I'm back for another week. I guess the first thing to talk about is the weather. We got a lot of snow starting on Sunday night. I keep telling people how amused I am that we've gotten more snow now in the past couple days than we've had all winter. You know it's bad when a lot of the city busses get stuck during the day. I even heard on the news one night that there was a traffic jam that was about 30 miles long around the boarder.
As for work this week, things are still going pretty good. I got my quarterly report done for now, so that's out of the way. I am still getting a lot of interest in the assistive technology computer too. I had a lot of people scheduled to come in this week, but sadly because of the weather, most canceled. Still I met with a newer customer again this week, and things are going really well. She has a computer at home and a screen magnification program similar to Magic. It's actually the main competitor, ZoomText, which I also have on my personal laptop. She's learning to use the computer, keyboard, and how to type stuff up in Microsoft Word. It's going really well so far.
I'm also determined to get this Dragon thing working for me yet. I was talking with my supervisor, and we came up with a great idea. One of the regular customers who often comes in to use the computer and Magic is also looking for volunteer opportunities, so we set one up. So next week, he's going to work with me and see if we can't get Dragon trained for my voice. As it is now, it's hard to do this just using Jaws. You have to read several blocks of text, and if a word is highlighted, you have to repeat that word until it recognizes it and then move on. As I think I've mentioned before, there's a program that helps with these problems, but it's spendy. So we're going to just try training it another way. I'll post how that goes next week.
That's really about all there is to mention about work, other than I'm still working on some tech proposals for the library, and will be trying out the new version of Freedom Box soon. The more I read and hear, the more I actually like about the program. I listened to an audio demo yesterday, and I really like how it handles web pages. It can some how tell what the main part of the page is, and just start reading from there automatically, which is very nice. I have a feeling it just looks for the first heading or paragraph tag and starts reading from there. So when I get my trial going at work, I'll test it with some really strange and complicated page layouts to see just how well it works.
Things are finally starting to get done in my masters class too, which is good because the semester is flying by. It took me a while, but the first step was really to narrow the scope of what I'll be developing this semester by a lot. I really have a feeling that what I planned out last semester was the layout for a whole semester's course. I guess that's one of my strengths/weaknesses. When I plan, I plan big... The project for the semester now looks like it will focus on accessibility for the visually impaired, with some background on vision impairment itself, assistive technology used, and then some information on common barriers and a couple sections for basic page elements. Even just focusing on vision impairment, I'm not covering everhting I could for this semester. The hardest part for me I think will be making the transition between sections because of how the course was originally designed. With so much lacking information on other topics, I'll have to be sure everything fits together well. So there's a lot of work to be done still, but at least I'm making progress.
Another interesting thing that happened this week was a phone call yesterday. A company had my resume for a while, and some jobs are becoming available. The great thing is, the company is focused on assistive technology and accessibility. All of their positions relate in some way to this issue. The job they told me about was for a web consultant to help make sure websites for a company were accessible and followed the guidelines of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. They're also looking for people all the time, so I'm definitely going to keep them in mind for when I'm done with CTEP. Apparently they do work in all kinds of areas including E-learning and Instructional Design, so yay, maybe my masters program will give me an edge there some time too.
So that's what's going on this week.
As for work this week, things are still going pretty good. I got my quarterly report done for now, so that's out of the way. I am still getting a lot of interest in the assistive technology computer too. I had a lot of people scheduled to come in this week, but sadly because of the weather, most canceled. Still I met with a newer customer again this week, and things are going really well. She has a computer at home and a screen magnification program similar to Magic. It's actually the main competitor, ZoomText, which I also have on my personal laptop. She's learning to use the computer, keyboard, and how to type stuff up in Microsoft Word. It's going really well so far.
I'm also determined to get this Dragon thing working for me yet. I was talking with my supervisor, and we came up with a great idea. One of the regular customers who often comes in to use the computer and Magic is also looking for volunteer opportunities, so we set one up. So next week, he's going to work with me and see if we can't get Dragon trained for my voice. As it is now, it's hard to do this just using Jaws. You have to read several blocks of text, and if a word is highlighted, you have to repeat that word until it recognizes it and then move on. As I think I've mentioned before, there's a program that helps with these problems, but it's spendy. So we're going to just try training it another way. I'll post how that goes next week.
That's really about all there is to mention about work, other than I'm still working on some tech proposals for the library, and will be trying out the new version of Freedom Box soon. The more I read and hear, the more I actually like about the program. I listened to an audio demo yesterday, and I really like how it handles web pages. It can some how tell what the main part of the page is, and just start reading from there automatically, which is very nice. I have a feeling it just looks for the first heading or paragraph tag and starts reading from there. So when I get my trial going at work, I'll test it with some really strange and complicated page layouts to see just how well it works.
Things are finally starting to get done in my masters class too, which is good because the semester is flying by. It took me a while, but the first step was really to narrow the scope of what I'll be developing this semester by a lot. I really have a feeling that what I planned out last semester was the layout for a whole semester's course. I guess that's one of my strengths/weaknesses. When I plan, I plan big... The project for the semester now looks like it will focus on accessibility for the visually impaired, with some background on vision impairment itself, assistive technology used, and then some information on common barriers and a couple sections for basic page elements. Even just focusing on vision impairment, I'm not covering everhting I could for this semester. The hardest part for me I think will be making the transition between sections because of how the course was originally designed. With so much lacking information on other topics, I'll have to be sure everything fits together well. So there's a lot of work to be done still, but at least I'm making progress.
Another interesting thing that happened this week was a phone call yesterday. A company had my resume for a while, and some jobs are becoming available. The great thing is, the company is focused on assistive technology and accessibility. All of their positions relate in some way to this issue. The job they told me about was for a web consultant to help make sure websites for a company were accessible and followed the guidelines of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. They're also looking for people all the time, so I'm definitely going to keep them in mind for when I'm done with CTEP. Apparently they do work in all kinds of areas including E-learning and Instructional Design, so yay, maybe my masters program will give me an edge there some time too.
So that's what's going on this week.
posted by Jesse Anderson at 6:44 AM
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