Alyssa ErvenTo my #Blind current and future jobseekers out there, please take the time to learn to use a computer. Especially if you are in school, resist the urge to just use your iPad or notetaker. Most workplaces require computer skills, preferably using Windows at least here in the U.S. Thank you for reading my unsolicited words of wisdom.
And to anyone who's curious, I was attached at the hip to my BrailleNote in high school. I swore it would need to be pried from my cold dead hands. Then the rest of life happened. I knew enough computer basics to survive, but have learned so much as an adult because I didn't take the time to do so as a student, even though my teachers pushed me to do just that.
@alyssa6595 So was I. It was a revelation to suddenly have braille at my fingertips, then email, then the whole internet. I loved my BrailleNotes dearly. I even learned to code on them, kickstarting my life as a programmer and proud geek. But the older I got, the more I realized they couldn't do, and the further behind I saw KeySoft was. I hate to think what would have happened had I settled and not learned Windows.
@alyssa6595 Oh yeah, I loved my note takers, but I’m so thankful that my teachers pushed me to also use the computer. That was not common even back then.
@alyssa6595 Thank you!
@alyssa6595 Could we carve this on every classroom and library wall out there?
Keri Svendsen@alyssa6595 Good words of wisdom though. :)
@alyssa6595 Oh god, these words are truer than you know! Even partially-sighted elderly adults that I train with always, always reach for their damn phones before they'll get friendly with a computer screen. It is one of my biggest pet peeves. Those people have no idea how Office works and are perfectly content to dictate their emails, messages and documents using Siri and dictation.
Kitty@alyssa6595 What the squeaky squeak! That's a thing now? Kids, don't, know, how to computer? *Meep, fall over, die*
Jeffrey D. Stark@menelion @alyssa6595 agree completely and wholeheartedly
The Witchy Bitches@alyssa6595 Currently having this discussion with one of my high school students and his justification is that since I don't do it, he doesn't have to do it and I said the difference is I can do it and I choose not to that is different than not being able to.
Andre Louis@pawpower @alyssa6595 Now imagine the fussing and fighting I had with a young lady that had to learn to use Logic, was only used to using a braille note-taker and hated the idea of computing?... Right.
@FreakyFwoof @pawpower @alyssa6595 I feel your pain. I had to train a client last school year who was very similar. Not with logic, but her school work was on microsoft and/or another online platform, and she was just insistant her Braille Note Touch was easier and wanted little to nothing to do with her laptop.
@Mendi_Tech @pawpower @alyssa6595 You ain't going to have fun in university/college with that attitude. I had to gently tell her so, even her mother who was in the room agreed.
@FreakyFwoof @pawpower @alyssa6595 Yep, and I attended her case conference, and her dad definitely was not pleased when we reported her behavior, we meaning myself and her teacher of record.
@alyssa6595 I guess I mistakenly assumed that at least the younger blind crowd loved any type of technology. I guess that's not always the case and might not be for older folks?
@DavidGoldfield @alyssa6595 Well, some of the young people I see at our agency have spent many years dictating to their iPads or iPhones so they have no idea how to spell or type. Drives us all absolutely bonkers. Why their families and school systems would do them such a disservice and let them carry on this way as beyond me. I will never forget how Adi Kushnir said that in Israel he was taught to use a computer starting at the age of nine with Jaws and Microsoft products. Heck, even if it was NVDA, I don't care. You're not getting a job by dictating to your iPhone!
Kara Goldfinch@alyssa6595 All of this.
@alyssa6595 The same skills are typically required at the undergraduate university level as well. They should be put in place long before becoming a first-year student. I also think the ability to learn new applications quickly and independently is important, especially for knowledge and information-intensive work (where most of the interesting careers are).
@alyssa6595 This 1000 percent. I couldn't imagine trying to get any actual work done on a phone/tablet. If you can, more power to you, but that simply won't fly in a professional work environment.
@alyssa6595 I have to say, I love my phone. But it is mainly for consuming content and writing messages. I honestly can't imagine trying to compose a long piece of writing, especially using dictation. Give me a computer with an editing interface with inline spelling for that. Also, if I'm doing research, keyboard commands from NVDA or Jaws work so much more efficiently for me.
Blink With A KinkI volunteer with an organisation helping young blind folks in high school/university and it disturbs me how many young people have bearly turned on a laptop. One of my mentees used an iPad for everything in school, another used a Braille Note. These are clever young people who want careers. One wants to be a lawyer. I was forever screaminga bout how important windows skills are. Often got brushed off as a old guy out of touch lol. @alyssa6595
@alyssa6595 Yes, thank you. In high school I had at least one, maybe two or three, teachers who pushed and pushed me to use a notetaker over my computer. Even then I knew what a heaping pile of bullshit that was. You're not really gonna get far in the working world if you heavily rely on your notetaker over a computer for most of your tasks. Give me a computer over some notetaker or ipad any day.
Borris@Kaliah @alyssa6595 Yes, I definitely would have gotten Microsoft and Novell certified while I was still in high school if I had only used my notetaker for everything... except not.
Different time and place. There were no iPhones or iPads when I was in school. Students are in a weird place now, with so much being done on Google chrome books. In many cases, they have no idea about the basics of what the real world has been using for years, so that entire paradigm is shifting, and accessibility complicates things even more on top of all that. It's all a mess.
Different time and place. There were no iPhones or iPads when I was in school. Students are in a weird place now, with so much being done on Google chrome books. In many cases, they have no idea about the basics of what the real world has been using for years, so that entire paradigm is shifting, and accessibility complicates things even more on top of all that. It's all a mess.
@BorrisInABox @alyssa6595 Yeah no. A notetaker is a tool for those who want it, but not every blindy is a notetaker enthusiast. I certainly am not. Pushing them on every blind person, which is what every teacher I seemed to be encountering in my high school was doing, is useless. I'm not saying "don't use notetakers ever," but if someone doesn't want them, they shouldn't be forced to use them. And I think every blind person should at least be made to have basic computer knowledge, you're not going to get a single step into the working world with just your braille notetaker and dictation on an ipad.
@BorrisInABox @Kaliah @alyssa6595 I hate notetakers for this reason. They're fine for school use but because they're so locked down you don't really get the skills you'd learn if you were using a standard PC. I get it, the laptop route isn't for everybody, but if you're trying for a job you need to know your way around one, at least somewhat. I stopped really using a notetaker in high school. I used what I had as a braille display but I did 99 percent of my work ona PC.
@MariahL @Kaliah @alyssa6595 Even the concept of the notetaker is radically different from when I was in school. I used Braille 'n' Speaks for ten years. They featured a 6 MHz processor, 12 mHz if you got the double speed upgrade, but that wasn't available until I think 1996 and I never had it, and at most, a little more than 640 KB of RAM for storing all your files, and if you were really lucky, they had two MB of flash storage. Not really a way to get on the Internet, though if you had an external modem and a terminal emulator, you could do some stuff, it had a very buggy scientific calculator, a quirky language for text formatting, and what would be by today's standards and incredibly terrible speech synthesizer, not much more than that. Yes, you could load external programs that were written specifically for it. It even had a basic interpreter, which was the first language I wrote programs in. But, if you wanted to do anything "real", you pretty much had to use a computer.
it was great for actually taking notes, though. You could turn it on and be ready to start writing in less than two seconds. Try doing that with anything modern. Wait for it to boot, which might take a while depending on if it is actually powered down or just sleeping, navigate through UI of some sort, etc.
Since this was all long before the days of USB being common place, in order to transfer files from my BNS two and from a computer, I had to learn how terminal emulators work, the differences between X modem, Y modem, and Z modem, when you did and didn't need error correction, how to match the baud rate, data bits, stop bits, parity and handshaking on both sides of the connection. I had to understand those same sorts of concepts when using a printer, and the braille embosser and dot matrix printers I used at school had different settings, so I had to be aware of all that stuff, too. A plug-in play operation, it was certainly not.
then, my first windows machine from 1997 existed at a time when software speech synthesizers were around, but were not ubiquitous. I couldn't really use one effectively with only 16 MB of RAM. My family certainly couldn't afford an expensive hardware synthesizer, so for a couple of years, I used my notetaker as a synthesizer at home, and a notetaker at school, which meant I also had to learn how to transfer files to and from my computer and BNS without a screen reader running on the computer, since I couldn't use speech and the notetaker at the same time.
yeah, things were a lot different 30 years ago. I can't say I didn't learn stuff.
@alyssa6595 @menelion I agree with this wholeheartedly. For personal usage I will absolutely use my mantis and iPad. When I get to work though there are multiple tasks that we have to use the iPad for because we are Fitness people and we cannot sit at a computer while working with our clients. I have been in office jobs though where my computer skills are very useful. I personally have a love-hate relationship with computers. Computers do not always like me. They will stop functioning in ways that absolutely make no sense when I am using them. It is becoming a trend though not just in the blind community but also in the sided community to use iPads for school with a keyboard rather than a laptop. I have seen it many times in my college classes. I absolutely believe in having typing skills though for a blind person. Dictation makes a lot of mistakes and you have to be able to edit those mistakes. With either your on screen keyboard or a Bluetooth keyboard.