BlindConfidential

Science, Skepticism and Disability

2011-05-26T11:42:00.000-05:00

Over the past few years, I have become increasingly interested in the science and skepticism movement. For those unfamiliar with these positions, we try to promote real scientific inquiry and shine light on bogus, pseudo-science. I believe this world view is essential for people with disabilities for a number of reasons, most especially, it is important that we illustrate the completely bunk set of cures for otherwise incurable diseases and disorders that may cause disabilities. Recently, I have started working with some friends from within this movement on a web site dedicated to illustrating which claims of possible remedies for various disabilities are in fact just scams and to dispel various myths regarding disabilities. As with many projects of this sort, it may never actually get off of the ground but we do already have a small but growing crew of people who want to be involved and we seem to be building up some steam on this project. If you find this post interesting and would like to get involved, please write to me offline, I'm especially interested in hearing from people who have disabilities other than vision impairment.

My blindness was caused by retinitis pigmantosa (RP), a disease with no known cure. There has been real, science based medical research on this and related retinal diseases and there have been some promising results in the laboratories of great centers of study around the world. The world of science based medicine, though, is making no claims of actual cures yet and the procedures involving stem cell based retinal transplants are not yet available to the general public.

In preparation for this article, I googled "cure retinitis pigmantosa" and was presented with the phrase, "about 264,000 results" and found a number of advertisements above the actual search results. The first ad was titled,, "Retinitis Studies," and was a link to a very sketchy looking group that claimed to be doing some research on something not entirely related to RP, their site is also partially inaccessible so I doubt if they are looking for anyone who actually knows much about the world of actual blindness. The second ad had something to do with acne so was a false positive but the third ad was titled, "Retinitis Pigmantosa Treatment," I found this title interesting enough to go to the site which is owned by a group that calls itself, RightHealth which seems to be a healthcare search site which found both real and pseudo-scientific items and did nothing to distinguish between the two.

Some of the search results were to legitimate scientific sources that stated that there was no cure for the disease but discussed both retinal transplants and various experimental gene therapies. These show promising results and offer hope for the future if research into these areas continue to provide what appear to be positive results, the rest, however, offered nothing more than pseudo-science and false hope.

When and if we launch our web site, I will do a more in-depth study of the scam artists. For now, though, let it suffice to say that the web sites that promise actual cures do so with the same flawed claims as most of the world of bogus "alternative" medicine. Acupuncture, homeopathy, , energy healing or any of the panoply of supposed "cures" I found are all entirely without basis in reality. None of these so-called treatments do anything beyond providing a placebo effect for any sort of malady, including RP. Some people will ask, "What's the harm and I answer, people who have a degenerative disorder, especially one that will result in blindness or some other major disability, are often desperate. People, like me when I was in my twenties (roughly 25 years ago), are often willing to try anything and spend every dollar they can get hold of to avoid blindness. The harm is that these scam artists trade dollars for false hope and, as we all seem to acknowledge, people with disabilities can often not afford expensive medical procedures that do work and these purveyors of junk science victimize individuals who are willing to try almost anything to avoid the dreaded possibility of having to live with blindness.

Please do not waste your time sending me claims that alternative medicine does actually work unless your comment is accompanied by a pointer to an article in a well respected peer reviewed journal. No, "Yoga Journal" or other publications that promote pseudo-science and publish neither peer reviewed studies nor the methods used to research a claim will not convince me. The only thing that "alternative" medicine offers is an alternative to actual efficacy.

I am not an expert in medicine or alternative medicine. I will take my lead from blogs like Steve Novella's "Science Based Medicine" and Rebecca Watson's "Crap Based Medicine." These two cornerstones of the movement are on the popular podcast, "Skeptics Guide to the Universe" (SGU) and Rebecca is the leader of Skepchicks, a women in skepticism group. Along with these two people, I will draw from real scientific publications that discuss alt-med and will try to find as much information on both sides of this debate. If anyone claims that alt-med doesn't have the money to do research, I will point out that the sales of alt-med products is well into the billions of dollars per year and I believe that they can and should be required to spend a few hundred million per year proving their positions. Alternative Medicine is big business and should be required to work the same way as legitimate science and medicine. I also believe that such substances and procedures offered by practitioners of alt-med should be subject to the same approval processes as real, evidence based medicine and that people selling false hope should be charged with practicing medicine without a license as there is no legitimate governing body to regulate these procedures as, to do so, would be endorsing a scam.

I can be convinced to change my position on various types of alternative medicine if the aforementioned articles can be provided. I am opposed to con men taking money from people who feel that they have no real alternatives. I am not opposed to any specific practice if it can be demonstrated to have a real positive effect in a double blind, controlled study. I am not religiously against alternative medicine, I've just been shown zero credible evidence that it does anything beyond a placebo and I believe that I can say with absolute confidence that sugar pills and plain old water will not cure RP or any other disease that leads to a major disability.

-- End
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Model T Syndrome Continued

2011-01-21T09:24:00.001-05:00

This morning, I read and published a comment by an Android user who took offense at being labeled a puppy yapping for a biscuit. The anonymous post stated that this user was a member of the "Eyes Free" mailing list, a group to which I also belong and correctly stated that some of the people on the mailing list were critical of various things regarding Android accessibility. This person also correctly stated that GPS navigation apps designed for people with vision impairment are superior and less costly on Android phones than on any other types of handsets.

Then, the user writes that it is good that Android supports some of the most minimal features like answering and placing calls and entirely dives into symptoms of Model T Syndrome by stating that there is an expectation that Android will get better. The anonymous Com enter then states that it is only due to Android accessibility that a person with vision impairment can use Sprint as a carrier. Sprint, if we forget, is bound by Section 255 of the Telecommunications Act to provide accessible handsets and that it hasn't before should be the basis of an FCC investigation and not a celebration of Android's half assed accessibility.

My point is that it is absolutely unacceptable for any company to release access technology that is too far from the state-of-the-art. On handsets, this means that the AT is competitive with VoiceOver on the iPhone and not a handful of really excellent features like pedestrian GPS and few of the basics like out-of-the-box web browsing.

Let's explore how Android as a whole compares to Android accessibility. How many mainstream users would buy an Android phone if it wasn't competitive with the iPhone? What if such users had no web browsing, could not read descriptions in the Android Market (a problem fixed in 2.3 but not available to any blink with an Android 2.2 based handset), could only "see" some buttons with meaningless information on them in order to do things like installing new software, could not use more than half of the standard apps, could not use the on-screen keyboard, could not use the built-in email client, could not use any of the handsets without a built-in hardware keyboard, could not turn it on without assistance and could not do a panoply of other fundamental smart phone activities? The answer, plain and simply, is that a phone with all of these problems would have been the laughing stock of the telecommunications biz. But, our anonymous comment-or seems to say that we should be grateful and that such failings are acceptable for we blinks.

I'm not suggesting that people with disabilities should have an experience substantially better than that of our mainstream friends but, rather, I'm saying that anything less than parity out-of-the-box is unacceptable. this is entirely the Model T Syndrome and an entirely discriminatory approach to software development on behalf of the technology giants that make such incredibly flawed solutions like we must endure on Android. Google has billions and billions of dollars in its arsenal but cannot make a screen reader superior to that built by a really smart and really terrific 22 year old hacker in his spare time. This would be the equal of Chevy building a new car based not on state-of-the-art electric engine technology but, rather, on the Model T, a vehicle that was pretty wonderful a century or so ago.

Google is not alone in this problem. Microsoft released Windows Phone 7 with no accessibility solution and no way for third parties to create an accessible solution. Symbian seems to have lost its accessibility in more recent releases, Blackberry seems to have broken its accessibility and Palm never had accessibility in the first place. None of the failings of other OS, though, is an excuse for Android to provide such a substandard solution. We have state-of-the-art accessibility from Apple and all comers should provide something quite similar and do so immediately.

-- End.

The "Model T" Syndrome

2011-01-16T08:02:00.001-05:00

A number of years ago, I published some articles in this blog that were very critical of Apple and the early versions of its VoiceOver screen reader. Specifically, I compared it to the high powered Windows screen readers like JAWS, System Access, Window-Eyes and NVDA. For these articles, I was blasted by friends like Gabe Vega and by my harshest critics as well. These people agreed on one thing: VoiceOver was in its early stages of development and should not, therefore, be compared to software that has had the luxury of many years of development and testing. I call this failed logic, "The Model T Syndrome."

The source of the term "Model T Syndrome" is, of course, the automobile industry and we need to look to it as an example of new product introductions. In 2009, General Motors went into bankruptcy and was bailed out by the US Federal government with taxpayer dollars. In 2010, GM had recovered profoundly and went public again making a terrific profit for our government and its underwriters.

How did GM go from a corporate baskets to a shining IPO? They started building automobiles and trucks with exciting new designs and state of the art technology. The Chevy Volt electric car is perhaps the finest example of the new General Motors engineering successes.

The Chevy Volt, advertised as "more car than electric," is the most interesting entry into the mass market electric car space. The Volt is not a hybrid but the first major entry into the purely electric car space. The Volt is 100% state-of-the-art technology and is an unapologetic bit of serious innovation.

What would have happened if General Motors, instead of building new, interesting and exciting vehicles instead built several new designs that were immediate derivatives of Henry Ford's legendary Model T? While this question sounds completely absurd, it is, nonetheless, the statement made by many people with vision impairment every time a shitty new screen reader that at best, limps along providing support hardly better than JFW or Window-Eyes 1.0.

Recently, this discussion has been most frequently focussed on Android accessibility and its TalkBack screen reader. TalkBack was less than useful on Android 2.1, it got worse on 2.2 and, as some things were fixed in 2.3, other general accessibility issues were broken. Perhaps its most glaring shortfall is that it still does not support web browsing on Android handsets. that's right folks, a screen reader that does not support web controls being developed and distributed by a huge major corporation with insanely great levels of resources in 2011.
Might I say that this is the equal to of building a Model T based automobile in the second decade of the 21st century? Sure, the Model T was a great car a century ago and JAWS 1.0 was a great program in 1995 but trying to sell either today is absolutely absurd.

To further emphasize the ridiculous nature of Android accessibility we should take a look at Spiel, an Android based screen reader written outside of Google by our friend Nolan, a really sharp free software hacker. Nolan has a full time day job where he does not work on Spiel, a screen reader that performs equally well to TalkBack in all areas that TalkBack does work and also adds a powerful scripting facility not present in TalkBack. Spiel is more useful than TalkBack and was written entirely using the resources of a young blind hacker in his spare time. Like talkBack, Spiel has some serious limitations resulting from severe failures in the Android accessibility stack. Nolan cannot fix this and the people at Google apparently choose to ignore the needs of users with disabilities and make absolutely no improvements to their fundamental accessibility support. In screen reading, Google, one of technology's biggest players, has been outperformed by Nolan, a lone hacker working in his spare time. Google builds a Model T and acts like we should be awed by their software and be grateful that a multi-billion dollar company does anything that may even be of marginal value to our community.

Why then does our community so often jump for joy like puppies being offered a Milk Bone when everyone else is eating steak? Frankly, I do not know. When VoiceOver sucked, I was slammed for saying so and I'll bet that there are people out there who will blast me for saying such things about Android accessibility as well. They will say that TalkBack is still just a version 1.x and shouldn't be compared by the now excellent VoiceOver. These people will give Google a free pass and like the puppies yap happily for a portion of a biscuit while our sighted friends enjoy the rich experience of a full Android system.

It is true that Apple has improved VoiceOver into a very credible competitor on Macintosh and the absolute leader on portable devices but this does not excuse the miserable performance of the early VoiceOver releases. If Google improves Android accessibility and builds a screen reader as usable as VoiceOver, they should be celebrated but, for now, releasing a tremendously flawed "Model T" release that actually does less than JAWS For Windows did in 1995 is inexcusable. Google, Microsoft, RIMM, Palm and all other OS vendors that do not have a native screen reader built into their platform that is at least as useful as the current version of VoiceOver should be shunned by our community until they start building accessibility that is state-of-the-art.

If we look at Spiel and NVDA on Windows we can observe that tiny to small teams with little or no money can build outstanding accessibility products, we must ask the question, "Why can't Google, Microsoft, Ubuntu, Palm, RIMM, Nokia and others build a credible AT stack and a screen reader that can compete with VoiceOver, JAWS, NVDA and other high performance solutions?" and "When will our community stop giving a free pass to companies and organizations that continue to build the Model T?" If we compare Google's annual income to that of our friend Nolan, I'm willing to bet that the ratio would be close to an infinitely greater level of resources, why then aren't we seeing at least a far greater level of commitment to accessibility than can be put forth by a really smart young man in his spare time?

-- End

Airport Follies

2010-12-09T10:52:00.001-05:00

By Gonz Blinko

"Gonz Blinko, blind journalist and social critic was found dead from an apparent heart attack in his Florida home. Blinko, the controversial fifty-two year old writer was oft quoted as saying, 'If you are going to have a live fast, die young lifestyle, do not mess up the second part,' suffered from numerous physical and mental illnesses and was thought to have been hiding for much of the last year of his life," wrote Captain Capcha, Blind Jackass Journal, while eating a burrito somewhere in Marriposa County, Arizona.

***

Sitting in SFO,, I typed, "Reports of my death are, for the most part, untrue," and waited for my flight to Tampa to board. "I have taken some time off to spend with Krysta Cryptic, a mostly wonderful human being."

I felt a hand move across my shoulders and start rubbing on my left side. The hand and arm came from my right side where a woman had just sat down. "Please don't touch me" I said quietly and politely.

"But I love you and your dog," came a response so thick in alcohol fumes that, if I had lit a match, the terminal would have exploded into flames.

"Sure," I mumbled, "Just please do not touch me," I said in a voice that was about as non-thretening as possible. While I like the occasional explosive moment, I didn't want to be on the business end of a flammable drunk at an airport gate. I then felt a pair of hands grab my right forearm and start kneeding the muscles.

"I just love you so much," said the sloppy woman. "Your dog is so beautiful," she slurred sounding like she had a mouthful of marbles.

"Please stop touching me," I said as I cautiously removed my right arm from her grip.

"Don't touch the man's dog," I heard an adult male say.

"Shut up!" barked my drunk from the floor in front of the X-Dog.

"Please Donna," I heard the voice that I would come to recognize as the drunk's husband plead.

"Go away!" she yelled.

"Maam," asked a Jet Blue employee, "Please leave the man and his dog alone."

"You all shut up and go away!"

I sighed and the Jet Blue personnel and the woman's poor suffering codependent husband continue to plead with my assailant. I added another, "Please don't touch my dog," and heard a "Screw you, you can all go away. All of you, shut up!"

Then, I heard the Jet Blue people ask the drunk and her husband for their boarding passes, "You won't be flying together Mr. Robinson, we can't let her on the plane."

"You see that Donna, we have to go home now, they won't let us fly"

"Shut up!" she yelled again.

As the security people walked off with Donna the drunk and her spouse the Jet Blue people came to me and appologized frofusely. "Mr. Blinko, we are so sorry..."

"There's nothing you could have done," I replied. "You can't be held responsible for the behavior of passengers who were drunk when they arrived at the gate.

"It's just good that no one lit a match," I concluded with a smile.

***

Five minutes later, I heard another woman's voice, this one sounding pretty sober. "Are those two dogs going to be allowed in the cabin?"

"Of course maam, it's the law." I heard my Jet Blue buddy say regarding me and, for the first time since I have had the X-Dog, another guide dog on the same plane.

"Well you cannot allow that," I heard the whining woman say.

"Maam, it is the law, we must let them fly," I heard and thought that he should have continued with, "and those dogs are much more pleasant than a bitch like you," but was satisfied that the airline people were at least sticking up for my rights.

"But I won't fly with dogs in the plane," said the increasingly obnoxious woman.

"That's your choice," said the Jet Blue person.

"Well, what can I do?"

"We can try to find you a seat on a later plane."

"That's not acceptable, get me your manager."

"Maam, it is the law that they be allowed to fly with their handlers, my manager can't change anything."

"Well, I'm leaving," shouted the annoying human as she grabbed her carry on and carried on as she stormed toward the terminal exit.

"Mr. Blinko," I heard the Jet Blue person say," I am so sorry..."

"It's ok," I said, "you can't be held accountale for the stupidity of some of your passengers," I said and laughed while shaking my head.

Finally, we boarded the plane and left for the skies all the way to Florida.

***

I wrote this while waiting for a plane from Tampa to an undisclosed location in South Florida where I will hang with El Negro for a long weekend.

-- End
, .

Comment

2010-11-25T00:36:00.001-05:00

Someone sent an anonymous but very good comment to BC yesterday. The author hadn't read BC until yesterday and saw lots of old posts with a Windows bias.

As I now work for Free Software Foundation, I tend to promote Orca and other free software AT. I also agree that Macintosh has come pretty far.

Names

2010-11-15T11:48:00.001-05:00

Last week, things on my MacBook Pro 13 started getting weird. Suddenly, it didn't recognize passwords that were in my Keychain and, when I typed in a password into the box that comes up in Apple Mail, it would work if I didn't check the "save in my keychain" checkbox. Something was clearly wrong and other programs regarding passwords (Syrinx for instance) all started acting quite queer.

On Saturday, I spent about three hours on the phone with an Apple Care representative who finally suggested we do an entire system restoration using Time Machine from my Apple Time Capsule. The restoration took more than 17 hours so I didn't see the results until the next morning. The screen said, "Restoration Successful, Click to Restart." So, being an obedient sort of computer user, I clicked "restart" and then the fun really started. My MacBook Pro 13 did reboot but all that came up was a plain white screen with a colored pinwheel spinning (according to my sighted wife). This wasn't exactly what I had expected. So, we called AppleCare for more help (I could have done this on my own had Apple not insisted in making Time Machine restorations completely inaccessible). After trying all kinds of other things and getting no better results, we erased the MacBook Pro 13 hard disk, reformatted and reinstalled the OS and Applications. Then, one folder at a time, we restored various essentials and, except that I'm missing a password or two and have had to ask that they be reset, things look pretty good.

At the end of our marathon session with the third AppleCare guy (he assumed that VMWare Fusion was the culprit as it loaded things before the login prompt) he gave me his personal Apple email address as he became really interested in accessibility on the Macintosh and I'm writing a book about it.

When he said that his last name was, "Stoner," my wife chuckled. He jumped in with, "It's not funny!" and, in all honesty, he didn't get to pick his name but perhaps he'd have chosen a career like surf or ski bum instead of technical support where we tend to expect sober helpers.

This got me thinking about various odd names I've encountered over the years.

In high school, we were often seated alphabetically. This meant that I would sit behind a woman named, Linda Head and directly in front of another named Laurie Hooker. Caught between hooker and head generated high school hormone driven fantasies that I'm sure you, my loyal readers, could figure out on your own. If you can't conjure such, get serious help.

In college, at NYU, I had a friend over in the film school named Richard Payne. It cannot be easy going through life named Dick Pain.

I have a friend named Roger Long. He promised that if he ever had a son, he would name the boy, Richard Brendan Long or Dick B. Long for short. I haven't talked to Roger in quite a few years and don't know if he and his wife have any children at all. Maybe I'll look for him on Face Book or twitter.

One of the kids I went to elementary school with was named Mark and had a large, dark birthmark on one of his cheeks. This was not lost on the schoolyard bullies.

On Lake George, NY, probably in the town of Bolton Landing, there is a sign advertising, "Walter J. Law, Attorney." What other profession could he have considered?

Calvo means bald in Spanish. I know a few Calvos and they all have hair.

I sign my emails with my initials, "cdh." Our pet dog, Charlie, takes prescription medicine that we buy at Walgreens. The pharmacy requires all three name fields be filled in so we have prescription bottles that read, "Charles Dog Hofstader." Can he sign emails "cdh" as well? I doubt we'll be confused but I was the first cdh in this house and lay claim to the signature.

In Digby, Nova Scotia, a sign hangs reading, Edward Outhouse, Attorney at Law," possibly the most honest name for one in that field.

Many years ago, I knew an opthemologist in Tyrone, Pennsylvania named Dr. Dollar. His son was named Bill Dollar and always wore a denim jacket with a dollar bill patch on the back. Bill Dollar, Dollar Bill, no matter how you put it was a first class dork.

Some academics did a study on how names could effect one's career trajectory. They took a set of identical resumes and only changed the name, address and phone numbers on them. If I remember correctly, women with South Asian names, Lakshmi, Suman, Meeta, etc. were the most likely to get calls for an interview, very white protestant names, Robert Ambruster Woolridge Brauns, came in second, other white but ethnic names came in tied with East Asians for third, latinos came in fourth and in a distant last place were people with names like Rahim, Tyrone, Shantell and others that could be assumed to be African Americans. So much for equal opportunities when a resume that claims one graduated from Princeton with honors will land the Indian chick a gig and the black person won't even get called for an interview. I heard of this study second hand so one might search scholar.google.com or elsewhere to get some of the details.

I always wished that the former major league baseball player, Darrell Boston had played for the Red Sox. Of course, when Troy O'Leary played for the Sox, I assumed that, like much of Boston's residence, he was Irish. I was actually very surprised when he turned out to be a black guy.

So, inspired by Mr. Stoner, I thought of these name stories while walking with my dog this morning and came home and wrote them down. I hope you find them a little amusing.

Afterward

While walking the X-Dog this morning, I remembered exactly why I live in Florida during the "ugly" months up north. The sunshine on my face and the cool breeze off of the bay was perfect and X-Celerator liked it too.

-- End.

Walking Home From Harvard Square

2010-10-25T13:33:00.001-05:00

Like many quirky urban centers, Harvard Square has its own collection of screwballs, nuts, junkies, hustlers and weirdoes, I wouldn't feel at home with out such people around me. Today, while walking home from Harvard Square, I had the following conversation:

"Are you totally blind?" I heard in a woman's voice from over my left shoulder.

Yes." I mumbled as she pulled in and walked beside X-Celerator.

"That's amazing!" she said a little too jovially.

"Uh huh," I muttered.

"How long have you been blind?"

"Totally? About fifteen years," I replied, "How long has it been since your last ECT appointment?" I asked as, indeed, she seemed highly qualified for shock treatments.

"What?" She asked.

"Oh, sorry, I must have been mistaken," I muttered, wishing she had picked up on my rebuff regarding her mental health but not at all in the mood to suggest that I thought she probably was batshit crazy.

"You've got a great dog," she continued.

"Yeah, I know," I said.

"You know, the Bible teaches us that dogs help bring us to God," she stated with a tone of authority.

"Really?"

"Don't you read the Bible?"

I tried to Think quickly of the most obscure religion I could muster , I replied, "No, I'm a Zoroastrian."

"What's that?

"It's an ancient Persian religion, there aren't too many of us left. You should look it up in the library."

"What's your name," asked the nut who wouldn't go away.

"Chris."

"I'm Reggie, good to meet you."

"Likewise," I added with as little enthusiasm as possible.

"Chris, do you know I am psychic?"

"If you're psychic, why did you need to ask my name?

"I didn't want to invade your privacy," she stated with certainty. "I think most blind people are psychic too."

"She didn't want to invade my privacy but felt entirely comfortable walking up to a complete stranger on the street and asking about his disability. This one is a true winner," I thought. Shit, if all of us blinks were psychic, I'd have moved to Vegas and become a professional poker player years ago.

"I'm sure you are psychic," she continued.

"Ok."

"Well, it's been nice chatting with you," said Reggie, "I'm off," she said and then was gone.

The only useful thing this particular person said that made sense was her final words, "I'm off." No shit, she was off, way off.

-- End

The Meaning of Unlimitted

2010-10-10T14:04:00.000-05:00

About a year and a half ago, I jumped on the Apple bandwagon and got the first iPhone to support VoiceOver, the screen reader available on nearly all of their products. I really like the iPhone with VoiceOver and, as I have been evaluating Android lately, I can really see how much effort Apple put in to get the UI for people with vision impairment right.

One of the stipulations, though, was that I switch to AT&T. Previously I had been using a Windows phone on a T-Mobile handset using Mobile Speak Pocket. I was pretty happy with this phone and very happy with T-Mobile.

Alas, I had to switch and bought both the unlimited voice and data plans.

Now, if I try to download anything larger than 20 mb while attached to AT&T 3G, I get an error telling me that the file is too big and that I needed to download it using wifi or by attaching to a Macintosh. What part of the word "unlimited" implies such a limitation?

While in our car, I wanted to tether my MacBook Pro to my iPhone so I could look at the Internet as we drove. I couldn't figure out how to do this. I called Apple technical support who politely referred me to At&T sales. I was given the option of having to give up my unlimited data package and pay even more for special tethering service. Again, what happened to unlimited? I can tether with my Android phone on Verizon without a special plan at all.

People who buy packages with a specific number of minutes can get some of the minutes back if the call is dropped. As I have unlimited talking, what do I get other than aggravation when calls drop? Recently, I have spent a couple of weeks in San Francisco, a few days in Florida and am back in Cambridge. Due to what I'm told is excessive volume, AT&T drops calls in the middle of conversations all day long in the big cities but worked well in Florida. Having to make six or more calls to complete a single conversation is infuriating but those of us with unlimited packages get nothing in terms of compensation.

So, I ask AT&T, what am I actually getting for your highest priced plans? The only thing that comes without limit is frustration.

-- End

McDonalds, Burger King, Poverty and Fresh Fish

2010-05-29T15:43:00.001-05:00

As we remain in a wait and see state to learn if the BP oil leak has been stopped by pouring mud into the pipe to neutralize the pressure and stop the flow of oil, I find myself contemplating the very hard working poor along the Gulf Coast.

The shallow waters from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida is home to a class of fisherman who work incredibly hard to feed their families and make rent on their tin can in a local trailer park. These people, mostly men, get up at around 3:00 am and push their old john boats with their old outboard motors that are always in need of repair, into the water and they start fishing for what sport fishermen call "trash fish." These species, ladyfish, jack kreval, hardhead cats, sail cats, lizard fish and others that are plentiful and, to most people, have no food value. These guys then take the trash fish to one of the local processing plants where such fishes are turned into a substance that is then shaped into the design of a McDonalds and Burger King fish sandwiches as well as frozen fish sticks and other "parts is parts" fish products. For these fish, these impoverished fishermen are paid between 25 and 50 cents per pound.

Back in the 1980s Ronald Reagan stated that many homeless people are so because they elect to be. He made similar statements about people in the class of working poor. While some minuscule portion of these subsistence fishermen do so by choice so they can live in and spend their time in our beautiful west Florida outdoors, most do so because it's the only thing they know and they can eek out a meager living from this work.

I know a few of the guys who do this by choice and they are happy folks as they can catch all of the trash fish in the morning, drop off their load and get paid by the processing facilities and then go out fishing or hiking or hunting or any of a large number of sea related activities. I know these guys from fishing tournaments and other gatherings of those of us with a passion for the outdoors.

Sadly, those who would accept poverty to live in near absolute freedom are few. Most of these people do so out of need to keep their kids in shoes and pay rent on their trailer which especially precarious during hurricane season.

Now, the BP oil spill has already reached the shores of Louisiana and threatens Alabama and Mississippi soon and, maybe even parts of the Florida coast.

Crude oil and fresh fish do not go together in any sense of a productive manner. These trash fishermen already live in poverty and, now, may have even lost their single source of income which hardly kept them above water when things are going well.

These fishermen provide a lot of the fishy materials that go into the McDonalds and Burger King sandwiches. Now, those in Louisiana are waiting for the state to announce that it is safe to do their kind of fishing. The processing plants have stopped buying from Louisiana, Mississippi and the western edge of the Alabama coast. These poor buggers have, for a indeterminate amount of time, lost their access to the twenty five to fifty cents for their daily catch and they have no idea how they will buy food or pay rent.

These are good hard working people without whom we wouldn't have fish sticks. I fear for these people as this country does a relatively poor job of working with the poor and these families are among the poorest and probably have no safety net.

So, maybe these are all part of Ronald Reagan's "welfare queens" and the trailer parks are actually hiding subterranean mansions but I doubt it.

I don't know if anyone has set up a charity for these people but, if so, I will be contributing and I hope you will too.

--End

My Birds

2010-05-04T10:19:00.001-05:00

or years I have poked fun at many aspects of Florida living but have
always written fondly of our natural settings, state parks, county parks
and many other beautiful spots around the state. From the Everglades to
the Nature Coast, I have greatly enjoyed the Florida outdoors, paddling,
fishing, birding, swimming, splashing at the beach with my dog.

A retired Exxon executive who had, for a chunk of his career, had been
VP/Environmental Engineering, told me on the phone that the only good
thing about the BP disaster in the Gulf was that it was "worse than the
Exxon Vald-grease" so he feels a bit off of the hook as BP now holds the
dubious distinction of being the worst oil related disaster in American
history. In fact, the BP spill/leak may be the worst industrial disaster
of all time - quite a feat when one considers Love Canal, TMI and other
real zingers.

When President Obama diah announced that we will need to have to start
off-shore drilling increased, we Florid-iots were told, "These platforms
will be 150 miles off-shore, there's no way an accident will even reach
the Florida shores."

Well, British Petroleum's disaster is not just 150 miles away, it is
Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi away and, Susan, my lovely wife of 23
years this month, described a map in the newspaper that shows that the
eastern most point of the slick is already in Florida waters, a bit
south of the panhandle, heading straight for the Nature Coast, one of
the most beautiful and well preserved coastal areas in Florida and a
place where we enjoy an occasional long weekend of outdoor activities.

I am passionate about fishing. It can take the typically high strung cdh
and insist that I be patient. Depending upon where we are fishing, if
the fish aren't in the mood to eat, there are all sorts of other natural
treasurers to feel, hear, smell, touch and the sun on my face reminds me
that I'm still alive.

Tourists and people who watch fishing shows on the television think of
Florida fishing as an off-shore activity where a very expensive boat
brings you 30 to 50 miles out into the Gulf and they fish for gigantic
animals while strapped into a chair and using the boat to pick up
distance when the fish has pulled out too much line. Other tourists
enjoy going to the reefs off-shore for grouper, amber jack and other
tasty delights - for these fishes, I prefer a restaurant as "drop your
line to the bottom, crank twice, wait until something eats your bait"
is, to me at least, really boring and a fish market or fried fish joint
handles all of the preparation and for much less money.

Locals mostly haunt the in-shore areas. One can catch a 36 inch snook in
about 24 inches of water. The redfish hit your lure like a freight
train, sea trout are loads of fun and one never goes more than about 500
meters from the shore.

We have an adorable Gheenoe, a boat designed exactly for these purposes,
it's very narrow but has interesting boyancyfeatures that keep it from
being too tippy. On it we have a terrific 2 horsepowerentirely electric
motor so we can enter tights spots with near silence. We also have
thousands of dollars of fishing gear (feed a man a fish and he'll enjoy
a nice meal, teach him to fish and he will spend nearly all of his free
time and money on fishing gear). For those of you who know fishing
stuff, I almost exclusively use rods from G. Loomis and Shimano reels
loaded with expensive braided line. My most trusted lures all come from
DOA lures (www.doalures.com) and, when using them, confidence grows
which helps one remain calm enough to impart something like a natural
behavior to a bit of rubber shaped like a shrimp about 75 meters away.
Knowing to work a lure properly takes takes years of practice and one
can always learn even more by talking to and fishing with the real old
timers. Fishing is a hobby (sport?) that one become totally emersed.

Getting out onto the water, especially in a boat with a nearly silent
motor or paddling in a canoe or kayak, as I mention above, provides a
multi-sensory experience. You may get bumped by a bottlenose dolphin,
maybe a manatee will approach you to ask for a drink of fresh water, in
some places, you can sea and hear giant sea turtles who have lived in
these parts since before Columbus arrived. a 600, 700 or even 800 year
old animal the size of a Volkswagon Super Beetle is a treasure to see
once and, to see them with some frequency, if you know the right spots,
is a wonderful gift from Mother Earth.

Other coastal animals can be entirely entertaining and the local snakes,
cottonmouth (must have smoked too much pot), rattlesnakes (one only
tends to catch a glimpse of a jubenile or two as their elders are really
good at camoflauge), the deadly water mocassonas well as others remind
us of the borderline between beauty and absolute violence that is
nature. I mustn't forget some of our truly awesome spiders who, if you
can see them, are effectively harmless to anyone smart enough not to
pick one up and play with it. The spider webs are incredible works of
archetecture spun in silk. May people have what seems like an innate
fear of spiders and snakes but, spending a little time in their
territory shrinkens the fear and permits one to glory in the wonder of
really interesting creatures.

I tend to use plural terms when referring to our natural areas. I
will say, "our fish" or "our manatees" or "our dolphins." When it comes
to our birds, I grow quite proprietary and to say, "my birds," because I
feel a kinship with our fine feathered friends.

At one of our favorite fishing spots, we, on low tide - the best time to
fish this particular flat,would often see a juvenile male bald eagle. I
watched him, for about three years, slide into the water withan elegance
lost on pelicans, grab fishes in its talons and then pound its wings
against the water to regain flight and, sometimes, letting out a shout
to celebrate his catch - the beautiful and the brutal, the sound and the
fury that is the American outdoors could not possibly get better.
Watching him mature was a natural phenomena that I really enjoyed.
Watching him grow up, though, me feel like his is part of the family.

At Fort De Soto state park, just about 30 minutes from here, we enjoy a
pair of mature bald eagles, probably a mating pair. They catch fish,
birds and small mammals to eat and feed their young. Others, like my
great blues, cormorants, spoonbills and vultures (black and turkey) help
make up my kinship with our winged raptors.

The thought that these animals are now in tremendous jeopardy, our
fishes, dolphins, manatees and other critters who suffered one of the
coldest winters in Florida history, which caused both fish kills and a
lot of dead manatees is almost too much to take.

Sure, drill baby drill!! Sure, put up more platforms, the damage from BP
will last for decades and we outdoorsmen will just be fucked by the way
our American plutocracy passes and enforces laws.

The shrimp supply for nearly the entire US is rapidly dying, clams,
oysters and other stay at home fishes will take a long time to bounce
back. Subsistance fishermen will now need to get some sort of welfare
check until they can figure out a new way to make a living. Our tax
dollars will go to support people who who, up until last week, had
provided a useful service and carried on a 200 year tradition of Gulf
commercial fishing.

So, my birds are in jeopardy, some of my buddies who fish out of small
boats and hardly make enough to make ends meet will get checks from the
government. Our tax dollars will be subsidizing British Petroleum's
disaster.

I am heart broken already for my friends with whom I have fished in
Louisiana, Missippi and Alabama and now Florida waits to get our coast
poisoned.

Whill Sarah Palin send me her oil profit redistribution check she
receives as an Alaskan to help me pay off the fishing gear that people
like her felt was an expendable resource, was a chance they were willing
to take?

I am going to cry now for my birds, our fish, our marine mammals and our
way of life. Does anyone know what a blind guy and his trusted dog do
help volunteer in the clean-up effort? I've handled many wild birds over
the years so maybe I can help wash them?

Afterward

The pinhead republicans call President Obama a socialist In fact, Obama
is far more a believer in unrestricted capitalism than most other
politicans. Alaska, however, with its actual redistribution of oil
profits is acting in a manner only called for under various theories of
communism. We Floridians, as well as our friends in the other Gulf
states, will be screwed as our coastlines get trashed and we don't get a
nickel in compensation.

Remember, you can't spell CRAZY without R-AZ which is now leading the US
in absolute weirdness.

Drill Baby Drill! You already sorely fucked the Gulf so might as well
let it get worse. Maybe I'll move to Alaska and, as my outdorors time,
I'll shoot wolves from a helicopter.

-- End

GNU's Not UNIX!

2010-03-01T09:28:00.001-05:00

As of today, I am the official Director of Access Technology for Project GNU (www.gnu.org). I will continue my work with RTFI and NPII (www.raisingthefloor.net and www.npii.org) but as the representative from GNU which probably means that my activities there are not going to change much.

As GNU and most of the free e software world has (with obvious exceptions at Sun, Mozilla and IBM) been without any real leadership based in one of the prominent organizations, my role will, at first be collecting a lot of information, finishing the GNU Accessibility Statement (GAS) (possibly the strongest statement of commitment to accessibility), talking about accessibility and free software and how one cannot say they promote freedom while disenfranchising one or more minority groups and working with other leaders in the field to find and set priorities. My first public appearance in this role will be at the Libre Planet conference in the Harvard Science Center on Saturday March 20 at 3:00 pm local time.

I am very proud to be joining Project GNU and grateful to my old friend Richard Stallman, whom I've known for nearly 25 years, for facilitating my appointment to GNU's august set of leaders. Richard Stallman, commonly called rms, and I co-founded the League for Programming Freedom (www.lpf.org) many years ago and are credited with being the force behind Borland's victory in when Lotus sued it claiming user interface copyright. Today, at least in the US, UI one cannot copyright a UI.

I want to take a little time to honor rms and his place in history:

Anyone who has paid any attention to free (as in liberty) software, has probably heard one or more versions of the Richard Stallman birthday party, immediately after which the free software movement began. My favorite one says that rms, walking back from a Central Square Chinese restaurant where he and friends celebrated his birthday, got back to the MIT Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence and was told by Richard Greenblatt (then Director of the Lab) that Symbolics, an early AI company that's been defunct for a lot of years now, had stopped sharing its source code with MIT but used a lot of the code developed on the ninth floor in the legendary building on Main Street in Cambridge.

Angered by this news, rms went to the roof of the building, found the Symbolics microwave antenna, tore it off of its supports and threw it into the parking lot. Stallman then went on to, as a lone hacker, duplicate everything Symbolics did and gave it away for free.

Thus, the free software movement started. After some time, rms decided to do an entirely free version of UNIX and formed the Free Software Foundation (www.fsf.org) as its home. Linus came along a number of years later and contributed a kernel to the body of free software and, sadly, today gets almost all of the credit for the free/open source movement. Today, at last count, a GNU/Linux distro contains about 1.5% code from the kernel Linux and about 15% from Project GNU with the rest coming from the community of contributors worldwide. So, we call the distros GNU/Linux to give credit where it is due.

Virtually all free software programmers know a number of the tools developed by GNU, including: bash, gcc, emacs, flex and far too many others to list them all in this blog entry.

GNU/Linux distros also include many famous works of free software, including: APache, Firefox, Drupal, and lots of other programs that have a free software license, GPL, Apache, MIT, BSD, etc. GPL sticks the most closely to the original goals rms had when he started the movement, it's controversial but it does provide the most freedom (without the Scientific) of all of the licenses.

As another bit of history, let's look back at 1995. The Interweb had few tubes and most users connected by dial up. Publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to Mother Jones all said that the web would be important but nobody could figure out how to monetize a web site. Its success was not certain and early adopters were taking what then seemed like huge risks.

Meanwhile, big companies still sold WAN systems that sort of worked like the web. IBM had Domino, Microsoft had Exchange, Lotus had Notes, Novell had Groupwise, Oracle had something and there were a few other players in this space. Ask any IT professional who was around back then if they could get any of these systems to communicate with each other and, at best, you will get a laugh. This could have been the future of the Internet - big companies with proprietary interfaces that could hardly communicate with each other.

Then, it was free software to the rescue. Servers like Apache started to grab the largest share of the servers and, as anyone could view and modify the source, compatibility came swiftly. Free software gave us a robust Internet where the most problematic features, Flash for instance, cause the most trouble while free programs chug along nicely.

If rms hadn't started the concept of free software that always included source, would the Internet have been so successful. What percentage of servers run some GNU/Linux distro? Could this be the reason for near universal compatibility?

Surely, rms was not solely responsible for the Internet but the openness, the freedom component of the net's philosophy certainly started on the ninth floor where he still maintains an office.

So, can we build a universally compatible, free set of accessibility tools? We'll certainly try.

Afterward

There are lots of amusing rms stories from years past. My favorite takes place at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) freshman dance about 15 years ago. Gerry Susman (author of one of the most successful computer science text books in history) was approached by a young woman who he was advising.

Sussman asked, "Are you having a good time?"

Student replied, "Yeah, I've been dancing with this guy all night and he's really nice and very funny. Only oddity is that he thinks he's Richard Stallman."

Sussman replies, "That is Richard Stallman."

The student nearly passed out as rms had been a hero of hers for years, she had been dancing with him all night and, until gjs told her, she had no idea.

-- End

The Gonz Twitter Compromise

2010-02-06T09:08:00.001-05:00

By BlindChristian

Yesterday, I put out a request for ideas on how Gonz Blinko should behave on Twitter. More than a few people had been confused as to where the fictional Gonz ended and where he strayed into reality.

There's an interesting book of literary criticism called, "The Gang that Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, thompson, Didion and the New Journalism" (author name not remembered but it is available on bookshare.org). It starts with the New York Tribune in the fifties which may have had the greatest writing team in US journalism history. The Trib had Tome Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Jimmy Breslin and many more who would create the "new" journalism.

This "new" journalism searched for truth and not facts (read Gore Vidal's criticism of John Hersey's "Hiroshima") for an explanation of how facts can ruin truth.

After the Trib went bust, the gang started New York magazine and had most of the Trib gang plus people like Gale Sherry and others. It was in New York magazine where Wolfe would publish his now legendary "Radical Chic" article exposing the limousine liberals for all of their silliness. It was in NY where Thompson would first publish an article about the Hell's Angels which would lead to the really long pieces in The Nation which, in turn, would turn into the book that really launched his career.

Gonz Blinko is mostly based on a cross between Thompson and me. I would blend fact and fiction and add lots of absurd twists as Thompson did throughout his career. This worked pretty well in the blog format as it had enough space to make the absurdity of it all quite obvious (excepting to the truly humor impaired like FS's CEO Lee Hamilton). In the 140 character mode, sliding in and out of fact and fiction is much less obvious. Yesterday, I contemplated killing Twitter Gonz until a friend of mine suggested that we try to recruit other people to Twitter as fictional characters and play around purely in the absurd and silly and fictitious side of our worlds.

We will also look back at Gonz blog posts over history and use the fake names I used to describe companies, Freeman Scientology == Freedom Scientific as seen through the lens of real weird alternative universe play. We have names for real world human inspired characters as well and use them in appropriate context.

So, Gonz Blinko will be posting more absurd, flashback inspired tweets and BlindChristian will actually take the world mostly seriously. Readers should assume Gonz has gone over the top at all times and that BC may have fun now and then but will be far closer to the realm of reality.

Afterward

This transfer from Gonz to BC for real items will take place over the next few days. You can follow Gonz at www.twitter.com/gonz_blinko and BlindChristian at www.twitter.com/BlindChristian.

If you would like to have a fictitious character in the Gonz world, crate one and introduce yourself to Gonz so we know who is real or not as letting us guess may be fun as well. If you want to take on one of the characters already known from the blog, please write to me as they all have certain parameters.

-- End

Gonz and Twitter

2010-02-05T10:09:00.001-05:00

By BlindChristian

For many years, Gonz Blinko has entertained readers in the fictional blinkosphere invented by cdh intended to be an alternative universe where all sorts of things regarding blindness could be viewed through a very alternative lens. I've enjoyed writing Gonz stories and, based upon feedback, a lot of readers enjoyed reading them as well.

Recently, Gonz has taken to tweeting and his Twitter feed is laden with wisecracks, paranoia, silliness, actual comments about AT and inclusion of fact, opinion and weirdness. SOme people, however, probably those who do not know Gonz from this blog can't seem to understand that he is intended to be humorous and doesn't reflect cdh's actual opinions all of the time.

In the blog, there is a context in which Gonz lives. In tweets, the 140 limit may make him sound a bit too stark and actually serious.

Gonz has never had a terribly consistent narrative but may be the tweets, as random as they are, cannot be seen as funny in such a medium.

So, should we kill the Gonz Blinko feed?

-- End

My First White Cane

2010-02-04T10:00:00.001-05:00

My First White Cane
By BlindChristian

In the summer of 1991 or 1992, a bunch of us then working at the now defunct Turning Point Software (TPS, not to be confused with TPG) decided to hold a comrade's bachelor party in Las Vegas. Being the organizational sort and designated cruise director for the gang we hung with in and out of the office, it fell to me to handle the arrangements.

So, I got us a block of rooms at the Riviera, plane reservations on the only non-stop from Boston to Vegas, fight tickets for Chavez versus Camacho and a few other tasks that elude me.

Like many people who have deteriorating vision, I felt some shame that I would sometimes need help and, more so, I didn't want anyone to know of this ever worsening problem with my vision.

I still drank alcohol and used the odd illicit drug back then. Sometimes, when in a bar or restaurant, I would trip over something I couldn't see. Instead of explaining to the bartender or other employee of the establishment and showing them my Massachusetts Commission for the Blind ID, I let them think I was drunk and accepted getting tossed out on my ass. I would much rather have been thought of as a drunk than a blink. I didn't want any help and used drunkenness and other causes for doing something as a result of my bad vision. The humiliation of acquiring a disability caused me tremendous, albeit irrational, emotional pain so bad that I'd rather be thought of as a drunk, a drug addict, a public nuisance and anything else that people would accuse me of except blindness.

I went through extreme personal anguish during those last couple of years. I didn't know of screen readers so I made my own crappy little tool for Macintosh. I thought it would be impossible for me to return to software engineering so I enrolled in a creative writing program at Harvard (a program I would quit when HJ made me an offer). Other than quitting the booze and drugs, and enjoying my classwork,very little seemed to go as I would have liked until the offer from Henter-Joyce.

The thought of blindness seemed so isolating and freaky that I couldn't handle accepting it. I didn't know any other blinks and made the assumption that most were shut ins who hid from the dangerous real world. No, I wasn't going into the night of blindness without a fight that I was destined to lose.

The Vegas trip got me thinking about getting a cane. I knew that out there, I would need to hold onto elbows of our all male gang. Without a white cane in my hand, people may assume that my friends and I were gay. Herein lies a strange quandary: some of my friends are gay. I had lived in Greenwich Village for six years before the virus hit and was, therefore, emerged in gay culture. I would hang out with friends in gay bars and my band played a couple of gigs at the notorious Ramrod Club on West Side Highway. Homophobia, no way, not me?

Alas, I found that I would rather be seen as blind than queer - even though I'd flirt with gay friends and listen to Cher and Judy Garland records from time to time. The notion of being considered gay pushed me to make a handful of phone calls and found a place in the Boston area to buy a cane.

I never had any orientation and/or mobility training. How difficult it be, if I hit something solid, don't walk there as we can't occupy the same space at the same time. On one of my earliest ventures, I went to a Red Sox game (we had season tickets back then and I could sort of see well enough to keep track of the action) and, as I often did, I decided to walk back to our Cambridge home. On Prospect St. in Cambridge, a car was parked across the sidewalk and I missed it with my can and I came crashing into it.

The motorist yelled, "What are you, blind?"

I said, "Yes." He saw the cane and I gave him my Commission of the Blind ID. He had identified himself as a cop so I got especially polite as I really didn't want to spend a night in the clink.

My new cop friend offered me a ride home and I agreed with one provision: that I could ride in the front seat. I'd been in many a police car but always in the back and often handcuffed. He agreed. I then asked if I could play with the siren, he said, "No." but did laugh.

The trip to Vegas went off really well. It's a city where no one really cares how drunk, blind or gay you are as long as your money is green. After the trip, I was much more comfortable using the cane and accepting "blind" as a description of myself.

Still, though, when I reflect on those months leading up to my getting a cane, flashes of shame come back but they are accompanied by very funny memories of Vegas and other places where things grew amusing.

If you have deteriorating vision and want to know whether to get a cane and want to talk, you can find me on FaceBook, Twitter and elsewhere.

Afterward

This article was written by BlindChristian who, for the most part, is actually me. The account above is entirely true as far as my recollection of some drunken nights can be. You can follow BlindChristian on twitter: www.twittr.com/BlindChristian.

There also seems to be some confusion about where cdh/BlindChristian ends and Gonz Blinko begins among the twitter folks. Gonz, as always, is over the top, somewhat outrageous, paranoid and is purely a fiction. Gonz statements on twitter and elsewhere are intended to be amusing, outraging and just fun. I dig into weird parts of my creative mind to keep Gonz going.

If you want to follow Gonz on twitter, www.twitter.com/gonz_blinko.

-- End

The Velvet Blinkerground (fiction)

2009-12-21T08:41:00.001-05:00

By Gonz Blinko

"White light going messing up my mind, Don't you know it's going to make you go blind, White light, White heat..." - Lou Reed, Velvet Underground.

Samhara had just arrived in one of our undisclosed locations deep in the Glades. El Negro took off on his Harley to collect new girlfriend and hang out at South Beach. I received secret communication that said Lou Reed, the heart of the Velvets, the Rock and Roll Animal, the transformer, the man who took us for a walk on the wild side had grown vision impaired in his advancing years. Not only had Lou lost some of his vision, he actually went out and had a programmer make a special "ghetto" application to make his iPhone easier to read.

I would have preferred if he had chosen Zoom but to find an artist of his caliber actually taking action and diving right into AT was amazing.

***

"Sam?" I said, "I've got to get to New York."

"Why?"

I explained about Lou Reed getting into the blindness biz and that I had to get the story for Blind Confidential.

"So, you had the boat brought down and hidden so you could return to New York in two days?"

"It's not about the boat, it's the dirty boulevard. It's about a major player from the never ending scene jumping right into the belly of our beast," I said with emphasis.

"What makes him so important?"

"Have you noticed that all cool people, especially men, in the New York scene dress like he has for years?" I asked rhetorically, "Look at the string, Springsteen, The Ramones, even the hip hop kids - black leather jacket, Ray bans, t-shirt, jeans, leaning against a wall on St. Marks Place, smoking cigarettes and acting so entirely nonchalant that one would think their existential realism might make them disappear in a cloud of apathy."

"And you were once one of these kids?" asked Samhara knowingly.

"About 30 years ago..." I mumbled.

***

I hitched a ride on a friend's private jet from Fort Myers to New York and, using numerous evasive maneuvers, found myself at my condo on Joey Ramone Blvd. The X-Dog and entered through the back door, got upstairs and made a pot of coffee.

"Allie," answered the familiar voice.

"I'm in New York," I told her.

"Cool, what's up?"

"It's Lou Reed."

"Did he die?"

"No."

"Oh, well then what do you have to discuss with Lou? By the way, is he still married to Laurie?"

"Don't know about marital status, his vision got really bad and he's making AT these days."

"Really?"

"Yup."

"I'll get us an appointment."

***

We sat down with Reed in a Middle Eastern place called Mustache on a side street in the West Village. We started with a bit of chit chat about the early days of punk and how many of our old friends had already died. Jim Carroll, the most recent made us the most sad. It always seems that reunions from that period start with a "who died" topic and then move into happier subjects.

"You look great," Reed said to Allie with his heavy Long Island accent.

"I look old," she quipped.

"We're all looking older," he said, "You just look better than the rest of us."

Allie laughed and we started talking vision impairment.

"Well, I couldn't use my iPhone too well," said Lou, "So, I had a programmer friend make me the contacts programmer."

"Why didn't you use Zoom, the program on your phone that makes everything bigger?" I asked.

"Zoom? What's Zoom?"

Allie took Lou's phone from his hand and turned on its magnifier.

"Holy shit!" blurted Reed, "And this works in all programs?"

"Yup," I replied, "and it comes built into all of the iPhones Apple sells."

"No shit?" asked Reed again.

"Truth," added Allie.

"Well it's not as pretty as my contacts program," said Reed, "we took a lot of time designing our program."

"I'm sure you did and maybe your custom program will be useful for you and others but the real solution is getting the technology onto all handsets without modification," I lectured.

***

Lou agreed to join our band of blinks and work, in his own way, toward universal accessibility. He clings to the thought of artsy fartsy custom interfaces but we need all of the help we can get.

We took some additional evasive Maneuvers returning to the condo on Joey Ramon Blvd. where we had a pizza delivered from a trusted source. Allie and I catted about how Lou and his commitment to art hadn't changed, we did a toast of espresso to Andy Warhol and talked rapid fire like the old days. Allie fell asleep on the sofa and I went to the bedroom.

***

"Well, Lou Reed is in the fold," I said to Samhara as I got back to the house boat carefully cloaked in on of our favorite secluded locations.

"So, are you going to say hello?" asked Sam. "I got here and you jumped off and sped to New York."

"Oh, uh, sorry about that," I stumbled, "Hello, hello, hello, I repeated and leaned over to give Samhara a peck on the cheat."

Afterward

There is one strand of truth in the story above, namely, Lou Reed has, had a magnified contacts program made for him that runs on the iPhone. Other than that, I know nothing about his vision, computer use and I've not said more than three words to the man in 25 years or so. He remains a musical hero of both Gonz and BC and, if you don't know of him, check out the 1960s recordings by the Velvet Underground (an invention of Andy Warhol in which Lou played guitar and sang) and lots of recordings that Lou has released as a soloist since. He is also a poet and art photographer.

If you want to follow Gonz Blinko's interesting and twisted thoughts on almost every topic, sign up for his twitter feed at: http://www.twitter.com/gonz_blinko.

If you would like the more rational BlindChristian tweets, go to http://www.twitter.com/BlindChristian.

You can "friend" me on FaceBook, just search on Chris Hofstader.

And, if you care to share an IM chat, send me a buddy request at BlindChristian@live.com.

Happy Christmas everyone!

-- End

Social Networking

2009-12-03T09:00:00.000-05:00

Recently, primarily because everyone is talking about them and I thought I'd stick my toe in, I've set up accounts on various social networking systems. I've also broken my long term policy of eschewing instant messenger programs and set up a couple of accounts for them too.

On FaceBook, you can, if you are interested in the banality of my existence, "friend" me using "Chris Hofstader" as your search criteria. I update my status about once per day and have no idea why anyone reads my little statements.

On twitter, I set up an account for myself, http://www.twitter.com/BlindChristian where I will probably tweet about random topics in a manner like this blog. I've yet to post anything as I've no followers signed up and am not sure if a tweet falls in the woods and no one is present to hear it...

Gonz Blinko also has his own twitter account: http://www.twitter.com/gonz_blinko. He also has yet to post anything but I think his followers can expect gonzo headlines about the absolute weirdness that is reality.

Someone told me that I am on LinkedIn and am signed up for the League for Programming Freedom group. I got an email about a month or so ago saying that someone added me as a contact but, otherwise, I have never visited its web site or used its service in anyway.

I have an IM account on MSN with the email address, BlindChristian@live.com which I only have two people to chat with so it's all pretty boring.

Twitter keeps asking me if I wasn't tweets sent to my mobile phone. I can't imagine that anything that a twitter person would would be important enough that it can't wait until I sit down with some free time. I would understand this if I was involved in protests in Iran, Honduras or some place where a tweet may mean life or death but listening to Sarah Palin tell us that she changed her socks can wait.

So, I think the gonz_blinko twitter account may be fun and suggest that of the above it will probably be the most interesting so sign up to follow it right away. People who like the general content of BlindConfidential might also sign up for the BlindChristian feed as it will contain short form headline like things that refer to issues BC may cover in this blog.

Otherwise, all of my new and boring contact information is above so feel free to join me at anytime as I'm often bored and lonely enough to enjoy a chat on the phone or online.

-- End

Writer's Block

2009-11-28T08:40:00.001-05:00

First I tried to kill BC but got so many emails of support that I decided to revive it. Of course, since then I think I've only done two or three posts and, for the most part, I am struggling through a period of minimal imagination and lack of interest in the AT biz.

My gonzo alter-egos aren't speaking to me in manner that is conducive to telling their stories. I feel that they are acting more like imaginary friends than sources for gonzo journalism . None have died or anything and I expect something will trigger them to come back.

From the AT world, I pretty much use either VoiceOver on Macintosh OSX or orca on GNU/Linux distros. I have not done much to keep up with the news and have heard few rumors lately.

I have been told that JAWS 11 does a pretty awesome job with relatively complex web 2.0 applications (googledocs and the like) and that the others are working to catch up. I'll give JAWS 11 a test drive one of these days but, for now, I've heard its praises from a number of very credible sources so I'll assume they are correct for now at least.

I guess the biggest rumor from around the campfire is that MS plans on following Apple and building a very usable screen reader into some future Windows 7 update. This would certainly cause a tectonic shift in the way blind people choose to spend their money. It also raises the question of whether MS is buying or building a new screen reader - rumors on this question are all over the map so are probably as much guess as knowledge.

I'm on FaceBook and you can "friend" me using my full name: Chris Hofstader.

I've thought about setting up a twitter account but what good is tweeting if no one listens? If a tweet falls in a forest...

I am collecting a set of pan-disability ideas for technology projects, I think we have blindness well covered but I could use help in most other areas. We hope to post these as "challenges" and try to work with people to get these projects launched through a wide array of different means. If you have any ideas, please send them to me directly and I'll add them to the list for our web site.

Some friends and I are starting a "Bullshit Detector Database" that will contain information about bogus cures for various different causes and symptoms of vision impairment. Way back in my late teens, early twenties, when expert ophthalmologists at great centers of medical knowledge (Massachusetts Eye and Ear, Wilmer Institute at Johns Hopkins, New York Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat and some others) told me that retinitis pigmantosa had no cure and that, eventually, I would lose the rest of my vision. With the desperation of a man who knows he is going to go blind, I chased all sorts of bullshit remedies for my family malady. I spent a huge amount of money on everything from acupuncture to enemas, macrobiotics to herbology and, along with the expense, the crushing emotional side of having hope and watching it get crushed time and time again, not to mention the discomfort some of these procedures caused motivate me to create a space where people with the same desperation I felt back then can go to check out the validity of the claims of the modern version of snake oil salesmen.

If one googles on "cure for retinitis pigmantosa" they will get more than 40,000 hits. The "sponsored links" (about a dozen in the last search I did) were all intended to sell bullshit to people who have lost hope in actual science. These predators will take your money, send you something (nobody entirely knows what may go into these witchy potions) and, when you don't improve, blame you for doing something that invalidated their cure.

Some people will say that the science based medical establishment is conspiring to cover up the offerings of these voodoo doctors because it doesn't fit their model. These naysayers, sadly, do not understand the scientific method nor the process in which claims are reviewed. Anyone who actually presented a cure for RP or, as some claim, blindness in general, would probably win the Nobel Prize for Medicine and make the front cover of virtually all serious scientific publications. Hiding actual cures is fundamentally against how not just science but capitalism itself works.

So, if you've been duped by or have avoided such by doing a bit of actual scientific inquiry, please send me a link so we can make sure the bogus claim you found has made it into our database.

Note: I'm not a database guy and don't really know anything worthwhile about mysql and am relying on other people to help with this part of the web site and would appreciate any volunteers who may also want to help. For now, we're focussing exclusively on bogus cures for blindness but, perhaps, in the future we'll add other disabilities.

-- End

Peace

2009-10-09T08:01:00.001-05:00

Normally, I take a very cynical view of world affairs, I believe that
climate change is irreversible and that all wars are unwinnable. I
find very few good guys and a vast crowd of "evil doers" but my
definition of such extends to governments and not just outlaw
terrorist groups. I feel strongly that George W Bush is an evil doer
and so are many members of his cabinet and other officials who worked
for him.

President Obama actually filled me with something resembling hope; So,
throughout this year I have been giving him the benefit of the doubt.
When he hired Larry Summers instead of Paul Krugman, I got a bit
nervous as Summers is a racist, sexist and was responsible for the
Clinton White House's support of the massive deregulation that led to
this disaster. Then he hired Reuben instead of Steiglits; another
Goldman Saks guy, it's beginning to remind me of GW Bush's finance
team who also came from the same bank.

Then Obama pushed off getting rid of "don't ask, don't tell" and I
accepted that it would happen in the near future. Then he announced
support for the absurd Defense of Marriage Act.

His promises to bring home troops from Iraq is woefully behind
schedule and, this week, he is contemplating sending another 40,000 of
our young people to the mountains of Afghanistan.

This week, the Dalai Lama will be paying a visit to Washington.
President Obama is refusing to meet with him as he wants to downplay
the human rights issues in his discussions with China. Is the same
Obama we heard speaking so eloquently about such important issues in
sweeping platitudes this time last year? Where did that guy go.

My cynicism is back and for many more reasons than the highlights I
note above. It's just too depressing to think about how rapidly Obama
turned from hero into back slapping old boy. As Zappa said, "the
torture never stops." As Gore Vidal said, "We don't need a third
party; we need a second party."

-- End

Jim Carroll Dead at Age 60

2009-09-21T07:49:00.001-05:00

"Teddy sniffing glue, twelve years old, fell from a roof on east two
nine, Cathy was eleven when she pulled the plug on 26 reds and a
bottle of wine, Bobby got leukemia 14 years old, look like 65 when he
died, he was a friend of mine.

Those are people who died, died!" - Jim Carroll

I suspect that some post punk, alternative, indie, modernist grunge,
deconstructionist act will kick out a quick "tribute" version of
"People Who Died" that includes Jim, who died this past week at his
desk in New York. Jim was sixty years old and had just completed a
new novel which the publisher was about to send to print.

Jim Carroll was supposed to be the poet laureate of punk. He hit the
writing scene at age thirteen when some of his pieces started
circulating around the super hip downtown scene. He caught the
attention of other New York writers, most notably some of the beats
like Alan Ginsberg and William Burroughs. His work reached Jack
Kerouac, still alive but incredibly down and out living in the Hotel
Detroit in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida, who wrote that, at 13,
Carroll's work was better than 90% of professional writers in America.

I was three years old that year so I don't think any of Jim's early
work made it into my awareness for another decade and a half or so.
In fact, I do not think I had any exposure to his written work prior
to his forming the Jim Carroll Band and releasing the very important
punk LP, "Catholic Boy."

Jim was very much part of the punk scene and hung out at CBGB, Max's
Kansas City and other of our haunts. I met him on many occasions but
I cannot recall having exchanged more than a sentence or two at any of
these encounters. I remember that Jim was actually fairly shy, very
tall and, when I did get to reading his written texts, I realized he
was also brilliant.

Jim Carroll, back before his band would do readings on stage during
breaks in a Patti Smith show, she wanted to get him as much exposure
as possible so as to promote punk poetry and the work of Carroll
especially as they were close friends. Jim fell in love with the rush
of live performance at punk events so he went out and started his own
band.

Critics almost immediately crowned him as the "Bob Dylan of the Punk
Era" and the voice of my generation. While almost all of Jim's
published work, to me at least, was generated out of genius, he sadly
leaves us with far fewer published works than one would expect from a
guy who was recognized by the big time when he was only 13. Some
people say it was heroin that kept his productivity poor but he had
kicked the smack addiction well before the band and the publication of
his legendary, "Basketball Diaries" work of non-narrative prose (a
must read even if you saw the movie as they are quite different).

"Too old to rock and roll but too young to die," Jethro Tull

A whole lot of the greats of punk didn't have the grace to check out
while young (just like Syd, dead at 21). Some of the people were
friends of mine, others casual acquaintances and still others with
whom my relationship was a nod or quick greeting of recognition as one
of the regular faces in the crowd.

In 2002 alone, Joey and Dee Dee Ramone and Joe Strummer from the Clash
would all die and the following year Johnny Ramone joined them. Like
the Jethro tull line quoted above, these guys all died young on US
census data standards but, with our crowd, it, as people might say
regarding a used car, wasn't the years but, rather, the miles. Many
of our miles were off-road and involved smoking, snorting, drinking or
injecting serious poisons into our systems. Many of us survivors look
back and wonder why some are gone and others stumble forward as we all
shared similar and dangerous behaviors.

It's sad that Jim didn't leave us with more work. The Ramones, the
first ever punk band, may have been the most productive act from that
scene and are survived by an incredible catalogue of songs. Carroll,
even while alive, frustrated his fans as every time he came to town to
do a reading, the event would sell out but he would read the same old
stuff. Living up here in Cambridge, I stopped attending his spoken
word events and poetry readings when I could no longer wiggle my ass
onto the guest list. I think I last heard him read at some club over
on Lansdown Street (sometimes called Ted Williams Way) about 15 years
ago. By then, I was a full time hacker, married and modestly
respectable. Many of the early punks whose band, like mine, never
made it ended up with similar fates. A few still hang around either
the periphery of the "what's hot" music scene pretending that being 55
years old and hanging around with kids who were born after Syd died is
still cool and a very small number actually made it as executives in
the recording industry who seem so sleazy when one encounters them.

Of course, a few of the bands made the big time and those who are
still going and making new music deserve our praise and
congratulations for keeping the fire alive.

I can't say that I will miss Jim Carroll. I learned he had died last
week while on a phone call with my sister who had heard it on the
radio on the way to her teaching position. If she had told me that
Jim had been dead for five years or that he was coming to Harvard
Square for a reading, I would have believed her. While I include
"Catholic Boy" in my "All Punk" playlist on my iPhone, I hadn't spent
much time thinking about him. I wondered if we had ever shared
needles but his obit said he had quit smack well before we would have
had the chance to meet so I guess the answer is no.

I'm not sure how to end this post. I really enjoyed Jim Carroll's
work but can't remember anything beyond a nod of greeting that I had
actually shared with him. He was undoubtedly a brilliant writer whose
body of work, while small, is very worthwhile. I guess I feel like
another chip of my misspent youth has been knocked off and my
attachment to cornerstones of that exciting era is gone.

So, kids, I'm looking forward to the Youtube video of "People Who
Died" that includes some lines about Jim Carroll as it is probably the
highest honor we can pay him.

-- End

Swimming in the Kool-Ade

2009-09-15T08:19:00.000-05:00

In case you missed the flurry of press releases and general buzz
around the blinkosphere, Apple Inc. has continued its commitment to
universal design out-of-the-box with the largest number of accessible
products announced in a three week period. that I can remember These
include the brand new and much more powerful VoiceOver in the Snow
Leopard operating system upgrade, a highly improved VoiceOver on the
iPhone in its general purpose 3.1 release and a whole new and improved
iPod line of products all with a stripped down VoiceOver included.
Apple has shipped something like five new mainstream products that we
blinks can enjoy without sighted assistance as soon as we take them
out of their packaging.

I don't want to spend any time or space here in the blog describing
the new features as I may mix up what is in which product and I will
undoubtedly leave out someone's favorite feature or most annoying
bug. I will repeat the economic argument I made in the last blog post
and talk a little about my attitude lately.

On the financial front, all of Apple's new line of products come to
people with disabilities with the accessibility built in at the
factory. These are mainstream products so we get to enjoy the
economies of scale that have forever existed outside the access
technology world. Using the universal design metaphor, though, lets
us choose whether or not to buy a product without even contemplating
the cost of the AT needed to make it useful. So, the Snow Leopard
upgrade costs us 30 bucks, the new fully accessible iPod Shuffle costs
only 60 smackers and so on. A new Macintosh laptop costs less than a
single JAWS license and the iPhone is incredibly usable and so are
many of the popular applications that are available for less than five
dollars and some for free. The out-of-pocket costs are minimal.

Back in the sixties, Esquire magazine featured a cover that depicted
the great pop artist Andy Warhol swimming in a can of Campbell's
Tomato Soup. Andy loved the image and kept copies of the cover around
in The Factory until his death.

If someone were to PhotoShop me in a glass of Apple grape Kool-Ade, it
would not be an inaccurate representation. I am overwhelmingly
impressed by everything Apple has done over the past year as regards
features that people with vision can use if they so choose. This
stuff is cool but not without flaw but I don't want to list bugs here
as this item is about products released in a condensed period of time
and not a review of said products, some of which (the iPods) I haven't
even touched yet.

So where is the cynical, crusty old hacker jerk BlindChristian? Well,
I fell into a swimming pool of grape Kool-Ade and while I'd like to
get out and turn on the grumpy old self, I find that as soon as the
cynicism rises, Apple does some kind of minor update that fixes some
problem I find annoying and their bug fix turn around is pretty amazing.

Also, from the start of BlindConfidential I have promoted the concept
of access technology being built into mainstream products to provide
the numbers of units needed to keep the costs under control. Apple is
doing this. One might also ask if Microsoft's new attention to and
financing of NVDA might be there answer to a no-cost blindness
solution. VO, however, has all sorts of slick documentation,
tutorials and a hefty number of "experts" in its user community
available to answer questions for others who need help. I'm pretty
sure NVDA has a good community of users as well but all of the slick
documentation and tutorials do not seem to exist.

So, c'mon in, the Kool-Ade feels great when one swims in it.

Afterward

Look for a cynical, Gonz Blinko post soon.

-- End

AT&T, iPhone and the Edge of Weird

2009-09-09T09:15:00.000-05:00

Last week, The New York Times reported that, due primarily to iPhone
usage that AT&T 3G bandwidth gets so flooded that during "peak" hours,
it is virtually impossible to get a signal in New York, San Francisco
and a number of other major cities. I have not experienced any such
trouble in Cambridge but I haven't crossed the river into Boston
during any of those hours either.

Although dropped and virtually non-existent signals present a high
degree of problematic behavior for the iPhone user, we should take a
look at the cause. No other technology product that I can remember
has held a buzz for as long and as loud as the iPhone. In the first
few days the lines spanning blocks in major cities and suburban malls
alike would make one think that a new Beanie Baby had hit the
streets. In the summer of 2009, the iPhone 3G S became the king of
bling.

The iPhone, however, goes well beyond cool rims for the SUV, a
Rolex, and most other truly ornamental but cool objects that fashion
followers buy. AT&T wouldn't have their signal slammed if the iPhone
was just another high tech gadget that people could show their friends
and enjoy the envy.

Smart phones have been around for quite some time. Most fell into one
of two camps: Windows Mobile or Symbian, two competing and
incompatible operating systems for handheld devices. Then came Apple
with the iPhone and, as if by magic, the whole marketplace got tossed
on its ass.

Why didn't perfectly good AT&T Windows phones like the Blackjack 2
cause the usage meters to ring tilt? Why didn't the Nokia N82, the
most powerful and memory laden handset on the market shut down the
grid? The answer is: people bought them but, due to their very
clunky, desktop simulator interfaces, people hardly used any of the
features or added more applications onto these devices. Some people
used the music player features but little else in the now not-so-smart
phone market.

Apple, long known for its excellent designs actually made a phone with
an interface that one, sighted or blind alike, not just can use but
that they actually do use. With so much a tap, flip or rotator away,
a user is watching a YouTube video, downloading a new album, sending
a text message, checking the weather for their current location and a
plethora of other web based tasks, that add up to a whole lot more
bandwidth than one would use on the clunky Windows or Symbian based
operating environments.

So, AT&T is crippled by the major advances in smart phone user
interface on the Apple iPhone. I can attest to the fact that I use my
iPhone at least ten times as much as I did my other handsets as the
things I want to do are right in my face and, for the majority of
programs I've encountered, are also accessible.

The iPhone 3G S marks a transformative moment in the world of mobile
devices in general and telecommunications in particular. Apple rules
the day.

Some other AT&T and maybe Apple issues that annoy me: If I try to buy
and download an application of more than 10 megabytes, I get a
dialogue telling me to switch to WiFi. I'm paying for unlimited data
service from AT&T and that's what I want. Of course, my WiFi network
is much faster but its the principle we're talking about here.

The New York Times article included a number of other features that
AT&T is delaying lest they make the bandwidth worse. I don't care
about most of them but I was looking forward to using tethering while
we drove back south to Florida at the end of the month.

Thus, we still don't have all of the features and the awesome Apple
design is already killing the AT&T capacity. This, in a bizarre way,
is really cool just to observe such a tectonic shift in such a huge
industry.

Back during the hateful George W. Bush administration, At&T admitted
that it spied on American citizens for the government. President
Obama has not ruled out spying on Americans so, the following bit of
very weirdness gave me pause the other day:

Because of the work I do, I need to be in contact with people around
the world. Sometimes Skype isn't good enough so I went to the AT&T
customer page and checked that I wanted them to turn on International
dialing. The web site reported that I had to call a number so I did.

The phone was answered by some sort of phone-bot and I sat on hold for
about a half hour - keep in mind that all I want to do is sign up so I
can pay AT&T more money every time I dial a number in Asia.

Finally, a cranky woman came on the line and started interrogating
me. This was far more than the last four digits of my social security
number or mother's maiden name; I was asked questions like, "Where
were you living when your Social Security card was issued?" "Have you
ever held a job in Biloxi, Austin or Durango, Colorado?" "How often
did you leave the United States in 2009?" "Have you ever lived in
Pennsylvania?" And they continued with personal questions that, as
far as I can see it, they should not know the answers.

I had my radical days when I was young. I sang for an anarcho-punk
band, attended demonstrations, got arrested more times than I'd like
to recall but I have never been a spy. Although Margaret Atwood wrote
an excellent novel called, "The Blind Assassin," and I personally know
blinks at CIA and NSA, I'm really not good at subterfuge nor secrecy,
my life is a pretty open book and, if you read through the past few
years of blog entries, you'll see that I admit to almost everything
short of the Kennedy cover-up, no grassy knolls in my history, I
promise.

Why then is AT&T giving me the third degree just so I can call my
charter accountant in New Delhi? It simply boggles the mind.

Of course, my mind is boggled by AT&T on my very kick-ass iPhone which
does kind of soften the blows.

-- End

Apple Releases OSX 10.6, Snow Leopard Edition

2009-09-01T09:42:00.000-05:00

As Apple gives all of its OSX releases a cute wild cat name, everyone
who writes professionally, as a hobby, on mailing lists, in blogs, on
Face Book and virtually anywhere that one can publish text, they use
some sort of silly kitty related cliche in their title. I, therefore,
in this, the first Blind Confidential story since I pulled it out of
mothballs, have elected to use the most boring but descriptive title I
could think of on a single cup of coffee.

As the title asserts, Apple has released the latest version of its OSX
operating system and, as a consequence of the two being intertwingled,
a new version of its VoiceOver screen reader. As a general computer
user, SL -proves to increase the speed of the Intel based Macintosh
computers and does so in a highly perceptible manner. SL also
contains a lot of cool goodies and if you are interested, I recommend
reading any of the bazillion reviews in mainstream press. I
especially liked the New York Times review as it actually mentions
VoiceOver and the features for people with disabilities.

Since its release on Friday, I've been using SL and the new VO but
other pressing activities have kept me from doing anything like a
thorough investigation of the software. Thus, I give you my immediate
impressions and suggest, if you are looking for a whole lot of user
feedback, that you search for other VoiceOver related blogs and
mailing lists of which there seems to be new ones popping up daily.

VoiceOver, however, adds far more than performance improvements to
the world of people with vision impairment who use computers. For a
comprehensive list of such features, go to the Apple web site and go
to the Snow Leopard accessibility pages for a long and highly
informative read.

To begin with, the Apple accessibility team fixed a whole bunch of
bugs. While I'm sure I will find a few over time, all of my favorites
are gone and I won't miss them.

Apple has added a VO preference setting to allow one to turn off its
pathological insertion point related speech and turn on the insertion
point speaks the item to its right (a Peter Korn invention from back
in his days making outSPOKEN) it can now, for people who have used
virtually any other screen reader, speak items at the caret as they
would expect. A few hardcore Macintosh worshippers say that the way
VO spoke the contents at the cursor is how "sighted people perceive
its location," a notion that is pure bunk as, when the insertion point
visually sits between two characters or words, its location is
ambiguous - it is both to the left of one character and to the right
of another. Peter and his team back in the cave man days of screen
reading saw this ambiguity and selected to speak the item to the right
as, to a screen reader user, the notion of "between" is a very
difficult or even impossible one to convey with any efficiency.

One of my favorite new behaviors in VoiceOver is its extensive use of
sounds and TTS attribute changes to denote a lot of different actions
a screen reader user may take. Other screen readers may have
different or altered speech when changing cursors but Apple provides
special sounds when one is moving backward or forward (among lots of
other things) that are really nice and they have definitely moved from
the 1 dimensional sequence of syllables and pauses into a 2D sequence
of syllables, pauses and audio effects providing an interface far more
rich than I've used before.

When one first starts the new SL, its verbosity is set to "high" and
the user will hear a whole lot of new information. For a user new to
VO or one who is an infrequent user, these augmentations are terrific
as they help guide a user through a sometimes complex world
translating a very visual environment to one that can be reasonably
navigated by a blink with relative efficiency. Some of these
enhancements are pretty verbose and can be turned off if a user finds
them to waste time.

The new VO adds a number of features, like nice table navigation, that
it probably should have had in the past. It also adds some very cool
new features to enhance web browsing and, in my not at all humble
opinion, makes many web sites work as well or better than JAWS, the
reigning champion.

Snow Leopard and VO add the ability to use a multi-touch pad to
navigate data on the screen. I do not have one of these track pads
yet but I have been using the iPhone with its version of VO and its
multi-touch gesture based interface and, once one grows familiar with
it, they will find all sorts of advantages to being unbound by the
keyboard and cursor keys. I've heard other blinks report on this new
feature in SL and look forward to getting the appropriate hardware to
use it.

I don't want to repeat a lot of stuff you can find in the
documentation or in lots of other blog poses out their in the
blinkosphere. I do however want to discuss the economics of this
upgrade as it compares to other systems accessible to those of us with
vision impairment.

NVDA and orca, because they are GPL, free as in freedom with a lower
case "f," software never have an upgrade price. System Access
announced at one of the conferences earlier this year (ATIA or CSUN)
the "death of the SMA" and have stopped charging for upgrades. The
screen readers with the largest number of users, JAWS (with an
overwhelming worldwide market share) and Window-Eyes (a distant
second) both charge a hefty sum when they ship upgrades to the
software. If one has an SMA to JAWS Professional, the FS yearly
upgrade costs them one half of the SMA price or something over a
hundred dollars. I don't recall the GW Micro upgrade policy but it is
similar to FS in terms and costs.

One thing I can say for sure is that the Windows screen readers with
upgrade and SMA charges will take one of these expensive upgrades from
their users in order to run Windows 7.0 when it is released. Thus,
users will need to pay MS for the OS upgrade and FS or GW for their AT
upgrade, putting them somewhere in the $300 range.

Snow Leopard, though, came with a $29 price tag for both the OS and
the VoiceOver upgrade all on a single DVD. No, I didn't leave out a
digit, SL, VO together cost $30 or roughly 10% of the market leaders.
I also cannot recall a screen reader upgrade with as much new stuff as
VO coming out in years (if pushed, I'd probably say JAWS 3.5 but
others will have their favorites as well).

The SL version of VoiceOver introduces the ability to write scripts to
tweak the performance of the screen reader and to allow for
communication directly to other applications. This powerful tool is
exposed as AppleScript, a widely used and long included scripting
language on the Macintosh with a bazillion people who understand it
and tons of examples out in the real world one can use for reference.
There are also a lot of AppleScript tutorials of varying value that
one can find with a google search. This, in a way, echoes the GW
Micro approach to scripting by using a feature built into the OS
rather than sticking to an ancient proprietary system that will have
problems every time a new version of the screen reader is released.

If one decides today to go out and buy a new Macintosh and want to use
a screen reader, they can go to their favorite Apple store, Best Buy, newegg.com
and other vendors and, for around $800 - approximately the price of
a Windows screen reader - they can walk away with the only platform
that a blink can configure entirely from its first start up forward.
The Macintosh will start VoiceOver if it perceives that a new owner
has taken too long to interact with the initial dialogue - very
slick. Macintosh has no long locking code so one needn't find a
sighted person or call MS for the Windows upgrade nor, if they do not
read Braille, need to find said sightie or call FS to get their copy
protection working and their system talking. So, a blink buys a Mac,
brings it home, plugs it in, hits the on button (all things I was able
to do sort of by instinct when I got my MacBook a year or so ago),
wait a minute or so and start hearing the screen reader talk, asking
you if you want a brief VO tutorial or to continue with the new
computer set up. This is super slick and avoids all of the
aforementioned hassles inherent in platforms that insist on copy
protection and relying on third parties to make screen readers rather
than building them into the OS.

Needless to say, I'm impressed with Snow Leopard and especially with
the new revision of VoiceOver. Give it a spin at an Apple store and
see if you may like it too.

Afterward

I am out of practice writing extemporaneous blog posts so please
forgive the clunky prose above.

-- End

back by Popular Demand

2009-08-09T07:31:00.001-05:00

Well, rumors spread by me in the last item I wrote for BC that it was
going away turned out to be quite premature. I did close that item
with a statement that we might be back and, two and a half months
later, I'm writing here again.

I received a whole lot of emails from a wide variety of different
people asking me to take Blind Confidential out of mothballs and here
it is. We're back, we're fat and we hope to have some fun again.

In the short term, readers can expect more in the "Eating an Elephant"
series as well as a bunch of stuff about accessibility on Apple
devices as I've spending a lot of time with them and enjoy quite a lot
of the accessibility aspects of these very cool toys.

I will also be talking about various free software and open source AT
projects as I believe that it is very important for the end users and
not the bean counters to ultimately control our destiny and, as far as
I can see it, open source is the only way to go.

Finally, I'll probably be writing about software patents as the League
for Programming Freedom (www.progfree.org) is making a comeback and
I'm on its board so I'm reading a lot about IP law.

I can't say when I will post the first new article. Some people asked
me to start a twitter thing but I can't figure out what I could say of
any value in a sentence or two. Maybe twitter would be good as it
could help me with brevity.

-- End

It's Been Fun

2009-05-20T09:20:00.001-05:00

Over the past few months, I have received a bunch of private email
asking where BC was hanging out and when we could expect him to
return. Well, after a long stay away from writing articles for this
blog, BC has decided to move on and let BlindConfidential fade away
into blinkosphere lore.

Boris, Sam and, of course, Gonz and there friends will be moving to a
new space dedicated to the weird world of gonzo journalism from which
they arose. I'm not certain when or where they will return but I will
probably create two new blogs: one for the gonzo stuff and the other
for creative writing pursuits (articles like the Snow Bird's Tale,
Actors Inside, etc.).

For the three years that I ran this blog, I have had an awful lot of
fun. I've made a lot of new friends from the online community and,
very sadly, lost a few resulting from things I wrote in these pages .
As I have said many times in these pages before, I write them off the
top of my head, usually in the morning while somewhat caffeine
deficient. Also, I've had my share of mood swings over the years and
have written some pretty hurtful things from a false sense of self-
importance and righteous indignation. I'm not sorry for anything I
wrote here (except for the one I actually removed by request of the
CEO of one of the AT companies) but, upon rereading quite a number of
them, the tone and content could have certainly been more fair but,
alas, they are what they are . As I work toward getting the two
creative writing blogs in order, I will start removing items that fall
into the criticism and creative non-fiction categories from Blind
Confidential as most are woefully out of date and problems I discussed
have long ago maybe got fixed.

One long term reader asked me to write about the characters in the
Gonz articles, whom they are based upon and where and how I came to
invent them. I think this might disappoint a few people as it is
hardly outrageous:

Gonz Blinko is based on me if I was actually a far better writer and
had someway of having lived a life similar to that of the great Hunter
S. thompson. Gonz, in many ways is the he whom I wish I could have
been but the best I could do was let the Gonz inside speak out.

Boris Throbaum is a spoiled, whiney child of affluence. the
character in the Gonz stories was revived in name from that which I
used when I sang for the Corporate Pigs back in the 1980s when it was
pronounced "Throw bomb" and represented my anarchist leanings. In the
blinkosphere, Boris never went blind but he didn't really accomplish
anything of value after his early twenties when he vocalized for a
punk rock band. Boris is the character who speaks for me when I feel
dark and dismayed.

Sydney "Sy" T. Greenbacks was not to satirize any particular company
CEO but rather speak from the most cynical crevasses of my mind.
Years ago in an FS executive staff meeting, it was me who pronounced
that war is good for the blindness business as shrapnel and eyes, when
combined appropriately, cause screen reader customers.

Samhara, Gonz's gay lawyer was loosely based on Laslow Toth, Raoul
Duke's (HSt) legal companion. Gonz, from the beginning needed a
sidekick and Samhara (the name of a favorite perfume of an ex-
girlfriend of mine) came into mind and, in my opinion, became one of
the most interesting characters.

Most of the other characters, typically made from their real world
names by changing a couple of letters in their names should be fairly
obvious. but feel free to write me about anyone you can't figure out.

Like most authors, most of the Gonz stories came from some actual
event blown up to be enormous or some weird idea I may have had
sitting in a journal for years looking for a home.

There are lots of other blogs that cover the technology used by people
with vision impairment and now that I am out of that biz for about 5
years, I really cannot be relied upon as a source because virtually
all I use fits into a small set.

So, my fearless readers, if there is anything you want to keep from
this blog, get it now because sometime in the coming weeks, it will
start to disappear. If there are any articles you especially despise
that are not Gonz based, send me an email and I'll put high on the
list to be eliminated early in the process.

Finally, as I've taken back many promises I've made in these pages,
there is some probability that BC will return in this spot and with
the current Blind COnfidential attitude.

Why the death? I have a full time gig and in my spare time I'm
working on a chapter for a friend's textbook and a work of creative
non-fiction for a real life publishing company. Thus, I'm all written
out and simply cannot generate any spare energy for the blog.

I, with a triple shot vente late, salute you, my loyal readers and
thank you for your support over the years.

-- End

Writer's Block

2009-04-03T11:03:00.001-05:00

Thanks to all of you who have written wondering why Blind COnfidential
had disappeared for a number of months and why all of our BC
characters have gone silent. As a quik update: BlindChristian and his
lovely wife are holed up in an ashram some where in South India where
devotees are encouraged to smoke huge amonts of hashish and have sex
only on rare occasions, a situation not entirely like marriage in
general. Secretary Clinton appointed Gonz as embassador to
WhatsItStan and he and Samhara are hunkered down in a mud hut in an
obscure corner of Central Asia. Boris is acting like an ass and the
rest of the gang are up to their usual antics.

In reality, I've had the worst case of writer's block that has hit me
in years. I have a pile of opening paragraphs, a bunch of cool
sentences in my bank of goodies to be used later and a number of plot
lines that just rumble around in my head. I haven't even attended a
meeting of my creative writing club in months. I signed up for and
downloaded a writing course with lots of cool exercises from iTunes U.
that should shock the block out of me but, rather, give me a pile of
assignments that I feel guilty for not attempting - at least the
course came at no cost.

I had started writing about Raising the Floor (my new full time home
that you can read about at: http://www.raisingthefloor.net) and had
some amusing thoughts about simply lowering the elevator, alas, I
jotted a paragraph or two and could go no further.

If you are interested in the blindness aspects of rtF, it is being co-
chaired by Jamal Mazrui and me. We are just getting off of the ground
but all are welcome to join our BLV working group.

I did go to CSUN and started a Gonz Blinko story called "Bicycle Built
for Two" as Daisy dominated the conference. I had planned on calling
the LAX (pronounced lacks by screen readers) as the Ex Lax hotel and
the conference would be called Sea Sunk (look for the homophone). I
had a bunch of material piled up for a satirical view of the show but,
once again, it was as though my hands were tied whenever I started to
write anything beyond an email or other short item related to RTF.

I'm still blocking pretty hard and find that I'm surprised by finding
the energy to write even this much but, with hope, we'll be generating
stories again soon.

-- End