Month: March 2008

This morning, I had a few emails containing comments people have made to recent BC posts. I have comment moderation turned on so spam comments don’t get through to the blog itself. When I hit the “publish” link on the first comment today, I was presented with an error page from blogger that said something about cookies being corrupted or acting poorly for some reason. After doing a bit of clean up, I could log back into blogger and post the comment.

So, if you see this message with no text following, it means that my Word 2007 problem went away as a function of fixing the possibly related blogger login function.

Ok, that didn’t work and I even tried to delete my blog account within Word and start over from scratch but, for no reason apparent to me yet, I get a dialogue containing an error message that says something like, “Word could not contact your provider, please contact your blog host for additional help.” This sentence was pretty useless but I’ll try sending blogger a note or searching their FAQ to see if others are having the same problems.

Ok, trying to publish using the blogger interface didn’t work either as I seem to have dropped my Internet connection. I’m going to try again with Word before resorting to the blogger interface which almost always means that I need to summon Susan, my lovely wife, to read the visual verification as I can never seem to understand the numbers played in the audio alternative.

Ok, when I returned to Word 2007 and tried the publish to blog feature, I found that I had lost my Internet connection and had to reboot to get it back. Thus, I’m in the blogger interface hoping I can do this independently but suspecting that Susan will need to help again.

Anyone with any information about the Word 2007 blog posting issues that I’m experiencing should please write to me to see if we can find a solution.

–End

This morning, I had a few emails containing comments people have made to recent BC posts. I have comment moderation turned on so spam comments don’t get through to the blog itself. When I hit the “publish” link on the first comment today, I was presented with an error page from blogger that said something about cookies being corrupted or acting poorly for some reason. After doing a bit of clean up, I could log back into blogger and post the comment.

So, if you see this message with no text following, it means that my Word 2007 problem went away as a function of fixing the possibly related blogger login function.

Ok, that didn’t work and I even tried to delete my blog account within Word and start over from scratch but, for no reason apparent to me yet, I get a dialogue containing an error message that says something like, “Word could not contact your provider, please contact your blog host for additional help.” This sentence was pretty useless but I’ll try sending blogger a note or searching their FAQ to see if others are having the same problems.

Ok, trying to publish using the blogger interface didn’t work either as I seem to have dropped my Internet connection. I’m going to try again with Word before resorting to the blogger interface which almost always means that I need to summon Susan, my lovely wife, to read the visual verification as I can never seem to understand the numbers played in the audio alternative.

–End

I had to get assistance from my lovely wife to post the item about the Word 2007 Publish to Blog feature. For no reason I can discern, it simply no longer works for me. If anyone has any ideas how I managed to break this or how/if some combination of Microsoft and google broke it, please send along any information you might have about the problem and, hopefully, anything you may have learned about how to fix it.

Also, has anyone noticed that the keystrokes to get to the publish menu is Alt F U? What are Word’s authors saying with that F U to those of us who want to publish blog entries from within Word? Coincidence? I think not, clearly this is all part of the international conspiracy against my personal happiness.

While I’m writing about MS Word, I will add another problem I encounter with relative frequency that may have a solution somewhere in the Word options dialogues but, for the life of me, I haven’t been able to find it in either Word 2003 or 2007. The symptom, using either JAWS or System Access (I haven’t tried Window-Eyes yet but I’ll take a leap of faith and assume it works in the same manner as the others ifn this case) is that epigraphs disappear, at least in the context of a screen freader’s output.

What is an epigraph? To split up a short written piece of text into “chunks” one may place a few asterisks or some other symbol between two sections of the article denoting to the reader that the next section contains information different but related to the text above it. In Word XP, I could type *** and center it relative to the text above and below it and, using a screen reader, one would hear “star star star,” which our readers could figure out means a break in the story.

Since I switched to Office 2003 and later to 2007, typing three consecutive asterisks and hitting ENTER causes the stars to disappear (to a screen reader at least) and sometimes makes the text flow strangely as scenes in a story change without anything telling the user that one segment had ended and another began. I found this especially annoying in the “Blind Machurian Zone” Gonz Blinko story which jumps from place to place and character group to group pretty frequently and, reading via a SayAll (or the equivalent command in screen readers other than JAWS) it sounds very choppy.

I do not know if the epigraph is translated into anything useful for sighted readers as I haven’t polled any lately. I can only speak to how they don’t work in a usable fashion for readers with vision impairment.

While writing about writing, I’d like to ask our readers a question. Typically, if I have a question about virtually anything regarding grammar or the rules of writing in English, I go immediately to what many consider the Bible of writing guidelines, “Elements of Style,” by Strunk and White. Both Professor Strunk and E. B. White died long before the Internet came to the general public so did not include any style rules regarding usage of URLs and other web related elements. My question: most web addresses (www.google.com for instance) are almost always written in all lower case. What is the rule for starting a sentence with a URL such as, “Bookshare.org is one of my favorite web sites?” Should the author capitalize the “b” or start the sentence with a lower case letter?

Has anyone put out a style guide for the information age and, if so, does anyone pay attention to it?

End

I had to get assistance from my lovely wife to post the item about the Word 2007 Publish to Blog feature. For no reason I can discern, it simply no longer works for me. If anyone has any ideas how I managed to break this or how/if some combination of Microsoft and google broke it, please send along any information you might have about the problem and, hopefully, anything you may have learned about how to fix it.

Also, has anyone noticed that the keystrokes to get to the publish menu is Alt F U? What are Word’s authors saying with that F U to those of us who want to publish blog entries from within Word? Coincidence? I think not, clearly this is all part of the international conspiracy against my personal happiness.

While I’m writing about MS Word, I will add another problem I encounter with relative frequency that may have a solution somewhere in the Word options dialogues but, for the life of me, I haven’t been able to find it in either Word 2003 or 2007. The symptom, using either JAWS or System Access (I haven’t tried Window-Eyes yet but I’ll take a leap of faith and assume it works in the same manner as the others in this case) is that epigraphs disappear, at least in the context of a screen reader’s output.

What is an epigraph? To split up a short written piece of text into “chunks” one may place a few asterisks or some other symbol between two sections of the article denoting to the reader that the next section contains information different but related to the text above it. In Word XP, I could type *** and center it relative to the text above and below it and, using a screen reader, one would hear “star star star,” which our readers could figure out means a break in the story.

Since I switched to Office 2003 and later to 2007, typing three consecutive asterisks and hitting ENTER causes the stars to disappear (to a screen reader at least) and sometimes makes the text flow strangely as scenes in a story change without anything telling the user that one segment had ended and another began. I found this especially annoying in the “Blind Machurian Zone” Gonz Blinko story which jumps from place to place and character group to group pretty frequently and, reading via a SayAll (or the equivalent command in screen readers other than JAWS) it sounds very choppy.

I do not know if the epigraph is translated into anything useful for sighted readers as I haven’t polled any lately. I can only speak to how they don’t work in a usable fashion for readers with vision impairment.

While writing about writing, I’d like to ask our readers a question. Typically, if I have a question about virtually anything regarding grammar or the rules of writing in English, I go immediately to what many consider the Bible of writing guidelines, “Elements of Style,” by Strunk and White. Both Professor Strunk and E. B. White died long before the Internet came to the general public so did not include any style rules regarding usage of URLs and other web related elements. My question: most web addresses (www.google.com for instance) are almost always written in all lower case. What is the rule for starting a sentence with a URL such as, “Bookshare.org is one of my favorite web sites?” Should the author capitalize the “b” or start the sentence with a lower case letter?

Has anyone put out a style guide for the information age and, if so, does anyone pay attention to it?

Afterward

The publish feature seems to get very confused. If one goes to the File menu, selects Publish (Alt+F U), selects blog from the submenu, then selects publish in the menu that gives one the opportunity to select between publishing directly to the blog or as a draft Word will insert its bit of text saying the item had been published but it doesn’t show up on the blog page (at least when using blogger). I would appreciate help from anyone who has an answer to this problem as I’m growing frustrated ever since the email post feature was broken followed by the blog post feature in Word that did work recently but since has ceased to do anything useful.

I’m still accepting bids for the PAC Mate. The device is in near mint condition, has a 40 cell Braille display and half of the proceeds are going to two of my favorite charities: Bookshare.org and South Eastern Guide Dogs. My initial asking price is $1500 and will accept bids equal to that or better until April 15.

End

I had to get assistance from my lovely wife to post the item about the Word 2007 Publish to Blog feature. For no reason I can discern, it simply no longer works for me. If anyone has any ideas how I managed to break this or how/if some combination of Microsoft and google broke it, please send along any information you might have about the problem and, hopefully, anything you may have learned about how to fix it.

Also, has anyone noticed that the keystrokes to get to the publish menu is Alt F U? What are Word’s authors saying with that F U to those of us who want to publish blog entries from within Word? Coincidence? I think not, clearly this is all part of the international conspiracy against my personal happiness.

While I’m writing about MS Word, I will add another problem I encounter with relative frequency that may have a solution somewhere in the Word options dialogues but, for the life of me, I haven’t been able to find it in either Word 2003 or 2007. The symptom, using either JAWS or System Access (I haven’t tried Window-Eyes yet but I’ll take a leap of faith and assume it works in the same manner as the others in this case) is that epigraphs disappear, at least in the context of a screen reader’s output.

What is an epigraph? To split up a short written piece of text into “chunks” one may place a few asterisks or some other symbol between two sections of the article denoting to the reader that the next section contains information different but related to the text above it. In Word XP, I could type *** and center it relative to the text above and below it and, using a screen reader, one would hear “star star star,” which our readers could figure out means a break in the story.

Since I switched to Office 2003 and later to 2007, typing three consecutive asterisks and hitting ENTER causes the stars to disappear (to a screen reader at least) and sometimes makes the text flow strangely as scenes in a story change without anything telling the user that one segment had ended and another began. I found this especially annoying in the “Blind Machurian Zone” Gonz Blinko story which jumps from place to place and character group to group pretty frequently and, reading via a SayAll (or the equivalent command in screen readers other than JAWS) it sounds very choppy.

I do not know if the epigraph is translated into anything useful for sighted readers as I haven’t polled any lately. I can only speak to how they don’t work in a usable fashion for readers with vision impairment.

While writing about writing, I’d like to ask our readers a question. Typically, if I have a question about virtually anything regarding grammar or the rules of writing in English, I go immediately to what many consider the Bible of writing guidelines, “Elements of Style,” by Strunk and White. Both Professor Strunk and E. B. White died long before the Internet came to the general public so did not include any style rules regarding usage of URLs and other web related elements. My question: most web addresses (www.google.com for instance) are almost always written in all lower case. What is the rule for starting a sentence with a URL such as, “Bookshare.org is one of my favorite web sites?” Should the author capitalize the “b” or start the sentence with a lower case letter?

Has anyone put out a style guide for the information age and, if so, does anyone pay attention to it?

End

Yesterday, after finishing my post about the potential for crankiness in the life of blinks, I tried to use the Word 2007 publishing features which had worked for me in the past. After hitting the publish button, the document had the “Published to BlindConfidential at time and date” message added to the top of the document but the article never showed up in the blog. So, in case anything went wrong somewhere in the infrastructure either on my PC or on blogger, I’m trying again, hence the title of this message.

A few minutes later:

I tried publishing this post again using the “publish/publish” buttons but instead of going to the button bar, I used the keystroke sequence: “Alt+H P P” which gave different results. Instead of telling me through the text it inserted at the top of the document that It had indeed published the article, instead, I got a dialogue telling me that Word had trouble connecting to the host and to try again later. This didn’t “fix” the issue but helped in getting to the root cause. I had made the amateur assumption that Word would act the same using keystrokes as it did with buttons which, for no reason I know, it does not.

A few minutes later:

I heard one of the applications currently running (Word 2007 Outlook 2007, IE, Skype) play a sound with which I was unfamiliar. I hoped it meant that Word had, after a long delay, found a way to publish the post – unfortunately, I was wrong. The purpose of the sound, one which I hadn’t heard before, remains a mystery to me.

A half hour later:

I played around in the blog account settings for a while and read some help text about publishing to a blog. I deleted the account in Word and started over. Word told me that my new account had been verified by my blog host with a nice dialogue and a cute sound. I went back to the article which you are now reading, hit the key sequence from above and got the same error about my host being unavailable.

This is starting to really suck…

Finally:

I went to the blogger control panel, found BlindConfidential and hit the link for creating a new post. If the text ends here, it means that, for the first time ever, I managed to get beyond the blogger visual verification by actually understanding its garbled speech. If, however, you read some more text, it means that Susan, my lovely wife, came into my home office and read the verification information off of the screen to me.

 End

Yesterday, after finishing my post about the potential for crankiness in the life of blinks, I tried to use the Word 2007 publishing features which had worked for me in the past. After hitting the publish button, the document had the “Published to BlindConfidential at time and date” message added to the top of the document but the article never showed up in the blog. So, in case anything went wrong somewhere in the infrastructure either on my PC or on blogger, I’m trying again, hence the title of this message.

• End

Recently, St. Petersburg, Florida has added a small number of cross walk buttons that make it much easier to cross major streets without causing the burden of a stop light which would most certainly be a minor inconvenience for motorists. The buttons on either side of 22 Ave. (a very busy and fairly high speed thoroughfare) and 7 St (a relatively low traffic road) work great and have speech synthesizers built in (they work about half of the time) which provide the pedestrian with moderately useful information.

The first thing the device says, “You have pressed a button,” overstates the obvious as, if I hadn’t pressed a button, it wouldn’t have started talking. The second bit tells the person who pressed the button that he or she is about to cross 22 Ave. at 7 St. which is slightly valuable in the event that the pedestrian thinks they might be at 5th St. and 22 Ave. which has a similar configuration. Finally, the voice says, “Remember to wave to thank the motorists for stopping.”

I enjoy shopping for fishing gear at Bill Jackson’s, a real terrific store here in St. Pete which sells mostly outdoor gear for fishing, hunting and other sports of that sort. Never in my many visits to this store have I waved to the guy in the gun department for not killing me; why then should I thank motorists for not smashing me and my guide dog on to a one way trip to the hereafter? I find the idea of thanking someone for not killing or severely injuring my dog and me a bit silly, I thought that, in our culture, not killing or maiming people comes as part of the social contract one signs at birth in this great nation.

So, what can we do to remind the sighties that providing thanks for a common courtesy (not killing us) is ridiculous? Enter CrankyBlindPerson.com (a fictional web page), the place for blinks to buy items that tell the world what we really think.

Product number one will come in the form of a “crossing guard” orange. The front of the shirt will have a cartoon of an SUV squishing a blink and his dog. The back, in large and bold black letters will say, “THANK YOU FOR NOT KILLING ME!” I think this statement is apropos to many situations and especially so to crossing streets.

The second idea for items to sell on the “Cranky” site actually requires a minor level of what many people may consider vandalism. This idea, presented to me by Dena, will be a bumper sticker that says, “I Endangered the Life of a Person With a Disability Today.” We expect people with disabilities to use these stickers to come when an motorist parks her car across a sidewalk, crosswalk or, my personal favorite, the case in which a pick-up truck parks in a driveway but has boards or some other hard object sticking out at head level into a sidewalk. In all three of these situations, the blind pedestrian can find the car’s bumper, peel off the back of the sticker and slap it on so other motorists will know that the offending driver has done something that most people might not think about.

The last idea we’ve thought of so far is a bit controversial and one of our friends thinks it goes too far. This item, a sign for one’s guide dog handle, rather than coming in a typical dark color with white lettering and saying something like, “Please don’t pet me, I’m working,” is far less polite. If we do decide to have some of these made, they will come in bright, warning signal orange and say, “Very Friendly Dog, Violent Owner, Touch neither!” And will have a small Uzi stenciled on the bottom As so many sighted people simply do not notice the polite, albeit in understated colors sign on my dog and, after they start petting X-Celerator and I point to the sign while asking them not to touch the animal while he’s working causes reactions ranging from polite apologies to snippy remarks about said sighty’s love for dogs and, occasionally, even a statement that by working my animal, I have crossed some line into abusing the guy which really makes my blood boil. I think that a bright orange sign with a less polite statement would serve us better.

Maybe the Blind Panther Party can help us with distribution?

There seems to be a common feeling among most sighties that we blinks should act excessively politely and be thankful of anything the city, county, state, Federal government, AT companies and any other organization or individual does for us. In his CSUN keynote address, Jim Fruchterman stated that “accessibility is a basic human right,” this statement is contained in the text of the treaty that grew out of the UN Convention on Human Rights and People With Disabilities, a UN initiative to which the United States is the only major nation not to participate. Mike Calvo’s bold move to allow the Accessibility Is a Right (AIR) Foundation distribute System Access To Go (SATOGO) without cost to any user on Earth seems to be the first major move by an AT company to acknowledge that the work they do is different from mainstream technology and that, above all, their duty is to their users first and their investors second.

According to UN data, there are 600 million people with disabilities in the global population. According to another statement out of the UN, people with disabilities are the most oppressed minority on the planet but the community has no real leaders on the political front. Who will be the Martin, the Mandela, the Gandhi of our cause? Who is willing to jeopardize their career by pointing out flaws in AT products? Who is willing to take on city governments about the needs of pedestrian rights when many of us already know that the likelihood of change is poor? Who is willing to take on the FCC for doing little or nothing to act on 255 complaints years after the bill came into effect?

Any person who steps up into these issues tends to receive harassment from other blinks who oppose what they consider “radicalism” and think we should just kiss asses and politely hope that kindness will catch more flies than vinegar (to mix metaphors).

I have made the decision to only work on free software that is distributed under GPL or a similar license. I’m making some interesting progress on some of what I think are very cool projects. I also see a number of other open source/free software programs that people throughout the world are working on. I think community developed software may take longer to create than well financed programs from the for profit AT companies but I think that the community based hackers will be more inclusive of changes requested by users and, as free software has been demonstrated to do, will get far more bugs fixed as there will be far more ears listening to the output.

Even non-hackers can take on very important roles in the world of free AT. The movement (as it is) needs users to help design features as they think they should work. We need a lot of people to volunteer to write documentation as free software docs tend to be a bit rough. There are free AT projects for Windows, GNU/Linux and Macintosh so I urge everyone to help out in some way (excepting those people who have a non-compete agreement with an AT company as I wouldn’t want to drag anyone else into the legal hell I’ve experienced).

So, tune in, hack on and yell out!

Afterward

I have a relatively old PAC Mate that has not been used since I got it back from the repair shop at FS which I would like to sell. I believe it qualifies for the upgrade to the Omni edition but I’m not sure on this. The unit is a QX 440 running Windows Mobile 2003, thus, it includes a 40 cell Braille display which, alone would cost far more than I will ask for this item.

I will start the bidding at $1500 plus shipping for the unit in an “as is” state. The highest bidder will, upon payment, get the PM. I’ve long ago lost the case and the strap on mine came from a proto PM relatively early in the development cycle of the product so is different from the shipping Pac Mates.

As I did with the Braille Blazer I sold a month or so ago, I will give half of the purchase price (in the case of the Blazer I gave the entire sum but it was only $150 and splitting it didn’t make sense) to be split evenly between Bookshare.org and Southeastern Guide Dogs. Also, I’m going to keep half of the purchase for myself as I’m feeling greedy these days.

Please send bids to me at the email in the “Contact Me” section of the BC blog.

Bidding on the PM will end on April 15, 2008.

Happy Hacking…

–End

    Recently, St. Petersburg, Florida has added a small number of cross walk buttons that make it much easier to cross major streets without causing the burden of a stop light which would most certainly be a minor inconvenience for motorists. The buttons on either side of 22 Ave. (a very busy and fairly high speed thoroughfare) and 7 St (a relatively low traffic road) work great and have speech synthesizers built in (they work about half of the time) which provide the pedestrian with moderately useful information.

The first thing the device says, “You have pressed a button,” overstates the obvious as, if I hadn’t pressed a button, it wouldn’t have started talking. The second bit tells the person who pressed the button that he or she is about to cross 22 Ave. at 7 St. which is slightly valuable in the event that the pedestrian thinks they might be at 5^th St. and 22 Ave. which has a similar configuration. Finally, the voice says, “Remember to wave to thank the motorists for stopping.”

I enjoy shopping for fishing gear at Bill Jackson’s, a real terrific store here in St. Pete which sells mostly outdoor gear for fishing, hunting and other sports of that sort. Never in my many visits to this store have I waved to the guy in the gun department for not killing me; why then should I thank motorists for not smashing me and my guide dog on to a one way trip to the hereafter? I find the idea of thanking someone for not killing or severely injuring my dog and me a bit silly, I thought that, in our culture, not killing or maiming people comes as part of the social contract one signs at birth in this great nation.

So, what can we do to remind the sighties that providing thanks for a common courtesy (not killing us) is ridiculous? Enter CrankyBlindPerson.com (a fictional web page), the place for blinks to buy items that tell the world what we really think.

Product number one will come in the form of a “crossing guard” orange. The front of the shirt will have a cartoon of an SUV squishing a blink and his dog. The back, in large and bold black letters will say, “THANK YOU FOR NOT KILLING ME!” I think this statement is apropos to many situations and especially so to crossing streets.

The second idea for items to sell on the “Cranky” site actually requires a minor level of what many people may consider vandalism. This idea, presented to me by Dena, will be a bumper sticker that says, “I Endangered the Life of a Person With a Disability Today.” We expect people with disabilities to use these stickers to come when an motorist parks her car across a sidewalk, crosswalk or, my personal favorite, the case in which a pick-up truck parks in a driveway but has boards or some other hard object sticking out at head level into a sidewalk. In all three of these situations, the blind pedestrian can find the car’s bumper, peel off the back of the sticker and slap it on so other motorists will know that the offending driver has done something that most people might not think about.

The last idea we’ve thought of so far is a bit controversial and one of our friends thinks it goes too far. This item, a sign for one’s guide dog handle, rather than coming in a typical dark color with white lettering and saying something like, “Please don’t pet me, I’m working,” is far less polite. If we do decide to have some of these made, they will come in bright, warning signal orange and say, “Very Friendly Dog, Violent Owner, Touch neither!” And will have a small Uzi stenciled on the bottom As so many sighted people simply do not notice the polite, albeit in understated colors sign on my dog and, after they start petting X-Celerator and I point to the sign while asking them not to touch the animal while he’s working causes reactions ranging from polite apologies to snippy remarks about said sighty’s love for dogs and, occasionally, even a statement that by working my animal, I have crossed some line into abusing the guy which really makes my blood boil. I think that a bright orange sign with a less polite statement would serve us better.

Maybe the Blind Panther Party can help us with distribution?

There seems to be a common feeling among most sighties that we blinks should act excessively politely and be thankful of anything the city, county, state, Federal government, AT companies and any other organization or individual does for us. In his CSUN keynote address, Jim Fruchterman stated that “accessibility is a basic human right,” this statement is contained in the text of the treaty that grew out of the UN Convention on Human Rights and People With Disabilities, a UN initiative to which the United States is the only major nation not to participate. Mike Calvo’s bold move to allow the Accessibility Is a Right (AIR) Foundation distribute System Access To Go (SATOGO) without cost to any user on Earth seems to be the first major move by an AT company to acknowledge that the work they do is different from mainstream technology and that, above all, their duty is to their users first and their investors second.

According to UN data, there are 600 million people with disabilities in the global population. According to another statement out of the UN, people with disabilities are the most oppressed minority on the planet but the community has no real leaders on the political front. Who will be the Martin, the Mandela, the Gandhi of our cause? Who is willing to jeopardize their career by pointing out flaws in AT products? Who is willing to take on city governments about the needs of pedestrian rights when many of us already know that the likelihood of change is poor? Who is willing to take on the FCC for doing little or nothing to act on 255 complaints years after the bill came into effect?

Any person who steps up into these issues tends to receive harassment from other blinks who oppose what they consider “radicalism” and think we should just kiss asses and politely hope that kindness will catch more flies than vinegar (to mix metaphors).

I have made the decision to only work on free software that is distributed under GPL or a similar license. I’m making some interesting progress on some of what I think are very cool projects. I also see a number of other open source/free software programs that people throughout the world are working on. I think community developed software may take longer to create than well financed programs from the for profit AT companies but I think that the community based hackers will be more inclusive of changes requested by users and, as free software has been demonstrated to do, will get far more bugs fixed as there will be far more ears listening to the output.

Even non-hackers can take on very important roles in the world of free AT. The movement (as it is) needs users to help design features as they think they should work. We need a lot of people to volunteer to write documentation as free software docs tend to be a bit rough. There are free AT projects for Windows, GNU/Linux and Macintosh so I urge everyone to help out in some way (excepting those people who have a non-compete agreement with an AT company as I wouldn’t want to drag anyone else into the legal hell I’ve experienced).

So, tune in, hack on and yell out!

Afterward

I have a relatively old PAC Mate that has not been used since I got it back from the repair shop at FS which I would like to sell. I believe it qualifies for the upgrade to the Omni edition but I’m not sure on this. The unit is a QX 440 running Windows Mobile 2003, thus, it includes a 40 cell Braille display which, alone would cost far more than I will ask for this item.

I will start the bidding at $1500 plus shipping for the unit in an “as is” state. The highest bidder will, upon payment, get the PM. I’ve long ago lost the case and the strap on mine came from a proto PM relatively early in the development cycle of the product so is different from the shipping Pac Mates.

As I did with the Braille Blazer I sold a month or so ago, I will give half of the purchase price (in the case of the Blazer I gave the entire sum but it was only $150 and splitting it didn’t make sense) to be split evenly between Bookshare.org and Southeastern Guide Dogs. Also, I’m going to keep half of the purchase for myself as I’m feeling greedy these days.

Please send bids to me at the email in the “Contact Me” section of the BC blog.

Bidding on the PM will end on April 15, 2008.

Happy Hacking…

–End