There will be 9 contractions that will be going away: by, into, to, ble, com, dd, at ion, ally, and o'clock. There are also some changes in punctuation. If you'd like to get a chance to learn the changes and practice your brailling, http://uebonline.org offers a free online course to learn about the changes.
Sunday, September 14, 2014
Changes Coming to the Braille Code--Are You Ready?
In 2012, the United States adopted the Unified English Braille Code, and the Braille Authority of North America has lots of documentation to learn about the changes to the code. Go to www.brailleauthority.org/ueb.html to learn what the changes are, how the changes are being implemented, etc.
Monday, September 1, 2014
Advice Expressed in an Anecdote
I've discovered that the best piece of advice I can offer anyone who has a problem to solve, tech or otherwise, is to use your favorite search engine and type in the question or problem; you may be amazed to find out that someone else has been seeking a solution to the same problem.
Last week I had stopped by one of our resource rooms, and the teacher said that the iPad he'd been given by our program had a sound problem. The sound was perfectly fine with speakers or headphones plugged in, but through the internal speakers, it was just making squawking sounds--very annoying--making the iPad useless to those students who depend upon the VoiceOver screenreader. I took the iPad, verified that with or without VoiceOver, sound was not emitting from the iPad correctly, then immediately went to the Safari app. I typed into the address bar [BTW, did you know you don't have to go to the google/bing/yahoo search page first? Just type your question/statement right into the address bar]:
"sound problem on my iPad Air".
A whole page of links appeared, and I scanned through the title links to see what might fit my issue. I finally settled on a link that was for an iPad 3, but hoped that it may apply to my Air. I can't remember now all of the information on the page, but the one suggestion I settled on fixed the problem! In true IT Crowd fashion (if you haven't seen the BBC series, I highly recommend it), I "turned it off and turned it on" by doing a reset of holding the Power and Home buttons together till the screen went dark and the Apple appeared and it restarted]. I left the teacher with the iPad, relieved that I didn't have another piece of equipment to get repaired, but asking the teacher to let me know if it happened again (in case this was a precursor to further issues).
So, this school year, in addition to my endless harping on using keyboard shortcuts (just ask any of the teachers I work with; I'm a broken record), I am now asking teachers to try to 'google' a tech problem or question--you may be surprised what you find!
One more great place to search: YouTube. There are so many people out there who have kindly posted how-to videos on a wide range of topics, including VI-specific videos on using low vision devices/software and braille devices and screen readers. You don't have to be an expert, you just need to learn how to hone your search skills--hey, this is great advice for your students, as well!!
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Last week I had stopped by one of our resource rooms, and the teacher said that the iPad he'd been given by our program had a sound problem. The sound was perfectly fine with speakers or headphones plugged in, but through the internal speakers, it was just making squawking sounds--very annoying--making the iPad useless to those students who depend upon the VoiceOver screenreader. I took the iPad, verified that with or without VoiceOver, sound was not emitting from the iPad correctly, then immediately went to the Safari app. I typed into the address bar [BTW, did you know you don't have to go to the google/bing/yahoo search page first? Just type your question/statement right into the address bar]:
"sound problem on my iPad Air".
A whole page of links appeared, and I scanned through the title links to see what might fit my issue. I finally settled on a link that was for an iPad 3, but hoped that it may apply to my Air. I can't remember now all of the information on the page, but the one suggestion I settled on fixed the problem! In true IT Crowd fashion (if you haven't seen the BBC series, I highly recommend it), I "turned it off and turned it on" by doing a reset of holding the Power and Home buttons together till the screen went dark and the Apple appeared and it restarted]. I left the teacher with the iPad, relieved that I didn't have another piece of equipment to get repaired, but asking the teacher to let me know if it happened again (in case this was a precursor to further issues).
So, this school year, in addition to my endless harping on using keyboard shortcuts (just ask any of the teachers I work with; I'm a broken record), I am now asking teachers to try to 'google' a tech problem or question--you may be surprised what you find!
One more great place to search: YouTube. There are so many people out there who have kindly posted how-to videos on a wide range of topics, including VI-specific videos on using low vision devices/software and braille devices and screen readers. You don't have to be an expert, you just need to learn how to hone your search skills--hey, this is great advice for your students, as well!!
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
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