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Software Vault: The Gold Collection
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Software Vault - The Gold Collection (American Databankers) (1993).ISO
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1993-05-30
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░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░Information Access With Braille░░░░░░░by Bryan Dufelmeier
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As a blind person interested in computers and reading I had to
have some way of satisfying my interests. Although there are many
ways of accessing the PC screen, I'll limit my discussion to
braille and speech systems. I'll tell you why I prefer braille and
what its advantages and disadvantages have been.
There are a number of braille displays and, I hope without
sounding too much like an ad campaign I hope to show you my
favorite.
So where to begin. I've been using braille all my life. I've
read books in hardcopy books. I read about the first developments
in braille computers and heard about those using speech systems.
There were reading machines with scanners and speech that cost
$20,000 and took a great deal of work to use with documents that
didn't fit a standard format.
I listened to books on tape and had them read to me. In short,
I found ways to follow my interests. My interest in computers
really started in college with my roommate and his Apple II
Plus.
When I got my Versabraille, the braille device I'm currently
using, I was in seventh heaven. I was ready to print a
paper for an evening class I was taking.
Then the story really begins. I like braille because you get
a character-for-character reproduction of the screen. With speech
you always got some program interpreting characters, names, and
symbols. Screen formatting is difficult enough to follow with
speech because you have to pay attention to everything the program
says about punctuation and anything else it's set to announce. With
braille you can see centering and paragraphs and other formatting
conventions. Speech is faster but it has its limitations.
Unfortunately, it's not a perfect world and the honeymoon with
my new braille device did end. It couldn't track those highlight
bars and other nonstandard cursors, and had no way of handling
windows. Speech software was considerably more advanced. Through
the use of menus you could cofigure soft cursor tracking and
windows to jump to or even monitor for changes.
Slowly, and I do mean slowly, the pc software that works with
my braille display started adding features but now its development
has finished because the machine has been deemed out of date.
There's no more room to put new features in it. It does have some
internal memory and word processing capabilities but they are so
limited that I almost never use them anymore. I use it almost
exclusively as a screen access device for my computer. It also has
its own keyboard which I use to do most of my input.
The software improvements in access for the computer have been
too minimal and too late. What I needed was some uncomplicated yet
powerful applications that provide real productivity.
I started reading as soon as I got my computer. In fact, I
even did some reading of ascii books on my versabraille before I
got a pc. I learned most of what I know about DOS from reading
Running MS-DOS on the pc.
A month after I bought my braille device, the company released
its replacement. It didn't have any internal functions or a
keyboard. It was designed to work both as a display for both
desktop and some laptop models. It came initially in two sizes, 20
and 40 cell models. A cell it the six-dot group that is used to
represent braille characters. Later they came out with an 80-cell
model so a whole line of text could be represented on the screen
without having to move the reading window.
Let's look at the difference between six and eight dot
braille. Most braille is produced in a standard six dots. A popular
format developed in Europe was an eight dot display. The extra dots
came in handy for representing foreign language symbols but they
have some other advantages. In six dot systems the cursor has to
be hidden by a command before the character at its position can be
felt. The extra dots in eight dot mode make this unnecessary. In
addition, this mode allows for the display of the extended ascii
character set.
The other major difference between braille displays is the way
the cursor is routed to specific locations on the screen. Some are
like mine and use software. This is clumsy and awkward. There
has never been a software approach that will take the cursor to an
exact spot on the screen. You can get it as close as the beginning
of the reading window. The more sophisticated displays have
hardware features in the form of tiny buttons or optical sensors
above the cells and this allows for direct routing of the cursor to
specific screen locations.
There two other points worth mentioning here. First, some
diplays have extra cells that give the cursor and reading window
positions and in some information on screen attributes as well.
Second, some displays are completely software driven, others are
completely hardware driven and some are a combination. Some use a
serial and others a parallel connection. All have the same basic
function, conveying with varying degrees of detail and ease the
information on the pc screen. They all allow you to access
information in a pc file. This now leaves us with all the
wondrous possibilities that exist today, including "Smoke and
Mirrors."
The beauty of disk-based publications is that they can in many
instances be customized to the preferences of the individual
reader. Colors can be changed or ignored. The cursor size can
sometimes be altered or just used in the normal way. If more than
one way exists to move through a menu system than the preferred
method can be used. Different levels of sophistication are required
for different kinds of documents. The software is available to give
users these options. This means to me that I can easily find
publications that are both easy to read and contain an unabridged
edition of the same material regularly produced for my sighted
counterparts. It is the regular edition. No special pricing is
necessary and no extra waiting to get the same piece of material.
Whether it be technical or general interest, the choice is mine and
the choices are growing.
Now I must say I am glad I have found "Smoke and
Mirrors." It is a delightful and thought-provoking gem
that may very well get better over time. I look forward
to reading and contributing to it in the future.
-end-
Copyright (c) 1993 Bryan Dufelmeier