Hello. I'm back for another week. This week has been very hectic in some ways, and very slow in others.

Work has been going pretty well. Sadly there weren't many customers coming into the library this week, ok, there was one. However it still went quite well. She was another new computer user, and was learning Jaws. We went over some of the basics, and I explained some of the technical concepts. It was a pretty fun training session.

Otherwise I've been doing a lot of outreach work this week, e-mailing and calling some places that might be interested in our services. I've also been trying to keep an eye open for any cool bits of info from last week's CSUN conference. Next week should pick up more though because I have a few appointments already, and a good idea of a few projects I want to work on.

The hectic part of the week is from my school course. It's still progressing pretty well. I have all the instruction done in draft form, so now it's mainly to tweek it and make it sound better. My current project is to reword the objectives for everything, and then come up with evaluation questions for each unit. These will be a few thought questions throughout each unit, and actual quiz style questions at the end of each one. Still a lot of work to do there, so I'll be very busy with that today and tomorrow. From there, it's just updating and uploading everything into HTML EZ, so next month I can get a few people to test the module.

I haven't had too much time for much else this week. I did have a couple of interesting bus rides yesterday evening and this morning. Both times, people started fighting on the bus, and yesterday the cops actually came by. I think the driver reported the people this morning too. Seems like when the weather gets nicer, the crazies come out.

So there's nothing too interesting to talk about this week, but next week should be a lot more eventful. Until then.

I'm back again for another week. This week hasn't been too eventful at work, but there are still a few things to talk about.

This week has also been rather slow for customers, but I've gotten other work done instead, which is good. On Monday a new customer came in to learn about Kurzweil, and really liked the software. I think he'll be coming in fairly often to scan and read books and other printed materials.

On Tuesday I showed another staff member some of the technology we had on the computer, and we had an interesting discussion on some of the issues with assistive technology, like how inaccessible it can be due to pricing. I think I've touched on this in other entries, but this is my biggest annoyance right now. Immediately when I think of assistive technology, especially computer based, and maybe rather high tech stuff, I immediately think cool and very expensive. So then I think there's little to no chance I'll be able to ever use the technology unless I win the lottery, get lucky enough to get help paying for it, or pay on a loan for the next 15+ years.

This has been an issue forever, but it's really starting to be talked about more lately. Instead of propritary note takers, people can now buy software that runs on off-the-shelf PDA's and phones. I also have to say I really like what Serotek is doing with the Freedom Box. Not only does it offer different functionality for beginner computer users through the Freedom Box Network, it also has a pretty impressive screen reader component via the System Access program. I just found out too that it even includes remote computing at no extra charge, which I have to try out. And it's significantly less expensive than many other AT products out there now.


Anyway, on Wednesday I finally got Dragon trained to start recognizing my voice. One of the regular library customers I've helped in the past came in to help me as a volunteerer. He basically read me the paragraphs of text, and repeated whatever it got stuck on. The process was actually pretty painless, but still a little strange. Surpringly enough though, it picked up on how I spoke pretty well. This morning I did some more training on my own. I created a Word document, edited text, did some formatting, and navigated around Windows a bit. I was impressed at how well the program did. However what I need to still do more research on is using it with the Internet. speaking web addresses and navigating links seems rather clunky and inefficient now, but I'll definitely work more on that next week. I'm just happy I can start using the program now, and better help and teach others to use it.

As for other stuff going on, there's a really cool new computer/PDA device from GW Micro now that runs Windows XP and WindowEyes. It's basically a laptop in the skin of a PDA. It's got a 1 Ghz processor, 512 MB RAM, 30 GB hard drive, and can run Windows XP Home or Pro. It was just announced at CSUN this week. CSUN is an anual assistive technology conference in California, which I really wish I could have attended this year. You can find more info and cool pics of the device at www.gwmicro.com . I can't remember the name right now, but it's something Ultra. I'll defintely be keeping my eyes open for more info on this thing.

Things are finally starting to progress with my grad school project too. I've got a long way to go, but got a good start on my instruction. Hopefully I'll have the basics of most, if not all, of the instruction done by this weekend. It's a lot of work though, and I really have to respect instructors who put the time and effort into a great course. It's just as much work prepping everything for the class as it is doing the homework, sometimes more so.

Finally I'll hpoefully do a little gaming this weekend. I got my couple games I'd been waiting for for a long time. Tetris DS and The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion came yesterday. I quick tried each last night, and I love both. Tetris DS has several cool modes in addition to the standard Tetris everyone's probably played by now. I also like the cool retro Nintendo vibe they put into the game. The different game modes have cool remixes of classic Nintendo music from games like Super Mario Bros., Metroid, and Zelda. It also lets 4 people play online at a time, and up to 10 people locally with one cart. I Must find a way to try 10 players. That sounds like pure chaos and a lot of fun. There are a couple things I don't like though. Like how you can rotate pieces quickly so they don't fall, and how you can see 6 of the next pieces in line. Come on, I want at least the option for the classic 1 piece view. It takes a lot of the fun out of the game if you see so far ahead. I find myself not even looking over there most of the time. Still the games a blast.

Oblivion is quite great too. I could write an entire entry on this game because there's so much to talk about, and I might if people want to hear more. Basically it's an action RPG with this huge world to explore. Every character is voiced, and has their on lives in the world. The AI seems pretty cool, and the characters can do a lot of surprising things. I only got through the initial training dungeon and explored a little of the countryside, but wow! This game is beautiful, and best of all the load times are very quick to non-existant when walking around the world. My character is a huge Orc that's great with swords and axes. I only wish I'd put more into lockpicking. That will soon change though.

Until next time.

I'm back for another week. I guess the first thing to talk about is the weather. We got a lot of snow starting on Sunday night. I keep telling people how amused I am that we've gotten more snow now in the past couple days than we've had all winter. You know it's bad when a lot of the city busses get stuck during the day. I even heard on the news one night that there was a traffic jam that was about 30 miles long around the boarder.

As for work this week, things are still going pretty good. I got my quarterly report done for now, so that's out of the way. I am still getting a lot of interest in the assistive technology computer too. I had a lot of people scheduled to come in this week, but sadly because of the weather, most canceled. Still I met with a newer customer again this week, and things are going really well. She has a computer at home and a screen magnification program similar to Magic. It's actually the main competitor, ZoomText, which I also have on my personal laptop. She's learning to use the computer, keyboard, and how to type stuff up in Microsoft Word. It's going really well so far.

I'm also determined to get this Dragon thing working for me yet. I was talking with my supervisor, and we came up with a great idea. One of the regular customers who often comes in to use the computer and Magic is also looking for volunteer opportunities, so we set one up. So next week, he's going to work with me and see if we can't get Dragon trained for my voice. As it is now, it's hard to do this just using Jaws. You have to read several blocks of text, and if a word is highlighted, you have to repeat that word until it recognizes it and then move on. As I think I've mentioned before, there's a program that helps with these problems, but it's spendy. So we're going to just try training it another way. I'll post how that goes next week.

That's really about all there is to mention about work, other than I'm still working on some tech proposals for the library, and will be trying out the new version of Freedom Box soon. The more I read and hear, the more I actually like about the program. I listened to an audio demo yesterday, and I really like how it handles web pages. It can some how tell what the main part of the page is, and just start reading from there automatically, which is very nice. I have a feeling it just looks for the first heading or paragraph tag and starts reading from there. So when I get my trial going at work, I'll test it with some really strange and complicated page layouts to see just how well it works.

Things are finally starting to get done in my masters class too, which is good because the semester is flying by. It took me a while, but the first step was really to narrow the scope of what I'll be developing this semester by a lot. I really have a feeling that what I planned out last semester was the layout for a whole semester's course. I guess that's one of my strengths/weaknesses. When I plan, I plan big... The project for the semester now looks like it will focus on accessibility for the visually impaired, with some background on vision impairment itself, assistive technology used, and then some information on common barriers and a couple sections for basic page elements. Even just focusing on vision impairment, I'm not covering everhting I could for this semester. The hardest part for me I think will be making the transition between sections because of how the course was originally designed. With so much lacking information on other topics, I'll have to be sure everything fits together well. So there's a lot of work to be done still, but at least I'm making progress.

Another interesting thing that happened this week was a phone call yesterday. A company had my resume for a while, and some jobs are becoming available. The great thing is, the company is focused on assistive technology and accessibility. All of their positions relate in some way to this issue. The job they told me about was for a web consultant to help make sure websites for a company were accessible and followed the guidelines of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. They're also looking for people all the time, so I'm definitely going to keep them in mind for when I'm done with CTEP. Apparently they do work in all kinds of areas including E-learning and Instructional Design, so yay, maybe my masters program will give me an edge there some time too.

So that's what's going on this week.

Hello again. Well things have been busy as ever this past week. Work is going well. Over the past week, I've had 3 new people call or stop by. I've met with one of them today, and I'll be meeting the other two early next week. So I think we're up to around 12 to 13 people now.

Magic really seems to be the popular program. Often people just need some form of magnification so they don't have to struggle to read small print on the monitor. The people interested in Jaws have been using the program some already, but just want to learn more. A couple people are interested in Kurzweil as well. So all the technology is getting some use.

I'm still working out how to actually train Dragon for myself. In order to start dictating to the program, you have to go through some initial training. This basically consists of reading through a few paragraphs of text clearly until the computer understands every word. As a Jaws user, it's rather interesting, and by interesting I mean difficult. There is a pretty cool program called JSay that will greatly help bridge the gap between Jaws and Dragon, but like most assistive technology, it's a few hundred dollars. I think I'm going to just set up a time with a library staff member and see if they can help me read the screen, and see if we can get through it. I really need to get better at Dragon, because it's rather hard to help people right now when I'm not able to use it myself. So that's one of my immediate goals for the next week or so.

I'm also working on getting a couple other technologies available to the library. I'm going to put together a proposal for WebAdapt and The Freedom Box. I really don't see any reason WebAdapt can't be put on a machine, because it's small, and totally free. I'm also going to be doing some evaluating of the Freedom Box software, and putting together a proposal why I think this would greatly help library customers. I see it very useful to new computer users who just want to be able to do a select few things, and not really become very technical. A lot of people simply want to be able to communicate with family via E-mail, and look things up on the Internet.

I also had my first quarterly review with my site supervisor and CTEP supervisor. It went pretty well. Things are going smoothly, but we came up with a few things to try and work on for projects and just improving what I'm already doing.

I also had my first conference with my grad school instructor for my course project. Things are actually going fairly well, even though I'm probably still a little behind. I learned some basics about putting my instruction into HTML EZ, and just some tips for the instruction itself. I will also be figuring out how to trim down what part of the instruction I'll actually develop for this semester. My training module is so huge, and has so much content, that there's no way I'd get it all developed, implamented, tested, and evaluated before mid May. I now have a few ideas how to make this thing more manageable. Now I just have to sit down and work on it more...

Finally, nothing too exciting or fun has happened lately. I'll hopefully get together with a few friends in the next couple weeks. Oh, and I did get to visit the science museum last week with the rest of CTEP, and that was really cool. I love the omnitheater. And yay! There's finally a release date for a game I've been looking forward to for the past year or so, 2 actually. The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion and Tetris DS both come out on the 20th, and I can't wait for either. Tetris will be great because I love Tetris, and there are lots of new modes that we can all play with only one copy of the game. That's definitely one of the coolest features of the Nintendo DS. And Oblivion, if it has everything it is supposed to, will probably be one of the coolest games ever, and thankfully my PC is powerful enough to run it now. And anyone who likes action games should definitely get F.E.A.R. and play online. I've been quite addicted to that for the past few months. Hopefully I'll be able to find more fun events and places to go in the near future too.

Anyway, that's all for now.

I'm back, and do I have a lot to talk about today.... I'm not sure where to begin, so here we go.

Work is going well. I've had a couple of new customers, and some returning ones as well. It also sounds like some more people will be stopping in or making appointments soon. A lot of people are really interested in Magic, the screen magnification program. I'm also still hoping to get WebAdapt installed on the machine some time some how. I think it would be very helpful. The program is free to anyone to use, and it would help the majority of people I've worked with because a lot of what they want to do is use the Internet and e-mail. All I would have to do is make a quick getting started sheet and make a user account for them. They could then download the program at home, or I could even burn some more CD's to give them.

I attended another training at SSB this past Monday, and it was quite interesting. The presenters showed off a few pieces of technology like the Braille Note, Trekker, and a couple others. The Braille Note is a little PDA style device that comes in either a Braille or QWERTY keyboard style. It has an electronic Braille display and speech output. The device supports programs like Pocket Word, e-mail, Internet Explorer, etc. It's also got a couple of pretty cool exclusive features.

My favorite has to be the database feature. It's got a built-in database program that's so easy to use, I demand a Windows version. I don't understand why using and creating databases can't be this simple. The unit comes with some pre-built ones like for phone numbers and addresses, media collections, etc., but it's just as easy to make your own. There's even advanced features to make certain default values for fields, and how it reports info back to you. This would be sweet for a person doing anything via phone where they had to get someone's information and input more information in other fields. I love that software and wish it was on other platforms.

It also had a couple other cool things like some accessible games, an FM tunor, support for both Compact Flash and SD cards, and a couple more I can't remember. The only thing I didn't really like about it was the cost, and some of the hardware. Like it had a built-in modem, but no form of network card. It had a PC/MCIA slot, but no wireless. I think it would be much better to have an ethernet/modem combo card, and wireless card. Their reasoning was they didn't know what to support, A, B, or G. My thought is, they have cards that have all 3 wireless types supported. My laptop has one such card. Just put one of them in there and you're covered. Finally the cost was pretty insane, like over $2000.

The other main demo they had was a GpS for the Braille Note. This is a program that allows GPS functionality with a little hardware GPS add-on. This would be very nice at times. Using maps, you can figure out where you are, plan and follow routs, and find points of interest on the way. So I could plan my trip to work, and as I'm traveling, it would tell me where to go, and I could request certain points of interest along the way. Say I wanted to know about all the electronics stores along the way to work, because I'm a geek like that... I could easily set this up. There are some other cool features to it too, but I won't go into them here because I don't know enough about them to properly explain them. The device should be accurate within about 10 feet, so good mobility skills are still very important, but it would really help find new locations.

The Trekker was also there, but not demonstrated. This is another similar device to the GPS and Braille Note combo, only the PDA part isn't propriatary hardware. There's software you can install on a supported off-the-shelf PDA, which many are supported. It's also a bit nicer for the GPS part because it's smaller and easier to use because of its size. The Braille Note is quite big compared to it, and could cause more problems when walking. The Trekker can fit in a pocket, and has a case protecting it more from the elements, which is important when walking around here. The Braille Note has a case too, but has to be open to use the device in GPS mode.

OK, enough on that day... I also had a very cool presentation this morning at the library. Someone from Freedom of Speech came in to demonstrate a product called The Freedom Box. I had heard of it before today, but didn't know much about it, and what i knew turned out to be not quite so accurate. This thing is pretty cool, and has a lot of interesting features.

The program comes in a variety of types. You can get it on a Flash drive, mini-CD, or on a piece of hardware. You can also get it with a little keyboard or without, but more on that later. The sweet thing is, no software has to be installed. It all runs from the CD or flash drive.

The software allows a blind or low vision user to easily surf the internet, check and send e-mail, get news and entertainment, play games, listen to books or descriptive movies or TV shows, and more. The service kind of works like a cross between something like AOL but better, and regular computer use. There's the cost of the initial purchase, and then a monthly subscription of about $19. The initial purchase isn't that bad though in AT terms, it's around $250 to $550 depending on what type you order.

The main draw for this package is its ease of use. Rather than having to know a lot of computer and Windows concepts, keyboard navigation commands, etc, they make it very easy to use. Once the program starts, the user is presented with a menu of what to do: E-mail, games, news, etc. Once they choose an option by arrowing to it or pressing the number of the choice, they are presented with another menu of choices. They can compose e-mail in this way for instance, until they get to the actual To: field and such. But even then, they only have to type that information if they so choose. They can record a voice e-mail as an option and it will send an MP3 attachment to the message the other person can listen to. So there is minimal typing required, and navigating the rest of the system really only requires the arrow, tab, enter, and 1 or 2 other keys. There are lots more shortcut keys for advanced users if they want it, but they're not necessary.

Take this one step further by getting the PS2 or USB Keypad. This has the basic keys people would need to perform most of the functions without a standard keyboard. The very basic keys are the biggest, and slightly more advanced keys are smaller. Both ways work very well.

We tried a variety of things with it today, both with the keyboard and external keypad. We checked websites, e-mail, looked for movies, and more. It was all very easy. It provided speech output and large print, both of which can be customized at any time. Keep in mind all of this is running with nothing being installed to the computer. This would be excellent for beginning computer users or senior citizens who may have trouble learning or be intimidated by the computer's complexity. But it also has some useful features even advanced users would like.

Oh, one of the coolest things I forgot to mention.... When browsing the Internet, if I came across a site that had something I could fix like a button with no alt tag, I could custom label it. Jaws and most other screen readers can do this too, but that's not the cool part. The cool thing is, after a page is fixed up right, since a lot of the service is server based, you could press a keystroke to upload these fixes to their centralized server, and anyone who browses this page in the future would benifit from your fixes instantly. This was very awesome, and I'd love to see Jaws implament something like this, rather than having to find and copy settings files to a particular user. This is a quick and easy way to benifit everyone.

There's probably more I could say about all of this stuff, but i'll leave it at that for now. I will say though, that you can download a 30 day demo of Freedom Box from http://www.freedombox.info Interestingly enough, the company making this product is from here in the Twin Cities too.

Other than that, nothing too exciting has happened. A couple of friends were staying in St. Paul this week for job stuff, and a couple of the tech demos I went to, so that was cool. I'm starting to get something done with my masters project, but I really really really need to do a lot more, which is one of my plans for this weekend. I'm also looking forward to tomorrow because CTEP is going to the Science Museum, and that should be fun. And hopefully no one will be sick this time, and we can do some serious Mario Kart battling. So I'm keeping plenty busy, and having a little fun too.

Till the next novel...