Training Centers
As you have doubtless learned by now, I am fail. So I've been looking into training of some sort or another.
But research on the organizations in the US is difficult! You may recall that I could find no link between formal training and notability, but it's more bothersome than that.
I've been leaning toward the NFB centers throughout most of this, because it's so stupidly difficult to find anything with better PR, or at least a decent review of an NFB center not written by the NFB, so all I get about them is positive.
In contrast, the leading opponent for my attendance, World Services for the Blind, has spawned multiple horror stories. Yet someone always pops up and insists that changes are being made a couple years after said stories get published.
Were I to go for an NFB center, I'd want to aim for the one in Colorado (WSB is closer to me than any NFB center, which I hope should be explanation enough for why I'm not particularly excited about the Louisiana center). That one's hardest to find information on (apparently a spam warlord set up a copy of their site to advertise the sorts of things spambots advertise).
All the opinions I find on the NFB centers come down to either NFB members singing their praises (which is similar to WSB staff singing WSB praises), or complaints about four specific things (Sleep shades, NFB canes, guidedog policies that may or may not actually exist, and the NFB's general attitude).
But I don't care about the politics of it; I want some bloody independence. The real kind, like my sighted sister has. Will I actually learn those skills from any of these places? And how l ong will it take? Not gonna lie, I spent 2013 not doing anything useful, and I don't want to disappear off the face of the development scene for six to ten months on the heels of that.
I talked with my new DSB person last week about this, and it turns out that WSB does a 30 day no-commitment trial. I decided this would be a decent compromise: she's clearly affiliated with them, and my parents would prefer someplace closer, and I could maybe even talk people I know in the area to make an appearance... oh, and having a much shorter-term evaluation period is very nice (the thing to do with a hypothesis is to test it, after all). And she did suggest that if WSB doesn't work out, we could look into somewhere else.
Does anyone have any up-to-date (as in, the past 3 years) info on any of these programs? NFB, WSB, some other program I haven't mentioned (after all, this is an international community), anything's game.
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=162007#p162007
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