There are times when I feel like everything is breaking or on the verge of breaking.  This is one of those times.  My computer’s hard drive went bad.  My phone has been acting clunky.

Both my hearing aid and cochlear implant have been acting “off”.  It just goes to show that no matter how great technology is, it can still fail.

The scary part is how much we rely on it.  If it weren’t for my implant, I’d be up the creek since my hearing aid has to be sent off for 3 weeks.  My implant isn’t programmed correctly, so if I for some reason can’t wear it, I’ll really be up the creek without a paddle.

So, I think it is just a reminder, or more like a shove, to get us to realize how much we depend on these gadgets to function.  Now that mobile devices are everywhere and wi-fi is readily available, it is really hard to totally break away from connection.

I cherish my “quiet” mornings before I put on my “ears”.  The bombardment of every day sounds can be overwhelming for a damaged ear.  I wondered why I was so exhausted all the time throughout the first month or two of getting the implant turned on.  It was because my brain was working and still is working extra hard to hear.

The quiet time gives me a chance to relax and gain the energy to hear and communicate on a daily basis.  It is also a great feeling when I do turn them on because technology makes it possible for me to hear.  And, technology will only improve so my ability to hear will only get better.

A similar sentiment goes for cell phones, internet, TV, etc.  Disconnecting can be refreshing, and also makes us appreciate those handy modern conveniences that make our lives so much easier.

So, to sum it up, take a break.  It may seem daunting to do without for even just an hour, but it sure will give our overstimulated brains some much needed rest.

Accessibility didn’t really become a big advocacy issue for me until I get to college.  Until then I got by with an FM system and monocular.  I never liked using any special equipment.  I even cried when they tried to get me a really big computer screen in elementary school.

When I got to UNC Chapel Hill, I was in  for a rude awakening.  My grades suffered until I finally figured out that I had to fight for everything I needed.  They weren’t going to do it for me.

When I first got to Carolina, the disabilities department put me in a dorm room with a louder and brighter fire alarm.  That is useless when I lay with my deaf and blind side up.  After two years of fighting to get a proper fire alarm sensor that vibrates my bed, I finally got one.  It took me not hearing a fire alarm several times to get them to realize that this was needed.

The second thing was notetakers.  I had gotten by with taking my own notes in the past.  I never realized how much I missed in theprocess of trying to follow what was going on with my monocular and through hearing with the FM.

The third issue was audio recordings during exams.  During my freshman year I took a French class.  I missed the entire audio portion of my final.  That was with my FM system right next to the recording.  It dawned on me three years later during my senior year Beethoven class that I could take the audio portion of the exam in the disabilities department with headphones, and in my hearing aid’s t-coil setting.

Once I finally figured everything out that I needed, my grades improved dramatically.  I went from nearly failing out at the end of my freshman year to making the dean’s list my senior year.  I just hate that it took that much trial and error to reach that point.

The disability department at UNC Greensboro, where I went to graduate school is a lot bigger and is a little more proactive.  UNCG has a larger need for their services than Carolina does.  It was a sigh of relief not to have to fight for everything.

So, I took everything I learned at Carolina and immediately got the help I needed from the beginning, and did very well overall in graduate school.

That experinece led to my interest in accessibility issues.  A lot of my projects in graduate school ended up being accessibility related.  This is where I gained my interest in accessible technology.

The biggest thing I’ve learned is that no one fully understands my needs except for me.  So I have to tell them or show them what I need.  Hopefully Global Accessibility Awareness Day will help people understand that everyone’s needs are different.  I also hope that it help people with special needs realize that they can get help if they ask for it.

I’ve been very vocal about my experience with the cochlear implant because I want people to understand that hearing loss can pose challenges that we may not realize.  The cochlear implant has been life changing for me, and I don’t know how I ever went without it.  It isn’t perfect however, and taking a completely deaf ear to one that will be in the normal range is a long process.  That process is fully worth it.

Spread the word!

Check out the Global Accessibility Awareness Day Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/globalaccessibilityawarenessday for more information on events, and for information about various accessibility needs.

If you have Twitter, follow #GAAD and #gbla11yday hashtags.  Please let me know if there are more hashtags that I have missed.

Let’s join together and promote awareness so that we can move towards a world where information can be accessibility to everyone, regardless of needs or background.

My background is library and information science is basically information search and retrieval.  And yes, it involves a lot more than “let me google that for you.”  There was a saying floating around Facebook once about how “Google gives you many results, but Librarians give you the right one,” and that sums it up pretty well.

More recently with Scriptorium, my focus has shifted from searching for information  to creating the containers that hold the information.  That may be a PDF, e-book, a wiki, or any other electronic document.  So I’ve been able to see both sides of the process.  It has been insteresting to find how closely related information science and technical communication are.

Now, with that said, here’s where accessibility comes in.  Technology is moving so fast I can barely keep up.  That often leaves accessibility out of the loop.  That is why I stress so often to put it in the development life cycle FROM THE BEGINNING, and that way accessibility updates will just become a part of overall content updates.

People nudge me to consider taking a job that focuses on accessibility, but I don’t want that to be my sole focus.  I think it should be integrated into any job.  In an ideal world, accessibility would not be a separate entity.  I look forward to learning and exploring the different aspects of the topic both personally and professionally.

CCTV’s are HUGE.  Newer ones are more compact, but they are still not that portable.

There’s a new iPhone/iPad app called See It.  It does pretty much what a regular sized CCTV does, but for $4 instead of $1000+.

I downloaded it and tested it on both my iPhone and iPad.  For a book, the iPad would work better.  But, the iPhone one works fine as well, just on a much smaller screen.  I tried it out when I had to read tiny print on a menu, and it worked great.

There is a slider to zoom n the magnification strength in and out.  For darker settings, you can turn on the light.  The app uses the iPhone’s camera flash bulb.  There is also a button to invert the foreground and background colors.  There are also options to switch the display to gray, blue, green, or red.

This app is new, so there are some kinks to work out.  The gray option wouldn’t work.  I got kicked out of the app completely when I tried to select it.  Other than that, the buttons and the app as a whole can use some refining.  That part will get better as the iPhone display improves.

In an effort to promote awareness of See It, I am passing along some links from Brandon Smith, the developer behind the app:

See It can be found in the Apple App Store with the URL – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/see-it-video-magnifier/id514559829?ls=1&mt=8

For a video demonstration of See It, see our feature on the Daily App Show’s podcast – http://dailyappshow.com/see-it-video-magnifier

You can also read the See It review over on Tapscape (they gave it a 9 / 10) – http://www.tapscape.com/see-it-video-magnifier-iphone-app-review/

Assistive technology is well on its way to going mainstream.  I am amazed at what smartphones and tablets have been able to do to make communication and information access so much easier for people with disabilities.

Interacting with people face to face when you have hearing loss is tough enough.  Adding the phone to the equation just adds to the stress.  The good part is that hearing aids and cochlear implants are getting better and better all the time.  They now come with features that make talking on the phone a lot easier.  However, if you haven’t had an easy time with the phone for years, it is hard to shake that mindset.

I can hear on the phone okay.  My hearing aid doesn’t handle my iPhone very well, but does well with a landline via the t-coil.  There’s some kind of weird interference going on.  It may be that my hearing aid doesn’t have a good way to shield the interferences.  It is four years old, and hearing aid technology has gotten a lot better since then. The cochlear implant does fairly well, but it isn’t perfect yet because I am not hearing all of the pitches.

The increasing role of text based communication has made my phone phobia if you will, a lot worse.  This week I emailed back and forth with my dentist office to make an appointment, set up a transportation request via email, and sent a message to my bank online.  All of these are traditionally done via phone.

It is a catch-22 of sorts.  Before text and email became the norm, I had to call people.  I still didn’t like it, but there was no other option.  Now I’m going to have to make an even bigger effort to use the phone when it is necessary.

I am very grateful to live in a world where the options of text or audio are so readily available.  I hope to see more and more “call” or “email” options pop up.  Text options knock down the communication barrier for the deaf and hard of hearing, and allow them to respond quicker and more efficiently.

I think the toughest phone conversations I’ve had in the past few years have been job interviews.  You have multiple people who might be on speaker phone and in a noisy background.  I think I remember someone was conducting the interview while in the car with their kids!

Offering an instant messenger option would solve this issue.  They give the interviewee the chance to formulate an answer and check their spelling.  It also provides an automatic transcript to refer back to later.

So, in short, making text based communication available whenever possible is the way to go.  It puts everything in writing, prevents a lot of frustration, and is fast and easy.

The irony here is that I am legally blind, yet I rely so heavily on visual and text elements.  My hearing is definitely my bigger disability in terms of how it directly impacts my daily life interactions.

I am currently working on getting my cochlear implant to hear music better.  The best process of doing this is to play a familiar song over and over.  It sounds pretty warbly because the higher pitches aren’t there yet.  It is funny.  I do really well with speech recognition, but the instrumentals sound…bleh.  They’ll come with my next adjustment I hope.  I still don’t have the higher pitches yet, but they’ll be added in gradually.  Music is the only advantage left that the hearing aid has over the implant.  I’m thinking in six months or so, that will no longer be the case.

This blog has become the unofficial journal of my cochlear implant experience, along with my Facebook status updates.  It has been cool showing people what it can do, and what a miracle it truly is.

However, I want to put my focus back on what this blog is really meant for, and that is all types of assistive technology.  So, I hope to get back to doing that here soon.

Been really busy lately, and the few times I don’t have to spend on the computer, I go bury my face in a book…er Kindle.

Google is jumping on the bandwagon with a self driving Prius.  Find out more about the test drive here: http://mashable.com/2012/03/29/blind-man-drives-google-car/

The steering wheel turns automatically, while radar and lasers stop at redlights and prevent collision.

With this news, the idea that I will drive a car not only in my lifetime, but maybe even in the next 15-20 years or so is closer to reality.  The issue that would take the most time would be making the car affordable.  The concept is already in place.  It just needs to be ironed out. And a Prius too!  I’ve always said that if I could drive, my car of choice would be a Prius because of its excellent gas mileage and storage space.

This idea sounds amazing, but I am also thinking that public transportation in the form of a light rail or even a automated single rail car will become more common.  So, some of the focus will shift from individual cars to mass transit.  Spikes in gas prices always gets people thinking more about public transit.

I will be very eager to see what transportation looks like in 10, 20, 50 years.  I hope that one day I’ll be more choices on where I go and live.

Since I got my iPad, I’ve really enjoyed being able to hold it close to me while zooming in and out quickly. As I’ve said many times, I wish the iPad had just a couple more things that would make it powerful enough to replace my computer.

I really like what Apple has done in the past 5 years or so with accessibility.  Assistive technology has been integrated into the iPhone and iPad, making it much much much more affordable than ever before.

So, I’m wrestling with myself because the Mac is looking more and more like the one I need to get, but do I really need an iPhone, iPad AND a Mac?  I’m heading over to the Apple Store on Saturday to test one out.  The MacBook Air sounds really cool.  I’d be in heaven if I could get a small, yet powerful laptop that zooms quickly in and out without my having to hunch over to see what I’m doing.

Mac’s come with iZoom already built in.  I’ve seen it in use before, but have never really gotten to sit down and play with it.  Seems like it is better than ZoomText, the Windows paid equivalent.

So, MacBook Air?  We’ll see.  Still open to alternatives at this point

Enough with vision, now let’s talk about hearing.  Today marks 3 months since my cochlear implant activation.  I just realized that while writing this post.  Time flies!  My 3 month mapping appointment is a week from today.  I look forward to officially being able to say that my deaf ear is now my better ear.

I also look forward to smoothing out the pitches so that things won’t sound so wonky.

Switching gears again.  Funny story.

So, the disability van service around here has been known to be unreliable.  If you know me, you’ve heard plenty of stories backing up this conclusion.  Understatement of the year.  Anyway, whenever I call them to cancel my pick ups, despite repeating the cancellation at least three times, they still manage to screw it up.  Usually it doesn’t get canceled at all.  This time they showed up on a completely different day and time that I have never even mentioned at all.  My coworkers and I got a laugh out of it though.  Better for them to mess up the cancellations than the actual pick ups though right?

I recently started a new job that involves getting on the bus, riding for ten minutes, then getting off.  That new reality is almost BORING in comparison.  But, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Which OS is the best for someone with low vision in terms of zooming?  I generally have trouble with laptops because I can’t position the screen to a point where I can zoom to where I need to be very efficiently. My iPad solves this problem, but it just doesn’t have the computing power that a PC does.

Bigger screens aren’t always better.  I have one eye, so traveling from one end of the screen to the other can be annoying.  I need portability, which is why I’m going with a laptop instead of a desktop, which I currently have.

Suggestions welcome.  Other options in addition to these brands will be taken into consideration.