Friday, March 9, 2012

Is Bigger Better When it Comes to Aiding the Blind?

Am I the only person who gets a little irritated when sighted people say having bigger buttons or magnifying a television screen will help me see things and use them?

I just read an article online where someone, obviously sighted expounded the virtues of larger buttons on a phone, magnifying instruments to aid television and computer screen vision and variable text size on a Kindle reader, all as means to aid the blind or visually impaired.

Fine, I love my own kindle devices, I actually own two of them. Do I use text enlargement on either? No! I use the text to speech features to read a book to me.

I don't watch TV I can see a dim grey blurr of light where the Television is, but no amount of enlargement will help me see a picture there.

My computer too, I use Non Visual Desktop Application (NVDA) screen reader to help me navigate on my computer. I also use Dragon Naturally Speaking to navigate and write posts or papers to my class. The screen is of little use to me anyway.

My phone has speech recognition, I tell it to call a person and it does, well sometimes it does. Read my blog My Stupid Smart Phone!   for my day to day relationship with a really dumb piece of technology.

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