[MV] New to list, Legally blind

[Richard Smith]

Wyldceltic1 wrote:

> I was three month preemie and parked in an incubator of pure oxygen 
> and lights. My retina apparently took umbrage at this and went on strike.
>
> Consequently, I've been very visually impaired from 'day one' so to 
> speak. I'm told by my retinologist that what ppl see normally at 20 
> feet I would see the same thing at 2 feet.
>
> I have been trying to touch type and am somewhat getting it, but I 
> really would be kinder to my wrists and so on if I could just dictate 
> and my Mac would type for me. I hear disparaging things about Voice to 
> Texy software, but that the mic and headset type do make a difference. 
> I need to know what I should be looking at in these:

iListen is fast at dictating and relatively accurate.  However, even if 
you're lucky and manage to get a 95% accuracy rate, most of your 
sentences will still contain one or two errors and require correction, 
and it is this that makes speech recognition much slower than touch 
typing.  If you're blind I imagine the correction process is much slower 
than for a sighted person (because you need screen reader software to 
read your sentence back to you).  You really need to talk to other blind 
users to confirm this, but I imagine you would be far better learning to 
touch type.

I don't know how good screen reader software is on the Mac, but it would 
be my guess that the Mac is not the best platform for blind users.  A 
GUI is by definition graphical, i.e. visual.  I would suggest you try an 
entirely textual based system such as Linux.  There is quite a lot of 
free software available for Linux aimed specifically at blind users:
http://www.linux-speakup.org/
http://leb.net/blinux/

Linux can be used with a Braille display
http://www.mielke.cc/brltty/

On the other hand, Apple are planning to integrate a screen reader into 
Tiger if you can wait for that:
http://www.apple.com/accessibility/voiceover/

-- 
Richard