[optacon-l] Re: An Interesting Message,
- From: "Lee Smith" <leesmith108@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <optacon-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2009 23:24:35 +1100
I was trained on my own during the school holidays by two staff at Royal
Blind Society, 8ish hours a day for 9 days. Luckily at that time I had
enough sight to read large print so did not need to learn print shapes. I
took to it like a duck to water, and when I took it home I commenced reading
the one and only paperback novel I've ever read with it, an old Robert
Heinlein sci-fi. Reading that for an hour a day really built up my speed, so
that I was able to read allowed to someone else at a pace which, although
slowish, was not unpleasantly so.
My first real use of the optacon for study came when doing an electronics
module as part of my senior highschool physics. I was easily able to trace
along the lines which represented wires in a circuit diagram, and identify
the symbols which are used to represent the various electronic components.
In this way I could construct my circuits independently, which was good as I
was studying at a mainstream school.
Later, at uni, I found another great use for it. I was studying relatively
advanced statistics and therefore had to look up a variety of statistical
tables. This was in the early 80s, before PCs, and although at times I could
do statistical calculations using the uni's mainframe with hard-copy
printer, I did not always have access to a terminal, and certainly not
during exams. It would have been a great waste, not to mention very bulky
and ridiculously time-consuming and expensive for Royal Blind Society to
have transcribed all the tables into braille, so I just made my own braille
table of contents to stick in the front of my print book, listing only those
tables I needed to make finding them faster, and then had no trouble
following down the columns and across the rows to look them up. During exams
this did mean that I would often sit on the floor as there was not enough
room on the desk with my Perkins and braille exam paper, but I always had my
own room so this was no problem.
Stats assignments had to be done on the mainframe, which of course had no
large print or speech output. I would type in my lines ever so carefully,
but I was really glad to have that optacon beside me as after each response
from the hard-copy printer I would read what it had spat out, and thereby
determine if I was on the right track. I think I had to roll the paper out a
couple of notches, as I would do when looking to see if I'd made a typo in
any other assignment in order to go back and white or X it out, and would
use the retina of the camera in the inverted position so I could hold it
upside-down and thereby as close to the printer head as possible.
Between highschool and uni I had spent a year in Japan as a Lions exchange
student. My school had taught Japanese, but I had taken French instead, so
needed to learn Japanese from scratch once I reached there. Now there are a
number of highschool texts in braille teaching Japanese to English-speakers,
but not in Sydney in 1980. It would not only have been time-consuming and
bulky to have one transcribed, but in addition, although such texts start
off by teaching Japanese using the Roman alaphabet, they quickly start
introducing the two 46-character Japanese phonetic alphabets, the hirogana
and Katokana, and then some simple Chinese characters or Kanji, and again at
that time, unlike now, there was noone in ustralia who knew both these and
braille and who could have transcribed them. And anyway, I wanted to learn
the shapes of these new alphabets, plus as many Chinese characters as I
could. Luckily I could see a bit so began by learning them in dark pen or in
Japanese brush-writing caligraphy class, but I was then quickly able to read
them in my textbooks.
When I left Japan everyone wrote to me in Japanese, mainly in the phonetic
alphabet, but with a number of common Chinese characters as well. There was
noone I knew who would have been able to read out my mail, unlike a language
written in the Roman alphabet in which case you could at least get a sighted
person to spell out each word. Luckily Japanese people are taught to write
very precisely, so I found I had no trouble reading their pen-written
letters.
For the first 5 years of the 90s I lived and did volunteer work in a yoga
and meditation ashram in India. Again I used the optacon in a similar way to
learn Hindi, as well as to read English translations of Hindu and Buddhist
scriptures which always came back with their technical Sanskrit terms badly
mispronounced whenever I tried getting someone to read them on to tape.
Well I've raved on much more than I intended, but the only other thing I
wanted to say is that most people I know with optacons in Australia seem to
have gotten them through their work. There is a Government fund which pays
for equipment needed when a person with a disability goes to a job so that
the employer is not out of pocket. So here there was not so much debate
about agencies needing to purchase them for people, but I think there was
some suggestion that the training required was too staff-intensive.
Also, when many people I know got their optacons most blind primary school
children were still being educated in special schools. This was the middle
70s. Shortly after that kids began being integrated into mainstream schools,
and it was enough for their itinnerant teachers to keep up their braille and
cane skills and a lot of things fell by the wayside, including the teaching
of optacon, as well as such things as complex independent travel such as
that required around underground stations and busy city centres. It seems to
me that most kids now either get driven to school or can catch the necessary
public transport to get from home to school, but have never been given the
experience necessary to develop the confidence needed to expand this to go
whereever they like, and I therefore know many young people who, unlike
their sighted peers, never go into the city centre or to a new railway
station alone.
Anyway, getting off topic now, so better go to bed as almost midnight down
here!
Lee
----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Procter" <brian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Optacon List" <optacon-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, January 17, 2009 6:04 AM
Subject: [optacon-l] An Interesting Message,
> Good Morning,
>
> I was interested in Catherine's question about how an Optacon user in the
> United Kingdom could get the idea that the Optacon was nothing but a
> memory.
> The message did not surprise me. I do not know Mr. Payne personally, but
> his name has been mentioned by British pen friends I have been in contact
> with over the years. I know of the list because of my interest in reading
> American Braille magazines. I read a letter from Catherine a few years
> ago
> which appeared in an American magazine for deaf-blind people called Good
> Cheer.
>
> Communication does not seem to be a strong point amongst the British, or
> so
> I have thought for several decades. I exchanged letters with Dr. James
> Bliss in the mid 1970's because we thought that the Optacon was not
> receiving the publicity it deserved. I now believe that the major
> charities
> serving blind Britons were apprehensive about the Optacon if demand for it
> became too great. Helping clients to purchase Optacons would have
> required
> much of their financial resources, added to that would have been the cost
> of
> employing instructors and maintenance engineers. Charities like to spend
> their money in a way which benefits their clients collectively, not
> individually. I presume this is why Mr. Payne created the charity,
> Electronic Aids for The Blind. I expect most Optacon users in Britain,
> like
> myself, bought their Optacons despite the negative attitude of the blind
> establishment. I taught myself to use the Optacon - I had been a good
> print
> reader before I went blind in 1957 - and the training sounded so slow and
> difficult that I considered it would be a waste of money, especially as it
> would have involved staying in London for some time.
>
> Is this an original use for an Optacon? My bank recently sent me a new
> cheque book. At the front of the book are pages for noting cheques made
> out
> so I had to find the last of these pages and fold it over to separate that
> section from the cheques. At the back of the book are paying-in slips so
> I
> had to find the first of these , fold it over to separate them from the
> cheques. About five cheques from the end is a coupon for obtaining a new
> cheque book if one is not received automatically. I have to remove the
> coupon or I would put it into my typewriter like any other cheque. I did
> not buy a typewriter attachment for my Optacon although I remember being
> sent an advertisement for it attached to a Smith Corona electric portable
> typewriter. I have never used an electric typewriter. I have devised my
> own method of typing cheques based on the principle that if you do the
> same
> thing the same way, 99.9 per cent of the time you will get the same
> result.
>
> Best wishes for the new year and if anyone would like to discuss anything
> I
> have said in this message, my e-mail address it:-
>
> Brian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> Yours sincerely,
>
> Brian Procter.
>
>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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