Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) well it is a fact that blindness presents a challenge in every aspect of life. Anyone who claims otherwise is just naieve or has chosen to be so to bury their head in the sand rather than face reality. Rest assured you are not the only one who had to buy and choose more expensive apliences etc than what they would normally buy had they been sighted for usability. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/601763/#p601763 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Yep, that's true.I guess this bothered me as much as it did because it was the first time I really had to think about it. Having my own resolutions and feelings and desires growing up is all well and good, but that doesn't change how reality works. I mean, I'm normally easily accepting of that, but I have moments I guess. Lol URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/601781/#p601781 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Hi.@musicalman, I'm not sure if this product shhipps outside of the UK but here's a battery charger that talks and things like that: https://www.comproom.co.uk/product/powe … sb-output/For anyone wondering, no; I'm not back perminently, I just thought I'd reply to this post. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/601800/#p601800 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Well, is that the reason you're frustrated with blindness? I mean of course what you're writing here is a big annoyance, but still there are way more reasons to be frustrated with blindness. I am frustrated with blindness if I can't get a job that I like to do, or if I'm at a party and one sighted who has done far less than me in life, is not as handsome as me, gets a cool girl and I'm left with one of the low-ones in the list or nothing. These things really get me bored to a point where I really question if any investment I've made, or any effort I've taken in life is worth anything. It's depressing, it's mentally and physically exhausting, it's anything that has the label bad. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/601804/#p601804 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) I found one more website with the same battery pack that has times for each charge: http://www.caretec.at/Products.31.0.htm … etail=3414 URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/601805/#p601805 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Hi.@musicalman, I'm not sure if this product shhipps outside of the UK but here's a battery charger that talks and things like that: https://www.comproom.co.uk/product/powe … sb-output/I'm back for a day, but will be leaving again, I just knew I could help; so I diddid.This is the best thing for me to do, scramble my password but if I can really help I wil in the future. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/601800/#p601800 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
2020-12-25
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : GrannyCheeseWheel via Audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) @4 Really? You have to turn this into a self-serving whiny thing on Christmas day no less? I'd report you, but it doesn't break any rules. Go then, go and don't look back.@OP I feel ya. My pet peeve is VST plugin inaccessibility. Oh sure, the parameters thing in Osara is great, and we'd be much further behind without that. But what I really mean is the plugins themselves. I'm tired of it. I want to use soft synths and have full access to all the features: the mod matrices, the cycling envelopes, all that stuff we lack now. I want to make patches that really sound epic. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/601811/#p601811 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) @GrannyCheeseWheel christmas doesn't mean much to me, but no, i'm not turning this into a whiny thing at all.I'm stating what is best for me and will be following through with it.I'll wait to see if musicalman responds in a day, if not I leave until I can help again, it's as simple as that. Please don't turn this into something it isn't. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/601826/#p601826 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) @GrannyCheeseWheel, oh crap, there's a keyboard and I can't remember it's name that has a screen reader built in, that you might enjoy either buying or messing around with, I think you need a windows machine though. damn it, if I remember it; I'll post a link in my next post. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/601828/#p601828 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) @https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXU_Q_i3-So&list=PL9IOjFRFjrOlaSN20n8BVup9Sw5pECF_N&index=113That's why I switched to hardware and don't regret it. Yep, it eats money for breakfast, but in the end is definitely worth every euro spent. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/601830/#p601830 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) @GrannyCheeseWheelIt's the KOMPLETE KONTROL s keyboards I was talking about. here's a link, the articles is quite old though but I don't think there's much better accessibility wise for us out there sadly: https://blog.native-instruments.com/tal … dre-louis/I am quite sure you can mess with sliders and things like that on there so you'd be able to make a cool sound, it's pricey though. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/601831/#p601831 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) I'm not quite sure how to put it into words atm, but I'd just like to say that I think I know how you're feeling, and have felt the same way several times.And yeah, of course life's not fair and we have to just suck it up. But sometimes you have to acknowledge how stupid it is that we get half the features, for twice the price. Sometimes you have to complain, to let it out. It won't change anything, but at least the words will be out there and you might feel a bit better. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/601832/#p601832 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
2020-12-25
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : GrannyCheeseWheel via Audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) I already have a Komplete Kontrol keyboard and it doesn't quite do the job.Stop threatening to leave, no one honestly cares at this point, do it or don't, but stop turning this into an attention seeking thing and act right. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/601833/#p601833 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) @GrannyCheeseWheel that sucks aboutthe keyvoard and ok. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/601835/#p601835 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Yeah. I'm not super into music, but I've got a Komplete. The music people I know say it basically is the best out there. But it's really really easy to run into places where it's not accessible even at my level of knowledge, and you're certainly not going to be building custom instruments with it.I think it's entirely fair to be frustrated by this stuff though. For whatever reason, the blind accessible equivalents of anything are suckier than they have to be. For example I'm only aware of one good set of measuring cups that has more than 4 sizes, and I'm not 100% sure they're even still made. One of my pipe dreams that will never happen in all likelihood is to make a platform for this kind of thing, probably around the Raspberry Pi, where you get some sort of base unit and pluggable heads--want the candy thermometer? Put the candy thermometer head on. Etc. If you did it right you could 3D print them on demand through something like Shapeways, then your accessible everything is you and your dad or whatever ordering a bunch of pieces and snapping it all together on a Saturday. But the startup cost of this is taking over a hackerspace and rather more money and time than I have, sadly. It's really feasible, but I have no idea how I'd get funding, so...O well for now.When people like Komplete do accessibility, it's understandable why it's worse. But when people like APH do a graphing calculator and it's literally so bad that it gives people headaches, the excuse is just not there at all. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/601896/#p601896 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
2020-12-25
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : GrannyCheeseWheel via Audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) NI did well at the beginning but gave up and it's year 5 and they've done fuck all except port the changes across to later models of their hardware. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/601910/#p601910 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Maybe NI did better than I give them credit for, but so far as I'm aware, literally the only thing they did is connect knobs on the keyboard to TTS. It's valuable, but to be honest it's also the kind of thing that someone probably did on a lark in a few days to see if it could be done then hey let's release it because it's cool.Admittedly actually making entirely graphical UIs like theirs properly accessible is a monumental undertaking for a whole bunch of technical reasons I could go into, so much so that there's probably under 1 people on the planet who could even try. So fine, the reasons for that are stupid, but it at least makes sense why they wouldn't. But what they did do, someone would have to do a *lot* of explaining before I even rate it as having taken effort.It's fun to play with. When I have the time, I enjoy it. But NI is one of the things I hold up as an example, where they did something and get a lot more points for it than they should because it seems like it's some magical software project that took a ton of work and they had to try really hard. I understand why everyone does that. You have to be a programmer to really see through their bullshit. But it's still annoying to watch. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/601915/#p601915 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) @musicalmanFor the exact same reason you described, I simply try to avoid devices, that run only on batteries and if possible, use cable power.It's also funny, that those recorders, that have a built-in battery, though don't know, if it matters here, but why the hell they can't measure the charge in percentage and only give us the high/mid/low indication.Quite a few of my synths can be battery-powered, but I wouldn't trust that solution for a gig or even simply for making patches/patterns and take that risk of losing shit when the batteries happen to go empty. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/601973/#p601973 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Thanks Brad for the suggestions. I will certainly look into it.Mayana wrote:I'm not quite sure how to put it into words atm, but I'd just like to say that I think I know how you're feeling, and have felt the same way several times.And yeah, of course life's not fair and we have to just suck it up. But sometimes you have to acknowledge how stupid it is that we get half the features, for twice the price. Sometimes you have to complain, to let it out. It won't change anything, but at least the words will be out there and you might feel a bit better.Yes, exactly that. The classic "I'm going to rant but I can't provide a meaningful solution" type of feeling. I generally don't like to indulge that, but I get to a point where I have to, or else go insane.@camlorn, I fully agree with your sentiment, but have been afraid to express it like that. You might get a lot of backlash for it lolI'm not a KK user myself. And even after I feel more confident with doing midi in Reaper, KK is going to be a hard one for me to get to grips with, because I'm not a fan of the idea that you need a controller or else you don't have accessibility. The controller might be great, and if circumstances get to the point where it might actually be convenient for me to get the controller, I would consider it. But for now, I have no space for another controller, and am happy with the keyboards I already have, at least in terms of how they physically work.I feel like getting into KK would require me to learn more about Komplete than the individual instruments I would like to use. I've also heard that installing KK is finicky because you still have to object nav and or oCR your way through a few screens.If the accessibility were in individual products like Kontakt, Massive X etc. i'd jump all over that. And so far as I know anyway, those installers are pretty easy to use. But sadly that's not going to be a thing, at least I don't think it will be for a long while if ever.I also love the idea of designing my own sounds. VSTs in general are already a mixed bag when it comes to that. About 70 percent of the ones I've tried are fully or nearly fully automatable, 20 percent are limited, and 10 percent really don't give you much if at all. But if NI could somehow make even the graphical parts of their UIs accessible, well... I would probably be so excited I would die. I'd probably throw away all my synths and just use Massive X or something lol. I don't dare get my hopes up though.99 percent of people I've asked about this stuff don't seem to be coming from the same place I am. I think KK meets their needs perfectly, and it's just exciting to finally have access to and control over these big epic sounds now. They focus on what KK and the accessibility can do, and not what it can't. Which is great, don't get me wrong. But I like to know the full picture with things, and for me, talking KK sounds like loosening one part of the accessibility knot, without really finding a way to undo it. And yeah, like Camlorn said, it's not an easy problem. They certainly made something which works, and works well for many people. It just could, at least hypothetically, be so much more. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/601996/#p601996 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) @musicalman, I can't find any demos of the thing sorry about that, I'd personally not spend that much money on a device and just charge batteries over night or something like that. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602005/#p602005 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) @19So here is the thing to understand about such people. And if you thought I am going to get backlash for what I said previously, just you wait.Blind people have learned to grovel. That's probably not the best word for it, but I don't think there's a better one, so let's go with it for now.That was probably always the case. Things are much better for us now than 50 years ago, yeah. We're no longer off in the corner. KK accessibility is good and useful, yes. It definitely improved people's lives, yes. Not disputing any of that.But instead of demanding more, or saying "this is really nice, but it's only half the product", we just stop there and fawn over how great it is. People do the same thing with Mac. People do the same thing with Android, though at this point maybe Android has improved. People do this all the time with devices for the blind. No one is saying "my braille measuring cups suck", it's "wow, I'm so grateful that someone makes a child's measuring cup set with braille". And so on. I'm not sure where the accessibility activism is these days, but I almost never hear about any anymore. Where are the people saying "but modern thermostats aren't usable even though they could be and already have speakers, let's legislate" and stuff? Nowhere, really. Instead, we just, well, grovel, and fawn and whatever else when we happen to be given some sort of crap version of whatever it is. Or we go buy the super expensive talking microwave or whatever and are glad that we payed more for the solution because isn't it amazing that my microwave talks rather than just trying to get some raised buttons that would cost literally a penny more on normal microwaves somehow.I've had older blind people tell me, for example, that schools for the blind used to be amazing and you'd leave them with a career. Nowadays they often don't even teach high school level math. Maybe they were always that bad, I don't know. But again, this is somewhere where everyone is just fine with the status quo. Schools for the blind suck. You'd think you'd see some sort of big group or something where all the blind people who went to one and then discovered that they couldn't go to college and are now unemployed got together and did something. It wouldn't take that many or that much, I don't think, just a bunch of press coverage and a bunch of people telling their story and you could get a lot of change going on there. But, again...nope. Not happening, for whatever reason.We've done this with STEM too. Mathplayer doesn't install reliably, it doesn't work for anything above K-12. Graphing calculators all universally suck, even though they don't have to. Everyone is mostly okay with this. If you say something negative, you get backlash. I know because I'm one of the very small minority of blind people who managed to get as far as calculus, and how dare I say "sorry, but these modern tools that are supposed to be so great don't actually work. Congratulations on making something easy to learn, but you've managed to make it entirely ineffective for those of us who want to use it outside middle school". We're even starting to do this with braille. UEB's math codes, which have sort of replaced Nemeth, are like twice the size of the old ones in terms of line length, in an arena where Braille is already bad enough that late high school and college level math has equations going on for 4 lines for each step and the textbooks are 90+ volumes. In 5 years, we'll probably be universally teaching it to people. There goes yet more capability. And, no one is really acting to stop it.I could go on. Look at the first party screen readers. No power user stuff at all. Nothing for those of us who need them at my level, where the trade-off is that extremely hard to learn things that let you go amazingly fast manage to barely put you on par with sighted colleagues. Nope. And here comes our theme again. "Modern Narrator is cool". "Voiceover has some issues, but it's not that bad, really". I've even gotten "not everyone is you, stop being an arrogant asshole" on here once for pointing out that it's basically not possible to be on par with sighted programmers with such tools and without putting the effort in to be one of those crazy fast synth blind people.So, yeah. This isn't a jab at you at all. But the best we get is the occasional rant by someone like you about this topic. It's not a jab because even if you and I wanted to go out and start some sort of organization, we couldn't. You know what blind people seem to care about the most these days? Descriptive TV and mainstream v
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) @Camlorn, I can confirm that blineness schools are horrible, at least nowadays. I went to one for two years, and it was just bad all around. They basically had the mindset of the NFB of, "blind people can do anything!" without actually allowing you to do as much because Algebra is hard or something. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602123/#p602123 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) I know. Trust me. I almost went to one, but as soon as we said "I'm taking honors math, what can you do in that regard" and they said "send you to the high school down the road", that was that. Very much a dodged bullet.Whether they used to be better, as I said I don't know, but I've had people tell me this was the case. It might be nostalgia, but I remember in the 90s and like the 2000 to 2010 era, where it seemed like people saw blind people as...I don't even have the words. Higher potential, I guess. It's like there's been a slow regression from "of course blind people can have jobs and stuff, let's make that happen" to "here's your nice corner". But then we've had steps back in a lot of things lately, so it's all probably just part of that. There should have been way more improvement from tech and stuff than there has actually been.I used to be friends with someone high up at Freedom Scientific back in the day, though they're not there now. I still technically am, we've just lost touch over the years. He says that in the 90s and early 2000s if you called them up and said "this app doesn't work, and I need it for my job", they'd take you seriously and see if they could get it working. That attitude is just gone now, across the whole accessibility industry. It's considered a major win if it works for people afraid of a stove or walking out their front door.Hell, I learned to program initially on a Braille 'N Speak 2000, which also had a graphing calculator that supported printing in Braille, and old braille printers could be connected directly to DOS with a little bit of work, both as a printer and as a speech synthesizer. There were blind programmers in the 80s, for crying out loud.Yes, it is very hard for me to avoid ranting about this topic. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602136/#p602136 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Let's not forget that blind schools seem to have trouble discouraging some of the really silly "blindisms" that make it harder for us to make it in the outside world. There was a drama thread not so long ago where communication came up, and I think this counts to some extent.Canlorn, I'm with you for the most part. Blind folks either criticize the snot out of fucking everything or, more commonly, they fawn when something is 65% accessible instead of the formerly 40% accessible that it used to be. It's good to recognize meaningful progress, but it's more important, I think, to keep pushing for more When my college's web portal wasn't screenreader-friendly at first, I told them right away. They worked on it. When they asked how the updates were, I said, in essence, "Good, a bunch more stuff works now. But here's a list of seven things that don't. I personally only need three of them, but other blind folks will need more". I don't know if all seven were eventually addressed, but the point was that I acknowledged that they were moving but asked them to keep going. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602150/#p602150 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) I don't mind the criticism. I mind the undeserved praise. I think a lot of the modern problems we have are because it's actually very, very easy to lower the bar and very, very hard to raise it again. That's true of everything, but blind people have been doing a great job lowering the bar really fast in my opinion.Obviously criticism without praise isn't great either, but at least it's not just being like "wow, that's a heavy bar, let's drop it on my foot" levels of lowering the bar.My ultimate conclusion is that it's stupid to even work on accessibility anymore, and we should go put all our resources into cures. You'd be surprised how little money cures actually get, and how few groups there are working on it, despite the huge levels of impact it'd have. Far as I know, the number of teams working on brain implants is in the single digits for instance. Same for gene therapies. And so on. But guide dogs for the blind gets like 50 million dollars a year or something stupid like that, and can only serve 1000 or 2000 blind people per year at most. You could literally retire a blind person at 20 and let them spend the rest of their life in the lap of luxury if you just said "here's all the money we'd be willing to spend giving you guide dogs for the rest of your life, we invested it at birth". Imagine if we went and just spent it all on cutting the knot. But as with all the other things I'm mentioning, this is yet another thing that will never happen, because blind people/organizations suck at allocating resources to things that are actually effective. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602180/#p602180 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
2020-12-26
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : GrannyCheeseWheel via Audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) That's one of the reasons I dislike guide dogs. You're talking about a 40 to 60 thousand dollar mobility aid. Surely, since you're supposed to be proficient with cane travel before applying to be a guide dog handler, it would make more sense to adapt new ways of getting sensory information. Some people go through 3 or 4 guide dogs, maybe even more. Sometimes, it can't be helped. Either because of behavioral issues that didn't come up in the program or were brought on by neglectful handling, or health issues, some dogs need to be retired early. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602197/#p602197 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Haha, proficient cane traveler. No, no, you most certainly don't have to be a proficient cane traveler to get one. Proficient here means can cross a road with no traffic. Proficient means I went blind at 50 and have been using a cane for 6 months and bump into everything. That bar is very low. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602200/#p602200 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Camlorn, you make alot of good points in this topic, and have alot of ground to cover here. So you are absolutely correct about blind people having low expectations. This isn't exclusive to the English speaking blind community iether. The same approach is dominant in turkish mailing lists for apple IPhones too. Everyone was fawning over apple like omg this company gave us access for the first time, we should be eternally greatful bullcrap. When I and other people brought up the fact that beta testing of new IOS versions was getting worse, and that some versions had very serious bugs that could prevent using your phone, we were met with backlash. Similarly, the 12 line has a bug where the volume of voice over will just randomly lower and raise on its own, and I reported this to apple, and have been in contact for several weeks, but no blind person ever reported this problem. I'll just say this. If the blind community won't change this attitude, accessibility will continue to regress very quickly. I just think this another aspect of some blind people burying their head in the sand as to the disadvantages or seriousness of being totally blind. And that, brings me to the next point, I am thinking that the reason so little resources are being devoted to cures is because of blindness organizations' efort to depict blindness as an identity trate, such as gender, or race. A huge number of blind people around me seem to be buying the idea that blindness is just a minor annoyance and nothing more. One individual I spoke with also mentioned how lucky we were compared to people undergoing cancer treatment chemotherapy etc, for being blind, which is apparently supposed to be better because it doesn't cause physical pain. This ignores the fact that blindness and other sensory disabilities are arguably worse than having a cronic condition because they are constantt and existential, affecting nearly every aspect of one's life, but more importantly, due to impaired perception of the environment they cause changes in brain structure. For example, for my research I was reading some quotes from some blind people that demonstrated impaired perceptions of the environment. A child apparently was surprised they couldn't touch the cieling in the back yard, and one woman apparently thought planes flapped their wings when they flew for decades.Downplaying blindness also ignores how much worse your condition becomes once you have other disabilities, such as hearing loss, even with a mild/moderate partial hearing loss, the affects are quite noticeable, as your understanding of fast speech becomes impaired and your orientation gets worse because the information you obtain from your environment is unrelyable. I hear the nfb also has chosen to ignore people with multiple disabilities or conditions because it challenges they're view that blind people can achieve the same things if they try hard enough. So basicly I think that the perception of blindness among blind people and their demands have to change before cure development accelerates. Also to kill off the blind identity movement, governments around the world should put in a mandate that if noninvasive, low cost or free and safe treatment becomes available if blind people refuse that treatment they should no longer be considered disabled under the law after a certain time.The downplaying of blindness also seems to have an effect on the demands patient groups with syndromic genetic conditions have I was watching a conference video for a syndromic condition that causes complete blindness at birth and hearing loss later in life that slowly progresses. One of the presenters, a doctor asked the crowd of people and their famlies what they would want researchers to focus on. Every single one of the blind people there said their blindness wasn't a big deal, that they wanted their hearing back and they would be fine. Alot of the families said the same. But I think this is driven by the bias that hearing was a sense that everyone there knew and understood, and so the loss of it slowly is a real and tangible loss. But since noone experienced vision, they don't know what they have lost or its importance, despite the fact that vision would do more for mobility and independance than hearing restoration would. And so all the research focused on hearing loss, which make no mistake is great, but vision might have been easier to fix because of easier access to the back of the eye. The inner ear is protected by the mastoid bone, which cannot be imaged, as well aas both the the blood brain and inner ear blood barrier, so any drug would have to pass through both, which presents a bigger challenge for treating it.well, that was a bit of a long post. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602209/#p602209 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-ref
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) My understanding of the vision versus hearing debate is that hearing is proving to be easier because the neurology is simpler.My understanding of the money problem, which is an impression and not a fact, is that something like 75% of the blindness money never gets used, most of the remaining 25% goes to inane stuff, and like a really tiny fraction of it goes to cures. Quite aside from cures, NVDA should be the most funded project in the history of projects, not by the virtue of being the most valueable thing, but simply by the virtue of if all the orgs gave it like 1/1000th the money they had, there's really just genuinely that much money going around. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602225/#p602225 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) From a neurology standpoint, hearing is easier, but for other reasons I mentioned, it would be harder to deliver a drug or gene therapy you developed to the inner ear. Also, since you can't image the inner ear properly, you can't tell what structural changes happened as a resulkt of treatment or as a result of a condition. That would be like trying to fix a car without being able to see the engine. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602229/#p602229 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Fun fact: it may cost forty thousand dollars to train a guide dog, but that's only because someone decided that it did. The food itself doesn't cost forty grand to produce. The vaccinations and shots and stuff don't cost forty grand to produce. Even if you charged cost for all the absolutely essential items (not services, but items), we're not anywhere close to forty thousand bucks.So it comes down to training. And sure, there's a lot of it. But it isn't guide dogs that are expensive. It's capitalism that's expensive. If I had the ability to train a guide dog, the time to do it, and the freedom to use that time not pursuing a living of my own, and chose to train and certify guide dogs, I could do it for no actual cost. There is a labour cost, certainly, but that should be up to the labourer to determine. So in our real-life scenario, labourers are deciding that same training that cost eighteen thousand dollars two decades ago now costs almost three times that, largely because prices are going up on just about everything, and they have to eat to live.I'm not disagreeing with you about the money being put into cures being entirely too small. I agree completely; we need to do much, much better here. I'm only saying that the money put into accessibility, like guide dogs for instance, is kind of arbitrary, and is more a reflection on capitalism and the need for profit than it is on the actual value of whatever it is that's being bought and paid for. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602255/#p602255 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Jayde, the same can be said for insane screen reader prices, and the millions of dollars jaws scripting can cost. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602259/#p602259 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Jayde, the same can be said for insane screen reader prices, and the millions of dollars jaws scripting can cost. But I do think focusing on a cure primarily is the best solution, and again when I dare to point this out, I get a backlash. I mean blindness not existing at all would fundementally fix all the problems. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602259/#p602259 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) @31Actually, your info is off on guide dogs. They don't cost $4 because it costs that much to train a dog, it costs that much because the rate of attrition is that high. 10 years or so ago, all the guide dog schools switched off German Shepherds to Labs, because Labs only fail out at about 50% and this was considered a major achievement. I was told by people at Guide Dogs for the Blind who probably knew what they were talking about that what makes this even worse is that they usually fail near the end, where you have to get the dog to understand things like when it's okay and not okay to disobey and also you're introducing all the guiding stuff that requires more intellect than what we ask of from most dogs. Apparently the common failure mode here is you end up with a dog that doesn't listen to sit anymore, or just runs you straight off the sidewalk and into the lake or whatever.If we could just flat out train one dog then sure, it'd be less. It's also a terrible allocation of resources to give blind people guide dogs when, as I said, we could just literally retire blind people at the age of 20 with the same amount of money. But as far as I know the people actually doing the training, etc, aren't inflating prices. Say it's $2 each, over a period of 18 months to 2 years, and that's not really even enough to pay the trainer minimum wage. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602262/#p602262 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Camlorn, I have a very simple answer to why so much money is spent on guide dogs rather than retiring blind people. Having a dog gives blind people a sense of independance and accomplishment, that is probably the only reason. In other words, pride. A 4 dollar sense of independence. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602274/#p602274 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) I'm not questioning why money goes there. It's not even about pride. It's about the fact that if you go to a bunch of sighted donors and say "I want to buy blind people puppies and they'll become more independent" everyone is too busy going "yay! Puppies! I would love to donate! Let me just open up my purse, and look, here's $5 in pocket change" in that upper class rich person accent.One of the key things to understand is that most of the money doesn't come from us, and we aren't consulted on where it goes. The people donating to guide dogs aren't asking us if we want a dog because it gives us a sense of independence. It makes them feel good to buy us a puppy. It makes them feel less good to go fund NVDA or get a city to put in some accessible crosswalks. So we get the puppy. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602278/#p602278 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Oh it also seems sighted are more socially accepting of guide dogs rather than canes. Like when a blind person with a dog comes along, they seem to be alot more accepting of that person and less awkward. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602280/#p602280 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Personally I'm not frustrated with blindness, but rather with this mess they call society.I'm not going to ramble here, just said out a sentence and that's it. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602296/#p602296 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Society is only a smalll, mostly tiny part of the problem. The main problems blindness has, are caused directly as a result of being blind, e.g not being able to drive, not by society. Fact is, making things accessible for a blind person is more challenging than say, making something accessible to someone in a wheel chair. The number of things that have to be made accessible, and the scope of those accomidations is significant. Like for example, a whole new code of writing had to be invented just so the blind could read. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602302/#p602302 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) I have personally have seven years of blind schooling, from the first standard to the seventh. and let me tell you, whatever problems I do have regarding math, it is their fault.True, you can argue that I was probably wasn't a great student or something, but tell me. Who the hell actually doesn't explain the order of precedence before algebra? Who was it who didn't explain what the hell is this thing called bracket even is? And don't even get me started on how fucked up things were with fractions and decimals were. No wonder that I have to go through khanacademy to fix the mess of my math skills.As for the guide dogs, they aren't even a thing here in India. I don't know of any organization which offers them here. But to be honest, I rather not go out here, the streets are very dangerous with packs of street dogs, out of control drivers, unrestrained cows... Even if you have a cane it is a high chance that you might end up hospitalized.Also a cure sounds nice, even if it comes during my fifties or sixties. And I completely agree, that it should overall receive more resources for the research.Too bad that I am not a billionaire. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602331/#p602331 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) On the topic of cures: I really don't know if I'll want one. My mom wants me to get one, but of course she does because she doesn't think that I should have a say in anything, but I don't know, honestly. It would be nice to drive, but A) I'm starting to come to terms with my blindness. It used to really smack me down, for days at a time. And I've just started working on that, and B) I don't know if it would be worth it to basically learn how to live again. I'm already going to have to do that because my family has taught me very little home/life skills, and I really don't want to have to again. Being able to drive and such would be nice, however. It's a hard choice. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602345/#p602345 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) damn it. and here I am frustrated because I don’t know and I don’t even have the courage to get a girlfriend, but look at the guy’s frustration! blind who never studied in school with people who can see and is super protected is tense. best post I've ever read in my life, it almost made me spit out the salty I was eating from laughing. I am frustrated because I was born blind, I never rode a bike, and I never saw Mario and Luigi running for another adventure. fuck, not even the sun I never saw! but it is life that goes on. and to finish this stupid writing of mine with the Google translator, that's all I say. BK trilogy forever! URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602344/#p602344 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) frustrated is it? I already saw it and it’s not 1000 wonders. just be who you are and accept yourself. when that happens, you will improve as a person. accepting is the first step. the secret is to really fight without having a support. here where I live is not capitalism that decided to put accessibility on the streets or anything else, but the people who aim for more accessibility in the world. I can only say one thing, what limits us is ignorance URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602360/#p602360 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
2020-12-27
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : GrannyCheeseWheel via Audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) To the people who are essentially saying, just deal with it, that's straight up ignorant. First of all, I'd be very surprised if every single one of you on here who are actually real people and not bots haven't felt this way at least once in your life. I'd be skeptical if you told me that you haven't. I know I have, and sometimes it's harder to deal with than others. Certain external factors apart from the blindness angle can influence the way you feel. So, if you have a mild irritation about the way something is going in your life, and it's related to blindness, then you start to feel down for other reasons, it very well could culminate in a depressive episode.In the end, it's true that we'll just have to deal with it. For the minute though, give OP some space to get his feelings out. It can be quite cathartic and release a sense of mounting pressure. I know it has been for me in the past, and the most recent example is my post about wanting to do drugs. Before anyone even replied to it, I started feeling a little better just because I got the words out.I know that a lot of the user base are children and teens, and it's a bit much to expect them to get this, but just for your information, a better approach would be to come at this from a supportive angle rather than one of condemnation. Also, some of you are definitely old enough that these types of things should be well within your level of understanding. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602371/#p602371 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
2020-12-27
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : GrannyCheeseWheel via Audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) To the people who are essentially saying, just deal with it, that's straight up ignorant. First of all, I'd be very surprised if every single one of you on here who are actually real people and not bots haven't felt this way at least once in your life. I'd be skeptical if you told me that you haven't. I know I have, and sometimes it's harder to deal with than others. Certain external factors apart from the blindness angle can influence the way you feel. So, if you have a mild irritation about the way something is going in your life, and it's related to blindness, then you start to feel down for other reasons, it very well could culminate in a depressive episode.In the end, it's true that we'll just have to deal with it. For the minute though, give OP some space to get his feelings out. It can be quite cathartic and release a sense of mounting pressure. I know it has been for me in the past, and the most recent example is my post about wanting to do drugs. Before anyone even replied to it, I started feeling a little better just because I got the words out.I know that a lot of the user base are children and teens, and it's a bit much to expect them to get this, but just for your information, a better approach would be to come at this from a supportive angle rather than one of condemnation. Also, some of you are definitely old enough that these types of things should be well within your level of understanding.One more thing to add. I've seen much, much more whiny and self-entitled posts on here than OP's. Of those types of posts, they don't always get the type of backlash I'd expect. So I hope the ones that are saying these things aren't the same ones letting much whinier posts slide, because that would just be silly. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602371/#p602371 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) @41I have covered this on here so many times, but being sighted doesn't mean relearning anything. If it's a problem, just close your eyes when you don't need it. It won't be a problem, but if it is, the eyes still close. Everyone treats this like it just fundamentally rewrites your life the day you get it and suddenly o my god, have to learn how sighted people do everything immediately. No. It doesn't. It gives you the choice to see, you can use that as much or as little as you want. You can play videogames and work on learning to drive and enjoy movies and all that, just generally do whatever things you want to do with vision, then go straight back to using a screen reader or reading braille or using a cane or whatever else it is you're afraid is going to be taken away as soon as you can see, and slowly work on becoming as much or as little of a sighted person as you want to be for lack of a better way to put it.Also, irregardless of career, being sighted probably doubles your salary within the first couple years of being sighted, or even gets you a job in the first place. And this also applies very much to programmers, etc etc etc. I'm guessing you're another person in the "I've never had vision, what's the big deal" camp. But look at it this way: anything that increases choices without taking other choices away is good, and this one at least doubles the choices available to you, job, hobbies, any of that. Just, poof, doubled.If I recall you're young. At the moment you're in an environment where a lot of the blindness difficulties aren't hitting you. Even the countries that do terrible at blindness are very good at insulating kids from the sorts of frustrations this thread is about. When you turn 18, most of those things just shut down and go "enjoy the world". It'll hit you hard then. This is especially true in the U.S., if that's where you are. In the U.S., school gives you a lot of things no questions asked, even in the bad places. You can't get braille as an adult trying to do college for example, not unless you're super lucky and go to one of the very few schools in the U.S. that can do it. Travel becomes 2-3 hours one way for most people, or you pay $50+ per day for Uber or whatever. And so on.I remember your other thread about your parents, and I don't want to take away from that sucking, but even if they're the shittiest parents on the face of the earth, they're also free assistants. They're taking care of a lot of sighted stuff that blind people have trouble with, and replacing them as an adult is very expensive. I mean hell, just wait until you get your first paper-only bills. Or, here's a good one. You have to cash a check, your bank's app is inaccessible, and the value of the check costs less than getting Uber both ways. Or "Hi, I'm from Instacart and I replaced half your groceries because the store was out. Byeee!" URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602376/#p602376 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) @44 just close your eyes when you don't need it. I'm not being sarcastic, but this makes a lot of sence. I asure you I'm not being sarcastic. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602377/#p602377 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
2020-12-27
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : GrannyCheeseWheel via Audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) There are too many variables to account for so unless this is someone's field of study, or they've personally gone through the process of gaining sight when they've had none, they're not really qualified to say how challenging it will be. Closing your eyes when you've reached your limit seems simple enough until you account for the fact that vision is the most highly prioritized sense we have as humans. Then we get into speculative territory which wonders if one begins to start using vision, will they be able to maintain their blindness related skills? If not, will the person at least experience a smooth enough cross fade that the diminished blindness related skills follows after improved visual perceptivity. Just as when we lose vision over time, there will come a point when we must start adapting our navigational skills, I'm sure the same holds true for gaining vision. Except we're met with the challenge that what we get will likely come at once, and even if it doesn't, the rate of improvement is likely to be more rapid than the rate of decline in people who lose their vision. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602381/#p602381 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Why does everyone feel the need to take the cure discussion and turn it into maybe the cure won't be perfect? That's like debating in bad faith 101. Obviously if the cure's not perfect and comes with weird side effects this is a different discussion, but that's what clinical trials are for. This discussion always goes the same way: as soon as someone points out all the advantages of sight and that being all conflicted about it is really silly, we change the definition of cure rather than just conceding the argument.This thing has so many side effects that it's useless, this thing only restores 1% of vision, whatever else, those are at best called treatments and at worst called failures. They aren't what is being debated every time anyone anywhere starts the cure discussion. "Under what circumstances can we cure blindness?" is an interesting discussion, sadly still an open question, and the one where "maybe neuroplasticity" or whatever is relevant. But trying to shift one discussion into the other to turn "I don't know if I want the cure because identity" or whatever into anything but a statement of ignorance, anxiety, or an ableist background isn't productive or helping our cause, in the same way that all the other things I've brought up here aren't productive and helping our cause. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602391/#p602391 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) @Camlorn, I suppose you're right. It just seems like a big, scarry thing. To be fair though, as you know, well I just, as in yesterday, turned 15, so that's how the hole world seems at the moment. The jobs/independence are pretty good points, too. I've had vision before, but I was too young to remember it. A lot of people make it out to be like, "You must stop using a screen reader! You can see now!" And while I know that's not actually how it is? It scares me nonetheless. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602395/#p602395 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
2020-12-27
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : GrannyCheeseWheel via Audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) It would be odd not to be scared. Maybe it would be a problem if that fear completely ruled the decision making process of whether to go for a cure if one should become available, but it's natural. It's a complete paradigm shift which will reshape your reality.@47 I fail to see how it's debating in bad faith. At least, in the points I raised, I stayed away from opinions on whether I or anyone else should go for a cure. You could say my premise is shaky, and I agree, because there are huge gaps in my knowledge of how this stuff works. But that's why I presented it the way I did. As speculation, rather than trying to state it as fact. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602397/#p602397 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Camlorn, another advantage of going for vision, if you have other disabilities or medical conditions, learning to use vision will minimize the impact of those conditions on your life compared to when you were blind. Also to those asking if you will be able to maintain blindness skills? Why would you? Sight is a superior sense to hearing etc in most aspects, at least based on the research I did. Those skills would be a backup and mostly obsolete if you had vision.And On grocerry delivery, I have had more annoying shit happen, like the person getting me 14! pounds of bananas instead of 14, and charging me for those, having rotting produce, spoiled meats, substantially different replacements, getting 1 of an item instead of 2, and being charged for the second. I basicly have to double check all my bags to see that I got everything and nothing is missing. You can get refunds for damaged items, and if you have an American Express card, that allows you to dispute charges successfully if you can't reach them or they refuse to refund charges. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602413/#p602413 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) when I was a kid, I lost my sight about when I was 9 years old.so i thought ... now i won't be able to go to the street? play soccer? skating? bishop?then I raised my head and made a loud reflection! will it really limit me? for real?will i let it hit me?of course not.so I went to the street, played ball with my friends, walked in sikate, biscleta, etc etc etc ...the only thing that was limited was my studies, but not because of my blindness, but because of the school that had no support to shelter a blind man.I know and see cases every day that people who see are more so let's say "dumb" than many smart blind people out there.understand, it is not blindness that limits you, but your insecurity, your fear of things always going wrong because you blind think that because people will look at you like an alien, oh! my god there's a blind man over there let's run!I learned never to care about that kind of thing, always with a smile and joy that infects people so that everyone can live in peace.then i ask you is it really worth just suffering for something that is material and mundane, having the guarantee that you will die someday?or is it better to live your life intensely facing problems with a smile on your face? in. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602422/#p602422 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) you will see from reading the rest of the topic that our problems are directly related to blindness. Though I never claimed that we shouldn't move on with our lives. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602427/#p602427 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Here is another thing which people might like to read here.My house is getting painted, so naturally all the rooms have to be emptied out, including mine.Can you imagine how does it feel when you watch your family struggling to move things, and set up temporary sleeping arrangement and such, while you just sit in the corner?Here's another example. My dad was hospitalized because of an accident in April 2020, since he works for the government, and according to the government, you do have to work, whether there's lockdown or not, regardless of your age and service you have already provided.so, when he went to a petrol pump, he failed to see the rope which was there to stop people from coming there since it was closed. (And I suppose that it was too much of an effort to put the sign of "We're closed.") because of the reflection of the sunlight, (And I do suspect that his eyesight is deteriorating slowly as well.)So, he lost the control of his bike, and the bike fell on top of him, snapping his left hip-joint, requiring an emergency operation, otherwise he would have lost the leg since the bloodflow completely stopped.If it weren't for my sister and her friend, imagine how hard it would have been for my mother to manage this. they took him to the hospital for the operation, in the time where the doctors were turning the patients away no matter how urgent, and when he was brought home, you know what I felt?A lot of self loathing. I couldn't help him in any shape or form during this whole crisis, aside from sitting grimly in my hall's sofa, listening his groans of pain.And here people talk about "Oh, you can do anything. Oh, it is part of you, accept it. Oh it is your identity, don't run from it."Ever since my late teenage years, when I got off from my high horse, and started to notice things around me properly, I have very few occasions to feel like this. But each and every time, my confidence takes a battering, and I always retreat into my room, and try to drown out everything with youtube or something. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602457/#p602457 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
2020-12-27
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : GrannyCheeseWheel via Audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) yeah it really annoys me when people say blindness has no limitations. Bullshit it doesn't. If it didn't, I'd be long haul trucking, flying commercial airlines as a first officer if not captain by now, riding a motorcycle in the summer. Just because those things don't matter to someone, doesn't mean that they don't matter to anyone. So yes, blindness does have limitations. definitely not as much as people would like to believe though. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602461/#p602461 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) @53Me, my brother, and most other blind people I know in person would be able to take care of someone with a broken leg. Also my brother, also blind, literally helps paint. Obviously nothing fine detail, and some help is needed at the end, but you can totally do the big part where you take a roller and roll it on the wall. Neither of these tasks requires any particular skill beyond whoever's leading it being willing to involve you and, in the case of painting, whatever perverse desire makes my brother decide that painting a wall is fun.I suspect everyone's busy not trusting you with this stuff, but being in front of someone who might fall so they can grab your shoulders or whatever doesn't really require much sight or even particularly good mobility skills as long as you're talking about your house. Unless you're just sitting there not even trying, put the blame on the people relegating you to the couch because obviously the blind person is useless in that situation, not on yourself. Just being there in the case of emergencies and otherwise doing nothing at all is sufficient to allow the rest of the family to leave you and dad home alone, but I suspect they didn't even do that based off how you're talking about this. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602463/#p602463 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) @53Me, my brother, and most other blind people I know in person would be able to take care of someone with a broken leg. Also my brother, also blind, literally helps paint. Obviously nothing fine detail, and some help is needed at the end, but you can totally do the big part where you take a roller and roll it on the wall. Neither of these tasks requires any particular skill beyond whoever's leading it being willing to involve you and, in the case of painting, whatever perverse desire makes my brother decide that painting a wall is fun.I suspect everyone's busy not trusting you with this stuff, but being in front of someone who might fall so they can grab your shoulders or whatever doesn't really require sight or even particularly good mobility skills as long as you're talking about your house. Unless you're just sitting there not even trying, put the blame on the people relegating you to the couch because obviously the blind person is useless in that situation, not on yourself. Just being there in the case of emergencies and otherwise doing nothing at all is sufficient to allow the rest of the family to leave you and dad home alone, but I suspect they didn't even do that based off how you're talking about this. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602463/#p602463 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) @55:You are correct. they don't trust me with with this at all, and thus I don't have any other way to prove myself.Of course, this didn't meant that I didn't help him whatever way I could, even something small as filling his water bottle is something I grabbed with both hands.I of course, have tried to change their mindset. But it is difficult to change, I am sure anyone here would understand that part.Also, on the side note, if you do know any blind programmers from 80's, please send them my way. I would like to interview them for my upcoming blog, which will hopefully be up by the March, or the June at the very least. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602465/#p602465 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) @56Yeah, but like. When it's someone else putting arbitrary limitations on you that don't make sense, don't feel bad that you did nothing, get mad at the appropriate party for it.Also, sadly, I don't know the aforementioned programmers from the 80s. It's something I know about some because a professor from college apparently worked with one at Disney, and a few other people who are old enough to have been around then have mentioned such things in passing. But I'm not even 30, and I wasn't seriously programming until 2010, so I'm way too young. Screen readers, braille displays, and the like were in their infancy, but they did actually exist that far back. You had to literally plug external hardware units into your computer for speech synthesis and stuff, but nonetheless it could be done.I imagine very few people here know that jaws for DOS was a thing. In fact, nowadays it's a free thing: in the late 1990s or early 2000s Blazie (what is now Freedom Scientific) stopped caring and posted it for free. Not sure where to get a copy though, it's been a very long time since then and I don't even know how you'd get it running because you need specialized synth hardware for it since DOS didn't really have audio, let alone enough spare processing power and the like.If you want to go even further back, look up the Optacon. I want an Optacon, but no one makes them anymore. It was sufficient to allow a few blind people to complete a college degree in the 60s via conversion of print to tactile stimuli using piezoelectric reeds. Nowadays no one cares because OCR apps, but that thing could just work for anything with print, light detection, use it on the freaking microwave, even graphics supposedly. One of my pipe dreams is to figure out how to get the right sort of friends to start building them with more modern tech. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602470/#p602470 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) @57:I'll say it it though, that it doesn't happen to me regularly. But when it happens, it kind of hurts.Also, if I ever became indipendently wealthy, I'll probably spend a lot of time with such projects. I have something like a USB chess board for us as well, which I admit is not unique since apparently sighted people do have it.But I think something like that would be really helpful for us in playing chess on computer, since again, algebraic notation is fine, but there is no alternative to making connections with the position on the board with eyes, or in our case, hands. The cognative load also reduces, so the strategies also come easily. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602472/#p602472 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Unfortunately, I doubt that 2d usb chessboard is feasible if you're talking about tactile feedback, e.g. a 2 dimensional braille display. Every design I've thrown at the wall for that has had one or another practical problem, but maybe one day I'll have the aforementioned hackerspace friends to really try for it and someone whose expertise is electronics and all the bits I don't know about. APH managed to get one going, but it's pretty low resolution and costs $15000 USD. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602476/#p602476 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Ok so one point people mentioned. 54, you say blindness doesn't impose as many limitations as people imagine. But I would argue it does on everything nearly, which is the limitation of time. Even when you can do a task that a sighted person can, you take alot longer to achieve the same task as you spend more time on tasks than sighted people do, that leaves alot less time for other tasks.. This itself is a limitation. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602481/#p602481 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) @60 do you know what effort is? if not, i think i should know him. @55finally something cool here URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602735/#p602735 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) aah how typical, since you can't make a point or sustain an argument, you resort to knitpicking spelling, which ironically is also a problem unique to blindness. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602744/#p602744 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) enes wrote:aah how typical, since you can't make a point or sustain an argument, you resort to knitpicking spelling, which ironically is also a problem unique to blindness.Wow never thought I'd see a 100% approval of nitpicking spelling, but there it is. Normally I don't like those but think that was appropriate, because sometimes the extra effort we need to put in is too much. Also, sometimes people don't let you help, and you get tired of coming up with things to do but not being able to: And I'm in the lucky category of blind people! URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602792/#p602792 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) enes wrote:aah how typical, since you can't make a point or sustain an argument, you resort to knitpicking spelling, which ironically is also a problem unique to blindness.Wow never thought I'd see a 100% approval of nitpicking spelling, but there it is. Normally I don't like those but think that was appropriate, because sometimes the extra effort we need to put in is too much. Also, sometimes people don't let you help, and you get tired of coming up with things to do but not being able to. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602792/#p602792 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) enes wrote:aah how typical, since you can't make a point or sustain an argument, you resort to knitpicking spelling, which ironically is also a problem unique to blindness.yep agreed. because sometimes the extra effort we need to put in is too much. Also, sometimes people don't let you help, and you get tired of coming up with things to do but not being able to. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602792/#p602792 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) enes wrote:aah how typical, since you can't make a point or sustain an argument, you resort to knitpicking spelling, which ironically is also a problem unique to blindness.yep agreed. because sometimes the extra effort we need to put in is too much. Also, sometimes people don't let you help, and you get tired of coming up with things to do but not being able to. Wish more of us would submit bugs to Google, Microsoft, and Apple though. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602792/#p602792 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) enes wrote:aah how typical, since you can't make a point or sustain an argument, you resort to knitpicking spelling, which ironically is also a problem unique to blindness.yep agreed. because sometimes the extra effort we need to put in is too much. Also, sometimes people don't let you help, and you get tired of coming up with things to do but not being able to. I hear a lot of people should struggle as much as I had to in these rebuddles to these situations, whether you mean to write that or not. Blindness is hard.Wish more of us would submit bugs to Google, Microsoft, and Apple though. LOL. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602792/#p602792 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) enes wrote:aah how typical, since you can't make a point or sustain an argument, you resort to knitpicking spelling, which ironically is also a problem unique to blindness.yep agreed. because sometimes the extra effort we need to put in is too much. Also, sometimes people don't let you help, and you get tired of coming up with things to do but not being able to. I hear a lot of people should struggle as much as I had to in these rebuddles to these situations, whether you mean to write that or not. Blindness is hard, and that's immature to say that IMPO .Wish more of us would submit bugs to Google, Microsoft, and Apple though. LOL. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602792/#p602792 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) enes wrote:aah how typical, since you can't make a point or sustain an argument, you resort to knitpicking spelling, which ironically is also a problem unique to blindness.yep agreed. because sometimes the extra effort we need to put in is too much. Also, sometimes people don't let you help, and you get tired of coming up with things to do but not being able to. I hear a lot of people should struggle as much as I had to in these rebuddles to these situations, whether you mean to write that or not. Blindness is hard, and that's immature to say that IMPO in many cases.Wish more of us would submit bugs to Google, Microsoft, and Apple though. LOL. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602792/#p602792 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) That is another good point. Alot of times something will be so exhausting or require so much time and efort that I will say fuck it and do something else or not put in the extra energy. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602805/#p602805 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Yep: I'm not trying to excuse bad behavior but I mean as blind people we judge others way to much, because we all have to struggle so much, compared to the norm. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602813/#p602813 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Yep: I'm not trying to excuse bad behavior but I mean as blind people we judge others way to much, because we all have to struggle so much, compared to the norm. No easy answers... URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602813/#p602813 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Yep: I'm not trying to excuse bad behavior but I mean as blind people we judge others way to much, because we all have to struggle so much, compared to the norm. No easy answers, but compassion isn't that hard. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602813/#p602813 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) It's very common for sighted individuals, strangers, friends or family, to be overly excited to help a blind person. Very frequently, this behavior holds the assumption that the blind or low vision individual requires assistance, although this might not reflect reality. We might perform a regular task slower but that doesn’t mean we're incapable of completing it. Rushing to help the blind without asking or being asked to do so, makes us feel helpless instead of independent. Moreover, not allowing a blind individual perform a task by themselves, does not give them the room to learn how to do so independently. e.g. If you walk with a cane on a map which you never traveled and you are using Google Map, first time, you will take 40 minutes, whereas if you are with somebody who is sighted, you will take 20 minutes. If you travel alone second time, you will take 35/30 minutes, and the time will reduce, because we will know the presence of pits and others and etc.Blindness is hardSociety has made it hard. Everyone, weather sighted, blinds, and people suffering with other impairments have to struggle in one way or the other, it's a part of our life. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602818/#p602818 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) is there really value in performing a task in 45 minutes just for performing it totally alone? I mean, why should someone spend 45 minutes trying to figure out a street when they can just ask someone? That defys reason. That just feels like idiocy to me. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602841/#p602841 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) But I would argue it does on everything nearly, which is the limitation of time. Even when you can do a task that a sighted person can, you take alot longer to achieve the same task as you spend more time on tasks than sighted people do, that leaves alot less time for other tasks.. This itself is a limitation.I mean, why should someone spend 45 minutes trying to figure out a street when they can just ask someone? That defys reason. That just feels like idiocy to me.I see. Changing your stance? By this way, you said it yourself, most of the limitations have a solution, but needs to be figured out. Who said it will be a street every time? What if you had to travel by another way which is very quiet? There is nobody around? Suppose, the way which takes you to your work place is closed due to road construction or something and you had to take another, quiet, rough way? You may be more experienced than I am. But sometimes people offer to help rather than telling us the way, because they don't want our cane, and us to bump with any object. And if we allow them to help us, we maybe more relaxed sometimes, sometimes we may even not note from what kind of area we are passing by. Just a quick note, I am not much experienced in this walking thing, I am just a learner, I am open to all opinions, feel free to correct. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602860/#p602860 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) @ 62a, I give up arguing with you.everything for you is the limitation of blindness. and mimimi.seriously try this? think otherwise.anyway, goodbye URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602862/#p602862 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) I think it's important to know how to solve problems yourself. You cannot always rely on help. So even if learning a solution takes time, and enacting that solution takes time, it should be available to you wherever practically possible.Example: if you're travelling, you may be able to ask which street you're on if you hear pedestrians around you. However, if you're in a quiet part of town, or if you're out late at night/early in the morning, that help may not be available. My go-to is that you should be able to travel independently if you have to (which may include having the ability to call for help if you're stranded, since that is a last resort but a viable one). If you can't do that, at a minimum, you shouldn't travel alone, but you should absolutely put effort into learning.This goes for other skills as well. Try, fail, figure it out. Ask for help in figuring it out. Then keep your skills sharp wherever you can.I agree completely, however, with the idea that taking extra time for no good reason is arguably pretty silly. I feel no particular shame in having to ask for help if I manage to get myself into a bad situation while travelling. Once, for instance, my phone got so cold that it stopped working, which meant I couldn't easily check which street I was on. So when I heard some people talking, I walked over and asked them which street I was on. Could I have scavenged for clues and figured it out myself? Yeah, probably. But this saved me time. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602872/#p602872 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
2020-12-29
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : GrannyCheeseWheel via Audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) NFB people will do this. They'll literally freeze to death before asking someone. This is why I don't like them and don't respect their philosophy. I'd rather know how to do something myself rather than ask for help all the time, but if it comes down to it, I will ask. It's not exactly fair that we need to put in 3X the effort as our sighted peers, but c'est la vie. We don't have control over that shit, so why worry about it. We're blind, it's going to cause problems, we're going to have to learn to solve them, and even anticipate them before they come up. The ones who do this will most likely be successful in life; the ones that don't will probably not be. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602877/#p602877 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Jayde wrote:however, with the idea that taking extra time for no good reason is arguably pretty silly.Uh I agree. I did not mean to say you will have to walk alone no matter what, this is just an example for completion of tasks. If we take a little more time than sighted people, there is no harm in it is there? Sorry, did not got any other example, studying for 15 hours for exams and sitting on chair for 15 to 16 hours screws up brain lol. By the way, thumbs up to Jayde and GrannyIronChese URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602881/#p602881 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) What I was doing was rejecting the NFB-style philosophy which says that you can't ask for help, or shouldn't. When they're training you, it makes sense not to get an easy bail-out unless you're totally screwed and completely panicked or something. But once you're in the real world again, I say use the skills you have as much as you can, and ask for help if you feel like it. As it happens, I don't actually ask for help much, and will sometimes refuse it politely when it's offered without my asking because I'm fairly independent.However, I have a pretty big problem with people who take that to an extreme. If all you do is let people do stuff for you, you're never going to be self-actualized enough to do for yourself what others are doing for you. It doesn't matter how many good wishes are aimed your way from these people either. Sometimes it will take literally just doing a thing until you figure it out.Example: say you've got a family member who has been maimed (broken leg, let's say) and is on pain pills. Rather than just sit passively by while others bring that family member their pain meds, figure out what's needed and when, then stick your neck out and do it yourself. If you're immediately recoiling in horror and thinking, "But Jayde, what if I give him the wrong pill? I might kill him!", that won't happen, not if you're careful at any rate. If there are other family members present at some point, ask to touch the bottle of pain meds, just so you know which one it is. If there's a label on it but it's otherwise identical to other medicine bottles in the house, bend or tear a corner of the label a bit for easy touch identification.Or, if you think this is too out-there and weird a step to take, do things like asking the people in your household if you can get them things when you get up to get yourself something. If you find a dirty dish on a table, pick it up and put it in the sink. Do things proactively instead of only when you're told. Eventually, your family will get the picture.Part of the problem with overprotective family members is that people let themselves be protected. This is by no means the only problem, of course, but it's one of them. You have to take that person's power away before you can expect anything to change, and part of that involves doing things for yourself. When they leap up and say "No no, I've got it", move faster. Or, if you really want to set the cat among the pigeons, step into their path and tell them that if they're going to get it for you, you don't want it/won't accept it. If it's something you don't know how to do, demand that you be taught. Really rock the boat on this one. You will win the battle eventually, unless your family is crazy enough to try and lock you into a room or tie you to your bed or something. Making one token show of resistance or uncertainty or independence isn't enough to show some people that you really, truly mean business. The good news, however, is that most people who are close to you will probably come on board with the idea of empowering you, to some extent, if you keep at it. Hell, I'm still working on both my parents. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602885/#p602885 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) A question: if you guys really don't like how the blind organizations are training blind people, then do you think that they should actually ask older and more experienced blind people to train the younger ones, (Such as yourselves?) URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602894/#p602894 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Well, where do I start?Firstly, I totally agree that accessibility has indeed improved in comparison to where we were in the past decades, but it's still not optimal all the way.The problem that I am facing from time to time though is that, even if I try to get in touch with certain companies or organizations concerning their products and their accessibility, the only thing I get in a lot of cases is an Email saying something like "Thank you for your feedback, we keep it in mind and work on it" and yet nothing happened.I don't give up though, because on the other hand there are companies who stayed in touch with me and keep asking if there is anything they could possibly do to make their product more accessible.One example is a ride-sharing service operating in Hamburg. You can book a ride with an app and, after the booking process, you can check your status and when/where your car will pick you up. And here were a couple of problems to mention:Firstly, certain buttons and gestures in their app were inaccessible with either VoiceOver or Talkback.Secondly, you could only review information such as the pick-up spot on a map, which couldn't be announced by the screenreader.Third, there is no option for both, you and the driver, to get in touch in order to find each other in worst case. Fortunately they don't charge you if you have missed your ride, but especially on bigger and more crowded squares it is especially difficult to find your car as a blind person.Anyway, after pointing out the issues I had and how to possibly fix them, I only got the usual thank you Email and they went silent. About 3 months later, however, they invited me and other blind and visually impaired users into their headquarters for a co-creation day where we discussed the issues we had in detail and tested their app together with ann app developer. A few weeks later, they released an update to their app which squashed most of the accessibility issues we were pointing out.From time to time, there have been updates which screwed up the accessibility a little, but whenever somebody contacted them to point out the issue, they fixed it in one of their next updates.This is how it could work, and it would of course be most ideal if other companies would react the same way.One issue I still keep nagging about is the fact that you cannot get in touch with the driver or at least leave a note for the driver with some additional information about how he or she could recognize you and/or that you are blind. Most of the drivers keep telling me that, if they knew that I was blind, they would have looked out for me more closely; and as long as a feature like that is not introduced, I keep bringing it up, hoping to see it in some of their future updates someday.Concerning schools for the blind, I'm not sure if you were only referring to schools in the US or generally to schools all over the globe, but I have been a student of the BLISTA, an institute for the blind and visually impaired people in Germany offering different kinds of courses and school training.At least as highschool was concerned, it worked just fine for me, and most teachers put a lot of effort in making their material accessible. However, I did struggle with Maths a lot, but I had the feeling that it depended on the teacher whether he or she was able to explain things.Some teachers couldn't explain certain tasks and calculations to me, whereas other class-mates or teachers only needed about 2 minutes to make me understand the same topic the other teacher couldn't explain to me.So, in a nutshell, understanding what certain teachers tried to teach us was a bigger problem for me than accessibility in first place.However, as soon as I passed the 10th grade and started attending a different course, it turned out that, once graduated, it wouldn't help me at all because of too less qualifications for a propper job, so I cancelled before graduation and went for an IT sales training at the same institute.I graduated now and found a great, suitable job starting in January, but if I knew in beforehand how theoretical the traineeship actually was, I would have possibly chosen another company for my training to gain some more practical experiences I can work with when eventually job-seeking.But to wrap it up: Thanks to the BLISTA I became a lot more independent than during my first few years of school where I rather relied on my friends who'd guide me around so I just needed to put the minimum effort in getting independent myself, and they got me much further than an ordinary school in my region could have got me at that time.Nevertheless, they should for sure improve some of their courses they are offering, such as the IT course so we don't end up frustrated because we graduated, but with insufficient qualifications or a lack of practical experiences that might come
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Well, where do I start?Firstly, I totally agree that accessibility has indeed improved in comparison to where we were in the past decades, but it's still not optimal all the way.The problem that I am facing from time to time though is that, even if I try to get in touch with certain companies or organizations concerning their products and their accessibility, the only thing I get in a lot of cases is an Email saying something like "Thank you for your feedback, we keep it in mind and work on it" and yet nothing happened.I don't give up though, because on the other hand there are companies who stayed in touch with me and keep asking if there is anything they could possibly do to make their product more accessible.One example is a ride-sharing service operating in Hamburg. You can book a ride with an app and, after the booking process, you can check your status and when/where your car will pick you up. And here were a couple of problems to mention:Firstly, certain buttons and gestures in their app were inaccessible with either VoiceOver or Talkback.Secondly, you could only review information such as the pick-up spot on a map, which couldn't be announced by the screenreader.Third, there is no option for both, you and the driver, to get in touch in order to find each other in worst case. Fortunately they don't charge you if you have missed your ride, but especially on bigger and more crowded squares it is especially difficult to find your car as a blind person.Anyway, after pointing out the issues I had and how to possibly fix them, I only got the usual thank you Email and they went silent. About 3 months later, however, they invited me and other blind and visually impaired users into their headquarters for a co-creation day where we discussed the issues we had in detail and tested their app together with ann app developer. A few weeks later, they released an update to their app which squashed most of the accessibility issues we were pointing out.From time to time, there have been updates which screwed up the accessibility a little, but whenever somebody contacted them to point out the issue, they fixed it in one of their next updates.This is how it could work, and it would of course be most ideal if other companies would react the same way.One issue I still keep nagging about is the fact that you cannot get in touch with the driver or at least leave a note for the driver with some additional information about how he or she could recognize you and/or that you are blind. Most of the drivers keep telling me that, if they knew that I was blind, they would have looked out for me more closely; and as long as a feature like that is not introduced, I keep bringing it up, hoping to see it in some of their future updates someday.Concerning schools for the blind, I'm not sure if you were only referring to schools in the US or generally to schools all over the globe, but I have been a student of the BLISTA, an institute for the blind and visually impaired people in Germany offering different kinds of courses and school training.At least as highschool was concerned, it worked just fine for me, and most teachers put a lot of effort in making their material accessible. However, I did struggle with Maths a lot, but I had the feeling that it depended on the teacher whether he or she was able to explain things.Some teachers couldn't explain certain tasks and calculations to me, whereas other class-mates or teachers only needed about 2 minutes to make me understand the same topic the other teacher couldn't explain to me.So, in a nutshell, understanding what certain teachers tried to teach us was a bigger problem for me than accessibility in first place.However, as soon as I passed the 10th grade and started attending a different course, it turned out that, once graduated, it wouldn't help me at all because of too less qualifications for a propper job, so I cancelled before graduation and went for an IT sales training at the same institute.I graduated now and found a great, suitable job starting in January, but if I knew in beforehand how theoretical the traineeship actually was, I would have possibly chosen another company for my training to gain some more practical experiences I can work with when eventually job-seeking.But to wrap it up: Thanks to the BLISTA I became a lot more independent and self-confident than during my first few years of school where I rather relied on my friends who'd guide me around so I just needed to put the minimum effort in getting independent myself, and they got me much further than an ordinary school in my region could have got me at that time.Nevertheless, they should for sure improve some of their courses they are offering, such as the IT course so we don't end up frustrated because we graduated, but with insufficient qualifications or a lack of practical experien
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) @74The problem with training is twofold, but what you're seeing here is specifically problems with the NFB. There's a lot of history there, but the short version is that the NFB did a lot of advocacy in the 80s and 90s, and as part of that it had to be "blind people are independent", and now it's almost ableist "if you're blind, you should never ask for help" extremism.The other problem is schools and organizations which have liability concerns. There's the safe way to do everything, and the effective way to do everything, but no one can teach the effective way because the effective way is generally dangerous-ish at the beginning and no one wants to take that risk. For an example of this, my favorite thing to complain about is how blind people are taught to use knives. It's almost universally you get a fork and you put your left hand wy at the top of the fork and then you do this complicated thing with using the fork as a guide. You know what sighted people do? Fuck the fork, and grip the food in a specific way that's not super dangerous for your knuckles, then have at it. You know where all 10 fingers are when I chop stuff? Within 2 inches or less of the blade. But no one will teach you that kind of thing, because you could lose a finger during training, then lawsuit/bad publicity etc etc etc.The problem with blind people training blind people is that the trainee needs to have a basic level of competence first. A lot of O&M requires being able to see the trainee for safety purposes. If they're at the point where you can trust that the trainee isn't going to get hurt, that opens up options. Same thing with e.g. the above about knives, lots of other things. Tell someone to use a knife how I do, and if you can't see they've got their thumb in the wrong place, then they've lost a thumb.I think how this goes for most of us is that we learn the safe way, then develop efficiency on our own. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602897/#p602897 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) @76:Long nails ftw. Better you chop a nail rathr than chopping a finger off. I can speed dice peppers fine like that. I do want to point something out, and I feel like you touched on it a little with blind people being ableist, and that's in regard to other disabilities and how they percieve them. I said it ages ago when I first joined, but I feel like there's absolutely some blind people who feel like their disability is more important than other disabilities however.Being over here, I was trained to do things a certain way, hello RNIB training, and the NFB is a US centric problem in the 80s-90s though, but I was trained to use as many gadgets as possible, which...um...no. If I want to know where a pan is, I'll hold food over it, thank ya very much, I don't need fancy thermometers screaming at me. I don't need a talking recipe book. Okay granted if I'm doing chicken or something, I'll leave that to people who can tel me if it's cooked all the way through orbut...y'know URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602905/#p602905 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) camlorn wrote:@74The problem with training is twofold, but what you're seeing here is specifically problems with the NFB. There's a lot of history there, but the short version is that the NFB did a lot of advocacy in the 80s and 90s, and as part of that it had to be "blind people are independent", and now it's almost ableist "if you're blind, you should never ask for help" extremism.The other problem is schools and organizations which have liability concerns. There's the safe way to do everything, and the effective way to do everything, but no one can teach the effective way because the effective way is generally dangerous-ish at the beginning and no one wants to take that risk. For an example of this, my favorite thing to complain about is how blind people are taught to use knives. It's almost universally you get a fork and you put your left hand wy at the top of the fork and then you do this complicated thing with using the fork as a guide. You know what sighted people do? Fuck the fork, and grip the food in a specific way that's not super dangerous for your knuckles, then have at it. You know where all 10 fingers are when I chop stuff? Within 2 inches or less of the blade. But no one will teach you that kind of thing, because you could lose a finger during training, then lawsuit/bad publicity etc etc etc.The problem with blind people training blind people is that the trainee needs to have a basic level of competence first. A lot of O&M requires being able to see the trainee for safety purposes. If they're at the point where you can trust that the trainee isn't going to get hurt, that opens up options. Same thing with e.g. the above about knives, lots of other things. Tell someone to use a knife how I do, and if you can't see they've got their thumb in the wrong place, then they've lost a thumb.I think how this goes for most of us is that we learn the safe way, then develop efficiency on our own.Agree with this, and some of the posts since my last post concerning asking for help. I do think in a lot of cases it would be best if the blind would train the blind, but if your family fights you, it's kind of hard to force your way into a situation and force to help. I'm not saying you always have to be sympathetic to a situation, but maybe a little compassion wouldn't kill you, because driven independents doesn't help in all cases either... URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602908/#p602908 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) I offer advice where I can, but it's entirely remote because I don't have in person blind friends. I'm not necessarily the best, but I'm very far from the worst. Since this is such a persistent problem: I'm in Seattle, once Covid is over if someone else is in Seattle and needs help with this stuff maybe we can do something about it. I don't have tons of time, but I could find a couple hours a month or something.perhaps we should have some sort of sticky thread or a web site or something where people who'd be willing to do that say where they're at and what they're skilled in. I am now wondering why no one has started this? it's not like we need to really wait for some sighted org to do it. Payment would be nice, but as long as it's not becoming some really intense thing where it's a second job or something, pretty sure you could get a lot of us volunteering for free. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602919/#p602919 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Problem is, Camlorn, we're all spread out. You're in Seattle, I'm in the UK, Jade's in Canada for instance, and recognition, why would someone use that over a blindness org? URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602968/#p602968 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) @80I mean, word of mouth is a powerful force. This site is spread out, but there's enough blind people that if it went beyond this site you'd actually find people who'd want to do it. Obviously at the moment posting only here, this is just kind of meh, but worth doing for the one person who happens to be close enough, which I'd be open to.But if I did actually do a site--well, it's much easier than you think to start an organization if we wanted an organization. I don't have the bandwidth for it so this is hypothetical, but being a "organization" is one standard social media campaign firm, a few newspaper interviews, and a mission statement away. In terms of legitimacy you legitimately don't beat "by the blind, for the blind" but that doesn't even matter: the people looking into this stuff can't tell anyway, because it's not like there's certifications that people actually pay attention to or anything. Get a couple adwords campaigns going which I don't think anyone else is doing, then you're at the top of Google. Could probably even raise funds for it pretty easily, to be honest. Then you get a few genuine case studies about how working with a blind person who's really been there just helped so much with whatever and you're set, after that you just have to seek out newspapers or something to keep awareness up.I was in the position of sort of bullshitting a contracting business for programming, which was an unfortunate and very stressful place to be for a whole variety of reasons and not something I recommend anyone do unless you're not doing it to pay the bills. But this isn't dissimilar in the sense that the organization would really only exist because the people won't be taken seriously without it, kind of like the frosting on the cake or something for a horrible metaphor. And it's really easy to do that especially if you have the humanitarian angle and such.My point is, it's not unreasonable to pull this off if someone had the time to do it. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/602972/#p602972 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Jayde, I never stated we shouldn't have the skills to be independant etc. My point was the same as yours. OIf I am alone and navigating, I use all tools available to me. However, when given a choice between freezing to death or dying from heatstroke etc, I will go and ask someone and do myself a favor if I am stuck.Interestingly, I was never formally trained for stuff like cooking etc. So I don't know any safe ways of handling the knives etc, I use the regular ways sighted people use. The particularly fun ones are using an ax or machetti to chop wood, and using your hand as a guide, or hammering nails in. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/603001/#p603001 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Jayde, I never stated we shouldn't have the skills to be independant etc. My point was the same as yours. OIf I am alone and navigating, I use all tools available to me. However, when given a choice between freezing to death or dying from heatstroke etc, I will go and ask someone and do myself a favor if I am stuck.Interestingly, I was never formally trained for stuff like cooking etc. So I don't know any safe ways of handling the knives etc, I use the regular ways sighted people use. The particularly fun ones are using an ax or machetti to chop wood, and using your hand as a guide, or hammering nails in. What probably helped though, I would help out with household chores from a really early age, and had very little regard to my own safety, I remember as a child I would use large stones or hammers to smash nuts etc, or fuel and stir wood stoves. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/603001/#p603001 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Another long post ahead, I didn't intend it to be but my brain ran away.I'm not sure about my feelings on how much training one should receive from a sighted or blind instructor. Camlorn mentioned it in post 74.I grew up with mostly sighted instructors, who mostly felt that there was only one way to do things. As a result I still struggle to this day with feelings of "Am I doing this right?' And they're not distant echoes of my past either. My head says "If it works for you and those around you then what does it matter?" but my emotions say otherwise... I get skittish because I'm afraid I look like a klutz, I'm going to get scolded, I'm going to do something stupid because I didn't follow all the steps I was supposed to etc. If I could let go of that and say "I'm going to just try and see what happens," I would be fine. But it's one of those things that's easy to think, and hard to put into practice. It's like jumping into the deep end of a cold swimming pool. No matter how much you know it's going to be cold and unpleasant at least at first, the adrenaline rush still comes when I think about it, and I don't deal well with that. Now if someone pushed me into the pool and I didn't have much control over it, then the adrenaline rush would be focused more on survival and just getting through it, and not on the act of forcing myself to do something I don't know I can handle. Not trying to be overly soppy and dramatic, just trying to think of a way to explain the feelings.I was never at an NFB camp but I've heard stories. My girlfriend was at one of those, and they made her learn a route, then perform it without any external aid, and she was only allowed to ask for help once. Being the rebel she is, she decided to use the GPS on her phone if she got lost (and she did). She could've gotten expelled for it, according to her, but she wasn't caught.I'm in two minds about it. On one hand I can sort of see why they didn't want her using the GPS or asking for help, since if you rely on doing that, then you'll never be ready to tackle a situation when none of those things are available. On the other hand, it does bother me that they seemed to be so adamant about it. As I said in my first post, I only started coming to terms with my blindness when I started trying to find ways to integrate with the sighted. So training a route for 6 weeks for the purpose of being able to do it without the GPS just doesn't sit well with me, because sighted people don't do that. Now, if the primary goal was blind people to learn safe street travel, then maybe I could see the point of limiting how much help you can receive, but still, a GPs isn't going to save you from that either. It won't magically orient you or help you cross streets. Hell, when I used my first GPS, it confused me because it would tell me I was facing southeast on an east-west street because of how I/it was turned. At the time, I couldn't cope. So yeah, I don't quite get it, not unless I push my own beliefs aside.Then there was the time I was getting some instruction navigating my way around college. The instructor I had was as new as could be. She was sighted, and I was among her first clients. She had book smarts, and knew how to provide instruction. But she didn't know how to relate, or how to help when things went wrong, and things often did go wrong with me. She was nice when we weren't doing mobility, but during mobility I was tense. At one point, when I just wasn't getting it after about half an hour, she became frustrated and exclaimed, "I could've done this in training with a blindfold, and you've been blind most of your life, so this should be no problem for you!"Needless to say I took some offense to this, but I honestly think she didn't mean it to come out that way. I think she was just... puzzled and frustrated. Not at me, but at everything. Like I say, she knew how to train by the book and that was about it. I don't even know if she's still working now.Funny enough, I didn't become good at mobility until I started getting into FPS games like Shades of Doom, Technoshock, GMA Tank Commander etc. Stuff with maps that you have to figure out. Stuff where walking into walls doesn't hurt, or facing halfway between north and east will at worst get you a bit lost but not stranded in the middle of nowhere. Trying to find my own way to navigate those maps got me more comfortable with directions and things of that nature. I don't know how much better it made me at navigating in the real world, but I felt I could understand orientation better. To this day, I prefer to play those games walking forward i.e. face east, walk forward and sidestep once to pick up the gun, no
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Another long post ahead, I didn't intend it to be but my brain ran away.I'm not sure about my feelings on how much training one should receive from a sighted or blind instructor. Camlorn mentioned it in post 74.I grew up with mostly sighted instructors, who mostly felt that there was only one way to do things. As a result I still struggle to this day with feelings of "Am I doing this right?' And they're not distant echoes of my past either. My head says "If it works for you and those around you then what does it matter?" but my emotions say otherwise... I get skittish because I'm afraid I look like a klutz, I'm going to get scolded, I'm going to do something stupid because I didn't follow all the steps I was supposed to etc. If I could let go of that and say "I'm going to just try and see what happens," I would be fine. But it's one of those things that's easy to think, and hard to put into practice. It's like jumping into the deep end of a cold swimming pool. No matter how much you know it's going to be cold and unpleasant at least at first, the adrenaline rush still comes when I think about it, and I don't deal well with that. Now if someone pushed me into the pool and I didn't have much control over it, then the adrenaline rush would be focused more on survival and just getting through it, and not on the act of forcing myself to do something I don't know I can handle. Not trying to be overly soppy and dramatic, just trying to think of a way to explain the feelings.I was never at an NFB camp but I've heard stories. My girlfriend was at one of those, and they made her learn a route, then perform it without any external aid, without even a GPS, and she was only allowed to ask for help once. Being the rebel she is, she decided to use the GPS on her phone if she got lost (and she did). She could've gotten expelled for it, according to her, but she wasn't caught.I'm in two minds about it. On one hand I can sort of see why they didn't want her using the GPS or asking for help, since if you rely on doing that, then you'll never be ready to tackle a situation when none of those things are available. On the other hand, it does bother me that they seemed to be so adamant about it. As I said in my first post, I only started coming to terms with my blindness when I started trying to find ways to integrate with the sighted. So training a route for 6 weeks for the purpose of being able to do it without the GPS just doesn't sit well with me, because I don't think sighted people do that. And even if the primary goal was to teach blind people safe street travel, a GPs isn't going to get you exempt from that. It won't magically orient you or help you cross streets. Hell, when I used my first GPS, it confused me because it would tell me I was facing southeast on an east-west street because of how I/it was turned. At the time, I couldn't cope. So yeah, I don't quite get it, not unless I push my own beliefs aside.Then there was the time I was getting some instruction navigating my way around college. The instructor I had was as new as could be. She was sighted, and I was among her first clients. She had book smarts, and knew how to provide instruction. But she didn't know how to relate, or how to help when things went wrong, and things often did go wrong with me. She was nice when we weren't doing mobility, but during mobility I was tense. At one point, when I just wasn't getting it after about half an hour, she became frustrated and exclaimed, "I could've done this in training with a blindfold, and you've been blind most of your life, so this should be no problem for you!"Needless to say I took some offense to this, but I honestly think she didn't mean it to come out that way. I think she was just... puzzled and frustrated. Not at me, but at everything. Like I say, she knew how to train by the book and that was about it. I don't even know if she's still working now.Funny enough, orientation stuff didn't really click with me until I started getting into FPS games like Shades of Doom, Technoshock, GMA Tank Commander etc. Stuff with maps that you have to figure out. Stuff where walking into walls doesn't hurt, or facing halfway between north and east will at worst get you a bit lost, but won't bring on the sinking feeling of being stranded without help. Trying to find my own way to navigate those maps got me more comfortable with orientation. I don't know how much better it made me at navigating in the real world, but I felt I could understand orientation better. To this day, I prefer to play those games walking forward i.e. face east, walk forward and sidestep once to pick up the gun, now turn south and walk forward to the
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Another long post ahead, I didn't intend it to be but my brain ran away.I'm not sure about my feelings on how much training one should receive from a sighted or blind instructor. Camlorn mentioned it in post 74.I grew up with mostly sighted instructors, who mostly felt that there was only one way to do things. As a result I still struggle to this day with feelings of "Am I doing this right?' And they're not distant echoes of my past either. My head says "If it works for you and those around you then what does it matter?" but my emotions say otherwise... I get skittish because I'm afraid I look like a klutz, I'm going to get scolded, I'm going to do something stupid because I didn't follow all the steps I was supposed to etc. If I could let go of that and say "I'm going to just try and see what happens," I would be fine. But it's one of those things that's easy to think, and hard to put into practice. It's like jumping into the deep end of a cold swimming pool. No matter how much you know it's going to be cold and unpleasant at least at first, the adrenaline rush still comes when I think about it, and I don't deal well with that. Now if someone pushed me into the pool and I didn't have much control over it, then the adrenaline rush would be focused more on survival and just getting through it, and not on the act of forcing myself to do something I don't know I can handle. Not trying to be overly soppy and dramatic, just trying to think of a way to explain the feelings.I was never at an NFB camp but I've heard stories. My girlfriend was at one of those, and they made her learn a route, then perform it without any external aid, without even a GPS, and she was only allowed to ask for help once. Being the rebel she is, she decided to use the GPS on her phone if she got lost (and she did). She could've gotten expelled for it, according to her, but she wasn't caught.I'm in two minds about it. On one hand I can sort of see why they didn't want her using the GPS or asking for help, since if you rely on doing that, then you'll never be ready to tackle a situation when none of those things are available. On the other hand, it does bother me that they seemed to be so adamant about it. As I said in my first post, I only started coming to terms with my blindness when I started trying to find ways to integrate with the sighted. So training a route for 6 weeks for the purpose of being able to do it without the GPS just doesn't sit well with me, because I don't think sighted people do that. And even if the primary goal was to teach blind people safe street travel, a GPs isn't going to get you exempt from that. It won't magically orient you or help you cross streets. Hell, when I used my first GPS, it confused me because it would tell me I was facing southeast on an east-west street because of how I/it was turned. At the time, I couldn't cope. So yeah, I don't quite get it, not unless I push my own beliefs aside.Then there was the time I was getting some instruction navigating my way around college. The instructor I had was as new as could be. She was sighted, and I was among her first clients. She had book smarts, and knew how to provide instruction. But she didn't know how to relate, or how to help when things went wrong, and things often did go wrong with me. She was nice when we weren't doing mobility, but during mobility I was tense. At one point, when I just wasn't getting it after about half an hour, she became frustrated and exclaimed, "I could've done this in training with a blindfold, and you've been blind most of your life, so this should be no problem for you!"Needless to say I took some offense to this, but I honestly think she didn't mean it to come out that way. I think she was just... puzzled and frustrated. Not at me, but at everything. Like I say, she knew how to train by the book and that was about it. I don't even know if she's still working now.Funny enough, orientation stuff didn't really click with me until I started getting into FPS games like Shades of Doom, Technoshock, GMA Tank Commander etc. Stuff with maps that you have to figure out. Stuff where walking into walls doesn't hurt, or facing halfway between north and east will at worst get you a bit lost, but won't bring on the sinking feeling of being stranded without help. Trying to find my own way to navigate those maps got me more comfortable with orientation. I don't know how much better it made me at navigating in the real world, but I felt I could understand orientation better. To this day, I prefer to play those games walking forward i.e. face east, walk forward and sidestep once to pick up the gun, now turn south and walk forward to the
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) When it comes to going beyond the sighted instructors, I didn't get where I am by just going for it. It took like 10 years starting somewhere in high school when they were finally just kind of like "we don't have anything left to teach you". You figure out the unsafe efficiencies in two ways: either someone else blind tells you about them and you take the ones you feel comfortable with, or you just sort of slowly change until one day you look back and go "how silly" at the "official" methods.As I've already said the NFB has many stupid ideas, but they aren't wrong about needing to know how to function without the GPS. Unless you live somewhere in fantasyland, a rain shower can make it inaccurate enough to be useless--even if the rain shower isn't directly over you. Going outside and having a GPS that's like "accuracy 100 meters" in an area where the blocks aren't even 100 meters on a side has happened to me before even in Seattle, and it will happen again. Want to be clear that "you will get expelled for it" is definitely very stupid, but they have a really valid point.I don't know where you're getting 6 weeks learning the same route from. This probably just comes from practice, but it only takes me and my brother a day or two at most. When I was in college, we'd spend all of 2-3 hours finding all my classes. My point being that if it's taking you 6 weeks you should probably work on that even though it's frustrating, where work on it mostly just means find places to walk to even if it's something stupid like Mcdonalds once a week or even going around the block and coming straight back home.You're not the first person to discuss VR navigation games, but unfortunately VR isn't going to ever really work out for us due to space constraints. I know that the sighted people are working on tricks for it, but those tricks currently rely on hacking your brain via vision. More info on that here, but we don't have the weird thing where we can't walk in a straight line with our eyes closed, so...well, good luck.For the rest of it: you could probably get funding. You could probably connect it to something like Open Street Map or whatever that's called. You're not actually discussing any particularly new ideas here, and I think it's even been done. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/603058/#p603058 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context) Can confirm. When I learn to get to new places, it takes me hours or a few days if the route is complicated. In fact, when my instructor (when I had one) wanted to drill the same route more than two or three times, I'd get annoyed.Generally I use logic and work things out for myself. There's a karaoke bar I used to like to go to, pre-Covid, and it's about a nine-minute drive from my house. Now, I could just call a cab, pay twelve bucks and do it that way - and if I go there and have a few drinks, that might be how I get home - but I figure there's no reason not to get there by bus and on my own two feet. So what did I do? Looked up bus routes, mapped on the internet, asked my partner at the time one question, and then just bloody well did it. Fucked up the first time, but only because I missed a sidewalk. By "fucked up" I mean that I walked past the bar and had to come back. I've done it a dozen or so times since then.Six weeks per route seems...a touch excessive. But everyone's got different rates of knowledge acquisition.Funny you should mention Shades of Doom and whatnot though. In maps that aren't just grid-based, I often find myself side-stepping precisely because I am good with navigation. When huge areas on a MUD are hard for people to map, I'm the dude who follows walls and remembers my way in and out. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/603072/#p603072 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
