Accessibility

        One day I got on the bus, and discovered it could talk. When you were on the bus, it spoke as it approached major stops, but also it had an outside voice that told you the route of the bus. This voice wasn’t particularly loud, they didn’t have stereo surround sound speakers to project it, but whenever the bus stopped, the voice spoke. The general outside noise environment is the biggest reason that without a megaphone, the voice can’t be loud.

        On a related subject, I’ve mostly finished a bit of a back story to the novel I’m almost finished with, and it does concern a bus and a bridge. See my parents and brother often accuse me of having sentences without subjects, or talking while two completely different things in the same conversation. I have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about, now on the subject of politics, I really like…

        We saw Les Miserables a few weeks ago, and I liked the story, but not the musical part. The singing itself wasn’t bad, but a whole movie-worth was a little much. For anyone who doesn’t know, the story is about a convict during the French Revolution, and his efforts to best the law. In between, he befriends a mother and daughter, and takes the child in when the mother dies.

        I recently bought a new computer with a better processor for Dragon 12, but even for Dragon 11.5, one of the computer’s previous components only met the minimum system requirements. As good as Dragon 11.5 was, it still glitched sometimes, and had to be forced to shut down. Rarely, it wouldn’t start properly either, and I had to wait a little while before starting it again. Sometimes I reset the computer, and that worked.

        The computer has Windows 8, and it is not blind friendly, at least at the start. Upon starting for the first time, there is an icon in the bottom of the screen for the ease of access panel, but it is very small. First you set up your user account, and then it goes to another screen.

I still have no idea what that screen is supposed to be because it comes up when you logoff or restart your computer. It has some kind of wallpaper on it, and the time and date, rather large in one corner. I guess Microsoft figured they should make something big at the start.

Now I can get that screen off just by clicking, I don't really know what I'm doing differently. Anyway after I finally got off the screen for the first time, I got to another screen with a bunch of icons on it, and a button to change a few options on your user account up in one corner. I couldn't see what the icons were for; then I noticed there were some other options if you slid the mouse all the way into the corner of the screen.

I'll finish my story in my next blog entry, but needless to say, I mostly figured everything out.