Questions you wanted to ask the blind

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Vincent Seoracis

I have a long standing policey of answering questions related to being blind, since the medi isn't always accurate, and people often have questions, which they sometimes want answered. Let it be known that whatever your question might be, I've probably answered it, or something that is so close to being it that the difference doesn't matter. So, feel free to ask.
 

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What is the best Text-to-Speech program you've found so far? Do you use a braille keyboard and type, or do you use just use a Speech-to-Text program? Does braille have any non-gendered pronouns, or do you have to use context? (like with the English they/them being contextually dependent in order to know if it's a plural or a pronoun)

Is it presumptuous to automatically assume that blind people use braille? Are there braille dialects? Is braille hard or tricky to learn?
 

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Hello and welcome to Multerra. If there is any way we can make your site experience more comfortable or accessible, please let us know!

As for questions, I was wondering how your screen-reader reacts to URLS or links. Does it read off a full URL, or just say "link"?
 

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If someone explains their point to you and you get them, do you still say "I see"?

... okay, serious question. Do you find your other senses - hearing for instance - to be better than that of people who are not blind, or is that more of a media trope?
 
V

Vincent Seoracis

Addbookmark said:
What is the best Text-to-Speech program you've found so far? Do you use a braille keyboard and type, or do you use just use a Speech-to-Text program? Does

braille have any non-gendered pronouns, or do you have to use context? (like with the English they/them being contextually dependent in order to know if

it's a plural or a pronoun)



Is it presumptuous to automatically assume that blind people use braille? Are there braille dialects? Is braille hard or tricky to learn?



Right, by the numbers:

The best screen-reader I’ve used so far has to be Java Acquisition With Speech, or JAWS, and you can make all the shark jokes you want. While I’ve not personally used Window Eyes, other blind friends of mine have, and say its as good. These are screen-readers, not to be confused with type-to-speak programs, like dragon.



I use a regular keyboard, not a braille one. Braille keyboards are expensive, braille screens, even more so, with the cheapest integrated system — both screen and keyboard — being five hundred dollars.



Braille has two grades, grade one where each individual character is represented, and grade 2, which is short hand. If you encounter braille on a sign, odds are it is grade 2. Grade 2, in addition to the typical we, they, he, she, etc, has a pai of symbols that mean he/she. The context determines if this is in the general sense, kas covering everyone, or the singlular sense, as in it could be a he, or a she. Braille isn’t as hard as Japanese, but its not super easy. You need to have somewhat sensitive fingers for one thing, and baby powder will only go so far. Grade 1 braille is easier than grade 2, and the general concept of the eight cdot combination for each cell, or character space, isn’t that hard to learn. The biggest limitation factor though, is the fact that some prisons have stopped allowing prisoners to braille, and the increasing mentality that electronic text is just as good as braille. For this reason, older individuals that have been blind for a while are more likely to know braille, than younger folks. This is not a hard and fast rule, but a general indicator. Also I’ve personally found that those that have been blind longer often use braille to supplement other adaptive techniques. I have a braille type-writer, which I use regularly, and also have braille labeling material.
 
V

Vincent Seoracis

Dr. Olivia Octavius said:
Hello and welcome to Multerra. If there is any way we can make your site experience more comfortable or accessible, please let us know!



As for questions, I was wondering how your screen-reader reacts to URLS or links. Does it read off a full URL, or just say "link"?



For starters have lots of patients when I invariably do something dumb: like my character submission, which I’ll be correcting shortly.



As for links, it depends on the manner in which I am listening to them. I can type in a command for instance, which will provide me a list of all the links, save for those that are inplanted in an image, that are on a particular page. When doing that I only hear what the link is labeled as. When I’m tabbing through a webpage however, I will hear both the link label, but also its URL.
 
V

Vincent Seoracis

Mewtwo said:
If someone explains their point to you and you get them, do you still say "I see"?



... okay, serious question. Do you find your other senses - hearing for instance - to be better than that of people who are not blind, or is that more

of a media trope?



Yes, sometimes I do, even though I’ve not seen anything for a while. Don’t even have reliable light/ dark perception any more. Now, as for your other question, it’s a little tricky. Perhaps you recall the experiment where researchers asked people to count the number of times a video recorded group of basketball players tossed a ball back and forth to each other, while someone in a gorilla costume walked out, thumped its chest, and then walked off screen. Many people were so busy counting ball tosses that they missed the suit wearer entirely. This is called attentional blindness. Sometimes people are so busy taking information with one sense, vision perhaps that they don’t fully take in information with their other senses. My mind has one less sense that it has information to deal with and determine if it should override some other sense. When I mediate, and work with another mediator, we work to cover each other ‘blind spots’ so to speak: he/she covers my inability to cover physical cues, while I’m constantly on the search for both verbal cues, and tonality signals.
 

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How does your screen-reader read off mathematical symbols like plus, minus, equal to, etcetera? I’ve read that some screen-readers have difficulty with reading these symbols correctly, sometimes leaving out the mathematical symbol entirely so that “two plus two” becomes just “two two.” Is this your experience?
 
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Vincent Seoracis

Dr. Olivia Octavius said:
How does your screen-reader read off mathematical symbols like plus, minus, equal to, etcetera? I’ve read that some screen-readers have difficulty with

reading these symbols correctly, sometimes leaving out the mathematical symbol entirely so that “two plus two” becomes just “two two.” Is this your experience?

That used to be a problem with earlier screen-readers when you hit the total screen-read command, which is a command that will start reading where ever the PC curser is, until it reaches the bottom of the page, but it wasn’t a problem when you used the arrow keys to move the curser cell by sell, or symbol by symbol if you prefer, or word by word. Newer versions of both JAWS and Window-eyes, don’t have this problem any more, although there is a free-source screen-reader, the name of which escapes me at the moment, which still has this problem, and Microsoft Sam still have this problem up until Windows 8, but I don’t know if it has it after this. While Microsoft Sam isn’t a screen-reader, in a pinch a blind individual could use it to complete an exam… I have… more than once. When putting any screen-reader on an Apple operating system has been known to have this, along with a long list of other problems, but Apple has had a long history of being difficult for those with vision problems to work with.
 
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Vincent Seoracis

As an unimportant aside, when the good Doctor asked her latest question my screen-reader did read the one under the symbol mark at the top left corner of my page, when clicking on that botton, which is probably an image, it then give me the two drop down menus, with the one being stated when I came down to the lower of the two drop down menus. All private messages have given me a one at the upper of the two menus. I'll admit, I'm kind of surprised it did that, because on facebook, for instance, it doesn't automatically tell me when I've recieved new responses to anything.
 
V

Vincent Seoracis

Dr. Olivia Octavius said:
Could the open source screen-reader you’re thinking about be NonVisual Desktop Access, NVDA?

The sound of a chair moving can be heard. Several drawers are then opened and closed. This followed by the sound of pages turning, a bit of off toon humming can be heard. Yes, yes, that is the one. I’ve not used it myself, but those that I know that have, have given very mixed results over it.
 

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I’ve read a few threads discussing its merits on websites like Reddit. From what I recall, NVDA struggles to read certain typographical symbols and punctuation, including those needed for equations. Sometimes they are even muted!

This was an issue as of 2018 is what I’m gathering from a quick internet romp, so I’m curious about whether they’ve made much progress on that front since. Seems like this would have been a big issue for the developers, especially for their countless users in college or involved in math-heavy fields. A lot can happen in a few short years, though.
 
V

Vincent Seoracis

I'll ask around, and let you know if its been fixed.
I should point out that the two largest fields for the blind are the law, and the spiritual domain. I was the first blind individual at my college to major in research psychology, which required us to take more statistic courses than most math majors. I've only met one other blind person that followed such a math heavy selection, while blind.
 
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Vincent Seoracis

A quick question above my name, I hear "clickable", and then "V", what are those?
 

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That’s an interesting note about what fields you’ve noticed the blind tend to go into. Before I graduated with my Bachelors, there were only two blind individuals I met at university, though I’m certain that my limited time on campus didn’t give me the best grasp of the student body. I know that one man, a classmate, was involved in Creative Writing. We took screenwriting together, but I think we all had a mandatory math course at some point.

And yep, what Ganondorf said. It’s an automatically generated icon!
 
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Vincent Seoracis

And has been r viewing pleasure, and as proof that certain cartoons involving birds that wanted to leave their artic climates and trival to some place warmer clearly state "when there's a will, there's a way, they say."

Enjoy the image that's name is known, if not its content. By this I mean the image has a label to it in Wikimedia, but the exact character of the image is unknown.
 
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