Effective Tuesday June 26th I will no longer be able to keep up with things around here for aprox 4-6 months.

I am going in for a cornea transplant and will be without vision for some time. Those of you that know me know that this has been a serious ongoing medical issue for me. The Kerataconus has created problems ever since HS but was not diagnosed until 2000. At that point glasses (which up until that point were coke bottles) were no longer an option. At that point I was fitted with a prosthetic contact lense for my left eye at Casey Eye Institute in Portland. The problem is compounded by permanent damage done to both optic nerves from Pseudo-Tumor Cerebri leaving me blind in the right eye. I have never driven and at this point don't know if that will change after full recovery next year or not.

Thanks and wish me luck

Shilo

PS if you need to get ahold of me or wish to get me a message feel free to get back to me by Monday and I will send you some contact info.

Best Wishes and hopes to see you on the freeway driving next year!

Best of luck...

God bless you, Shyguy.

Herb

Hang in there, Shyguy. We'll be pulling for you.

Andrew

I schleped my dear Mom to many appointments at the Casey Eye Institute for treatment of her macular degeneration. I was always impressed by their professionalism, high degree of care and downright level of person-to-person hospitality.

You're in good hands, Geoff... and we'll see you back on the board in no time at all!

No Mikekolb I am indeed not Geoff Charles. Mr Charles is the long time afternoon DJ at Providence RI CC's WHJY one of the best on air personalities I have ever heard on one of the finest rock stations I have ever listened to.

Devers Eye Clinic at Emmanuel Legacy under the care of surgeon Dr Neda Shamie is doing the procedure.

I decided this evening that I am going to keep my broadband connection with Comcast but dump cable for the time being. My brother is my next door neighbor and while not that literate can keep me abreast of news and shit on the internet. I think I am going to invest in an Ipod so that I can listen to some podcasts and audiobooks which I can get from the Oregon Blind Commision I believe for free.

One Surgery down with Gastric Bypass possibly the next step for this fattie!

I am lucky to be able to listen to some (at least what I consider to be) good radio programming around here. Like: Lars, Emerson, Playhouse, Cort n Fatboy, Marconi, Coast to Coast, Drudge, Loveline, Dennis Miller and for music 947.fm/NRQ/Kufo/Kink.

I am an Internet news junkie, and television junkie (especially CNN) as well as a wrestling fanatic so all that shit is going to be hard to give up but its for the greater good of my body so I have to buck up and stop being such a whining bitch about it all and be a little bit more grateful.

Thanks for the good words people. Although we have never met I consider some of you guys my friends if only in the interweb universe!

Good Luck Shyguy! I can't imagine going through that kind of thing with all the research I do. Eye sight is so important. We'll miss your posts.

I'm thinking positive. Hope it goes well.

Good luck.

Here's lookin' at you, Shilo. Take good care of those orbs.

Shyguy, while you can still see for sure, consider the following:

Get some voice recognition software, and enable the text reading software in your OS. A good friend of mine, ended up without the use of his arms for an extended period of time. He didn't need the text reading part, but made heavy use of the speech to text software. Ended up finishing the development on a complex website with it, so I know it's capable. That was years ago, it's gotta be solid now.

It's highly likely you can use the computer on a decent basis, if you get a chance to compare what is seen now, with what is heard. Might not be so good for posting, etc... but I'll bet navigating to known places for news and such will be possible. Set it all up, and nav with the software running.

Maybe have somebody help out. Then, once you are in a place where it works, you can do your own thing. Might be some independance there you will appreciate.

Bookmark a bunch of sites, so giving instructions to others is easier. Some time spent finding simple sites, like this one, will yield better speech reading results.

Many of the talk programs are being archived on a daily basis. Download your favorites onto the iPod and enjoy those the day following the broadcast, or when nobody is around to help.

If you are in trouble, get e-mails to us. I can't speak for the others, but if it would really matter, I'll do what I can to help.

Shyguy, we are all pulling for you. Good luck and God bless, and we'll see you back here dealing with our bickering and ranting in no time flat!

Missing could you post a link to a company or website that provides this type of product which seems like it may be a possibility for me. Is any of it shareware?

Absolutely. I took some time to scope out the scene. The few links below should get you somewhere that works. At the least, I filtered a lot of "coming soon" crap!

It seems this kind of software sees frequent development changes... figures. IBM has something pretty decent coming, but won't be for a little while yet.

http://www.webbie.org.uk/

(free and interesting looking text to speech browser. This one is current, and appears to be easily installed.)

http://www.hdse.org/webnarrator/ (free trial on this one. )

One technique being used is caching things in text files, then using more common text to speech to read them. So, somebody could cache a fair amount of news for you, in a simple notepad or wordpad file. From there, you apply a reader to it and enjoy as you see fit. This gets rid of the navigation issues and allows people to help out where ever and when ever they are.

Send batches of text to an e-mail account, then have somebody open them, or you open them depending on how good this stuff works for you, and then you can do your thing, and they can do theirs without having to be so interactive. (Paste multiple text batches into one fairly large file for an extended session.)

Here are a few more:

http://atestore.enablemart.com/productDetail.aspx?pid=483&dept=24&store=10

http://rjcooper.com/keyread/

I like this one because it just uses the arrow keys, allowing one to navigate pretty much anything, listening on the way. Something like this might prove useful, because you have been seeing enough to visualize what you hear.

http://www.enablemart.com/productdetail.aspx?store=10&pid=379&dept=12

This one is not cheap, but is currently a front runner with commercial support. I'll bet you can get a trial.

Best of luck Shyguy!

Missing I downloaded WebbIE. Have no idea yet how the text to voice feature works yet. I gives me a huge text size that enables me to magnify but for the first couple of months post op that will not help me be independent on the computer. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I only briefly played with it last night so I figure I have until Tuesday afternoon to figure it all out.

Again thanks everyone for the support as I am not getting alot of support from people I thought were friends. They all know that this has been coming and what kind of ordeal I currently deal with. I guess they don't understand what I have to give up and for how long till I see improvement of my current situation.

What windows are you running?

I believe its XP home edition. Does that make sense?

Ok then. There are speech capabilities built in. I've got a spare box to try this on. Will do this evening, with WebbIE.

Hey there Shyguy- You take care, ignore the non-friends, and have faith that things will all work out well. That is stronger than most any force. Good luck.

Hey Shilo,

Good luck to you and I'll be thinking good thoughts and sending you good vibes and blessings! You are one of my favorite posters here, and we'll miss you lots!

Hopefully you'll be back very soon with good things to report! You're in good hands, I'm sure! And if you can't drive to our next get-together, I'll come pick you up!

I'm sending you an email right now, so if you need anyone to keep you up to date here, and read to you in a real voice, I'll read the posts to you over the phone every day. Wouldn't THAT be fun!

I know you haven't mentioned this, but I'd just like to remind everyone here of the importance of Eye, Organ and Tissue donation! If I'm in the situation where I won't be using my parts anymore, I'd sure like to give 'em to someone who can! It only takes a few minutes to sign up for it on the new website for Oregon and Washington.

See you soon, buddy!

Love,

MM

http://www.donatelifenw.org/

The browser depends on you having a screen reader, or using the built in windows one.

(the windows one isn't all that good)

There is a free screen reader here (linked by the WebbIE people.)

I'm loading that thing now.

Here it is: http://www.screenreader.net/

It works very well actually.

Ok,

You really should download and run thunder. Running it for a short time, while being able to see, is gonna make learning quick!

The Thunder program will actually interact with your computer in a pretty solid way. After loading it, and making sure it is running, I managed to do the following with the monitor off!

(Hit window key)

(arrow up, listening to each selection, run, help, search, settings, etc...)

(arrow down through menus, until I found webbie)

(press enter to launch)

[webbie fills screen, reads some stuff]

(hit tab key to highlight address field)

(type http://www.pdxradio.com)

[hear it read the pdxradio home page]

Webbie distills the site down to text, enumerates links and allows you to use arrow keys to nav the links, presented by number.

I would put thunder in your startup group, so it's just on. That way, when you log on, or just go to use the computer already logged on, you can just hit the window key (put a drop of something on it), then use arrow up, down to move through major menus, right and left to move deeper per menu, enter to launch something.

Technically, you don't need the mouse.

Use the tab key to go from active field to field, listening to the prompts Thunder will echo for you.

Oh, I made a coupla settings for thunder, under it's setting button:

I turned novice mode on, turned on echo characters and words. This will actually read you what you type!! I could post with this and am gonna try after I get this one done. I turned on the use music option too. This makes tones that help to remember where one is.

Essentially, you make sure thunder is running and that you can hear it. Launch the browser, or just put it in the startup group, like thunder.

Alt+Tab to change applications, should you get lost or run more than one.

Arrows to nav the windows menus, activated from the windows key.

Tab and shift+tab to move from application active field to another one.

Enter text and such in the usual way.

The alt keys can trigger actions in many applications. Might not be a bad idea to learn the browser ones for Webbie.

Tried this with Firefox and didn't have that good of an experience. Webbie is really solid in how it sets things up for a reader. I recommend using it.



There is no need to use a mouse with windows period.

This is a sample postingg

That was not easy!

But it can be done. I think getting a feel for how things go is important.

I could see consuming news with this combination, reading / writing e-mail, etc...

If you get these two running, I recommend doing the following:

-restart windows so thunder comes up when you log in. Delete your password or just get to know it, or change it to something dead simple.

(assuming log in works)

-Put your mouse down, hit the windows key and nav to the browser. Watch the screen and listen to get an idea of what means what. It's not too tough, but is tedious.

(man, we could use more improvement on this. If I were blind, I would use a command line computer for sure. This alone is a strong case for continuing development on command line stuff.)

-Hit enter to run the webbie browser and listen for the "new window [title] audio" When it completes, you are running the browser.

Hit tab and type a web address. This site is not a bad first pass. Explore it listening and using the arrow, tab, enter, page up and down keys.

Once you've worked your way around, try some addresses to get some idea of what things sound like, then turn off the screen.

Do not use the mouse again, until you can see the pointer, during recovery. Don't look at the keyboard, apply stuff to problem keys for location.

I found this possible. You will too.

Yay!

Thank you so much Missing.

You are welcome.

I said I was gonna limit posting. Well, I'm gonna but this was worth while. Nothing sucks more than being scared. After thinking about it, some empowerment is better than no empowerment, so this matters.

And I would be scared too --flat out terrified, plain and simple. Make damn sure you feel no shame in that. There is zero reason for this and it will sap the strength you are gonna need to deal and recover.

I would totally take Mrs M. up on the phone call too. We've met, she's the real deal, and is likely to just crack you up!

(might come in handy!)