Question of the day.

   How are you really? 

   My answer: 

   Pretty neutral I’d say. Okay overall. Didn’t get much good sleep as for some odd reason I had really annoying  tinnitus that wouldn’t go away pretty much until morning and it kept waking me up and was really frustrating. This is definitely not something that would be a regular thing for me so I got a bit worried and wondered whether it’s going to stay like this for longer-term, but it’s fully gone now so seems like it must have been just quite random. And I was really cold all night on top of that and couldn’t warm myself even with the hot water bottle, so I’m sure you know what it’s like to sleep when you’re cold meanwhile. But despite little sleep I don’t really feel sleepy or anything so I don’t really have a problem with it. 

   Also I’m still feeling a little bit excited about what my Mum and I did recently. I think I have mentioned to you that my Mum was thinking about possibly buying herself an Apple Watch, because now that she has an iPhone she often gets a bit nervous when she goes running or cycling and when someone calls or texts her, ‘cause she has to take the phone out and she’s worried that one day she’ll drop it and it’ll break, and I guess it must be just a little cumbersome replying to someone while cycling. Plus, she couldn’t find a good enough app for herself on iPhone for tracking kilometres that wouldn’t at the same time ooze with gentle toxicity and try to get her into the rivalling mode, yelling at her to share her «achievements» with friends or to break her records or whatever shit like that, when she just wants to do what she wants and when she wants and simply record the details of her sport activities for herself, she doesn’t do training for the sake of training or losing weight or stuff like that, just ‘cause she likes it. Initially I tried to discourage her from that because I didn’t think that Apple Watch would be much better in that department, it seemed to me, and still does in a way, that perhaps it’s even pushier with that sort of mentality, but Mum said that if it did all the other things well, she can ignore all the bs she doesn’t need like calories. And the more she thought about it the more she liked the idea, saying how Apple Watches look nice and things like that. It took her some time to make up her mind whether it would actually be as useful for her as she thinks, because she’s known for making impulsive decisions on the spur of a moment, and how hers should look, so she would look on Apple Store quite frequently and try to design it for herself so that it would fit her style and be a little different. She changed her mind a lot in the process, sometimes saying she actually doesn’t need it and while it could be fun, it’s not really necessary so why waste the money, and then she would say that actually why not buy something unnecessary for oneself once in a while as she doesn’t do that very often, since she’s on benefits and spends most of her money on Sofi and the only Apple Watch she was considering was the new SE 2 as she couldn’t afford anything more than that anyway. And finally last Saturday she made up her mind and stormed into my room saying that she needs to be delivered from constant thinking about it and make the decision once and for all before her mind changes again. 😀 Problem was that she didn’t have enough money on her card at that very moment so asked me if I could buy her the watch and then she’d give me the money back when she got them. So I gave her my phone so that she could choose the right looking Apple Watch, and as she was choosing everything, suddenly a wild thought popped into my mind, and I was all like: «Y’know what? Let’s make a deal! I’ll buy an Apple Watch for you and you’ll buy an Apple Watch for me, when you get the money». That wasn’t really as impulsive an idea as it may seem, I was already thinking a bit about whether Apple Watch might be useful at all for me in any way when Mum was dealing with her dilemma. Last month, I happened to have learned something about myself, or rather about something being a possibility, which I won’t be sharing just yet on here because I don’t have all the info yet ‘cause I’m still in the process of finding out and so I don’t want to prematurely raise any unnecessary emotions or tension or something, but I promise that if I’ll find out that it’s something more than just a possibility, I’ll update y’all on it. But anyway, finding that out made me think that, actually, perhaps an Apple Watch would be useful for me as well indeed. Maybe not as much as for my Mum, and not in the same way because I’m a semi-hermit so my phone generally doesn’t need to worry about being dropped somewhere outside and even when I go somewhere I very rarely take it with me, but it could still be useful if the possibility turns out to be reality, and even if not, I wanted to give it a try regardless. 

   And my Mum was happy with the deal. In fact, she was probably even happier than me. She’s a real chicken with technology so I think it made her feel better that I’ll have an Apple Watch too so I’ll be able to help her out make sense of it because she assumed that I would learn it faster. I think the thing isn’t about fast learning but about me being more inclined to actually sit and read about it, rather than blindly and chaotically try to do something without knowing anything about how to go about it which is how my Mum handles her devices and then it’s all like: «Hmmm, let’s guess what’s broken in the process”. In this situation, Mum really wanted our Apple Watches to arrive together, which was enough of a motivator that she decided on the spot to go transfer the change that she had to her card and then placed the order for my Apple Watch. Aren’t we just crazy people in this house? We got the same ones except my Mum’s is obviously larger, since I have mini hands, and hers is starlight with a red silicone band, whereas mine is silver with a slate blue braided loop band. 

   Our Apple Watches arrived together indeed on Tuesday. When my Mum went to get them from the delivery guy, she later told me that he said (as if Mum didn’t realise) that one package is addressed to «Some Bib-Bi-Bibiel Bibielz) and couldn’t restrain himself from saying that it sounds like an interesting name. Well thanks, it made my day. Yeah, I am a bit ironical, in case you’re wondering. But also I like when people say the word Bibiel out loud so for once I regret that I wasn’t there to hear it. I use Bibiel Bibielz as my Apple ID name ‘cause you obviously use Apple ID in all kinds of situations and I don’t always want some random peeps to know my full name, and don’t bother changing it just because I order something. Perhaps it’s further evidence of craziness. 😀 

   Anyway, we’re pretty happy with our Apple Watches, except I’m super mad at myself because I told my Mum to get herself an Apple Watch with cellular since it made sense if she’s going to use it when running, but I didn’t even think about checking previously whether our carrier even supports it. It seemed like an obvious thing to me that, since Apple Watches have been around for quite a while, duh they must be supported by carriers, right? Except ours does not support Apple Watch. So yeah, that was a fun discovery to make at the beginning for sure. My Mum claims it doesn’t matter ‘cause she has her phone with herself all the time anyway but I think it still sucks big time. But overall our Apple Watches are cool. I still find it kind of amusing that we both have Apple Watches, I never thought that either of us could be that kind of person lol. My Mum even sleeps with hers, but to me it still feels kind of off and I’m skeptical whether it’s actually comfortable. But I think I’ll try to do that at least once in a while ‘cause I’m curious about the sleep phases stuff. I wish it was possible to use apps like Voice Dream Reader or Audible without headphones on it, then perhaps Apple Watch could become a viable alternative for my PlexTalk at night and then it would be a very solid argument for me to get used to sleeping with it. I still hope that Apple will make my dream come true in the future. 

   How about your real feelings? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   What website did you use daily that doesn’t exist anymore? 

   My answer: 

   One example that came to my brain immediately is a very peculiar Polish website whose name literally translates to Great Calendar of Names (great as in large, not in a boasting sense lol). You know I’ve been a name nerd for years, and I’m into almost everything that has to do with names – their etymology,  popularity over time, social connotations associated with a specific name, trends, but even to some degree stuff that is seemingly as loosely associated with names as hagiography (writing about the lives of saints) as obviously saints have had a huge impact on how people in the Christian civilisation have named their offspring. So that calendar had name days for every single day (we do name days in Poland as several other European countries do, this is like a feast day associated with a specific name(s), often based on the commemoration day of the patron saint of that name if there is one, so when you have your name day you can celebrate it kind of like a birthday, although in some parts of the country they’re not quite as important or not celebrated at all, while in others a name day is a lot more celebrated than a birthday) ) but it wasn’t like your regular calendar that just shows you what day it is and two names per each day, it had loads and loads and loads of names for each day, pulled out of all sorts of different calendars, physical and online, from different points in history, as well as all kinds of name lists, name books, liturgical calendars, martyrologies and whatever else is out there, so basically it had data from all these places and books put in one place. And then when you clicked on a specific day, it would also show you what saints are venerated on that day and who they were, and that was very detailed as well, as it wasn’t just the most well-known saints, but also those that are pretty much only venerated somewhere locally or that it’s not even sure whether they actually existed but nonetheless their legendary existence had some impact on somewhere in the world, it also had people who weren’t even beatified but only declared venerable/servants of God, and aside from Catholic ones there were also Eastern Orthodox ones. The descriptions of their lives could sometimes also get quite lengthy if there was a lot that was known and could be written about that person, and if many sources mentioned them. I believe the sources themselves weren’t necessarily always very credible or trustworthy, but they weren’t listed anywhere, and I don’t think credibility or trustworthiness was the priority here, the author of that calendar seemed to just want to compile as complete a list of names as only possible and indeed I haven’t seen a more comprehensive Polish name resource when it comes to quantity either before or since that. The multiplicity of sources and their very diverse quality also contributed to a bit of a chaotic feel that it had, as it had different writing styles in different places and just simply looked like one huge bulky thing that combines a lot of bits and bobs from everywhere. Also separate from the calendar, there were alphabetical lists of names that were included in the calendar which had the origin of every name and if it’s been used in Poland lately at all, and with the more common names exactly how common they are. 

   The website itself apparently looked quite peculiar, because the man who made it was in his late 70’s from what I recall, he also had some other non-onomastic stuff on that website that I wasn’t into and I believe wrote some kind of a blog or articles or stuff like that on there as well, but I guess he wasn’t overly tech savvy because I once came across a discussion online where people were laughing at how dated that website looks but how at the same time it’s still so cool that he did such a thing, as people assumed, totally independently. As far as I and my screen reader were concerned, I saw nothing wrong with the thing, it was perfectly accessible, very easy to navigate and that was all I cared about. 

   I liked to look at that website daily to see all those huge lists of name days for each day and read the lives of the saints venerated on that day, and even though I thought I knew about a lot of very uncommon names and their origins, I still often found ones that were completely new to me. Like, it’s from that website that I learned that there is such a name as Tatul, which totally cracked me up because Tatul is how I call my Dad, and it seemed about just as absurd to be called Tatul as it would  be for an English speaker if they learned that someone’s legal name is Daddy. Except I don’t think Tatul is used as a name in Poland these days, or had been used ever at all, because it’s an Armenian name. It was just mentioned in that calendar because there’s apparently one saint Tatul of Armenia. I’m not sure that info is even correct or reliable because I could never find anything about him   anywhere else other than that website, but from what I can recall, it said that he was some sort of Armenian hermit who lived with two other men in one hermitage, one of them I believe was called Thomas, and the only thing they ate were some kind of leaves, , and they’re still much venerated in their home country and their feast day is 30 September. The author, or whatever other source he got that from, was guessing that perhaps it actually does come from the word dad in some language and claimed it to be a variant of the Latin name Papulus, but years later I read on Behind the Name that « Tatul » is a word in Armenian that means « paw » and I’m way more inclined to trust BTN here, even though « paw » seems like a weird name meaning to me. . Even when I went through the whole calendar in a year, later on I would still often consult it when looking up some names or was in search for a really odd and clunky rarity for a story or something, I really liked that website. 

   Sadly, some years later, the host of this website decided to shut down and thus so did the calendar, and I suppose the author didn’t have either the knowledge or energy or will to move it somewhere else. Now I feel a bit regretful that I haven’t archived it somehow for my personal use, but I guess back then I didn’t even know how I could have done that efficiently, and anyway I don’t really think I’d need it as much these days, it’s just a bit of a bummer that it’s completely gone. 

   Another thing that comes to mind, not so much a website but an app, although it still did have its own website which you could use to access some of the app features and it is no longer a thing either, was Klango, a sort of network community for blind people. The project was Polish but the community as such was very much international. It started out as an app containing several audio games, and then gradually morphed into something that I guess could be compared to what we currently know as social media, plus some more gimmicks. It was self-voiced and had a lot of sounds that informed you where in the app you are or on different things that were happening in it or what you were doing and people could create their own sound themes. You could exchange messages with people, write your own blog, which was really easy to do, as well as read the blogs of other users (people from outside the Klango world could see your blog too but it was unlikely to just pop up in Google so you had to give people the URL if you wanted to have any external visitors and I guess it wasn’t overly appealing graphically, it had all kinds of forums, including voice forums, groups in which you could talk about various topics of interests, you could create and take part in polls, add people to friends, change your status, have an audio avatar, create notes and collaborate on them with people, you could have a board like on Facebook etc. On the other hand, it also had a built-in media player, with a huge catalogue of radio stations, podcasts, a YouTube browser, Google, and if you really wanted you could browse the Internet with it, which had its upsides as the built-in web browser was super simple and accessible, but also stripped websites down to the bare minimum so a lot of features on websites didn’t work or were clunky, and it didn’t even have such basic options like being able to type in text fields, so logging in anywhere wasn’t an option. You could also manage files on your computer with it, listen to audio files, convert them, all kinds of stuff like that. The whole thing was controlled exclusively with keyboard, no mouse, and you could make it so that it wouldn’t show on the screen whatever you were doing, which was a cool privacy option if you wanted to do something discretely or something that your parents might not have been happy with you doing perhaps, 😀 people would just see the Klango Logo or optionally if your sound theme had any visual stuff to it it could show up as well. So it was a really fun place for me when I was just more or less starting to acquaint myself with computers and the online world as it was incredibly simple to use, you could perhaps even say too simplistic in some aspects. I met loads of people there and learned a lot of things and I generally feel quite grateful to Klango for all that. However, not very long after I joined, the authors decided that they’re going to ditch Klango in that they wouldn’t be developing it anymore. So while the community was more or less active for several more years, many Klango features were gradually becoming unusable, from YouTube and Google to blogs to all kinds of other things. I clung to it for a very long time, because I still talked to some people only on there, and I liked to use Klango for some of my online activity as a way of simplifying things. At some point one of the members of the Klango community decided to make a similar app that would actually work, which initially was a bit like a Klango copy but over time developed its very own look and personality, and I eventually joined it as well, but still used Klango or at least had it running somewhere in the background. But by then, I was feeling already since quite a while that, actually, I would like to go somewhere out. Outside of our blind community, where everyone knew me in person, often from school or something like that, and practically often the only thing that we really had in common was that we were blind. Of course it wasn’t like while I was there, I couldn’t be anywhere else, but I was feeling the need to distance myself from that. I know it works for a lot of people but when I was thinking about it I just couldn’t imagine staying like that my whole life and always mingling with people from school or thereabouts. I liked many of them and Called some friends, but none of that felt like any sort of deeper friendship. Initially I felt awful for even thinking about wanting to do this and never thought I actually could, because how do you even explain that without hurting people and not making them take it personally, but I talked about it with my Mum, Sofi and a few of my pen pals and they all said that I should do this. So one day I just simply left both those communities. I still felt awful initially, and whenever people like my Dad or my grandma asked if I still had contact with so-and-so from school or from Klango and knew how they were doing, and I said no, I’m no longer in touch with people from there, they were like « :O :O :O But why’d you do that!?» and seemed to think it was really weird or even really bad. Or I’d tell them something about someone online and they’d be like: «Are they blind?» That usually wouldn’t be the case but they seem to think that if you’re blind, you should mingle with blind people a lot or something. When my friend Jacek from Helsinki came to my 18th birthday party, my godmother, whom I told a lot about Jacek beforehand, was extremely surprised when she learned that he wasn’t blind and couldn’t get over it for the whole party and kept asking me why I didn’t tell her that. It hadn’t even crossed my mind to have to specify that, lol, and Jacek found it very amusing and regretted that he didn’t know in advance that she thought he was blind so that he could have pranked her. Perhaps my family make such assumptions precisely because I did mingle almost only with blind people as a kid. I do get it that it can be very useful because otherwise you may not know about things that could be important/relevant to you as a blind person, for example you could learn  by word of mouth that there is some funding that you could apply for currently, or you can help each other with things relating to blindness, but I am aware of that possibility and I try to stay on top of things myself, plus obviously it’s not like I’ve completely cut myself off from the blind world as a whole, I am still on various mailing lists for the blind, read blindness-related websites or those about assistive technologies etc. etc. and I don’t really feel like I’m losing much at all. I no longer feel guilty either, as I think everyone feels the need to move on from something sometimes, even if this something had been a large part of their life before. I’m pretty sure that if I didn’t ditch Klango and all that, I wouldn’t have my current Mishmashy English blog, probably wouldn’t have a Mac now because this new app that people use instead of Klango now is only on Windows, and wouldn’t have done a lot of other things, because most of my time online would be likely spent there as always. Still, I do feel a little nostalgic thinking of Klango, as, while it was lasting, it was a really good thing, taught me extremely much and showed me a lot. 

   What were such websites for you? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   What do you wish you were really good at? 

   My answer: 

   I kind of wish I were better at all things technology. I’m not particularly into it, only to the extent that it actually helps me, which is quite a large extent given that I’m blind, and as I always say an average blind person who wants to function well and do a lot of daily life things on their own has to have somewhat more of an idea about technology and how to effectively use it than their average sighted counterpart. I’ve heard from quite a few sighted people who don’t have much of an idea about it, including my Mum, how tech savvy I apparently am, in fact my Mum’s been saying it a lot lately probably because I’ve helped her set up and learn her new iPhone and she even said that she admires me for having transitioned to Mac completely on my own and learned it so quickly. To be honest, I’m still kind of surprised by it too, even though like I said I’m no power user or anything. 😀 But generally, despite my lack of deeper interest in technology, I sometimes think it would be really useful and helpful if I were able to do more advanced things with it, as it would consequently help me with other areas of life. For example, well now I obviously don’t use SAPI (the Microsoft speech API) since I’m on Mac, but I did back on Windows and SAPI5 had broken for me several times, and if I were more competent in this field, I could have been able to fix it by myself, rather than ask all sorts of people and have to explain to everyone what SAPI is, and that would be really neat. Or I could make a lot of things potentially easier for myself. Or help other people more. Or be some sort of accessibility advocate, as online accessibility is something I obviously care a lot about since it concerns me very directly but it’s difficult to tell other people like app developers about it when they do something wrong accessibility-wise because I don’t know what to suggest them to make it right, or sometimes even how to describe the accessibility issue so that it would make sense to a non-screen-reader user. Or, going back to speech synthesis, I’ve always wanted to have a speech synth off my Mum or Sofi, and now there are quite a few possibilities to create your home-made, decent-sounding speech synthesiser, without having to go bancrupt and having a professional company do it, but to someone like me, it sounds extremely difficult and cumbersome, and not really doable at all. But, like I said, I don’t really have a strong enough interest in technology and related stuff, and I guess you have to have a particular type of brain and way of thinking for that, kind of like for math, so I’m not really determined enough to actually try and become more tech-savvy. 

   What’s such a skill for you? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   What’s one thing you still prefer to do the old-fashioned way, regardless of technology and why? 

   My answer: 

   I’ve talked about this before, but definitely reading books. And no, obviously I don’t mean that I prefer reading physical books over ebooks/audiobooks, that would be cool if I could actually afford it and have enough place to store all those books, because I’d love to be able to read physical books, but it’s inconvenient, clunky, and either limiting when you get them from a library, because Braille books are costly and slow to produce so the available books are FAAAAR fewer than standard print, or it’s super expensive if you’re desperate enough to order a book to be printed just for yourself. 

   What I actually mean is that I much prefer reading books on a specialised device for the blind like a book player or a Braille display, rather than on the phone, which seems to be the most popular option right now among blind people. Specialised book players are no longer particularly trendy and aren’t even produced as much as they used to be, simply because people are turning to phones now which are cheaper than specialised devices, and it doesn’t pay off for people to buy a specialised device for double the price of an iPhone when such a device has a lot fewer functions, even if oftentimes the functions it does have work better than on an iPhone because it was made to do a few specific things rather than everything possible. Book players are more of a thing with older blind people, like such who have lost their sight later in life and don’t necessarily feel up to learning how to use an iPhone blindly when they never even had a desire to that when they could still see. Their advantage is that they are obviously always accessible, and very intuitive and easy to use. Braille displays/notetakers  are of course still in demand because people use them in connection with their mainstream devices like a phone or computer, but still I guess few people use their displays like that they just put an SD card in them and read books directly from them, without connecting to anything, like I do. 

   The reason why I prefer reading books the way I do is very simple – because that’s what I’m used to and because that is most comfortable to me. – My current book player that I’ve had for some seven years (although not the same copy). While it is still sold, its firmware hasn’t been developed in a couple years and will no longer be, so it has lost some of its features already. For example  sharing files between it and a computer over a network folder because the protocol it used for that is outdated and no longer secure and no self-respecting computer will let you do that anymore. Which is generally a bummer because, yeah, you can of course theoretically connect it via USB like anyone sane would, except it’s not the best idea because when you unplug it, it just freezes and dies, and you have to take the battery out and put it back in, and if you need to exchange files on it regularly it’s not cool because sooner or later you’re going to damage the battery holder from constant playing with it. This has been a bug since forever and I know a few other people who’ve had it, but it never ended up being properly solved. So now I just use an SD adapter instead rather thann connecting to the PlexTalk as such when I want to add new files. But worse yet is the fact that it has lost support for Audible, because Audible ditched its older audio format. I was disconsolate because the sole reason for why I chose PlexTalk over a much cheaper device of its kind (which had the Jacek voice in it unlike PlexTalk!!! 😭) when I last got funding was because PlexTalk is the only one I know about here in Poland that supports Audible, and back then Audible was my only source of English books except for BookShare, and then after a few months there’s no Audible. I wrote both to Audible people and to Shinano Kenshi (PlexTalk) people but Audible people very gently expressed that they don’t really care, and Shinano Kenshi people wrote to me like half a year later (because they’re doing other things now, duh) saying that, yeeeah, they could, theoretically, maybe, add the support for the new format (which has also been around for quite some time already and it’s not like Audible has suddenly introduced a new one and ditched the old one simultaneously) but it doesn’t really pay off, to sum it up shortly.

   In the meantime (between Audible ditching its old format and Shinano Kenshi responding to me) I finally got myself an iPhone, and part of my motivation was to have easier access to Audible, and to finally get used to read like most people (using the app Voice Dream Reader) because it also has the Jacek voice in it and because I kept hearing how it’s so so cool and as good as a book player. 

   I tried several times to make this transition, both with audiobooks and with ebooks, but it just doesn’t work for me. With all its annoyingness, I like PlexTalk because it’s small, so I can put it under my pillow and read in bed like that. It doesn’t really feel like an option with a phone, I mean I could theoretically, but, uh, who sleeps with a phone under the pillow. And the radiation and everything! PlexTalk has Wi-Fi, but I don’t use it anyway, so it’s always turned off for me, and even if it still emits some radiation it’s never going to be nowhere near that of an iPhone. Or I can read much more comfortably in the car or a public place. With an iPhone, I would have to also bring  headphones, and I’m a control freak and don’t like having my hearing limited while being around other people in not very familiar places or situations, and with PlexTalk I can just keep it at a low volume near my cheek and have everything under control, no one hears it but I do perfectly fine. I’ve done that for ages and it’s just the only thing that feels right. Also if I’m reading in bed, I’m used to also having some music or radio quietly going on in the background, because a softly speaking speech synth alone going from a mini mono speaker doesn’t fulfill my need for sound entirely, and I use my phone for the music/radio, so I can’t simultaneously use it for reading because it would be one big chaos. Unless Apple one day introduces the possibility to have multiple audio outputs at the same time, and regulating the volume of each separately, then I might reconsider it once again.

   And another thing is, I am just not crazy about Voice Dream Reader at all. I don’t want to say I don’t like it, because i can see it is generally a very good reading app compared to other reading phone apps, and it’s amazing that it exists because I still do use it sometimes for language learning and many people find it very useful. Oh yeah, and there’s Jacek, I even purchased him in the app, and I also bought a Welsh voice because I have none on the computer anymore after it got lost irretrievably just like Jacek so I read Welsh stuff with Voice Dream Reader out of necessity because I myself am a very slow Welsh reader, even though it’s a south Welsh voice as opposed to North Welsh which I’m learning, and reads some colloquial things really oddly. In my opinion, Voice Dream Reader doesn’t work very smoothly with Braille, it keeps losing focus or throws me into random places in the text when panning (moving through the lines of Braille) and Braille reading like that is just really cumbersome and annoying. . And even if you don’t read Braille but just listen to speech, navigating within that book isn’t quite as smooth and precise as it is in all the specialised devices that I’ve used so far, and I’ve used four different kinds in my life. That’s all probably because Voice Dream Reader isn’t really an app for the blind, but generally people with all sorts of print disabilities so it doesn’t really cater to any of these disabilities in particular I guess but just tries to work for everyone.

   So yeah, I much prefer either my PlexTalk, for reading with a speech synth, or Braille-Sense (my Braille notetaker) as a standalone for reading books in Braille. 

   My eccentric reading requirements, unfortunately, meant that I had to figure out how to strip DRM’s from Audible, alongside all sorts of English-language ebooks from major retailers (really people, why don’t you just use watermarks? :O ) which I feel very sad about that I have to do it, but if they don’t want to be like properly inclusive… Perhaps at some point when/if the Marrakesh Treaty will become a thing in practice everywhere I won’t have to buy mainstream books anymore. Or regarding Audible alone I’ve heard that there is/is going to be some new device that actually supports the enhanced Audible format, so when my PlexTalk stops working and I’ll have a good gut feeling about that other device in general I’ll happily buy it instead, because it’s not like it’s some extreme fun spending an hour stripping books, the more that I have to do it on Sofi’s PC because I don’t know of a way to do it on Mac that would be both accessible and secure and that’s an inconvenience for us both. So let’s hope that Audible doesn’t come up with a new format until my PlexTalk dies, lol. 

   How about you? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   Your objective is to go back in time into the 1700’s and blow the minds of everyone there. What do you bring with yourself? 

   My answer: 

   Some giant blow-dryer, I suppose, so that I could be able to blow as many minds at once as possible as quickly as possible, lol. But seriously, I think it wouldn’t be a difficult task at all to blow the 1700’s people’s minds, except for the actually getting there bit. My first thought was to show them some audio recording equipment, as well as something that music can be stored and played on, be it  a CD or an iPod or a computer with either audio files or a streaming service or whatever really. So I’d definitely have to get myself some pretty powerful power bank, or if even that fails back then perhaps I’ll actually have to borrow my grandad’s machine that produces electricity (I can’t figure out what its actual name is in English, but the huge, noisy thing that you use when there’s a power outage and whatever you make your living off doesn’t really allow for power outages) and drag it back in time with myself, plus something to keep it in that would muffle the sound so people wouldn’t think it’s the devil roaring. And then I’d also definitely pack my iPhone – but I wouldn’t actually be showing all its features to them, like what a phone actually is and stuff like that ‘cause they would either end up having some pretty bad shock, which can’t be good for your mental health, or wouldn’t be able to take it in anyway – I’d just use it to show them that there are such things that can record your voice, or anything really, for that matter, and then you can play it back and do sound editing and what not, and I’d show them some music, probably from just normal audio files because the only other way I listen to music and I guess most people do is streaming services, and I don’t think these peeps would be ready for the idea of the Internet quite yet and how you can stream something out of nowhere, plus I don’t know how I could take the Internet with me. It wouldn’t be anything  too modern like, dunno, dubstep,  lol, just some classical music and very traditional-sounding acoustic folk tunes or something like that, I don’t want the population to extinct in one mass heart attack. Perhaps this way, it would get them to think and develop ways of recording music earlier than people actually started doing it, and we would be able to have an even clearer idea of what people listened to back then, as well as they could simply make any other random recordings that could work as sort of family heirlooms for future generations, that they’d have recordings of their family members voices, and maybe as a result they’d learn to record video sooner as well. It would also be cool because for those who were still illiterate, or just weren’t very experienced at writing, they could just keep an audio diary, which would be sooo interesting for linguists because spoken language is so different from how it’s written, just in case you’ve never heard of this phenomenon before. 

   And then I’d also want to show them ebooks somehow, at least to the more educated folks out there. So I guess I’d need to take my Mac with me, explain what the screen and keyboard is all about and how you can display text, and read stuff, and I would show them how to read a text file and how to edit text files and generally type on a keyboard. I would probably also need to borrow a Kindle or something similar from someone and show them how books can be read on something like that. This would be for very selfish reasons – so that, once they’d hopefully wrap their minds around it, they’d also be able to write their books in other ways than just physical, which would make them accessible to Bibielz, which would mean that more deliciously old books in a deliciously rusty language would be available to all the Bibielz and non-Bibielz out there. As it is, a lot of old books are digitalised by libraries, but they’re typically just image scans that haven’t been converted to text, and a lot of classics to which copyright has expired can be downloaded for free very easily in accessible formats, but these are usually very obvious, very well-known books. It’s difficult to get something deliciously old and deliciously obscure, or simply not classic, in an accessible text format. 

   Problem is, I’m not sure I’d be the most fortunate person to blow their minds with this, because obviously I use screen readers, and screen readers are even later an invention than the Internet, and also fairly abstract to explain how it works (even to IT people sometimes *sighs*) and I’m pretty sure that even a computer alone could be quite a creepy thing for someone from 1700’s, let alone a talking one, and I actually wonder what would be worse, very robotic-sounding synths or the neural ones that even many people these days can’t tell apart from a human. Not to mention that the idea of blind people being able to basically read screens is still pretty difficult for many people to take in, so I would expect it to be even more spectacularly mind-blowing back then, and they’d probably think it’s some sort of prank or something supernatural or don’t know what else. 😀 

   What would your choice be? 🙂 

Question of the day.

What is something that sounds safe but actually isn’t?

My answer:

Registering somewhere online. ANYWHERE! Creating an account. Especially when they want your email! 😱 It’s like opening yourself to evil because you let all them companies and big tech people invigilate and track you and eavesdrop on you and read your most important emails (even the ones you didn’t send ’cause they were too cringey but still keep in drafts) and probably even your thoughts because they always show you the ads of things you’ve been thinking about recently! It’s not just Facebook and Google (although of course Google is the worst and responsible for all the catastrophes in the world) but everything, even small businesses which want you to log in on their website, they actually sell your data to China and God knows what else they do with it. 😀

That’s what my Dad recently shared with me. My Dad is slightly, well, perhaps more than slightly, backwards when it comes to technology, but he has no shame about it, and he doesn’t have to because he has Bibiel to deal with that when it comes to his work stuff, and other than work stuff, he only uses his computer to watch YouTube (I don’t think he realises it’s actually Google), go on Marine Traffic, which is also kind of to do with his job as he delivers fuel to ships among others, browse the Internet (using Bing), “travel” (with Google Maps, which he’s perfectly aware of, but oh well), go on OLX (which is like a Polish equivalent of eBay (logging in from Mum’s account, or rather not logging out), and sometimes watching some regional online TV and stuff like that. He also has an (Android) smartphone (from China) and to his credit he had a smartphone LOOONG before I did, but the only smart functionality of it that he uses is (paradoxically) Google Assistant, when he needs to look something up on the phone on the web, because asking Google is faster than typing. Oh and he also uses some app for translating in real time when he interacts with people at work who speak other languages, which I’m sure also uses Google Translate and Google speech recognition system, so… Somehow when it comes to the phone it doesn’t bother him so much that he uses Google as the search engine, and although I tell him that repeatedly, he still doesn’t seem to fully grasp or accept or something that his phone’s system is actually from Google.

He does NOT have an email address, well, to be exact he has several and with different providers, probably even more than I do, which either Mum or me or Sofi or Olek helped him create, but he doesn’t use any of them because (a) he doesn’t know how and doesn’t have the patience to learn, and (b) he doesn’t remember his passwords, or he doesn’t remember where he put the piece of paper where he wrote the password down. Back when he was still somewhat motivated to learn to use an email address, he’d ask me what his password was, as if I could have any idea about that, and then he’d be mad at the whole world. 😀

Anyways, quite recently he was sharing with me some of his tech woes and how he was trying to buy something online from somewhere else other than OLX, but they wouldn’t let him, because they wanted him to log in, to even see the seller’s phone number. I said that it seems pretty reasonable to me, it’s easier to shop when you create an account, and why would the seller want their phone number to be visible to all the random peeps in the world? I also began to wonder why it’s such a problem for him to register somewhere. I mean yeah, it can be a hassle, I myself don’t like registering somewhere where I don’t really feel the need to simply because it’s waste of time and sometimes you can still come across surprises like visual captchas which are very annoying and discouraging, some bigger websites can also be pretty intrusive with all their nagging, but generally I don’t see much of a problem with registrations alone. He doesn’t have an email address but Mum lets him use hers for stuff like OLX shopping so he could use it for registrations. So I asked him what his problem with registering was, was it too difficult or something, and that was when he told me all that amazing stuff about how it’s unsafe and evil. Well yeah I exaggerated it a bit for satirical purposes, but even knowing his paranoid tendencies it was a surprise for me how skewed his idea of Internet privacy is.

And don’t get me wrong here, I don’t like big tech either, I hate Facebook, wouldn’t use Google if there were better alternatives for some of their services and I value my online privacy very dearly and some people would probably also call me a freak in this regard. I totally get people’s concerns over their privacy online, but the extent to which my Dad takes it is quite hilarious, especially given that he doesn’t really understand how Internet works and really enjoys invigilating all those ships, looking up where people live etc. and it’s funny how he uses so much stuff from Google without even realising it, while at the same time hating it so much.

So that was the first answer that came to my mind when thinking of such unsafe things that sound safe. Being more serious, food is an excellent example, it can make you vomit. And can make loads of other things to you. Allergies, poison, choking, cancer, diabetes, what fun!

Also amusement parks and similar, all the rides in them. They always say they’re safe, but accidents seem to happen regularly. Oh yeah and you could also vomit from it and make your vestibular system go nuts.

Your turn. 🙂

Question of the day.

What is one old piece of technology you can’t bring yourself to part with?

My answer:

For starters, it was less than a year ago when I finally decided to take the risk and part with my good ol’ Nokia E66 with Symbian. For most people, that’s really strange. Even many blind people don’t understand things like that because, yes, smartphones can be a very helpful assistive technology, and many think that the only explanation for when you cling on to your old phone must be that you’re afraid of new things. Which, admittedly, was partly true in my case, as I typically dread change, but that’s only part of it. I would often tell people, and also here on my blog, that the reason I was still clinging to it was my loyalty to Finland (Nokia is Finnish, in case you don’t know). And, honestly, we’ve been through so much together during those ten years. And she was working perfectly fine, so why fix what ain’t broke. Although in those last few years I didn’t use this phone very extensively as I hardly ever talk to stranger people on the phone and don’t feel the need to talk on the phone to people I know ’cause we either see each other IRL or can email, and emails are also way better and more interesting than texting. But mostly, what held me back was that I didn’t think I could deal with a touch screen, and that’s not because of my lack of sight, but more the associated stuff. As you likely already know, I also struggle with coordination and dexterity, and have a hard time with spatial orientation be it on a big or small space. My previous experiences with other people’s smartphones (usually with Android, which is a bit less accessible, and its free TalkBack screen reader) weren’t particularly encouraging either. I did know that you can use a Bluetooth keyboard with iOS and there are various accessibility features that can make it easier but didn’t think that would be enough for me as you can’t do every single thing on iOS via the keyboard because it’s just not made this way really. But then as I’ve already written on here, Sofi got her first iPhone and let me use it, and while I still wasn’t convinced that I could find my way in the world of touch screens, I felt like perhaps it would be interesting to just try. I could buy myself an iPhone and if it won’t work out, I can simply sell it and come back to my old Nokia. Also I would need to find myself some other phone sooner or later, as even if my Nokia will keep going for the next 50 years, it soon won’t be supported and won’t have service, so it would feel safer to experiment now than last minute. Now that Sofi has an iPhone she could help me figure it out and maybe it’ll even work somehow. Then I came across a review of iPhone SE 2nd generation by some blind guy who also has dyspraxia, where he also mentioned that he uses a keyboard and, while in his situation it’s not ideal either, it works way better than the screen. Based on the review, he was a rather advanced user, so that really made me think. I do not have dyspraxia, my difficulties aren’t as severe as that, so if a dyspraxic person can manage an iPhone with a keyboard and use it efficiently, perhaps I could too. I definitely should try, that’s for sure.

And I did, and, as you know, I didn’t sell my iPhone. In the end I decided to use it in combination with my Braille-Sense which is a Braille notetaker which can work as a Braille display plus keyboard with the iPhone, although I do have a little keyboard as well which can be useful as it’s more portable and less clunky, and I can do most things this way. I do find it quite laborious to use the screen itself, but can do it if I have to and have gotten used to the laboriousness. I’m not the speediest iPhone user for sure when I have to do things from the screen, and I have to take my time to do some things, but because I theoretically know how to do most things on the iPhone, I can practically do pretty much everything I want to do, as long as it’s doable with the screen reader and as long as I have the time and patience, which I typically do. Well okay, my pics are still quite bad and I know some blind people do better, but that’s a bit of a different kettle of fish, and sometimes I also manage to take a decent one without any assistance. I still have the Nokia though. Just so it can work as an exhibit for future generations. 😀

But there’s still one old piece of technology I’m holding on to, despite I theoretically don’t have to now that I have the iPhone because the iPhone could do that job. It’s not quite as ancient, actually the current one I have is only over a year old, but generally the technology in it isn’t particularly cutting-edge for our current standards, so much so that many features it has that rely on external services are no longer supported because its firmware is a bit outdated and I guess no longer developed even though the device is still sold. It’s basically a specialised device (with a very specialised price, as with most of them) for reading books and playing multimedia. You can read ebooks on it with a speech synth or audiobooks, listen to music, podcasts, radio, record audio, it also has a calendar, alarm and other such little gimmicks which you wouldn’t normally expect from a multimedia player. Now that smartphones are being very widely used as assistive technology and many expensive, special assistive devices with limited capabilities have a hard time competing and don’t even try, book players like that are seen more and more as something for elderly blind people, say, such who have lost their sight late in life and don’t necessarily feel like dealing with an iPhone, especially if they wouldn’t even feel like having a smartphone if their sight was good, and currently sold “dumb” phones don’t do screen readers.

Why would I use an outdated and pricey thingamajig about which even its own producers forgot when I have an iPhone which can do its job just as well? Well, comfort is key when reading books. PlexTalk is smaller than my iPhone and easier when you want to read for example while commuting. It doesn’t have a touch screen, which could be accidentally activated while you go about your business with it in your pocket or bag. It’s faster to use for me personally. And, what Bibiels like best is reading in bed for a while before sleep or after waking up when I have the time. At the same time, Bibiels don’t do silence at night, so there has to be some music quietly in the background, or a radio station where they talk some fabulous language, it’s good to have a soundtrack to your dreams as long as it’s not too loud or intrusive. The music for a long time used to go from my computer, but my current computer is super noisy and that’s very uncomfortable for sleep, makes me feel like I’m having a sleep study in a lab rather than sleeping in my own room, and my speakers are also weirdly noisy in themselves, making the weirdest sounds, and I can’t seem to be able to fix that in any way, I guess it’s something electrical, which is okay during the day but not at night. So now the way it works is I have my lovely little B&O speaker which I connect to the phone, and it plays. iPhone, as you may or may not know, only supports one audio source at once, so I can’t possibly both listen to music and a book at the same time from it, and then maybe even set a sleep timer for the book, but not for the music. Not doable. Even if I could have two audio sources play at the same time, I think it could get quite overloading if they were both playing from the same device unless you could manage the volume of both separately.

So yeah, there’s an amazing app for reading ebooks, or texts in general, called Voice Dream Reader, which has speech synthesis for many more languages than the PlexTalk which only has, in my case, Polish and English, there’s even the Jacek voice on Voice Dream Reader, the one that I really like but have lost and which is no longer produced in the form in which I had it, so you’d think I’d be super happy to use Voice Dream Reader and have Jacek at least in there. But no, reading on the phone totally doesn’t go along with my habits.

One of the secondary reasons which finally led to me getting an iPhone was that the support of Audible audiobooks had ended for PlexTalk last year. That was super dramatic, as I had only started using that feature extensively and the only reason for why I decided to buy PlexTalk again after my first one broke, instead of another, fair bit cheaper, device of the same kind was the Audible support. I wrote to the Audible peeps describing my situation and asking them if they could have some mercy on people with assistive devices so that their users can somehow still use their audiobooks despite the old format being ditched. They wrote me very diplomatically that they don’t really care, and I guess they couldn’t even do much about it if they did. I wrote to Shinano Kenshi (PlexTalk) peeps, asking them very diplomatically if they could finally update their flippin’ dinosaur firmware so that it could perhaps support the newer Audible format, which, in fact, sounds way better in terms of quality and has been around for a long time before so it’s not like it’s super new. They didn’t even get back to me, which wasn’t a surprise, as I had a feeling they have limited their activity around PlexTalk devices to only what’s absolutely necessary. Then, months later, when I almost forgot about that email, I got a response from them, diplomatically saying that, um, yeeeeah, maybe it is possible, but it really doesn’t pay off, too much bother.

Now, I have Audible on my phone, but I hardly ever use it, for the reason I wrote about above. The good thing is I now have pretty good access to English ebooks instead that, with a little playing around, I can easily read on PlexTalk, so it doesn’t feel that bad not to have Audible on it.

Do you have such an old device? Why is it so difficult to part with? 🙂

I can deal with it.

I thought that I’d write another prompt-inspired, or at least partly inspired, post today. It’ll probably be long, so get yourself something yummy to drink and a snack and brace yourself.

The prompt I chose comes from one of my two books of journaling prompts – The Goddess Journaling Workbook by Beatrice Minerva Linden, and goes as follows:

“I can deal with it. You can. (…) Think about something which overwhelms you and imagine your life when that issue is resolved.”

I thought I’d twist it a little, or maybe a lot. Instead of writing about something currently overwhelming, I am going to write about something the perspective of which was always incredibly overwhelming for me, and I never thought I could deal with it, but, as it seems, better or worse, I can.

This thing is using my iPhone. As those of you who know me well or are regular readers know, I’d been loyal to my good old Nokia with Symbian OS for over 10 years, and I don’t even mean Nokia as a brand but one particular Nokia phone that I wasn’t changing as there was just no need for it. It was my first phone that I ever got and the only one until June this year. It was possible because, while in the past, my Nokia was through all sorts of things with me and survived a lot, in the last five years I used it very little. The people I usually text or call are my family, and now that I live with them there was little need for me to text or call them, and as I hate phone calls and always have the computer or Braille-Sense with me, I was always telling people that it’s easiest and fastest to reach me via email anyway. So it had very tranquil and idyllic retirement years with very little to do. I always joked that I stick to it because of my undying love for Finland (as Nokia is from Finland). But in fact I simply felt like, since Symbian had died, I had few alternatives.

As many of you also may know, the reason why I didn’t have a smartphone unlike a lot of blind people do now was that I had rather poor experience with touch screens when playing around with phones of other people, whether Androids or iPhones, they seemed extremely abstractive to me as I have poor spatial orientation and a coompletely flat surface doesn’t help you feel more oriented, and my coordination/fine motor skills are also a challenge – it’s generally a very mild and apparently not even diagnoseable problem, yet at the same time challenging enough that it affects my functioning in some ways and is evident for those who know me closely in real life. At the same time I had a terrifying feeling, that after all, at some point my Nokia will eventually die, and I felt clueless what I’ll do then. I contemplated buying another, used Nokia online, the same model as mine, or perhaps, what I would truly hate to do, get myself one of a few smartphones that have been developed with the blind (especially older blind people in mind). Why was it such an awful thought for me? Well, because the target market of these products is pretty small, they’re very expensive compared to their actual abilities and specs. They’re Android phones and run some pretty outdated Android versions, have very few capacities so you can barely call it a smartphone really, can be very sluggish, but they do have a physical keyboard and typically come with a screenreader onboard and running from the start, as far as I know. Apart from the physical keyboard, such a thing wasn’t really what I’d need. If I have to have a smartphone, I’d rather have it actually smart rather than just pretending to be smart and cost more than an averagely smart phone. I also contemplated on and off purchasing the dreaded iPhone and just using it to an extend that it would be possible for me. Which still felt far from satisfying because I didn’t feel like I’d be able to do more with it and iPhones are not the cheapest, and I’d probably be a little frustrated having a premium phone and not really being able to use its full potential, just because there wasn’t a better alternative for me. Yes, I’d of course heard that you can use iPhone with a Bluetooth keyboard, but I’d also thought somehow that the things you can do with it this way are limited quite a lot. But at least, I figured, I could learn iPhone better than I could Android phone, as I’ve heard about a lot of blind people who were less tech savvy or perhaps had some coordination issues like me or other motor problems, and were scared of the big wild world of smartphones and it took them a lot of time to make the transition, and found it easier to find their way around iOS rather than Android as it’s more accessible and kind of friendlier for this group of people.

So I was happy while my Nokia was still alive and clinging to it for dear life and praying that it would last for as long as possible, as I couldn’t make up my mind for years and felt mortified of the after-Nokia life. Deep down I knew I should change my phone or at least attempt to change it already while Nokia was still alive so I could see if it’s actually doable for me or should I better stick to archaic Symbian phones but I couldn’t get over my anxiety and doubts and thus had no motivation.

Despite that, it wasn’t my trusty Nokia’s death which finally prompted me to make a decision, which was good as otherwise it would probably be a little traumatising. I can’t really pinpoint what exactly it was, perhaps I just matured enough and ruminated it through thoroughly enough to be ready to make the big jump, or, which I personally think is more likely, it was a combination of different things.

My Nokia was visibly (or rather audibly) doing much worse, or to be more exact it wasn’t really the Nokia itself but its charger deteriorating. Whenever I plugged it in, it constantly emitted a high-pitched, ultrasound but nevertheless audible peep, just like a lot of obsolete chargers do. It was annoying but, worse still, it wasn’t even me who was most annoyed by it, but Misha! What better motivation for me to change my phone than have Misha tell me that he doesn’t like it! 😀 Very unfortunately, the power strip with the charger was right next to my bed, and on its – the strip’s – other side was Misha’s snack bowl, so whenever he had a snack, or slept in my room (his bed is up on my bed) and I happened to have the charger plugged in, he was clearly upset or even avoided coming near, and it took some time to figure out what was the problem. Well I’m still not perfectly sure, he didn’t tell me, but he always calmed down a bit when I switched it off and after I ditched the charger the problem magically disappeared so…

All the cool kids in Sofi’s class have iPhones. Sofi doesn’t aspire to be cool, I mean she already is in a way but doesn’t meet all the requirements, the key one being that the cool kids don’t really like her and are jealous of something about her, I guess it must be her confidence and perhaps that she’s so tall and has her own fashion style, but nevertheless the appeal of iPhone was huge for her. So last school year my parents prommised her that if she’ll have a certificate with honours, they’ll buy her an iPhone. She didn’t really, because there was lockdown and she had remote schooling and she didn’t do really well with this grade-wise, but she said that she sort of did and my parents didn’t double check, and bought her an iPhone, although a used (very heavily, as it seems) one and not in the best condition (so typical of my Dad 😛 ).

Sofi kindly let me play around with her phone and VoiceOver (the built-in screen-reader in most Apple products) a lot, and I asked her tons of questions while she was also figuring out how to use it so I could get a better idea what it’s like, though Sofi wasn’t really particularly knowledgeable or exhaustive at answering my questions nor was she a good teacher. The whole idea was scaring me big time but at the same time I was feeling more and more like I’d actually like to try it out for myself and have my own iPhone, at least for a while, to see how much I can get out of it, how much I could achieve.

Finally, some time later I read about the new iPhone SE and that it has a physical Home button, unlike most other newer models, and read a review of it written by a blind guy who actually has… er… apraxia? (I guess, or something similar) and so definitely has coordination and motor difficulties bigger than mine. He seemed a long-time iPhone user and really liked the new SE, and that made me think. ‘Cause if he has apraxia and can deal with it, why can’t I? I mean, yeah, it’s possible that I can’t, because even if my difficulties are milder than his we’re still different people and there may be things that I find more difficult than he does or just differently difficult, but isn’t it a huge miss not to try it if blind people with apraxia do? I would probably regret it my whole life if I didn’t, especially that for most blind smartphone users, their smartphones are more than just devices for communication and such but also help make things easier in daily life, like recognising bar codes, to give you an example off the top of my brain, or doing other things that otherwise may be only doable with some fancy specialised devices.

So, all jittery, on 12th June I went to the nearest Apple store and got an iPhone with all the necessary accessories plus a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard.

It was all very different than what I imagined it to be.

My Mum helped me set it up even though she didn’t have an iPhone in her hand for longer than a few seconds ever before, and it all went well. I remember my cousin was staying for the weekend at Sofi’s and I had a proper cheerleader team consisting of Mum, Sofi and Dominika – my cousin – supporting me morally and helping practically as I tried to familiarise myself with iPhoneland. The first few days were so hectic and all over the place and it was all so abstractive, but, and it was very much an uphill struggle all the time but at the same time a very rewarding one and I never had weird problems like you sometimes do when acquainting yourself with a new device/technology that something is not working and you have no clue why, whether it’s your ignorance or the thing itself being so buggy or glitchy. Here the only things that went wrong were only down to me not knowing something which made things less stressful and easier.

I hate any major changes and typically don’t deal well with them, and to add to it I had a fresh but really nerve-wracking experience of transitioning computers earlier this year – and that’s only a Windows 7 laptop to a Windows 10 desktop, and it was harrowing! I may be not a tech geek but I’m also not totally clueless, but found it difficult to adapt probably because the whole process was very much over-extended and there were a lot of major glitches and other stressful stuff going on with this new computer thing.

The leap from Nokia to iPhone felt much more intimidating, and the change in terms of how my whole life could change due to this felt infinitely more significant, and so I expected being just the same bundle of nerves this time, especially that the level of difficulty of this challenge was waaay higher, but perhaps because there weren’t any major problems that would be beyond my control, and I didn’t feel pressured that I needed to learn it quickly, I wasn’t a bundle of nerves. Yes, I was anxious, I couldn’t sleep, I bit my nails raw as I always do when things are a-changin’, but the dominating feeling I had was some sort of healthy excitement, rather than pure freak out mode which is typical of me with huge changes. What surely helped me was that, as I said, I didn’t feel the pressure. I told myself that there’s no rush with it and if I decide that iPhone is not for me, it’s okay, I can sell it, I can give it to Sofi, I can throw it in the loo, I don’t have to feel obliged to anything, no oone can make me like or use it other than myself. I gave myself a month for at least the initial figuring out whether it’s worth exploring further or whether I want to give up on it. Already after a week or so, even though I was still struggling a lot with learning to use it, I was sure that I was not going to sell it and that I’ll stick to it, even if my usage of it will be limited by my limitations. I quickly grew to like it, probably largely because it provided me with the possibility of finally being able to listen to my music at night on something else than my loudly humming computer and because learning new things about it was (and continues to be) quite rewarding.

My Mum helped me a lot in the first days and then later with various tests and experiments I was undertaking, as did Sofi (I really don’t think it’d go as smoothly as it did if I didn’t have Sofi nearby to consult with sometimes).

I struggled, and still do, with some gestures. Actually, to an extend, I struggle with all gestures, even basic flicking/swiping and can get lost on the screen, which can be frustrating, but not hugely because I use a physical keyboard most of the time anyway, and even if I don’t, with more basic activities it’s usually somehow manageable and I do try to use my iPhone just via the touch screen and not run for a keyboard in every single situation when I don’t have it at hand and I need to do something on my phone, or for Mummy when something is not doable from the keyboard, although it does take me significantly more time than with the keyboard, and even with the keyboard I still do things way faster on the computer so I don’t have the experience of many people that it’s more convenient and faster to do things on the phone, it’s just totally the opposite for me. Longer writing/editing is the prime example. I mean from the on-screen keyboard it’s a torture but I don’t really know why it’s such a pain in the brain for me to do it from keyboard, but it’s really a lot of hassle and a good patience training.

But I consider myself a fairly efficient iPhone user by now nevertheless, perhaps not necessarily advanced but I do know where everything is in it, how to use things properly, how it works in theory, dare I say better than some sighted users I know, what all the settings do and how to change them, how all gestures work in theory, how to do everything with VoiceOver etc. etc. Though it’s not a huge achievement in itself because, apart from learning the touchscreen for me, the system itself is very intuitive in my experience. A huge help and source of knowledge in this for me was AppleVis, which is a website with all sorts of information on accessibility of Apple products for visually impaired users.

One of the more difficult things for me at the beginning was the so called rotor in VoiceOver (this is a feature that makes it possible to change different settings of VoiceOver), and it seems like I wasn’t alone with it at all. To move between different rotor settings you have to move both your hands in a clockwise or counter-clockwise motion, people often explain it that it’s like turning a door knob. It felt very abstractive to me at first, then it made sense to my brain and imagination, but my hands responded with: “What the flip are you saying?!” I just couldn’t make it happen in the outside world for the life of me! But then I learned that you can change the gesture for rotor and that saved me. These days I can sort of make it with the original gesture but it’s too much thinking and trouble for me to put up with for such a vital thing because I do use the rotor a lot.

And I had to change a lot of other things as well to be more suitable for me because of what is not really doable for me and am so glad that these things actually are changeable.

My Mum says that she’s never seen it with me that I’d change my mind on something so radically in such a short time because from someone who thought smartphones are evil I suddenly magically changed into someone who claims that iPhones are the best and who likes Apple (even though I am not planning to equip myself with other Apple products any time soon but, as you can see from this post, you never know, right?…)

Despite I do have more or less touch screen trouble all the time, I use my iPhone extensively now, the more that I have set it up with my Braille-Sense, so these days more often than using the Logitech Bluetooth keyboard I use Braille-Sense to navigate on the screen and also to read what’s on the screen as I prefer to read things myself a lot of the time. And it’s easier to use it with the Braille-Sense as a physical keyboard. I only take the Logitech with me if I’m going out somewhere and really need keyboard because it’s very slim, dust-proof and not as valuable and flimsy as Braille-Sense.

I have got myself a great speaker and headphones just for the iPhone so that I can enjoy my music, especially overnight, even more. I have created Family Cloud for myself and Sofi, because my Mum is very wary of Sofi using the Internet and wants her to be safe and not overdose on screentime, and this is the only way which she agreed for Sofi to have any access to the Internet in her phone at all, so I monitor her screentime usage and do the bad guy job but also the good guy because otherwise she couldn’t really do much with her phone except for calling and texting.

I feel like I may need to start cutting down on my own iPhone screentime soon because I’ve become totally addicted to a game called BitLife lately (if you’ve ever played Alter Ego it’s something similar only more extensive and detailed). 😀 Just like Sofi is addicted to Brawl Stars.

So yeah, to sum up this elaborate post, my experience has shown that I can deal with it! And I feel really happy about it. I think I can even say proud and it won’t be a very big overstatement. I feel so especially because, except for the help of my Mum and Sofi’s, and referring a lot to AppleVis, I didn’t have any more external help, I mean, a lot of blind people have some training. I didn’t have that, and still, I figured it out. Perhaps if I did have someone who would come to me and show me things I could be better at it, but somehow I feel really sceptical.

Did I imagine that it could be this way if I managed to overcome the whole overwhelming touch screen hurdle? To a degree, yes. I knew that if I could make friends with iPhone it could potentially change my life in a good way and be very enriching. But I guess I didn’t imagine that it could be such a big change.

What’s something that you find very overwhelming and difficult to deal with, and how do you imagine your life if you could get rid of the problem? Or what was such a thing for you, and why/how did things change so that you now know you can deal with it? 🙂

Question of the day.

Hi people! 🙂

What was the last thing you purchased?

My answer:

I went with my parents and Sofi on Monday to do some shopping, Sofi needed some stuff for school and I needed to get myself a larger power strip for all of my newly acquired chargers and cables – to do with the iPhone. The strip I’ve been using for years is not enough for my needs at the moment, as it only has three outlets. I’ve actually purchased a new strip already last week or so, I bought it in iSpot – which is Apple’s reseller – I decided to buy it there as I had to get some accessories from them anyway so I got a discount for the strip – it was called Eve Energy Strip – and, as you could expect from Apple related stuff, the strip I got was smart and compatible with Homekit – so that I could control it from my phone, without having to dig my fingers into an outlet every time I wanted to plug something out or having to guess whether the strip is on or off as I had to with my old strip. With Eve, I could for example tell Siri to switch one outlet on, while all the others would be off, which was not possible with my old strip, which was either on or off, and so if you wanted something not to waste the energy you just had to plug it out. I really liked Eve and the level of control I could have with it, and how easy it was actually to use, but there was one huge problem. Despite the iSpot guy told me that it was going to have six outlets – three normal ones and three USB ones – it had only three outlets. Way too few for me now. I need at least six, ideally seven or eight. So as much as I liked Eve, I had to pack it away, and was going to return it once my Mum comes back from her trip in the mountains. I told Mum about that and she called the iSpot people, and the guy who sold me the strip was very apologetic, saying that someone in the magazine must have made a mistake and shipped the wrong one.

Mum came back last Saturday and we decided to call the iSpot general helpline and have them take Eve, while we would go to our local iSpot shop and get the right one in the meantime. Which we did on Monday. This new strip was called Koogeek and did have six outlets, although its cable was ridiculously short, which was a bit of a problem as the wall socket in my room where it was supposed to be plugged in is under my bed, so that meant the strip would barely stick out of there, and I would hardly be able to use my devices on the bed while charging, which I do a lot. But there was a much bigger problem with Koogeek, as it turned out when we got home. I installed the Koogeek app on my phone to connect the strip, and boy was I surprised by it! I think it must be some sort of a really geeky-techy app because I wasn’t able to do anything with it, absolutely flipping anything. The manual said I had to create a Koogeek account, and yes, there was a button called “Join Koogeek”, but when I tapped on it, it did nothing. Nothing was loading, opening or even trying to open, no communicate or anything. Oh well – I thought – must be something with VoiceOver. I’ve heard from people that some apps are so wonderfully made that when there is some sort of a checkbox, like for example when you have to accept privacy policy or stuff, for some reason you won’t be able to do it with VoiceOver, you’d have to disable it to accept or check whatever is required. I haven’t seen anything like this in my short time with iPhone but thought that must be the first time. I called Mum, disabled VoiceOver and asked her to look at it, but she also couldn’t do anything. There were a few other buttons as well and none of them did anything at all. We sat with it for an hour and both got very pissed, but it wasn’t helping either. In the end, Mum came up with an idea that I could return this shitty Koogeek thing, because even if there is some way for the initiated people to connect it to the iPhone, if there are problems with such a basic thing I probably would have more problems with this strip further down the road as well, and instead I could keep the Eve, which was still here, and get another Eve to go with it, and, with some rearranging in my room, have them both plugged in different sockets. This is some solution and after some thinking I decided it’s not that bad at all. For now I have my most basic stuff plugged into the Eve. Of course I could write to the Koogeek support now asking them for help, but with my luck with tech support people in all sorts of different companies I can’t see it could accomplish much and would be a waste of time.

Only then when Mum thought seriously about driving back to iSpot on her own (previously it was Dad who drove us) she didn’t like the idea. It’s rather far from us, in a big shopping centre, and Mum didn’t feel confident going there, as she doesn’t know the way there very well and she once got lost in that same shopping centre with Sofi as it’s really huge so she has like a mini trauma associated with it. And Dad definitely wouldn’t be up to going this far yet again, for such a trivial reason. So I decided to give the Koogeek thing to Sofi, who was very happy and didn’t care about the phone app and Homekit, and became even happier when she realised that, for whatever reason, her phone charger, which always made her phone act very weird while charging – it wouldn’t let her write what she wanted but would write some other characters or wouldn’t respond to her gestures appropriately – now worked just fine with the new strip. So that’s good at least.

But that means I’ll have to pay for THREE, not particularly cheap power strips, which is quite outrageous, and not fun as I’ve had quite a lot of expenses in the last few months due to the whole iPhone thing, especially with the headphones and speaker. At least I hope the two Eves will be usable for me for a very long time.

How about you? 🙂

Testing, testing!…

Hey people! 🙂
I have news of the year for you! Bibiel’s got an iPhone. 😄
It’s been hanging in the air for a while already, because Zofijka got an iPhone recently too, and as my ten-year-old Nokia wasn’t getting any younger, I had to think about something new at some point. You may already know that I’d been very reluctant to have a smartphone because of my coordination and orientation difficulties and that it felt sort of surreal for me that I’d ever be able to use a touch screen, and all my attempts on other people’s phones in the past were miserable, so I was always joking that I’m sticking to Nokia due to my undying loyalty to Finland.
It’s been one heck of a change, as you can imagine, but somehow I’ve been able to keep my stress and rumination at healthy levels so far, and am even a little bit excited about the thing. I have a whole lot of things to get used to and would definitely be lost if not my Bluetooth keyboard, as I can do barely anything on the screen, and so far struggle a lot even with the keyboard, but hopefully it’s just the matter of getting used to everything.
I just wanted to let you know about it and test how the email thing works, as I’ve just set up my emails in the Mail app and am sending this via email. This is actually my second attempt as something didn’t work out the whole time. So far I’m pretty sure it’s not going to become my default way of blogging, it’s really arduous.