Dear AccessWorld Editor,
I appreciate the honest and thoughtful writing in Deborah Kendrick's July article, Blindness and Medical Facilities, Take Two: More About Advocating for Yourself in a Medical Situation. I wanted to also provide a very helpful document prepared by the Pennsylvania Council of the Blind [PCB], which may be helpful to share with the medical community. The PCB is working toward options in producing this information in a meaningful format to include illustrations, images, and, if possible, videos. Please share the link to this current version with Access World readers.
Best Regards,
Jule Ann Lieberman CLVT ATP
Vice President, Pennsylvania Council of the Blind
Dear AccessWorld Editor,
I found the tips in Bill Holton's July article, Getting the Most out of Sighted Computer Assistance: How to Help the Helpers, to be helpful in reminding me to use the tools at my disposal when receiving training. Would you consider a follow-up article explaining how a blind person, not familiar with the mouse and less familiar with the visual elements on a screen, can instruct a sighted person?
Thanks.
Rebecca Skipper
Dear AccessWorld Editor,
I must take exception with the July article, Accessible Textbook Options for Students Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired, by Jamie Pauls.
The article portrays blind people as passive consumers of services at the mercy of textbook publishers and large non-profit organizations, rather than active producers of accessible textbook solutions. Specifically, the article failed to make any mention that blind people can obtain extremely accurate and accessible copies of textbooks by scanning the book using Kurzweil 1000. Unlike Open Book, it has the latest versions of the world's premier optical character recognition software. Even large books with many pages can be fully scanned and recognized within a few hours using a computer with an i7 processor and large format scanner. Issues regarding photo captions and sidebars can be managed by obtaining international editions of the textbook, when available, where most of this superfluous information is removed.
For more than 40 years, thousands of blind people have advanced and improved upon scanning and optical character recognition technology, so it is a highly useful solution today where blind people can often create their own accessibility.
Thanks,
Kelly Pierce
Dear AccessWorld Editor,
This letter is in response to Bill Holton's July article, Getting the Most out of Sighted Computer Assistance: How to Help the Helpers.
What a fantastic article! I am an instructor at Hadley Institute and I constantly have students inquiring about how to obtain assistance with their access technology. I will definitely recommend this article. As always, Access World provides a wealth of useful information.
Kudos to you and your staff!
Regards,
Vikki Vaughan, M.Ed.
Technology Instructor
Dear AccessWorld Editor,
I enjoyed your July article [Accessible Textbook Options for Students Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired]. It brought back good memories when I was a student at the University of Michigan and my room was filled with RFBD blue boxes with recorded books on cassette tapes. I wish I had then the technology and the resources that I have at my disposal today.
You forgot to mention Kindle. Recently Kindle became accessible to visually impaired readers. I have been using Kindle for about two years. I found a couple of apps that can remove the digital rights management (DRM), which was an obstacle when Kindle was not accessible. I still use them because I prefer to read PDF books in Kurzweil. The program that I use is called Codex. It was developed by a British blind programmer named James Schol.
Best regards,
Luis Eduardo Pena
Dear AccessWorld Editor,
Does Deborah Kendrick, author of the July article, Blindness and Medical Facilities, Take Two: More About Advocating for Yourself in a Medical Situation, believe every single blind person in the world owns a "smart" phone or tablet? If so, she is mistaken. Many can neither afford nor spatially grasp how to use the "smart" phones, and we all know Apple has a long way to go in making its products accessible to everyone.
Sincerely,
Belle Mills
