Hello Peter,
I was also trained by Jo Lucke, but very informally. I had about three lessons
in all. I was at the Pembridge secretarial college at the time and my room-mate
had an optacon. Her teacher was Jo Lucke and she agreed to teach me. I took to
it like a duck to water and although I hadn’t touched an optacon for six years,
when I started work as a computer programmer, I was supplied with an optacon so
that I could do my job. A teacher came to check my ability with the optacon as
I hadn’t had formal training, and she was very happy with my skills.
I was lucky because I already knew the print alphabet as I had been
fully-sighted to the age of five and a half. In my family, we all learned to
read very early so it all came back to me very quickly.
These days, I’ve lost feeling in my left hand and can’t read comfortably with
the optacon anymore. I can struggle to decipher a few words when all else
fails, so I keep my optacons in working order and hope that maybe one day, my
fingers will recover.
Cheers,
Anne
On 2 Jun 2020, at 23:30, peter wilkins <peterwilkins35@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello Carolyn and all.
I was trained for three weeks in London in 1982. One thing I
remember is that I was mentally exhausted or something after the
training course was completed. For a few days I couldn't
remember phone numbers and things which were always easy to
remember before. However, after a while things came back to me.
One other interesting point is that one of my trainers, Daphne
Band, said that she would never teach an oxygen blinded person to
use the Optacon as they have no spatial awareness or directional
sense, and would never master the Optacon. I don't know how she
missed it, maybe because she did not look at my records as she
was one of two trainers, the other being Jo Lucke, pronounced
lucky. Years later, I was at a conference where Daphne spoke
these comments, and when she finished I stood up and said that I
was a proficient Optacon user, who was oxygen blinded, and who
was taught partly by her.
Keep well.
Peter
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