Troll-isms in assistive tech

Here is my pithy little thought for the day, because the logical leap has been perplexing me (I made the mistake of feeding a troll). If people are afraid of looking different and so reject assistive technology on sight for that reason, or if the technology looks like it might actually require some use (e.g. touching it or reading directions) to familiarize oneself with it and is rejected for that reason, that says nothing about the effectiveness of the technology itself. It doesn’t indicate that the technology is defective. It just indicates a particular user’s aesthetic preferences at best, or at worst laziness or prejudice (at least if you’re of the bridge persuasion).

You can’t say, “Oh, this device will never work for anybody and shouldn’t be marketed because I talked to so-and-so and they said they hated it because they used it for 2 minutes and they were slow at it, so anybody else who wants to try this device will always be slow at it too.” Huge, cloying generalization.

Or, “If you use this technology, you’re admitting that you’re one of those HANDICAPPED people.” Well, um, yeah. “Handicapped” isn’t the word I use on myself, but I am unable to use standard computer equipment or do certain other things. So I have my own sort of tech toolbox. End of problem, for home use anyway. Not such a bad thing to be.

(These aren’t verbatim troll-isms, but their substance.)

Microsoft Office 2007 and the perks of assistive technology

I’m using someone else’s computer to learn Office 2007, because I don’t have it myself and public computers aren’t very accessible to me at the moment. However, I need to learn it for the sake of future employment. Friend graciously let me put Dragon on, so as to get the full idea. I don’t know that I’d spend the money for Office myself as I can get by with Jarte Plus and (to a less-reliable and more RAM-intensive extent) OpenOffice, but — dare I say it? — I like this program. Before you start doubting my sanity, let me say this for balance — I only like it because, having no mouse, I don’t have to touch the counter-intuitive, plasticky interface. So maybe that’s not true liking. Gratitude at squeaking by, perhaps?

I’m unsure whether to start with the good tweaks or bad first impressions, so I’ll give you a summary of what I did and elaborate from there.

Step 1: Say “start Command Browser” and choose Microsoft Word 2007 from the list. It’s easier if you uncheck Include Global, because it pares down the list. Study this list.

Step 2: Press F1 (there is no voice command for Help, perhaps in concordance with the tiny help button’s exile to the far right corner of the screen), and enter “hide ribbon.” Pressing Control-F1 hides the ribbon. There is no verbal command for this either, but you can certainly say the keypresses. Once you hide the ribbon, you get a great deal of your screen back. For me, I also regained my concentration, because I can’t take that much visual noise.

Step 3 (optional): Go online and search for a list of TRUE Word keyboard shortcuts (i.e. the ones that use Ctrl and Alt and function keys), then print what you find. The same goes for the other Office programs.

I just favor the traditional keyboard shortcuts, because they’re more compressed and become automatic; I have a quick memory. I would only use the F10 keytips (pressing F10 toggles the ribbon and keys to open various options) if you need to assist a mouse user with finding something in the Ribbon, which I will have to do if employed. But I prefer old-school for myself.

Now for some of the perks of being an assistive technology user:

• If you use Dragon, and study the Command Browser well, everything you do is invisible. You don’t need to know where Microsoft hid the line spacing options, or what have you, so you don’t have to guess at the counterintuitive menus. Thus, you don’t need the ribbon. All you have to do is say the command. As far as dictation, accuracy is the same and speed isn’t noticeably slower (but I suspect Jarte is infinitesimally faster).

• Once you’ve memorized the keyboard shortcuts from whatever list you find, your actions are likewise invisible. And I have to say, things become more convenient in some ways than they used to be. I absolutely love the keyboard shortcut for double spacing, for example — Control-2. I don’t think that was available in previous versions.

I could get used to this, though it’s not worth spending the money if I have a semi-decent alternative in Jarte; I’ve already put the work into Vocola commands.

I don’t digress, exactly

I should pin this as a page, but I’ll tag it too as a regular post. It fits my usual tags equally, if abstractly.

It occurred to me that some of my posts may be seen as digressions, especially those that talk about disability in general rather than a specific assistive hardware or software, or that mix in NVLD. But I don’t see it that way. As I’ve said, I don’t distinguish between the brain and the body — the brain damage that caused the hemiplegia also caused the NVLD. The hemiplegia, in turn, is contributing to the faster breakdown of the good side of my body. The NVLD causes me assorted bluntnesses and hesitations, a love/dependency for printed language, and grief at being less able to type it — leading to an addict-like effort to get it back. Assistive technology supports me in ALL of this — physically, cognitively, and emotionally — whether I’m explicitly talking about it or not. I wouldn’t be writing any of these posts without it. Not only does it influence how I write, but it has altered how I think and, gradually, speak.

I want technology to be a given here, but also the rest of it, because I can’t enjoy that integration elsewhere — mentioning it in conversation makes the other person uncomfortable because he or she assumes I’m deliberately harping on my disability. Never mind I just think a particular innovation is brilliant, or that computers interest me intensely, or that my computer malfunction is as critical and mundane as your car breaking down. It’s a part of my life. It’s not obvious unless you see or overhear me working, but it’s there. I can’t stand passing — it’s fatiguing. The same goes, obviously, for the NVLD. There is no artificial divide between the blogger who reviews assistive technology and Dragon tips, and the blogger who muses or vents on NVLD. “Both” are one and the same.

The right to ask, or “noncompliance”

At the moment, I’m looking at my keyboard and wondering if I should take it with me to my orthopedist appointment next week. I figure, when we get around to discussing the RSI part of my disability, that if I’m going to tell them I’ve been trying to type a little, I should probably show them what I’ve been typing on so they don’t get the wrong idea. This seems like a logical idea to me, particularly because a one-handed ergonomic keyboard doesn’t seem to have made it onto doctors’ radars. Neither, actually, has investigation into the incidence of RSI in one-handed people compared to the vast literature on two-handed people.

However, my confidence in this idea has been usurped by more familiar feelings of nausea and unease. Thanks to my jackass of a former orthopedist, I have to evaluate any of my own actions, questions, or opinions as a potential risk. He made sure of that, because any doctor or SSI official reading my records will see his version of our last visit.

Put simply, he told me there was nothing wrong and I should use my hand as I normally would. That didn’t feel right, because I sure felt something, even on good days. [I found out later that in addition to the RSI and hypermobility, I had ligament sprains.] Sometimes it was pain; others it was the inability to make a fist reliably. I asked him, then, whether the symptoms wouldn’t just come back that much faster. I can’t convey the tone of our exchange, but I know I was stammering and losing eye contact from confusion. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t at least refer me to someone who had the means to be more thorough — I was thinking, “Now what? Do I see a specialist, a neurologist, or what, here?” But I never got a chance to ask him that, because in the space of me lowering my eyes away from him and waiting a second for the words, he spoke in the way that you speak to a bratty child asking “Are we there yet?” One third incredulous, one third amused, and one third exasperated, he said, “[Hand2Mouth], that’s it! I’m done. What more do you want?” When I opened my mouth to ask about the referral, he threw up his hands, shook his head, left the room and closed the door.

Naturally, I requested my records in preparation for finding a 2nd opinion. Tellingly, my x-rays were not included. When I read the doctor’s notes, I found that he’d essentially covered his ass, saying that he’d found nothing out of the ordinary and portraying me as a hypochondriac, accusing me of being uninterested in recovery through physical therapy because I was stubborn. Hey, Doc, there’s a big difference between “normal use” and learning how to use my only hand in such a way that I don’t rupture anything. You said nothing about the latter. He also said he’d never left the room when I was asking a question. Split hairs much — he left the room as I was taking the breath between words to ask the question.

My 2nd opinion went much better, and the assistant dictated his notes in front of me. I don’t know if that was common practice or whether he just thought I was a troublemaker it’d be safer to appease, but I liked it. I also had concrete diagnoses, and was given a couple of tools to help. I’ve gotten better in the year since, though I do still have problems. Even so, the new doctor obviously knows what he’s doing. So I don’t know why I’m still afraid.

It’s true that I’ve often had to figure things out myself. I didn’t have an IEP or get accommodations when I was growing up, and I researched and gradually acquired my assistive technology myself because I wasn’t aware there were programs to help me. I even bought my own splint and glove instead of using what the new doctor gave me — I wasn’t able to fasten the doctor-issued ones myself. But that doesn’t mean I think I can do everything. I’m afraid that any assertiveness on my part is going to be taken as noncompliance, and thus I won’t be taken seriously. I know this fear will pass, but all the same it’s entirely unpleasant while it lasts.

We have that right though — to refuse treatment we don’t think is working, to advocate for ourselves, to choose what we think will work. If you have to ask questions to get it, so be it.

Wake up, Nuance!

This is a repost of something I yanked because I thought I came off sounding too harsh. I wish I’d kept the draft, though, because my annoyance has returned. The difference is that my sense of proportion is better, and while I’m still increasingly exasperated at the way Nuance conducts business in certain areas, I can clarify why exactly this annoys me.

The bottom line is this. I know speech recognition is a lot of work to program, and I know the programmers are busy. Small bugs are inevitable, and we learn to work around them. But when it comes to very basic things, I’m sorry — if you design assistive technology on which people depend for their education or employment, you have a greater responsibility to ensure that the things that should work ACTUALLY WORK. Furthermore, when a customer calls you with tech support questions, you should try to replicate the incident yourself, which — in the situation I’m going to describe — isn’t hard. If you can’t replicate the incident over the phone, you might offer to get back to the caller if that’s feasible. If you don’t try to replicate the incident, you’re going to give the customer a lot of useless information. When you’re talking to the customer, by the way, please let him or her finish a sentence. Even though we use speech recognition, that doesn’t mean we can all speak as quickly to people as we do to our machines.

You know how I’ve been telling you that you need an add-on program to simulate middle clicking, and thus to use auto scrolling in applicable programs so you don’t go hoarse? The reason is not that Dragon didn’t include a native command. “Mouse middle click” is in fact listed in the Command Browser. However, the code which is supposed to activate the command is, from what I’ve gathered, either missing or just broken. It has been broken for at least the past 2 versions. Nobody noticed because nobody asked, and obviously the programmers never tested it. So, a friend of mine offered to post on the support forum — I was away from my computer — and I contacted Nuance. I’ve never called them before, so at least I didn’t have to pay the 20 bucks.

The upshot was that the tech had never tried to use the middle button auto scrolling method himself, so I was trying to explain it to him and couldn’t get a word out. Yes, I said, I know that its function is to scroll. That’s what I’m trying to explain to you. Whereby the tech informs me that Dragon has a “scroll down” command. No kidding, Sherlock — that’s the command people don’t want to keep saying over and over. (I didn’t say that out loud.) So then, the tech tells me that I have to buy a 3 button mouse — which for me would basically be a paperweight since I can’t physically use a mouse — in order to activate the command. That’s bull. The “middle mouse drag” command works for me, and there’s middle click in there somewhere, and I haven’t had a mouse connected to my machine for years. If every click and drag and movement function works mouselessly except for the middle click, logic dictates that the middle click command would work too if it were actually functional. Telling people to waste their money is a no go. If the tech had just tried the command himself, he would understand that there was something up. By this point I was starting to stammer with the effort of trying to get the words out in an order that he would understand, so I thanked him for his time and gave up.

According to the Know Brainer discussion, this little question uncovered flaws that have been around since version 4, and have never been fixed. Add these oversights to the borderline false advertising regarding compatibility with certain programs, and you can see why these little things annoy me. You want to know what else? Nuance recently sent out a survey to its “valued customers”, asking them what could be improved. But the only people that can take the survey are Professional and Legal users — Preferred and Standard users don’t count, apparently. Hopefully enough of the code is similar that their fixes can be applied to the lowly “poor people” as well. NOTE: it’s possible that the site just may be down, but I had no luck in finding a similar survey.  At this point, I’m really rooting for Windows speech recognition to hurry up and get with it, because I’m starting to really dislike the way Nuance treats their customers.

Blogging 101…

I now have an e-mail address posted on my “About My Blog” page, for those who want to contact me about tech or disability related items. hand2mouthtech@gmail.com Now if I could get it in a mailto format…

Brief speech recognition humor

In honor of April Fools’ Day, here is “Rainy Day Robot,” my favorite speech recognition related cartoon, from “US Acres” (the farm cartoon included in “Garfield & Friends”).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOirqETfWqk