live in the paper's city is irrelevant. Of course, it will be cool to read news about Austin as well. Enjoy.
Ascribe Newswire
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Accessible Newspapers, Magazines Available Daily From NFB-NEWSLINE and Bookshare.org
PALO ALTO, Calif., March 29 (AScribe Newswire) -- For the print-disabled, a copy of the local newspaper delivered to one's doorstep is not accessible.
Fortunately, the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), the nation's largest organization of blind people, and Bookshare.org, the largest online digital
library specifically for the print-disabled, have teamed up to make local and national newspapers and magazines available and accessible online to this
underserved community.
Jim Fruchterman, CEO of Benetech, Bookshare's parent company, announced his organization's full commitment to the new partnership with the NFB, saying:
"As soon as we started offering NFB-NEWSLINE titles through Bookshare.org, many of our users instantly made it a part of their morning routine to
log on to our site to download their favorite daily newspapers before heading out the door. Our subscribers are now more informed and aware of what's happening
in their local communities, in their state, and across the country. We feel we're already lowering the barrier to accessible daily news each and every
day. Our agreement with NFB-NEWSLINE will allow us to make this a rich and ongoing aspect of Bookshare.org."
Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, which created and operates NFB-NEWSLINE, agreed, saying:
"Lifetime learning, including detailed awareness of current events, is part of what makes a good citizen, a successful employee or employer, and
a valuable participant in community life. This partnership with Bookshare.org gives blind and disabled individuals another way to gain access to crucial
information, so that they may compete on equal footing with everyone else in the world."
Using a synthetic speech engine, NFB-NEWSLINE has been delivering national and local newspapers over the phone to subscribers for a number of years.
Content is acquired electronically via a direct feed from the newspaper, and it is accessible twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, through a local
or toll-free telephone number.
The new partnership with Bookshare.org takes this model a step farther. In 2004, Bookshare.org began making a limited number of NFB-NEWSLINE titles
available through its online digital library on a trial basis, expanding the availability of accessible periodicals to those who are not able to benefit
from telephone-based access, such as the deaf-blind and individuals with organically based learning disabilities or other disabilities which prevent the
reading of print due to a physical cause. Bookshare.org made the periodicals available daily for download from the site in either DAISY (a digital audio
file format, which can be read aloud with synthesized speech by screen-reading software, or desktop and portable devices) or BRF (a digital Braille format,
which can be used with highly-portable refreshable Braille devices).
"I do a lot of traveling around Northern California, and the Braille newspapers from Bookshare.org allow me to make good use of my time by reading
the New York Times and other papers," said Brian Bashin, a management consultant from the San Francisco Bay area. "Without this partnership of Bookshare.org
and NFB-NEWSLINE, blind people would have no access to newspapers in places where there's no cell phone service - whether that be in a subway tunnel or
on a camping trip."
"This is a crucial service for those of us who cannot access newspapers either in print or over the telephone," said Lydia Roth, a deaf-blind individual
from Ellicott City, Maryland. "Now, thanks to Bookshare, NFB-NEWSLINE is available to those who require Braille access. I like to choose a newspaper at
random, just to see what's going on in other parts of the country."
Aside from large circulation national and metropolitan newspapers like the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Wall Street Journal and Los
Angeles Times, Bookshare.org's NFB-NEWSLINE offerings include newspapers with smaller circulations such as the Billings Gazette, Ukiah Daily Journal, and
Paducah Sun. Spanish-language dailies La Opinion from Los Angeles and El Nuevo Herald from Miami are available for download, along with nationally prominent
magazines, such as The Economist, The New Yorker, and AARP The Magazine.
Access to NFB-NEWSLINE periodicals, either through NFB's toll-free telephone service or through Bookshare.org, is limited to residents who provide
documented proof of a qualifying print disability and live in a state that funds the service. To download newspapers, the qualified reader joins Bookshare.org
by paying its annual subscription fee for unlimited access to all the titles in its collection.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
A complete list of the more than 125 NFB-NEWSLINE periodicals currently available through Bookshare.org, as well as information concerning qualifications,
is available at
http://www.bookshare.org/web/AboutNewsline.html.
Additional information concerning the NFB-NEWSLINE service can be found at
http://nfb.org/newsline1.htm.
About the National Federation of the Blind:
With more than 50,000 members, the National Federation of the Blind is the largest and most influential membership organization of blind people in the United States. The NFB improves blind people's lives through advocacy, education, research, technology, and programs encouraging independence and self-confidence. It is the leading force in the blindness field today and the voice of the nation's blind. The NFB headquarters has been located in Baltimore, Md., since
1978. In January 2004, the NFB opened the NFB Jernigan Institute, a $20 million, 188,000 square foot research and training facility adjacent to its headquarters.
About Bookshare.org and Benetech:
Bookshare.org is one of the literacy programs of Benetech, a nonprofit organization based in Palo Alto, California, that develops sustainable, technology-based solutions to address pressing social challenges in areas such as human rights, disability, education, and literacy.
Bookshare.org is a subscription-based digital library that provides instant, independent access to over 26,000 books and periodicals - opening up a whole new world of reading for people with print disabilities.
http://www.benetech.org/literacy/bookshare.shtml
Ascribe Newswire
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Accessible Newspapers, Magazines Available Daily From NFB-NEWSLINE and Bookshare.org
PALO ALTO, Calif., March 29 (AScribe Newswire) -- For the print-disabled, a copy of the local newspaper delivered to one's doorstep is not accessible.
Fortunately, the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), the nation's largest organization of blind people, and Bookshare.org, the largest online digital
library specifically for the print-disabled, have teamed up to make local and national newspapers and magazines available and accessible online to this
underserved community.
Jim Fruchterman, CEO of Benetech, Bookshare's parent company, announced his organization's full commitment to the new partnership with the NFB, saying:
"As soon as we started offering NFB-NEWSLINE titles through Bookshare.org, many of our users instantly made it a part of their morning routine to
log on to our site to download their favorite daily newspapers before heading out the door. Our subscribers are now more informed and aware of what's happening
in their local communities, in their state, and across the country. We feel we're already lowering the barrier to accessible daily news each and every
day. Our agreement with NFB-NEWSLINE will allow us to make this a rich and ongoing aspect of Bookshare.org."
Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, which created and operates NFB-NEWSLINE, agreed, saying:
"Lifetime learning, including detailed awareness of current events, is part of what makes a good citizen, a successful employee or employer, and
a valuable participant in community life. This partnership with Bookshare.org gives blind and disabled individuals another way to gain access to crucial
information, so that they may compete on equal footing with everyone else in the world."
Using a synthetic speech engine, NFB-NEWSLINE has been delivering national and local newspapers over the phone to subscribers for a number of years.
Content is acquired electronically via a direct feed from the newspaper, and it is accessible twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, through a local
or toll-free telephone number.
The new partnership with Bookshare.org takes this model a step farther. In 2004, Bookshare.org began making a limited number of NFB-NEWSLINE titles
available through its online digital library on a trial basis, expanding the availability of accessible periodicals to those who are not able to benefit
from telephone-based access, such as the deaf-blind and individuals with organically based learning disabilities or other disabilities which prevent the
reading of print due to a physical cause. Bookshare.org made the periodicals available daily for download from the site in either DAISY (a digital audio
file format, which can be read aloud with synthesized speech by screen-reading software, or desktop and portable devices) or BRF (a digital Braille format,
which can be used with highly-portable refreshable Braille devices).
"I do a lot of traveling around Northern California, and the Braille newspapers from Bookshare.org allow me to make good use of my time by reading
the New York Times and other papers," said Brian Bashin, a management consultant from the San Francisco Bay area. "Without this partnership of Bookshare.org
and NFB-NEWSLINE, blind people would have no access to newspapers in places where there's no cell phone service - whether that be in a subway tunnel or
on a camping trip."
"This is a crucial service for those of us who cannot access newspapers either in print or over the telephone," said Lydia Roth, a deaf-blind individual
from Ellicott City, Maryland. "Now, thanks to Bookshare, NFB-NEWSLINE is available to those who require Braille access. I like to choose a newspaper at
random, just to see what's going on in other parts of the country."
Aside from large circulation national and metropolitan newspapers like the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Wall Street Journal and Los
Angeles Times, Bookshare.org's NFB-NEWSLINE offerings include newspapers with smaller circulations such as the Billings Gazette, Ukiah Daily Journal, and
Paducah Sun. Spanish-language dailies La Opinion from Los Angeles and El Nuevo Herald from Miami are available for download, along with nationally prominent
magazines, such as The Economist, The New Yorker, and AARP The Magazine.
Access to NFB-NEWSLINE periodicals, either through NFB's toll-free telephone service or through Bookshare.org, is limited to residents who provide
documented proof of a qualifying print disability and live in a state that funds the service. To download newspapers, the qualified reader joins Bookshare.org
by paying its annual subscription fee for unlimited access to all the titles in its collection.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
A complete list of the more than 125 NFB-NEWSLINE periodicals currently available through Bookshare.org, as well as information concerning qualifications,
is available at
http://www.bookshare.org/web/AboutNewsline.html.
Additional information concerning the NFB-NEWSLINE service can be found at
http://nfb.org/newsline1.htm.
About the National Federation of the Blind:
With more than 50,000 members, the National Federation of the Blind is the largest and most influential membership organization of blind people in the United States. The NFB improves blind people's lives through advocacy, education, research, technology, and programs encouraging independence and self-confidence. It is the leading force in the blindness field today and the voice of the nation's blind. The NFB headquarters has been located in Baltimore, Md., since
1978. In January 2004, the NFB opened the NFB Jernigan Institute, a $20 million, 188,000 square foot research and training facility adjacent to its headquarters.
About Bookshare.org and Benetech:
Bookshare.org is one of the literacy programs of Benetech, a nonprofit organization based in Palo Alto, California, that develops sustainable, technology-based solutions to address pressing social challenges in areas such as human rights, disability, education, and literacy.
Bookshare.org is a subscription-based digital library that provides instant, independent access to over 26,000 books and periodicals - opening up a whole new world of reading for people with print disabilities.
http://www.benetech.org/literacy/bookshare.shtml
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