The real Scrabble keyboard

I finally figured out where all the searches for “Scrabble keyboard” came from on my blog stats. I know the Maltron single-handed and stick keyboards resemble the tiles because of the dual letter/number keys, but somehow I don’t think that many people have even heard of the Maltron to be hearing that comparison enough to look it up.

Sure enough, there is a “real” Scrabble keyboard out there, and it’s not the Maltron. The real Scrabble keyboard is an actual do-it-yourself wooden keyboard, with wooden tiles over the key switches — you could indeed use Scrabble tiles. There is a writeup of it on Geekologie: Do It Yourself Wooden Keyboard Available.

Music therapy case studies

In my freshman year of college, I had a roommate who was studying music therapy. Much of our relationship was creepy — she and her friends would pat me on the head, or she’d talk about her “frail” students and “making” them play music, or how happy she was to see them with smiles that “she didn’t put there.” In short, unfortunate word choices and a wee bit of a miracle worker complex. She flunked out her second semester, and on behalf of her future clients I have to say I was grateful.

However, music as a way of distracting from or improving upon or enriching a disability or source of pain has always been interesting to me. I always wondered about the rigors of the music therapy program — music therapy majors were required to possess the same skill, talent, and discipline as the performance majors or the education majors. I couldn’t think how the intricacies of modes, and major and minor keys, and arpeggios and intervals, would translate to a half hour session with a child and a toy drum.

So, I decided to look up some case studies online. (Most books, with the exception of the dated works of Juliette Alvin, are considered textbooks and prohibitively expensive.) I found a couple of very enlightening articles, which detailed both the necessity for musical theory and the importance of having respect for the clients as people, not projects. The links are as follows:

Creative Music Therapy with a Boy with Multiple Impairments
Music Benefits Brain Injured Patients at Crotched Mountain Hospital

Also, the website for VOICES — one of the most prominent music therapy journals — is quite informative, especially the discussion boards.

NVLD and languages?

I was interested to see what children diagnosed with nonverbal learning disability receive in the way of accommodations now that it’s recognized. One of the things I found suggested quite often was that they be excused from foreign-language classes. The sites never quite explained why, and I can’t imagine. I can guess, remembering my difficulties in my Spanish classes particularly in college, but at the same time I never would have wanted to skip them. In fact, I minored in Spanish and helped the majors in the Lit classes. While I don’t have much opportunity to speak or write it these days, I’m proficient enough that I can read novels fairly quickly. When I was able to write more, I also wrote proficiently, barring some idiomatic expressions I didn’t know.

My difficulty was with spoken Spanish. I can actually pronounce it very well, albeit with an inevitable American tinge, and was often asked to read the assignments out loud. As long as the printed words were in front of me, I could do that. Hearing it was another story, as was speaking it spontaneously. I’ve compensated well enough in English that the written and spoken are roughly the same now. But with Spanish, I hadn’t been around it long enough to learn how to do that. I could ask a question or make a comment in Spanish, but my mouth moved more slowly than my brain. Luckily, during my last two terms I had a professor who valued reading literature as a means of learning idioms and grammar, and more importantly spoke clearly and used her hands very fluently. My real-time spoken Spanish is somewhat improved now.

At the beginning of the semester I typed the professor a note in Spanish — I could type more then, and was able to hold and control a pen besides — explaining that I was hard of hearing. This was true; I’m nearly deaf in my right ear. But I needed to use that in order to approach accommodations to the other problem, so it was technically a sort of evasion. At any rate, she would give me reading comprehension exercises in lieu of the auditory translation/dictation exercises. I breezed through them. Everything was all right until I had to do a presentation, for which we spoke Spanish and weren’t allowed to read directly from our notes. I literally could not get the words out of my mouth. When I speak, I can see the printed words in my head, and I couldn’t see the Spanish that time and therefore couldn’t produce the words. I had to excuse myself.

So, at the end of next week’s class, the professor asked me what she could do to help. Feeling slightly awkward, I asked her to use her hands. I felt I could ask this because she tended to gesture when she spoke, but in such a way that she actually conveyed the corners of the words — it wasn’t a full-fledged sign language, but neither was it the vague hand flapping that accompanies most people’s speech. In this way, my comprehension improved somewhat by looking between her hands and her mouth, using the gestures to help verify the sound. And I owed her much for the respect she showed me during our final presentations. I projected the words and images on the screen, with summaries and captions written in Spanish, but I did not speak: the professor spoke for me. I had not asked her to.

Maybe I just got lucky for once, privileged to have an understanding professor who didn’t think I was being lazy or making excuses. But I really don’t think foreign-language classes should be dismissed out of hand. Couldn’t students with nonverbal learning disability just be evaluated more on their reading and writing, if auditory problems are indeed the concern? I never had the supposed “low reading comprehension” in either language, so I can’t comment on that, if these experts are referring to reading difficulties.

Now that I’m thinking about it, I’m wondering if speech recognition software might help others with nonverbal learning disability. It still reassures me immensely to talk to the computer, knowing that the words will be safe on the other side of the screen and I can see and edit what I’ve said. I’m curious, too, for myself: I wonder how my spoken Spanish would be if I could have used Spanish dictation software to verify and reinforce my speech. Nuance does sell a Spanish version of Dragon, as well as — I think — a bilingual English/Spanish version. Interesting, anyway.

Dragon and Lotus: a nerd horror story

In his Skeleton Crew collection, Stephen King has a wonderful short story called “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet.” It involves a writer, an editor, and little men called Fornits — Rackne and Bellis. The Fornits make their home in the writers’ typewriters, and their job is to sprinkle the keys with a good luck dust called fornus. They are paid with scraps of bologna and mustard, dropped carefully between the keys.

I mention this story because, in an attempt at testing various free and cheap word processors with Dragon — this was before I downloaded Jarte Plus — I had the adventure of installing IBM’s Lotus Symphony. I attempted to dictate and test the gamut of commands, and with mixed panic and amusement thought, “Holy god, there’s a Fornit in my machine!”

The program is no longer on my machine and was downloaded late at night, so my details are a little fuzzy, but it went something like this.

After the huge file finally downloaded and extracted and installed, I returned to my computer and said “Start Lotus Symphony.” Dragon complied. So far, so good. I got to a blank document page and tested the menus — all verbally accessible by name. Better. Then I started to dictate…

Under normal circumstances and a good machine, Dragon’s transcription is instantaneous, flashing all the words in the results box onto the screen like a photograph. Not so in Lotus. The results box registered “I am testing Lotus” dutifully, but the words floated to the screen as: I a-m t-e-s-t-i-n-g L-o-t-u-s, letter by letter as if some adroit two fingered typist were tapping out the words.

Interesting, I thought, continuing to dictate. Inevitably, though, I hit a snag and had to test the correction commands after a paragraph or so. So I said “Correct [some word in the middle of the paragraph].” Obligingly, if a little slowly, the correction box appeared and I made my choice. It was then that I realized I was indeed dealing with a Fornit for a scribe: a hunt and peck typist who gorged himself on RAM. How else to explain the logic of what happened next?

The Fornit proceeded to backspace my entire paragraph up until my correction point, as inexperienced typists will do, type the correct word, then cheerfully retype everything that it had backspaced. I don’t know what programming incompatibility led it to do this, but there was such an earnest human hemming and hawing about it that, even knowing the Select-and-Say didn’t work and it was terribly slow, I found myself almost charmed. The little guy was doing the best he could in that big gray box, after all. My bemusement didn’t last long.

Having finished my experiment, I attempted to close the program and found that Dragon and Lotus had completely frozen; the Fornit had gorged himself into a stupor. I just barely managed to press control-alt-delete on my keyboard, figuring that terminating Dragon or Lotus or both would fix the problem. No joy — the puckish little dude had witched my keyboard, too. My arrow keys were dead, as were the letter keys I tried to press to highlight an entry in the task manager. Pressing Alt-E for “end process” did nothing. Thinking I could resort to my trusty Mouse Keys backup, I reached for the keypad and attempted to physically move the pointer to the entry I was trying to kill. Something moved, but it wasn’t the cursor: the task manager window stretched and skewed as though it were melting. I alternated pressing Insert and Delete, thinking I had accidentally set Mouse Keys to drag, and the task manager just kept bleeding down the screen.

Clearly, Rackne and Bellis were pigs, frying bologna in my CPU and smearing peanut butter in my keyboard. I don’t remember how I eventually got the hell out of that program — probably invoked some arcane Lotus command in my frantic key-striking that they were bound to obey. I immediately uninstalled the program, but have you ever tried erasing the evidence of vaporized Fornit? There were Fornit-innards splattered all over my machine — it took at least two passes with CCleaner, more with Regedit, and a couple of search and delete missions before I was satisfied it was gone.

Do not attempt to install IBM Lotus Symphony. DO NOT FEED THE FORNIT!

Foxit: Dragon friendly PDF program

Adobe Reader (7 came on my computer) and Dragon — either version — didn’t seem to like each other. More often than not, trying to run both at the same time crashed Adobe. When I could get into Adobe, I couldn’t access the menus by voice — I had to say the keyboard shortcut. If I had to fill out a PDF form, I couldn’t dictate into it — I had to print it and, depending on the length of the form, have someone fill it out for me. Most annoying, however, was the fact that Adobe thought Dragon was a screen reader. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Adobe doesn’t work with my assistive technology, and yet knew enough to say that it had “detected” I was running some kind of assistive device. Therefore, every time I opened a document, it insisted I had to wait for it to “prepare the document for reading.” Okay, Adobe, if you can detect I’m running assistive technology, why can’t you figure out that it’s not a bloody screen reader?

So, since I haven’t subjected my computer to any experiments in a while, I decided to look up alternative PDF programs. I wasn’t even looking for them to work with Dragon — I was just hoping they wouldn’t crash it. The most prominent freeware I found was Foxit. I downloaded the earlier version, 2.3, because it sounded slimmer and more stable. The first good sign: Foxit weighed in at 6 MB.

When I ran the program, it opened quickly. I opened a PDF article from my flash drive and it came up on the screen with no problems — not once did Foxit assume I was using a screen reader. [PLEASE NOTE: I don't know if Foxit is compatible with screen readers to begin with.] So far, I haven’t experienced any CPU peg-outs, freezes, or crashes. Foxit’s memory usage is 16,284K last I checked. I seem to remember Adobe using a bit more than that, though I can’t be sure.

I could access the menus in Foxit by natural language — both main and sub headings. I could navigate by saying “page up” and “page down” as I did in Adobe.  I didn’t even have to say “page down” if I didn’t want to. Foxit has the ability to “auto scroll” through an article, which you can access by saying “View” then “Auto Scroll,” or by saying the keyboard shortcut, Ctrl-Shift-H. Tell you what, that beats hell out of going hoarse. (this feature was also available in Adobe, but I was too busy trying to get it to work to notice.)

To scroll faster or slower, press the Down and Up arrows respectively. To scroll up, press the minus sign. To stop, press Escape. I neglected to mention this before — was thinking of another program.

Foxit has a “Typewriter tool” that allows you to enter text into PDF files, then print or save the document. Foxit does note that if you save the document, some “evaluation marks” will be present if you use the typewriter tool in the free version, but I wouldn’t think that would be a big deal. I could dictate form information just fine, but be aware that depending on your form, your dictation might appear in the middle of the line instead of above it. You could, however, probably erase the line and just say your text. You can choose from a variety of fonts and font sizes. The default is Helvetica 12pt. To change the font or the font size, you will have to use the Mouse Grid or the mouse motion commands to click the drop-down menus.

The “Commenting tools” allow you to make various highlights, such as straight or squiggly lines in various colors, on the document. You can also put a comment next to an image or something, but be aware that you’ll have to move the mouse cursor over a speech balloon graphic to see what you’ve written. You can also write notes, using the “Note tool” subheading.

There’s probably a lot more to this program, but I don’t have enough PDF files handy to work with it quite yet, though I will shortly — a bunch of bureaucratic/medical forms coming up. But I can’t tell you how much I wish I had found this program earlier, particularly in grad school — almost every reading assignment was a PDF article, and my reading and notetaking would have been a hell of a lot easier. Oh well — if I understand correctly, at least I won’t have to ask anyone to fill out the red tape for me this time!