Toshiba lap top problem

[attributions elided ... along with much of the body]

Ah, OK. MG is a breakdown of the nerve-muscle junction. Think of it as the junction becoming "saturated" with use so that it no longer functions. Those junctions that can't "rest" to recover -- eyes, lungs, etc. -- eventually stop working (you die from suffocation with MG)

Understood.

I have tried to learn to use "audio books" just to get some sense of what it must be like. However, I just can't process things through my ears as well as my eyes. :< So, it is hard for me to relate my experiences to someone who is visually impaired.

Just listening to a speech synthesizer can be an eye-opening experience to folks who've not had to rely on that technology. Your *ears* "get tired" (I don't know of any other way to explain it!)

Yeah, but then it would be one more thing to keep track of! At least the big meters are easy to find (they can't hide under things as easily as a pocket DMM)

It does make you wonder how they can make things that cheap! Scary.

For years, I've been reading street signs by "counting letters" and guessing at distinctive shapes -- "5 letters and looks like the first letter is round... probably Olive Street..." -- despite the fact that I have 20/20 corrected vision.

An interesting corollary: if you have a vision restriction on your license and then have corrective surgery that restores your vision (e.g., cataract surgery), you *still* must wear your glasses in order to drive -- even though the glasses will now give you

*imperfect* vision! I.e., you need to have your license updated to have the restriction removed before you can legally drive with your "new eyes".

This makes *some* sense but is actually counterintuitive to many folks who have been down this road...

Ah.

Yes! :> A pair of (old) neighbors were deaf. When trying to get their attention I would resort to tossing pebbles. Always afraid that I would *hit* one of them, though... :<

There are "all sorts". I was first exposed to that population as a teenager. I can recall asking a client that I had developed a friendship with: "What's it like to be blind? What do you see?" and, almost as soon as I had finished saying that, realized how stupid my question was. As a testament to how cool this guy was, his reply was, "Don, if you can tell me what *you* see, then I'll tell you what *I* see.".

Of course, I still felt bad for askingn such a stupid question. But, it forced me to think about the problem and keep it in mind when I design things.

For example, 1 in 15 men are color blind (to some extent). Ask your kids' teachers if they know that figure. In practical terms, it means that one boy in each classroom can't reliably distinguish colors. Do they know that when they formulate their lesson plans? "How many red balls are in this picture? How many green balls are there?"

"Press the RED button to shut down the nuclear reactor in the event of a disaster. Press the GREEN button to restart it."

:>

Your doctor can issue a letter explaining your condition, till time to renew your license.

"Cut the red wire to disarm the warhead." of course, I've made a lot of wiring harnesses out of a single color & gauge to keep people from messing with them. I hated spending half a day repairing a test fixture, just to have some moron screw it up. When they open it up and see over

100 light green 22 AWG stranded wires, they didn't try to 'improve' it, to pass a bad module.

--
Greed is the root of all eBay.

A registered (not quite) blind person, I know, had great difficulty with locked-down sites with no text size change option.

No one had told him about highlighting with CTL-A, then CTL-C and then CTL-V into a basic text handler , notepad/wordpad or whatever , where he could easily increase text size and more importantly use a negative script.

Every now and then a poorly-sighted browser praises my gimmic-free pages on the www , just text and pics

-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on

When we would install a Reading Machine at a new site, it was always "priceless" to watch the expression on the client's face as they first started using the machine. The synthesizer was *really* had to get used to -- the stereotypical "computer voice". You could see the client straining to make sense out of these grating noises coming from the speaker. The inflection was suboptimal, prosody was stilted, etc.

But, there would come a point where you could *see* when they had started to understand complete sentences. Their eyes would literally "light up". You could almost hear their thoughts afterwards: "Now I can read ___________ without having to get someone to read it *to* me!"

(Libraries carrying materials for the visually impaired had dreadfully small collections at the time. And, waiting lists for popular titles would often be *years* -- Braille is expensive to produce; synthetic forms are "hard on the hands". And, anything current -- like last *month's* news paper -- are almost completely unattainable due to transcription times and costs.)

I can remember a client grinning that he would now be able to read Playboy (which seemed like doubly funny -- "Does anyone actually *read* those magazines?")

The military used to place a special premium on color blindness ages ago. Most camouflage is easier for a color blind person to spot than for someone who is not. I guess the perception of color aids to the confusion of what the mind sees.

Negative script == white on black. I don't understand why this is the case but this does seem to be easier for folks with

*low* vision to read.

For years, I used a text only browser to surf the web. Even now I disable images -- since most are just advertisements. Why waste bandwidth on something that benefits an advertiser? If I *need* to look at an image, I'll *know* which one(s) I'll need to see.

CTL-V

on

This schematic was originally the negative form etched into a side panel of the first? miniature oscilloscope.

This inversion of the original is much easier to read, size for size etc otherwise the same pic. Try saving to a graphics package and doing the negative of it

-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on

Why don't you go back to picking on the mentally handicapped in alt.usenet.kooks, Meat Clod? It's more your speed, you impotent little piss-flap.

We're all shaking in our boots. Really we are.

*Guffaw*

Some say the best part of his daddy ran down his mother's leg, while she was bent over the dumpster behind the Quickie Mart.

Or so I've heard.