[optacon-l] Re: An Interesting Message,
- From: "Lori Castner" <loralee.castner@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <optacon-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2009 15:26:59 -0800
Your uses of the optacon are just awesome! Your story alone should inspire
someone to manufacture a new optacon right now!
Congratulations for your endeavors.
Lori Castner
----- Original Message -----
From: "Lee Smith" <leesmith108@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <optacon-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, January 17, 2009 4:24 AM
Subject: [optacon-l] Re: An Interesting Message,
>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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>>
>
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>
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>
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