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.
@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.