Category: Uncategorized

Recently, while on the telephone with a friend I made at guide dog school, we started wondering what happens to a God when he or she goes out of favor.  Both of us describe and share in something of an ecumenical polytheist view of the spirit world.  I feel that I clearly understand the Christian and Jewish belief systems the best as those surrounded me as I grew up in Northeast New Jersey.

I don’t understand Islam very well as it seems to me that every expert on the religion I hear talk on the radio, from Muhammad Ali, whose extreme pacifism landed him in jail and got him the nickname, “Buddha in Boxing Gloves,” to the really mean and violent Osama Ben Laden who, even if he chose a different enemy would still scare the poop out of me.  I hear all kinds of people in between talk and each seems to have a different variant on their belief system.  

I realize that there exist numerous Christian and Jewish sects that do not conform to each other and, in many cases, to any translation of the Bible that I’ve read but very rarely (excepting radicals in the Middle East and those who bomb abortion clinics and gay clubs) do they break out in collective violence and, in the vast majority of cases, religious based violence is condemned by the majority of Christian and Jewish leaders.  Many Islamic leaders denounce violence but others lead their faithful in chants of “Death to America!”  While others call for the killing of movie producers, cartoonists and authors.  Thus, I don’t really understand the Moslem faith and will try not to comment on it until I read something more substantial on the subject.

But, we do have to acknowledge that the big three Middle Eastern Semitic religions with their variations on the same God of Abraham do a lot of praying to this individual they collectively choose to worship.

The world has nearly a billion Hindus, a very interesting belief system with lots of interesting Gods.  Different Hindu sects view different Gods as more or less important as some of the other sects but they all seem to accept the whole gang of major Hindu Gods.  Hinduism also permits one to add their own Gods to their pantheon so one can be a Christian Hindu by adding the divinity of Jesus to an acceptance of the divinity of Vishnu, Krishna and the other Hindu Gods.  I enjoy collecting statuettes of Hindu Gods as I like the tactile sensations of all of the different ones based on animals, the monkey being my favorite.

Off on a tangent, the monkey God is very popular in the South of India.  A colleague of mine and I went to Bangalore together while working on a project back in September of 2004.  Monkeys, in this part of the subcontinent, seem as common as squirrels or pigeons in New York.  Literally, monkeys are everywhere.  So, shortly after we checked into our hotel, I called the front desk that sent the IT guy over to my room to help me get my laptop onto their wireless network.  While he tinkered with the old Sony, my colleague returned to her room to get her cell phone which she had forgotten.  I wondered what took her so long to return as she typically moves quite swiftly.  When she finally got back, the IT guy still tinkered away as he struggled to get me online, she entered the room somewhere between terrified and laughing loudly.  Apparently, when she had first gone into her room to unpack, she opened the living room door to her porch so as to get a breeze going.  When she returned to the room to get her phone, a monkey had opened the screen door and wandered into her living space.  She screamed and ran into the bedroom, locking the door behind her and calling the front desk to send someone to get the monkey out of her suite.  Thus, I take my colleague’s fright to be a little omen that put me into direct contact with the monkey God and I find myself consulting him periodically.

There are also hundreds of millions of Buddhists who worship in their own way.  There are a number of aboriginal belief systems kept alive around the world and there are still those who favor Voo Doo and other ancient spiritual arts.

So, what happens to the Gods that have few or no people left worshipping them?

Do Thor and Horace hang around talking about the good old days when they kicked up big storms and heavy winds?  Or, do they consult with the currently popular and much younger Gods in sort of a mentoring system?  Sometimes, I think I can still notice Pan’s antics in the world of the living as people seem to panic over a lot of things they can’t see.

Where is Odin these days?  Do he, Zeus or Apollo if you prefer, teach the current Gods about warfare and being the big boss or do they act like former CEOs or guys like Rudi Giuliani wandering around the spirit world giving motivational lectures to angels and others who still respect but don’t work for them any longer?

Just listening to the nightly news reminds me that Dis, the ancient God of Chaos and the root of words like discord and disagree, still roams the Earth spreading death, dismemberment and a constant state of confusion.  If Dis isn’t behind this, who?  Mars?  Siegfried?

So, where do the less popular Gods spend there time and what do they do?

I’ll end here and write more on this topic in the coming weeks.  I just think it is interesting, how, one century, a God can be all powerful and worshiped by millions and, a mere few centuries later, nearly forgotten.  God’s can be damned but, as immortal, they can’t die.  Thus, they must be somewhere and doing something.

–End

When the word “stem” shows up in most news sources these days, it tends to refer to the cellular biologists and their work with stem cell research.  This work has great importance and may result in cures for many types of blindness as well as many other horrible diseases.  This article, though, refers to STEM (in all capital letters) subjects in schools and how blind students often miss out on learning about them.

STEM, the acronym, means, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.  Beginning with pre-school, most of these subjects come with very visual teaching materials.  Those of us who grew up with vision can synthesize many images of everything from chemistry experiments to drawings of a bored Galileo watching the incense urn swinging while timing it using his pulse to discover one of the most fundamental rules of physics.  The language of mathematics, with Nimith and Gardner providing good writing systems for blind readers, has been somewhat conquered in a tactile sense but I haven’t experienced a very good audio description of anything beyond the most basic equations.

Ted Henter, who, with HenterMath (link above), attacked this problem has a lot of basic arithmetic working in Virtual Pencil and also has an algebra module that does a great job for people trying to learn these subjects who have vision impairments and, through an unexpected side effect, also seems to have found a niche among students with a learning disability that causes trouble understanding symbolic information when read visually.  Thus, a package designed for blind students seems also to work for LD which makes the market potential much larger and should attract more investors and grants to such a task.

Presidents Bush, Clinton and Bush the Elder all spoke to the basic facts that the US is falling behind the other western nations in education for all students in the STEM subjects.  The matter seems far worse among students with vision impairments.  When a blind student asks most high school guidance counselors about college choices and career opportunities, they tend to be steered toward the humanities, social work and other fields where there are jobs but fairly low pay scales.

There is a reason that, when you visit a major US university ranked in the top thirty for science and engineering that you find so many students from abroad.  Simply put, the US has too few high schools like Bronx Science and too many that cater to the middling student and too few students who can excel at the university level as they never built the groundwork necessary for such studies.  Again, this tends to be far worse for students with some kind of vision impairment as school systems look at the current text books and educational theorists all seem to work to improve test scores for the mediocre and ignore discovering new metaphors that can be deployed using today’s technology with a bit of solid design work and a way to educate the educators.

Why are the STEM subjects important to people with vision impairments?  Simply put, a blind software engineer with five plus years experience, just like a sighted counterpart, in a solid market can earn $100,000 per year or more.  Science teachers and college faculty make a large premium higher than their liberal arts compatriots.  A lot of fields considered outside of the STEM fields require them to understand.  Finance, for instance, can be very restricted to a person with vision impairment as, if you can’t do differential calculus, you can’t do quantitative equity analysis (for instance) and, therefore, cannot take one of those super high paying analyst jobs on Wall Street.

If you don’t understand the basics of physics, all kinds of engineering from the highly abstract DSP sorts of things which are more like programming than electrical engineering, to problems in civil engineering where a blind person may not be the best choice to work on the aesthetics of a structure but certainly could handle a lot of the calculations for things like stress loading and such.

With very few exceptions, major league athlete, taxi driver, air traffic controller, there seem to be very few careers that a person with vision impairment cannot learn to do some or most of.  Unfortunately, the educational infrastructure, except in cases where very motivated parents, very motivated students and a very motivated system (Cambridge, MA for instance) combine to provide the blind students with the tools they need to work in the most lucrative jobs.

How can we change this?  First off, we can look at the tools that exist today.  Products like Virtual Pencil and Gardner’s Accessible Graphing Calculator and things I haven’t heard about should be brought to the attention of educators around the US.  HenterMath and ViewPlus are not among the biggest players in the AT business and neither has a lot of marketing power.  Both, however, have excellent products.  So, in order to push this topic, you can send a letter to your local School committee or Board of Education or whatever it’s called in your area and tell them that these tools exist and describe the compelling argument that without such, the poor employment record and relatively low salaries among blinks will continue forever but, with some tools that exist today, a major change can happen in the future.

If we can start a fire with VP and AGC, we can probably start attracting grants and investments into teaching other STEM subjects from pre-math for pre-school students to surreal numbers for post-doctorate students.  We can better provide companions to text books for people with textual impairments so they can study economics with augmentations that make the text books make a bit more sense to people who can’t process printed symbols.

I have my ideas on how to approach some of these problems but I am neither an educator nor educational theorist.  I’m just a hacker from New Jersey who went blind and started hanging out with other blinks and made some pretty good software for my community.  I hope to learn more about how to build UI metaphors that will improve efficiency and, perhaps to learn more about the educational concepts so I can participate in making these tools in the future.

As I got to grow up with vision, it’s difficult for me not to synthesize images of all kinds of scientific and mathematical information when I think about them.  Unfortunately, blind children today will not have the same opportunities I did and, to improve the lot for our entire community, we should start a letter writing campaign to help promote the tools that exist and try to convince researchers and AT companies to start taking this educational divide seriously.

–End
     

By Chris Hofstader

Notice, the byline on this post is Chris Hofstader.  This item is not written by BlindChristian nor is it by any other alter ego like Gonz Blinko, Sy T. Greenbacks or James Blink Secret Agent GGJ.  This is all me with the patina of fictional commentator stripped off.  This is not an easy item for me to write as it is very personal and dives into areas involving addiction and mental illness.  I hope it serves as good reading material and, for anyone who is going through something similar, I am available via email and Skype to talk about such issues.  While these issues are very personal, other than the specifics, they are not unique to me so I hope this serves the Blind Confidential readers and anyone else who receives this by email or a repost well.

I find that I struggle to think back on August 2005 with anything but terror as I felt horrible for the entire month.  I cannot remember feeling as poorly since I gave up booze and illicit drugs in March 1997.  My depression grew so bad that I had to go to a locked ward at Sun Coast psychiatric hospital for a short stint followed by an 8 week outpatient, full day, five day per week program at Windmoor Mental Health Clinic.

I can’t quite recall the order in which the events leading up to the suicidal ideation that brought me to the Sun Coast emergency room occurred during August 2005.  Some major events over the previous nine months and longer certainly contributed to the collapse on August 30, coincidentally my wife’s birthday, last year.  I left a job I heled and loved for six years due to medical and other personal reasons in November 2004.  I spent a long time before that and after trying to find a solution to the extremely painful RSI issues from which I suffered.  While working, I had two choices: feel a lot of pain or numb myself with pain killers, neither option works in a position where one thinks, directs and manages for a living.  The cognitive impairments caused by pain or Vicadan made work at my level impossible, my injuries had defeated me and I had to stop.

Shortly after leaving, I went through a series of doctors who kept increasing my prescriptions for Vicadan, the heavy pain killer, and Soma, the equally heavy muscle relaxant.  I also received heavy steroid injections directly into my spine and the area of the chronic muscle pain.  I now understand why so many professional atheletes behave so irrationally – steroids do really horrible things to one’s psychi.  I would often burst into tears over a sad event on a stupid television program, let alone the state of my life.

Thus, in the months leading up to August, the opiates and steroids dominated my conciousness which didn’t seem so strange to me as it did to others.  Meanwhile, I had a lot of legal problems going on around me with lawsuits threatened that, to me (then as now), made little sense.  By August, I felt that I may never work again, the pain had not decreased by much, a lot of people would call me and ask for advice (and you wonder why the AT industry is so fucked up, they would call a certifiable crazy person for ideas) but none seeking wisdom wanted to pay me for my time.  I had spent six years working in the blindness biz and few of my mainstream contacts remained intact.

By August 1, I moved almost full time into my bed.  I took between 3000 and 4500 milligrams of Vicadan daily.  For those of you unfamiliar with opiates, 1 mg of heroin is equal in strength to 10 of morphine which equals 100 of codeine.  Codeine is the active ingredient in both Vicadan and Soma so my daily dosage had reached more than a bundle of heroin per day.  The damnedest thing, I never got high.  I had worked my way up the resistence scale to a point that I never noticed the effects of the drugs, people around me saw that I had become pretty weird but, on the inside, I only felt an increasing darkness surounding me.

At some point during August, I went out fishing with my friends John and Jay.  Without knowing it, this very hot, very slow fishing day near Fort DeSoto may have become my last.  We did have a good time and I hooked but did not land some of the most desirable fish in our waters.  Metaphorically, it fit in perfectly with my month, a bit of leader pulled out, the drag would yell and, suddenly, all would go slack.

I spent a lot of time talking to people on the phone and over Skype that month.  I spent a lot of time listening to DVS movies stream from Freedom Box.  I rarely showered, my eating habits fell far from healthy but I never missed a pill.  I spent most of my time feeling sorry for myself, counting all of the so-called friends who called when I had a big swinging dick job but now ignored my pathetic self.  I received a phone call threatening litigation if I continued working on an open source project.  I started receiving the heaviest doses of steroids thus far in my treatment plan.  By the end of the month, I could not remember the last day in which I didn’t cry my eyes out.

On August 30, poor Susan’s birthday, she went out to some sort of event with the local Democratic Party.  I felt that, if I couldn’t work due to pain or drugs, that I couldn’t even help out on open source work, that people watched everything I did, listened to everything I said, I still felt the intense pain no matter how many pills I stuffed, I hadn’t even thought to get my wife a fucking birthday present.  I reached the end, I would take every pill in the house and, including all of the codeine, the various psych meds, including benzos, the sleeping pills the NyQuil, I should certainly succeed in doing what seemed to be best for all involve.  I would check out.

I hadn’t written a note and wanted to make sure I sent a final “fuck you” to all of the right people and a final loving message to the others.  I didn’t feel like writing and fell asleep or at least went into the nod for I don’t remember how long.  Susan came home.  She came upstairs.  I told her that I planned on taking all of the pills.  She asked me not to.  As it was her birthday, I agreed to postpone any such a decision.  Susan hid the pills.

The next morning, we went to the emergency room at Sun Coast and I got admitted for the suicidal ideation.  The psychiatrist there immediately Baker Acted me, thus certifying me nuts and, by the law of the State of Florida, required that I remain in the protective custody of this locked psychiatric ward.

Right before I kicked the booze and other drugs back in 1997, I went to Melrose/Wakefield hospital and later to Bornwood Hospital, both in Massachusetts.  Melrose/Wakefield is a terrific facility.  You get a really good class of nut, really good food and the group sessions always filled us with laughs.  My first encounter at Bornwood happened two weeks after I stopped the booze and drugs.  I went into a state in which I couldn’t sleep and I started to hallucinate.  They brought me to what the patients fondly call, “The Bug Unit.”  My wife seemed a little concerned at the 9 inch tall red letters on the door that said, “Keep Locked, Escape Risks.”  I told the doctor that I didn’t belong in such a place and pointed to the hole in the wall behind him where all of the roaches were climbing out.  There was no hole; there were no bugs.  They gave me a very nice pill and put me to bed.

On August 31, 2005, I found myself back in a very similar place.  The ward door remained locked 24/7 and one had to get buzzed in or out.  There were no carpets, just tile as some of the other inmates were incontenent.  The noise level high, the echoes off of the tile loud and the other nuts pretty scary.

First, the people at Sun Coast did what they could to remove all dignity.  They took away my cologne as I might decide to drink it.  They took away my pajamas, lest I hang myself with the drawstring.  They took away my casette player lest someone steal it.  They took away my shoes and sheepskin, Gucci loafers and replaced them with foam rubber analogues with smiley faces on them.  They took away my ball cap, my belt, my shower gel, my facial scrub, my little ball for washing myself and all other items that one would regard as personel.

Then, they escorted me to my room.  The matresses felt like hard phone rubber one might buy in a slab at a hardware store.  The pillows were filled with some substance that certainly does not exist in nature.  The sheets and blankets clearly had petroleum in their past.  I wanted my 300 thread count, Egyptian Cotton designer sheets, my real goose down pillow and my nice comforter.  I wanted pajamas made of silk and not the polyesther they gave me.  I wanted my silk bathrobe back.  I wanted to go home but, when I tried to check out against medical advice, they reminded me that I would remain there under state law as their charge until the psychiatrist approved my dismissal.  I went to my bedroom and cried myself to sleep.

The following day, someone woke us up, a nurse practioner spent about a minute with me and said I remained crazy and we nuts gathered in the day room for a miserable breakfast and spent our time until lunch watching Katrina on Fox and CNN.  We got our lunch, ate and returned to viewing the television.  I asked about things like group sessions and anything therapeutic and they said they had a schedule for such but had to finish other chores before we could get to them.  In 72 hours, I spent less than four total in anything resembling a healthy session and spent the rest in the day room watching Americans die on live television while the president said, ”I think Brownie is doing a great job,” from his vacation in Texas.

I made friends with a mentally challenged 19 year old woman who was in for observation pending an arson trial.  She seemed harmless to me and, on the day I got to leave, she gave me some pictures she made for me from her coloring book.  

One afternoon, while watching Katrina with my illiterate arsonist, the day room phone rang and someone announced the call was for me.  To my surprise, after I took the receiver and said hello, I heard a familiar voice say, “Hey Chris, it’s Ted.”  He had spoken to Susan and called to cheer me up.  Thus, a legend of our industry, a true hall-of-famer, called me in a psychiatric ward to discuss life, business and some issues of a legal nature.  This one phone call made a huge difference in my attitude toward everything.  Suddenly, the nasty ward seemed profoundly more tolerable and, while I can’t say that time flew by, the remainder of my visit included a bit of hope that hadn’t existed when I arrived.

After getting sprung from the ward, I noticed that the pain in my shoulder had dropped a huge amount.  This likely came as a result of the big steroid shots earlier that month which may not have had only poor effects.  I stopped taking the big pain killers and switched to Advil.  Susan and I went to see “The Aristocrats” and I can’t remember laughing so hard in years.  By the time we got home, though, I told Susan that I felt poorly.  She touched me and said she had never felt a fever so bad, my lungs were congesting and my head filled with snot.  I took some NyQuil and went to bed.  All night, I swung between freezing and sweating.  I assumed I had caught a nasty flu while on the ward.  

The following morning, the sickness really hit.  I would either sweat profusely from all over, most especially at the joints or feel so cold that I had to put on a heavy sweatshirt and get under the covers.  The auditory hallucinations started.  Then the visuals, “It’s a miracle, I can see!”

Anyone who has felt dope sickness knows the rest of the story.  Needless to say, I had to return to an emergency room to get the blood pressure evened out and had to spend weeks drinking gallons of water per day.  I spent a lot of time in restrooms during September.

A year later, I’m working again.  I’m even doing research into aging related disabilities and digging it.  I’m working with the guys on Blind Programming on building a tutorial to provide useful information to blinks who want to learn programming in VS .Net 2005.  I’m working on some more project proposals for the university.  Some of my legal issues followed me into 2006 but haven’t reared their ugly head in quite some time.  I can’t say everything is perfect, hell, I’ll find something to complain about in paradise, but no real shit is flying, I have few fears, I’m doing alright no matter what the world or I thought in August 2005.

Afterward

Our buddy Gabe left a comment on my “Don’t Blame the Victims” item yesterday.  In it, he cites the “income of AT vendors” and suggests that they could and should be doing much more investing in development.  He suggests that those who defend them on the smaller than Sun, IBM, Apple or Microsoft do so without understanding how the AT companies milk the VR system.

My question in response is to ask Gabe to cite his sources on the income of AT companies.  It will be one year and nine months since I left FS tomorrow and I have no access to their top, bottom or any line in between.  I don’t know how much debt they are carrying nor what their expenses might be.  I know even less about AI^2, GW Micro, Dolphin and Humanware.  I do know that Mike Calvo isn’t spending his days smoking chronic, sipping drinks with umbrellas and being surrounded by bathing beauties on his yacht so I don’t think Serotek is rolling in the dough.

So, if these guys have so many spare dollars, how did Gabe learn of it?  I thought I got a lot of industry gossip but he must be the master.

Also, even if the AT companies had the bucks to invest in more application support, I would not put Open or Star Office in the top ten list of applications to support.  I would first say, get the MS Office suite singing in every feature, every screen, every dialogue and add more augmentations to make the applications work better for blinks who need to work in collaborative projects.  Then, I would suggest MS VisualStudio and Eclipse as many blinks make a really good living making software and, if the screen readers worked better with these programs, then I think it will pave a way for the blind hackers to greater opportunities for promotions and greater flexibility in their career options.

I would then focus on the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) areas of educational material.  Studies show that poor understanding of the STEM subjects among blind students graduating from high school keeps them from studying such in college and, as a result, further narrows their career options.  I would encourage the AT companies to work more intensely on audio editting and music software as, while it is a stereotype, many blinks really like this stuff and many use such tools in their jobs.

Now that Microsoft owns and advertises Great Plains accounting and database software, I think the AT vendors should explore working with the boys up in Redmond on making these talk.  For years getting a professional accounting job has been nearly impossible for blinks as virtually none of the vendors of the software cares a wit about accessibility.  Intuit is nearly hostile toward blind people and AT companies but I have heard a few blinks have been able to square peg QuickBooks into something JAWS can sort of work with.  Thus, for businesses large or small to hire blind bookkeepers and accountants is nearly impossible today.

Then, following my dream list, the AT vendors would go in and figure out to provide 100% accessibility for every application they advertise they work with.  If they had such money, I’m sure they would have already done so.

Next, I would suggest that AT companies do some hardcore UI research to hopefully make screen readers less one-dimensional and, hopefully, improve a users efficiency so they can grow to be more productive in this very competitive work environment.

After all of that is done and in the box, they can start working on the next versions of all of the stuff I mentioned above so the blinks can keep their jobs when the products they currently need are upgraded.  If they can accomplish all of these things that blind people really need, then they should consider a second or third office suite.

The reality is that any of these AT companies could have profoundly larger development budgets and still not find that Open or Star Office is a high priority.  We have MS Office and it works really very well with most AT.  Sure, in an ideal world, Star and Open Office would be nice, I would enjoy having more choices over which products I buy.  The pragmatist in me, though, says lets get as many job oriented categories covered as broadly as possible and then work on the competition issue.  Sure, freedom of choice would be nice and, as I mentioned in the article that drew Gabe’s comment, no one is stopping Sun and its two former FS employees from writing the scripts or using the JAWS API DLL to build in accessibility for their programs.  They have the tools, they have appropriately skilled employees, they really want to see this done, they do, by the way, still have boatloads more money than FS or GW and they should shut up, stop whining and, if they truly want accessibility, DIY!

–End

As you all know by now, Jonathon Mosen has joined Freedom Scientific as Vice President of Hardware Product Management.  Since this became public, I have received a stack of emails, phone and Skype calls asking for BlindChristian or Gonz Blinko or any of my other alter-ego authors to write an article about this.  For two days, I’ve thought hard about trying to come up with something satirical, amusing or even a harsh farce about the entire AT industry.  Gonz and I talked last night and he said that he heard that his friend Moes Jonathonson had been hiding out somewhere in New Zealand but may have joined Freeman Scientology and, therefore, will no longer be a source for his writing.

My personal feeling about Jonathon, whom I’ve had a friendly, albeit distant, relationship with for many years now is that I’m happy to see him land on his feet in a challenging position working with some really talented people.  My thoughts on FS are that I am happy to see that, for the first time since the merger, they have hired a blind person into a senior management role.  In any AT business, it is always difficult to juggle qualifications and user experience in hiring decisions as, once again, we have a chicken and egg situation, if no blind executives exist, where do you find one with the skills to take on such a job?

Reading various items from Humanware people being passed around the usual emailing gossip circles shows me everything from graceful farewells to some normal nastiness to some sour grapes.  I just hope that HW does not try to take any legal action against Jonathon on issues regarding non-compete, non-disclosure or trade secrets.  I don’t know New Zealand law and I don’t know if FS has indemnified Jonathon but living under the threat of harassing lawsuits is truly horrible.  Also, I hope Humanware, even if they have such agreements in place, choose to waive litigation as doing so will do nothing more than publicly quiet the voice of a very bright and talented blind person and possibly keep his ideas out of the hands of the consumers who pay all of the salaries at all of the AT companies.

A number of years back, the NFB officially made a statement deploring restrictive covenants between blind people and their employers in the AT biz, as, if enforced, they deeply restrict the job possibilities for blind people, an objective to which NFB and AT companies both claim to promote.

I’m sorry to see Jonathon’s blog go away as I often found it both entertaining and informative (when he wasn’t trying to subject me to listening to he and his kids washing dishes or going on endlessly about his soul mate) but there are lots of other good blogs written by and for blinks out there (look above for links) but Mosen has a certain journalistic style that is both professional and concise which I will definitely miss.

So, congratulations to Jonathon Mosen on landing a seat at the table with some of the highest powered people in the biz, I’m sure he’ll learn a lot very quickly.  Also, applause to FS for putting a blink in a high profile role for the first time since the merger.  I wish all of you well and, to my readers disappointed at my approach to this topic, I’ll do something funny soon but felt this subject, as it effect real people’s careers and lives felt a little to close to home to satirize too heavily.

Thus, the kinder, gentler BlindChristian shows his face.  

–End

This morning, as on most mornings, I sat down with my first cup of coffee to read my email and found two articles in my Blind News (link above) folder explicitly “blaming” people with vision impairments for the failure of the open source push portion of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ open document format (ODF) initiative.  The first article, “Blind leading away from open source” ran in yesterday’s ZD Net out of Germany and the second, from the UK based Techworld.com, “Visually impaired prevent Massachusetts move to open source,” both propose the argument that we blinks should take the blame for the lack of accessibility in the open source office applications, “Open Office” and “Star Office” from Sun Microsystems.  Both articles admit that the ODF plug-in for Microsoft Office meets the Commonwealth’s requirements of keeping data in an openly documented file format and that Microsoft Office is accessible to all users and doesn’t exclude those with vision impairment.

Blaming the possible victims of the ODF legislation, specifically people with vision impairments who could lose their government jobs in Massachusetts because they hadn’t tools that could, prior to the introduction of the ODF plug-in for MS Office, be used to perform their jobs.  Citizens of the Commonwealth and others with vision impairment who chose to access this information would also have discovered barriers to entry without such a plug-in.

Discriminatory statements and blaming the victim, tactics common to most arguments against civil rights movements, simply do not hold water when placed in the light of scholarly scrutiny.  If we go back to the middle of the twentieth century, we will find many statements suggesting that company X would hire African Americans if said minorities had the skills to perform the requisite tasks.  Of course, as “said minorities” had no access to training for such a job, the validity of blaming the victim of discrimination for not having the skills is demonstrated to be void of reason.  In this case, these articles blame blinks because screen magnifiers and screen readers do not work with the open source office applications.  Thus, it seems that these people also believe that my transportation problems must result from the lack of a JAWS for Windshields that I could run on our Toyota to get around town.

The ZD Net article quotes Peter Korn, Accessibility Architect at Sun Microsystems (link to his blog above) and one of the smartest, most energetic and outspoken advocates for the digital rights of people with disabilities in the mainstream technology industry as blaming the AT companies for not investing enough in the open source office suites and, therefore, the relatively puny Freedom Scientific, AI^2, GW Micro and Dolphin Systems, according to Korn, should foot the blame and bill to remedy the situation.  “If Freedom Scientific and GW Micro and Dolphin Computer Access (makers of JAWS, Window Eyes, and SuperNova respectively) were to make similar investments in scripting and customizing their assistive technologies for OpenOffice.org as they have for Microsoft Office, or if they were to improve their existing scripting and customizations for WordPerfect and Wordperfect were to support ODF, then screen reader users should have no accessibility barriers to equal productivity and efficiency with ODF as they have with Microsoft Office in Windows,” wrote Korn according to the article.

When I worked for Freedom Scientific, a job I left nearly 2 full years ago, Peter and I had this discussion in person, on the telephone and in emails.  I have written at length about the general failure of the entire system of providing accessibility in the pages of Blind Confidential many times and, once again, find myself forced to argue against the intellectually vacant myth that one can blame the AT companies or their customers for the accessibility problems in products your much larger and wealthier company prefers.

Freedom Scientific, GW Micro and the others hardly have the resources to keep up with the latest releases of the number one market share products in every market niche.  An equivalent in the racial minority example would be saying that if relatively small organizations like NAACP, SNCC and SCLC would only pool their meager resources and start their own General Motors, MIT and professional baseball league, they could integrate them at will.  As I wrote in these pages in the past month or so, JAWS 7.1 came out with “support for Windows Media Player 10” listed as a new feature months after Microsoft had released Windows Media 11.  Freedom Scientific, the leader in the business of making AT for people with vision impairments, doesn’t intentionally lag behind the mainstream releases for the joy of hearing a cranky asshole like me point out such failures as the collective inability of the AT industry to maintain pace with the mainstream but, rather, its relatively large software engineering team works very long hours sweating blood to put out the best and most current product they can in the current economic climate.  I’ve no indication that my friends at GW Micro, AI ^2 and Dolphin Systems behave any differently.

Peter includes the closed source WordPerfect as another example of a product with poor support by the AT companies.  WordPerfect, which also does not support ODF, had far better screen reader support in the DOS days than did Microsoft Word for DOS.  Why?  Because it had a far greater market share, had a little known and hardly documented DOS interrupt that a third party TSR application (like Visual Eyes or JAWS for DOS) or a grammar checker like Right Writer (for which I wrote the TSR interface) could access a lot of information, thus probably making it the first host of an accessibility interface and as, according to John Dvorak, “was a simple application, you went to the DOS prompt, typed ‘wp’ and very little changed.”

Then, the founders of WordPerfect Corporation sold their enormous baby for $1.1 billion to Novell in what was then the single largest acquisition of a private company.  Novell played around with consumer software for a few years and watched the Microsoft Office market share surge past the once unbeatable WordPerfect as they mismanaged their entire consumer division.  Ultimately, Bob Frankenberg, having killed most of the WordPerfect line of products, sold its remnants, except for the still mostly inaccessible Groupwise, to Corel for $100 million.  I then wrote a letter to Bob, now the former CEO of Novell, suggesting that the next time he wanted to spend $1 billion and get virtually nothing for it that he should call me and that I would, for half a billion, guarantee that I would provide nothing of any value whatsoever, thus cutting out the overhead of managing such a loss.  Bob didn’t respond.

At one point during my six year tenure holding the reins of JAWS development, we did spend a fair amount of time working with Corel to help them make their office suite work well with JAWS.  The strategy we took, obvious to anyone who has a copy of JAWS who elects to open up and read the source code to the scripts for WordPerfect or Quatro Pro, was to advise Corel and coach them on implementing an object model identical to that in Microsoft Office which would let us leverage the existing investment in supporting the Microsoft suite to make theirs work in a similar fashion.  Corel paid Freedom Scientific its hourly consulting fee to do this job as, otherwise, FS would not have had the financial wherewithal to work on a product other than the market leader.

When Sun first got into the Open Office/Star Office business, I discussed this strategy with Peter and his then supervisor Marney Beard (also a terrific individual with a ton of energy and great focus in this arena).  I said that if they went with an object model identical to or similar enough to the one used by MS and Corel, that either FS or a third party or a group of volunteers or anyone else who cared to could write the scripts using the source to the JAWS scripts for the Microsoft and Corel suites as a template.  Sun chose to take a divergent path.

In the period since then, Corel has let its object model support decay and, as a result, the JAWS support for it has also fallen into decline.  Is this the fault of the relatively tiny Freedom Scientific or the billion dollar Corel?  Also, in the interim, other screen readers, Window-Eyes and Freedom Box System Access for instance, have followed the FS example and have started deriving information from the MS object model to provide their users with information from the market leading office suite.  If corel had chosen to keep its object model support up to date and hired their own JAWS scripter, they, for a minimal investment, could remain current with JAWS and, today, probably other screen access products as well.  If Sun had elected to add a MS emulation object model, powerful but different from the gnome accessibility API, they could be in the same position and, with some of their current employees, one the former manager of the scripting department at Henter Joyce, could easily have provided an open source office suite with the excellent accessibility available to blind users of the Microsoft products.

Microsoft has never tried to stop any other company from copying the functionality of their object model.  They were well aware that FS worked with Corel to provide a replica in Perfect Office and, indeed, employees in the MS Office team helped Corel and FS do this project.  

I know Sun Microsystems doesn’t have the same financial power it once had but I’m willing to bet that the Freedom Scientific stockholders would do a one for one trade of companies if offered the possibility.  Sun, compared to the entire blindness industry combined, is a giant.  The AT companies do what they can to support their customers while supporting their investors who took the big risks to bring talking and magnified computing to market in the years before ADA and 508 forced the hands of the mega-bucks mainstream companies.  People like Ted Henter, Doug, Ben, Jim Fruchterman and others shouldn’t be blamed for poor accessibility when an incompatible standard emerges but, rather, be applauded for bringing products as far as they have with so little financial ability.

I don’t want to blame Sun Microsystems or Peter for this mess either.  Sun stands as a terrific example of good corporate citizenship in the disability realm and Peter Korn’s leadership has gone a very long way to make the world of computing profoundly more accessible for people with disabilities.  The problem, as I’ve described in many ways from many different angles in these pages, has no simple solution.  

Blind people, as a group, have never made any objections to open source software as the articles I read this morning would imply.  These traditional victims of discrimination merely want to maintain the technological progress they have made so far.  Perhaps if one tried to deconstruct the path Massachusetts chose to take to get to its goal of using an open document format the oft repeated problem of including people with disabilities at the end of the process rather than the beginning might pop out as the culprit in the process.  I haven’t talked to my old buddy Joe Lazarro, formerly of the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind and now of the Commonwealth’s information technology bureaucracy, in a long time.  I wonder, if when he held the position of Technology Director at the commission if anyone in IT called him to ask about compatibility and inclusion issues early in the process?

On the opposite side of the coin, many blinks have joined the open source movement as both advocates and hackers.  JAWS, for the most part, exposes it’s most interesting components, nearly its entire user interface, in its scripts for which the source code comes included with every download.  One can actually look at most of the code for the JAWS user experience without buying the product as the script source, where the majority of the interface comes from, can be had by anyone who downloads the free demo of the product.  There is also a large community of JAWS hackers who, when FS chooses not to support a particular application, does so themselves.  Recently, on the blind programming listserv, a group of we blinks have been working together to create a tutorial for using the Microsoft development tools with screen readers and a subset of the tutorial team has been writing an excellent set of scripts and distributing them with source code included to support Microsoft Visual Studio .Net 2005.

The community beyond JAWS also does some really great things in the open source realm.  TV Raman’s emacspeak, an outstanding set of extensions to emacs, is a great example of open source development by and for blind users.  If I remember correctly, Raman takes a totally free software approach to the world and will not use any product that does not carry the GPL and does so successfully as a blind person in the corporate world.

Others, including those who work on SpeakUp, BrailleTTY, and the many other varieties of kernel modifications for console based flavors of GNU/Linux also work very hard to bring open source solutions to our community.

Finally, major corporations, including Sun Microsystems and IBM, have built their own screen readers for the gnome desktop.  Sun has ORCA and I can never remember the name of the one from IBM but I recently received an email that said it had been coming along nicely.  Both of these gnome solutions were demonstrated at CSUN as alpha versions and both, when they reach a truly usable level, promise to provide full support for both Open Office and Sun’s Star Office so, if the blind people in Massachusetts can do their jobs as well or better with these solutions, they can move away from Microsoft’s solution to an open source solution when the screen readers for a completely open source graphical desktop reaches maturity.

The gnome accessibility API, one in which I, as Freedom Scientific’s representative,  participated in the description of, takes the idea of an accessibility layer further than any I’ve seen from Apple or Microsoft.  It includes what might remain the Holy Grail of accessibility solutions, a generic way of exposing contextual information, which, if proven to work, may truly mean the next generation of access for blind users can start to emerge.  The operative point being “proven” to work which, in this context, means beyond working in the lab with some highly controlled applications and beyond being an outstanding demo that the market refuses to accept.  Sun and the gnome desktop accessibility advocates need to sell this solution both to the community of disability advocates as well as to the market at large before the little guys like FS, GW AI, etc. can be expected to use their scarce resources to support.

I believe in the gnome API on a theoretical basis.  I will write anything I can and add my voice to a truly generic standard for accessibility API layers that run on multiple platforms whether the standard turns out to be the one from Sun, Microsoft, Apple or a still unknown source.  I will not, however, stand by and watch people who work for multi-billion dollar companies, state governments and major media outlets take cheap shots at the victims of discrimination as they excuse for their own short falls.

As much as the beautiful Massachusetts State Capital Building atop Beacon Hill cannot put out a “Whites only” sign so as to not inconvenience the still racist communities in Chucktown and Southie, they cannot start insisting on using file formats inaccessible by people with disabilities.  The blind population should not be blamed but, rather, the disability advocates in the Massachusetts Information Technology bureaucracy should be applauded for stopping what could have forced a lot of people out of jobs before the deadline.  The plug-in for MS Office is a reasonable compromise and should be viewed as a victory for people with disabilities and not a defeat for the open source movement.

This is a rare situation in which everyone can win so, instead of pointing fingers, slinging mud and playing the proverbial “blame game” perhaps all parties should take this as a wake up call to ensure that the needs of people with disabilities are considered from the outset rather than when the cow has nearly left the pasture.

–End.

Where did the nearly daily posts to Blind Confidential go?  Probably, along with my general mood and outlook on life, very far south.  The calendar reads mid-August, the Florida equivalent of mid-February in Boston.  While I swore I would never complain about the Florida heat as long as I didn’t have to endure another New England winter, I find the discomfort of doing nearly anything during daylight hour’s outdoors to feel a bit oppressive this time of year.  What makes matters somewhat more depressing is that, in Florida, we know we have a full month of September to go before autumn arrives.

The new dog enjoys walking quickly when in a reasonably comfortable situation, if it’s nice and shady or, even better, air conditioned, he and I glide along quite rapidly.  When, like it started to become as we left the diner where we enjoyed our breakfast yesterday, sunny, hot and humid, he slows to a snail’s pace and reminds me that I’m neither wearing a fur coat or going barefoot on hot concrete and that I should shut up and enjoy that I’m not walking into anything dangerous.  His skills remain entirely intact but his pace slows to a near crawl.  If we go to the mall, though, he shows off by weaving in and out of crowds of people, showing off everything he knows and we move at a near trot.  The heat, however, slows us both down.

I’ve wondered if the heat of the South really does get to the brain in a bad way.  Surely, the South has given us a great literary tradition with people like Faulkner, Capote, Eudora, Toni Morrison and far too many others to list.  But, American recipients of Nobel prizes in areas other than literature tend to reside in the Northeast or out west.  Economists tend to come from the northeast or U. Chicago.  I would guess that U. Texas is the odd exception but it is in Austin, home to a lively chapter of the BPP and medium cool music scene.  Austin feels more like Cambridge, Berkeley, Ann Arbor, and Madison – the axis powers of thinking America than of the rest of Texas or the south.

I’ve been doing a fair amount of programming these days.  I’m working on a pretty cool project using Visual Studio .Net 2005 and C#.  It is my first “real” C# program (real defined as not just a demo or experiment).  I find that a lot of my rusty skills come back quickly and that I’m adapting to .Net and C# pretty quickly.  I’m still dubious of all of the code generated for me by the IDE but, alas, my state of malaise provides me with the permission to ignore things that work and proceed with the portions of the program that actually effect usability.  Still, I find it pretty scary that I am sending things to the compiler without even looking at them first.

I also find that I spend between 50-60% of my time wrestling with the IDE and my screen reader.  .Net 2003 worked better than 2005, which my vendor does not claim to support anyway.  Thus, I get frustrated as programming is certainly better for blinks than it was fifteen or twenty years ago but not as good as it was two years back.  I’ve gone over all of the reasons why screen readers can fall behind ad nauseum in these pages so I don’t want to repeat myself lest I find myself returning to a psychiatric facility for suicidal observation due to the general ideation that life for we blinks will never get much better.

I spent a while yesterday, after reading an article in Blind News (link above) about the new revision of the Macintosh screen Reader, VoiceOver.  The author said they included some verbosity options so the users could make it less chatty, something Windows users have enjoyed for more than a decade now, they have added support for refreshable Braille displays (something the author struggled with conceptually), another feature DOS and Windows people have had for at least 20 years and, if I remember correctly, existed in outspoken, the broken old screen reader for Macintosh from Alva, a product that, along with Alva, died on the vine.  Finally, the sighted author was most impressed by the really human sounding voice that Macintosh and VoiceOver now support.  These have also been available for a long time on Windows and GNU/Linux systems but never let someone tell Steve Jobs that he wasn’t first to a party.

I can hear Apple defenders writing comments already.  Well, it’s only a second revision, JAWS, Window-Eyes, HAL and even outspoken have had years of effort so you should cut Apple some slack.  This is akin to saying that a new automobile company should put out something that performs just like a Model T, with a few improvements, this year and claim, “It’s just a start, we haven’t had the time to learn all of the things that Toyota, Ford and the other guys have learned in the past century.”  I don’t buy the excuse that “it’s a relatively new product,” Apple has JAWS, Window-Eyes and lots of other stuff to serve as models and should not put out a half assed solution that raises hopes that are dashed by the reality of the system.

Also, I am really sick of sighted critics of technology for blindness related products.  Typically, they first ask, “so you talk to the computer and it does what you tell it to?”  No, dumb ass, I can type, there’s nothing wrong with my damned fingers.  Then, they ask, “How can you understand that robotic voice talking so quickly?”  Because I practiced to get good at hearing high speed feedback so I didn’t have to spend my entire day listening to a nice human voice reading my email to me without getting anything else done.

I am also completely sick and tired of reading articles by sighties who stumble across assistive technology for the first time and suddenly think they are experts in the field and must tell the world about it.  It’s 2006 and I still see at least one headline per week which says, “New Technology Gives Blind Access to Internet” and, upon further reading, realize that someone is writing about JAWS, Window-Eyes, Freedom Box, HAL or any of the other products that have been kicking around for a long time.

I really can’t stand the articles that tell me that K1000 “helps” me read books.”  No, K1000, OpenBook and Fine Reader, are tools that I can employ to hear text converted to speech.  This doesn’t “help” me, it gives me a damned tool that I can use or not.  If Ray Kurzweil wants to “help” me, he can come over and mow the lawn or do the forms layout stuff in the IDE which is really troublesome for a blink.

While I write the “kids these days” articles about programming and how different it is between then and now, I’m growing very tired of the “blinks these days” statements made by people blind far longer than me.  I hear all about how much better it is today than it was twenty years ago.  Fortunately, I don’t live twenty years ago but I live now and a lot of stuff still sucks out loud.  AT companies provide partial solutions (due largely to mainstream companies lack of compliance but also to a reticence to invest in innovation).  Mainstream companies fight compliance with such vigor that it would probably be simpler and cheaper to comply than fight.

I’m fortunate, I get to live in a fairy tale world of academia where our primary purpose is innovation and, while I am constrained by budget, market forces don’t play too hard on schedules and such.  Still, I bump up against the “no blinks apply” boundaries when I need to spend twice as much time to accomplish the same task as a sighted counterpart.

Somebody, please, send me some good news…

Somewhere between fifteen and twenty years ago, I sat at a table in the Crown Room at the Las Vegas Hilton accompanied by my good friend Gordon, a very peculiar journalist whose name escapes me and Charles Petzhold, the author of the best books about Windows programming back in the early days of the environment.  Hewlett-Packard hosted the gathering and Gordon, the journalist, Petzhold and I sat together to avoid the complete sleaziness of the marketing folks around us.  We certainly enjoyed the view and aroma of the occasional booth babe but, as nerds, we knew they avoided looking in our direction as our mere presence distracted from the generally good looking crowd of advertising, sales and other bullshit artists.

Our conversation started with whining about the “good old days” of COMDEX, when nerds ruled the scene in Vegas and even the marketing types looked and dressed like a bunch of geeks.  We laughed about the day Bill Gates received a new t-shirt from someone and, electing to wear it immediately, pulled it over his head without removing his sport coat.  It just doesn’t get much geekier than that.

In the old days, we could tell the difference between the people from the business and the Vegas types.  We looked like geeks, they looked like freaks.  When we saw a geek with an attractive woman, we knew, without question, that she came from an escort agency.  Back in the day, Las Vegas News Channel 8, their version of a 24 hour local news channel, would actually do updates on how the escort businesses performed during the convention.  You would actually hear a madam interviewed on the news say things like, “It looks like a typical COMDEX, the Asian business men all want tall girls with big ones, gay Europeans want tall black men, the rich guys all want blondes and the fetishists and nerds want something exotic…”  

By the time the four of us sat together at the party thrown by HP that night in a long ago November, COMDEX and the industry had passed us by.  No longer did the geeks rule.  No longer did companies (Toshiba in one case and I cannot remember the other) throw parties so wild that the local boys in blue would show up and shut them down for “violating the moral standards of Las Vegas.”  I only got to attend two of these but I have heard of others.  No longer did you find people like Gates, Philippe Kahn and George Tate making loud and obnoxious announcements in the middle of parties.  COMDEX had deteriorated to a point where the sex, drugs, booze and all night parties disappeared as everyone wanted to rush to their rooms to make sure they got a good night of sleep so they would look good in the booth the following day.  In the times about which we reminisced, no one ever looked too good so the party didn’t need to end.

We also bitched about how anyone could stand talking endlessly about laser printers.  They’re really not that interesting we thought and, as one of us got up to go to the bar for another round, someone plopped their butt down in the vacant chair and started professing why the HP standard beat Postscript.  When our beers got back to us, we politely got up and retired to the casino downstairs.

I don’t think I have talked to Petzhold since that night but, yesterday, my friend and frequent BC commenter, Will Pearson posted an email to the blind programming mailing list with a link to an article Petzhold did last November, almost two decades after we nerded out in the LV Hilton.  The article, “Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?” is one of the best “”kids these days” rants I’ve read by an old timer in years.  I did one in these pages on June 1 about progress the PPO team made on its development but Petzhold really slams it home with excellent examples.  He concludes by describing a nice little command line program he wrote recently in straight “C,” using Notepad as his editor and gcc to compile it on the command line.

Petzhold sure brought back memories.  I started thinking about the days when I could program for days on end without consulting a single reference book.  When we cared about memory, efficiency and how “tightly” or “cleanly” our hacks looked.  Now, a kid learning to program with Visual Studio .Net 2005 not only has no idea what the processor sees but hardly needs to know what the compiler sees.  Petzhold points out that the code generated by the Windows Forms Designer gets hidden by the environment as the compiler expects it to come in a particular format and, when you go in and inspect the code (something I did on my own and not mentioned in the article) it actually contains comments that says “don’t touch this code as it may make your program behave badly.”

For a couple of days, I fought with VS 2005 .Net Standard Edition.  First, it couldn’t find its local help files, then, when I tried to add a form to my application, it couldn’t find the appropriate templates and told me to go to Control Panel, click on Administrative Tools and, at that point, I gave up and ran the “Repair” which, during its reboots caused my screen reader to crash twice so I got to start the process three times last night.

Sure, DOS tools would crash from time to time.  Of course, DOS compilers and assemblers had their share of bugs, I remember going nuts trying to find why a program I wrote and compiled using MSC 4.0 back in 1988 didn’t work and found the culprit was a compiler optimization gone awry.  I remember Borland shipping its Turbo Assembler 1.0 which included a command line switch to emulate MASM bugs as some of we real old time hackers would sometimes use those bugs in creative ways to make our programs work better.

This weekend, while struggling with having no help files and a corrupted installation of VS .Net, the blind programming list members took to the topic of program comments.  As a joke, I wrote, “Comments, we don’t need no stinkin’ comments!  Hell, we don’t need no stinkin’ symbols either.”  I then said that any “real programmer” can just use SoftIce and someone else’s binary to make something work nicely.  One response seemed angry and said that “just because we all can’t read machine code doesn’t mean we’re not good programmers,” to which I replied that I had been kidding; obviously the reader hadn’t seen “The Treasure of Sierra Madre.”  Another reply that made my heart sink a bit, however, came from someone new to programming who asked, “What is SoftIce?”

I guess I must learn to accept that a generation of programmers is learning to write programs without really understanding what the computer does or how it works.  Maybe this is all part of a conspiracy between Intel and Microsoft, one which forces us to buy faster computers with more memory so we can run bloated, robotically generated software that looks and feels great but, somehow, lacks a human touch.

Afterward

In addition to the audio programs I write as part of my research into human understanding of multi-dimensional semantic information through non-visual stimuli, I work on programs for PPO (link above) and some other ideas we have for the GatorTech Smart House at the RERC at U. Florida.  I find that I get frustrated with making forms in VS as the interface design intends to make things easy for sighties.  Thus, I’ve added to my list of projects, the attempt to mingle my research with my hacking and come up with a three dimensional sound scheme as a plug-in to VS .Net that might make blind hackers more productive.  If it sucks, remember, I haven’t completed my research yet and, other than Will Pearson and a few audio game hackers, no one has really explored 3D audio for user interface purposes.  If it doesn’t suck, you can send me a thank you note and some money if you enjoy using it.  Either way, I’ll release it with source included for you to play with, add to and improve.  It will carry the GPL.

–End

I intended to do five initial articles in this series, the arrival, the rules, the people, the staff and coming home.  I decided to forego the article about the staff as I’ve spent a lot of time lately working on projects for my day job and preparing for the fall academic semester.  Thus, writing a lot of code, dealing with a ton of little things, a bout with depression, having a dental disaster and trying to instigate a revolution of the blind, for  the blind and by the blind has kept me away from Blind Confidential lately.

Thus, I will skip an article entirely on the staff at Southeastern.  I will, however, point out that, in previous articles in this series, I have referred to the trainers and others who work at Southeastern as a bunch of saints.  I wrote a letter to the Pope about Kate and Katie, the two trainers with whom I worked most closely, asking him to sanctify, transmophograte or do whatever Catholics do to officially raise an individual to the level of near deity and, for Darleen, our house mother, I will bring a letter to the Dalai Lama when I visit him later this month to suggest that she might actually be the 98th human incarnation of some great Buddhist from earlier in history.  About these three tremendous women, I can only say that they demonstrate personalities that can only come from divine intervention.

Now, to the specific topic of this article, coming home with my dog.

On July 1, my wife Susan drove down to Southeastern and we loaded the X-Dog in the Toyota and drove home.  We introduced the dogs to each other and then went to Pet Smart to buy a bunch of stuff, including a fold up kennel for the X-Dog.  The instructions we left the school with included keeping your guide dog tethered to you for two full months in order to build a very strong relationship.  Thus, unfolding the origami cage turned into a much more interesting experience than I expected.  My favorite part occurred when the back wall of the thing came crashing down on my forehead while the dog, leash attached to my ankle, pulled toward a toy.

We didn’t do much else that first day but introduce the guide dog to Baby, our 20 pound Corgie/Yorki mix.  After a little apprehension, I can happily report, that the two guys get along terrifically.  They share toys and play in the yard together, the big Labrador seemingly cautious and gentle with the much smaller guy.  

The following day, we went on our first training walk around the neighborhood.  Susan had Baby on a leash and I had X in his harness.  It seemed that, overnight, I forgot all of the commands, I lost track of my left and right and the walk turned into a somewhat frustrating stroll about the local streets.

The following day I felt a bit nervous (valium would have helped that pass) but Susan, Baby, the X-Dog and I set out for another walk.  I did a better job of keeping my left and right straight and Xcelerator seemed a bit more confident.  Thus, the walk went nicely and my confidence grew.  Actually, the confidence grew too much.

Day three started with my decision to try a solo walk on the route we took the previous day.  This resulted in me getting somewhere and calling Susan on my MSP enabled iPAQ PDA phone for help.  She found us and we came home.

Not to be deterred, I tried a few more solo walks.  Sometimes, I found my way home.  The last of these solo attempts found me walking east on 30 the St. but thinking we were walking south on 9th St., I knew I had lost my coordinates and, once again, called Susan.  She drove up and down 9th St. and I walked back and forth 30 Ave, we obviously didn’t find each other.  Fortunately, a neighbor asked me if I was lost.  “Yes, where am I?”

“You’re on the corner of 30th and Grove,” he said.

Thus, I stood less than a block from my back door.  I called Susan and told her of my whereabouts, thanked the kind neighbor and started in the direction of our house.  

The following week, Kate, one of the saintly trainers mentioned above, came to my home to help a bit with some additional training.  She seemed surprised that I would even attempt a solo walk so soon after getting home.  “Nobody told me not to…”  I mumbled humbly.  “Well, don’t,” she replied.

Kate and I worked a route to our local diner and back.  She showed me a number of refinements to my dog skills and, when she returned two weeks later, seemed quite pleased with my progress.  Susan and I go to the diner for breakfast pretty often and the X-Dog has grown quite confident with the route.

Kate will return at least once more to help me with a few other problem areas.  Xcelerator and I have done a few solo walks and, surprisingly, I find that the extra training and practice has really helped.  

Our house, however, now has a patina of dog hair.  It seems that no matter how often we brush the dogs or vacuum the rugs, the dogs will have a new layer of hair over them within two hours.  It’s a good thing that my allergies don’t include dogs.

As our relationship and bond has grown stronger, both the X-Dog and I have grown much more confident with each other.  Our travels go much faster and I’m gradually growing accustom to walking so fast without a safety net.  

–End

Back in high school, I followed hi-fi equipment as a hobby the way other people follow sports or stock tickers.  I had subscriptions to magazines like Stereo Review and Audiophile, I knew names like Bob Carver and those of other then famous (to we stereo geeks) engineers at the high end companies.  I would visit the high end stereo store in my home town of Westfield, NJ just to check out the latest stuff.  My boys and I would show off our new additions with pride similar to the way motorheads would show off their new bitchin’ Camaro.  Somewhere, I found my way out of stereo geekdom and realized that the music, the art had a far greater importance than the delivery system.

Today, I still appreciate the sound of really high end audio. I found that listening to John Coltrane’s “Live at Birdland” album on Mike Pedersen’s $30,000 system to approach a truly religious experience.  I suppose the people in the club that night might have heard it sound better but I doubt by much.  Although I really enjoyed listening to Mike’s system, we bought a BOSE Lifestyles stereo for the house because, while I can tell that something from Balanced Audio Design would sound better, I don’t value the difference at over $25,000.  

I like the BOSE products because their design makes them easy to live with.  My wife set it up in a few hours, including tuning the balance and such with the software that comes with the unit.  The entire Lifestyles system takes up little space, has tiny speakers and sounds really good.  Sure, for the same number of dollars, we could buy something that sounds better but without the ergonomics that make BOSE such a nice item to have in one’s house.

Thus, I haven’t followed the world of audio equipment seriously since the seventies and, today, I find all of it quite baffling.  I feel fairly confident with component stereo products as they haven’t really changed that much – most are black and stacked up like the monolith in 2001 and clearly designed to appeal to men.  I do, however, find the myriad new digital devices nearly completely baffling as few have an interface a blink can explore and all seem designed to appeal to people 30 years younger than me.  I find the pricing of these items surprisingly approachable and, when I have listened to them, I’ve found the audio quality very acceptable.  Nonetheless, the lack of accessibility to most of these products turns me off to them as I would prefer using more than one or two of their features.

This brings us to computer audio programs and peripherals which, other than the most minimal, tend to puzzle me.  When they work, these devices tend to work well; when they don’t, the cause never seems to be a loose cable but, rather, something that requires a trip back to Circuit City to return the item.

Yesterday, I bought a Logitech USB headset, it was on sale for $30 and my other headset had stopped sending a signal to my left ear and was starting to fall apart.  This morning, I installed the headset by plugging it into a USB port and using the automatic installer for the three separate drivers that this device seems to require.  Each of the drivers caused the error that they had not passed Windows XP logo testing (pretty cheesy for a company as huge as Logitech I thought) and I installed them anyway.  Everything worked right away, except the volume control on the cable.  

Like any good consumer awake at 5:00 am, four hours before the Logitech technical support line wakes up, I went to their web site to find an answer.  Searching on “USB headset volume control” found something like 630 results and none in the top 20 had anything to do with my actual problem.  A search of their user forum, however, resulted in a thread which started with “My Logitech 350 USB Headset Volume Control Doesn’t Work.”  The thread had a number of entries, all from people who said, “me too” and only one guy had an actual solution which had something to do with some weird desktop extension he was running that, when turned off, fixed the problem.  Everyone in the thread agreed that they could change the volume setting in Control Panel and that, coincidentally, the microphone mute button worked fine.

So, having exhausted the easy to find stuff, I went to the “contact us” link on the Logitech site.  There, it asks, what do you need help with?  The first option says “customer support” so I clicked on the link.  This brought me back to the search page where I had just come from.  Hitting the “contact us” link brought me back.  I could have looped infinitely had I felt like it but, alas, it had come to the time when I feed the dogs so I stopped and performed the morning feeding ritual.

As this problem has been nicely documented in the Logitech user forum for over a month, why doesn’t it show up in a technical support notice?  The answer, my frustrated friend, must blow in the wind as it seems that Logitech finds it all too confusing to address.

Here’s a bet for you all to ponder and comment upon if you like:  when Logitech technical support does open and I phone them, will the call center person who answers my call blame the problem on my using JAWS?  Personally, I wouldn’t rule out a screen reader as the cause of an audio problem, it has been known to occur in the past but, given all of the other variables, will the mainstream company try to wash its hands of the matter and send me to FS to try to sort out the issue?  Then, if the FS technical support team (in my slanted opinion the best in the blindness biz) hasn’t encountered the issue, escalates it to the test lab where a tester proves that it works with JAWS 7.10 on the computers in their lab and I get a call back, having wasted my own time and Freedom Scientific’s time and money, and I call Logitech back and forward them any email I might get from FS on the matter, will they then actually try to address my problem?

Which company holds the responsibility for testing hardware compatibility with AT?  As I’ve written here before, I feel strongly that the onus falls on the hugely wealthy mainstream companies more than on the AT vendors.  Even the richest organizations in the blindness biz (presumably FS and Humanware) have an estimated total annual revenue that is profoundly smaller than a company the size of Logitech pays for marketing its least popular product.  The population of screen readers grows each year.  Every time a new copy of JAWS or Window-Eyes gets shipped out, more often than not, it is going to a new user as the currently installed base has an SMA.  Thus, one would think Logitech would get an increasingly large number of complaints from blinks and it would behoove them to do compatibility testing to save on calls from angry blind customers.  Then again, maybe not.

I just want to go to a store, buy something and have a high degree of confidence that it will work with my computer as configured as soon as I get home.  Certainly, the screen reader vendors can do more to improve application support but, as we’ve also explored in these pages, small companies that try to support as much as possible have incredible difficulties keeping up with new releases of mainstream programs.  JAWS 7.10, for instance, announced as one of its “new” features, support for Windows Media 10 a month or two after Microsoft started shipping Windows Media 11 which fortunately works pretty well with JAWS right out of the box if you don’t mind poking around with the JAWS cursor from time to time.

I can hear our friend Gabe, a Macintosh and GNU/Linux hacker (link to his blog above) saying that I should switch to an Apple product and all my fears will go away.  Gabe has terrific technical savvy but I feel certain that he would agree that all of the programs I need to use to do my job do not exist in an accessible manner on a Mac.  So, I plod forward using JAWS, in my slanted opinion, still the best solution out there if, for no other reason, than I can, with a little help from my friends in the community, usually customize it to work with the program I need.

Freedom Scientific has some very good business reasons for not distributing third party scripts.  They cannot guarantee the quality of programs they did not build and test themselves.  So, users should remember to check a variety of other places for customizations written by people like Doug Lee, Jim Snowbarger and so many others as they will often do the trick.  I have found lots of very useful stuff out there that makes a lot of obscure to popular programs work nicely with JAWS and I contend that this remains one of the most important reasons that JAWS stays far out in front of all of its competitors.

I’m really rambling this morning.  This item started out to be about stereo stuff, morphed into computer peripherals and ended up in my repeating my standard speech about why user customizability is the most important feature that a screen reader can have.  I’ve had full my full compliment of coffee so maybe the heat of the Florida summer has melted the brain a bit.  

Afterward

I’ve received a lot of email commentary on my series of Guide Dog School chronicles and, for a change, virtually all of it has been positive.  I think there will be two more in the series, one on the staff and another on coming home.  I might do a follow up in six months or so but I don’t plan anything involving this blog that far in advance.

Blind activist, AFB employee and all around well respected individual, Crista Earl has gone missing and has last been sighted in Morristown, New Jersey, home of another very famous compound where adult blinks are segregated by gender, forced to live together and are constantly surrounded by highly trained animals.  She and Gonz don’t know each other so I don’t think he’ll be mounting a rescue attempt and, as Samhara is still on her island vacation, he probably won’t be leaving the city for a while.

Seriously, though, Crista has been writing articles on the AFB blog which start with Getting a Dog, Day 1 and have continued on a near daily basis since she arrived at Seeing Eye, a few miles from the town in which I grew up.  Crista writes from the heart and mind, has a readable writing style that contains far more detail about one’s work at a guide dog school than my “Chronicles” pieces.  If you find the topic interesting, I recommend checking into her posts, they contain humor, pride, personality and come from the perspective of someone who has lived in the world of professional blinkhood far longer than me.

–End

Recently, I read an article about music download sites in AFB’s Access World.  I sent a note to its editor in Chief Jay Leventhal, a decent guy with a lot of journalistic credibility but a tendency to look for the good in everything and not always point out the worst aspects of an item he may be reviewing.  I generally like Jay’s articles but I believe he can definitely hit a little harder sometimes.  Jay did not write the article about music downloads, though, rather a woman named Janet, an outsider, did.  I sent Jay a note of support about the article as I enjoyed it quite a bit and I pointed out a few minor factual issues that, in my opinion, do not warrant repeating here as I couldn’t see someone choosing a service based upon the little corrections I sent along.

I did find that the author only tested the site with Window-Eyes, a screen reader used by a minority of the population, kind of disturbing but Jay reminded me that AccessWorld doesn’t require outside authors to test with every credible screen reader which, today, would include JAWS, Window-Eyes, HAL, Freedom Box and for those who use a portable device, Mobile Speak, PAC Mate and a handful of different Humanware devices.  I agreed that the onus on a freelance writer, especially one who works for what Access World pays, would not be worth their while and accepted that such could use a single screen reader for their tests.

I enjoyed Janet’s article and urge my readers to go to the Access World page (pointer above) to check out the original.  I wanted to use this space today to talk specifically about emusic, one of the sites reviewed in the AW article.

I first started using emusic.com because my new Toshiba came with a shortcut that said, “50 Free Music Downloads,” on its desktop.  I clicked on the link, signed up with the intention of canceling within my free two weeks and started downloading.

I enjoy classical music and jazz a real lot.  I also enjoy “trad” country, bluegrass, blues, indie rock, hip hop and most anything that steers away from the vanilla of the mainstream.  Thus, I found the emusic site, where one cannot find songs by the Rolling Stones (a band I enjoy a lot) but features Pumpkinhead, Peaches, Benny Goodman, Arnold Shoenberg, John Coltran and Margaret Cho something to explore.

I have purchased their highest level subscription which gives me something like 100 downloads for $20 per month.  I don’t expect to find the Beatles or Prince here but nor do I expect the other sites to sell me their songs for twenty cents a pop.  I do, however, enjoy downloading the entire five CD set that includes all three hours of the legendary Benny Goodman 1938 carnegie Hall performance plus the classic hits of “the small band” from 1943 – 47 (the first truly integrated jazz act to perform without swapping out members for “whites only” clubs and concert halls) for about $13.  At the same time, I enjoy the serious positivism of the NY underground rap scene with guys like Pumpkinhead and Mystic, indie rockers who bring sexual politics to new heights like Peaches does on “Impeach My Bush,” and, of course, the hilarious stand up works that Margart Cho brings to the stage and now my collection of media files.

So, if you’re looking for an alternative to the mainstream download sites where you can spend a fair amount to download the same crap you can hear anywhere else, go to Urge (an MTV product) or the Real Networks site, if you’re looking for a reasonably accessible but no where perfect download site where you can discover some very cool alternative artists, head for emusic.com and enjoy.

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