Terri,
Thank you for your useful help with the Braille Note reading behavior. You
look like someone who's done her homework.
You asked about me being happy with the Braille Sense. The Braille Sense
Schedule Manager is impossible to work with. If you are anything like me,
you might have a few dozen recurring appointments in the manager, and that
makes the response umbareble. Let that be a bit of free market research for
Humanware. The Braille Sense Schedule Manager as it currently stands is
horible. I got a little tired of Raul saying he would mark this down, or
that down for review, and didn't thing the problem was going to be
addressed, so I went for something I thought would be better.
Well, If my braille note is going to be a 2 pound, $6000 schedule manager, I
really don't want it. It has been suggested by anotehr lister that we as
blind people use what tools are available. If that means a braille sense for
the good file management features, a pac mate for use of whiz wheels and a
40 cell braille display, and a braille note for the best typing confort ever
available on a note-taker, and an awesome planner, then I will write on the
braille note, save and manage my files on the braille sense, and read on the
pac mate. Never mind I'll be $17000 in the hole, or that rehab bought it,
I'll have the best set up ever. Think of it.
I'll also need a suit case, an extra desk, and a body gard to be able to
carry my technology , and keep it safe.
I believe that a company in this small a market needs to care for, and
cherish its reputation. Humanware has always carried a bad reputation when
it came to support, and it does not do things as transparently as others in
the field. Is there a Humanware podcast?
Freedom Scientific and Serotech do have one, and it is one way, though a
controlled one, to keep customers informed.
I do hate sounding so negative about Humanware, abut most of you don't know
me, and have come to accept your note-taker of choice as good enough. There
is an entire blindness community out there to cultivate as customers, and to
provide a quality product to.
Humanware needs to be more transparent, forthcoming, and responsive to
customer feedback. The more bad experiences, the more damage will be done.
There are some lessons in the addaptive technology field to be learned, and
GW Micro has learned most of them well.
Freedom scientific appeared to have jumped too soon to develop the pac mate
in what, 2003? They needed something more versatile, and now they have a
stable 40-cell display option with wiz wheels, and an open platform for
running third party programs. You say, why Antonio, get a Pac Mate. I didn't
want one. I liked the feel of the Braille Note keys, and become disappointed
with the service.
Attitude drives sales.
For some time the Freedom Scientific response to drain your battery and you
files shal die was
back up, back up, back up.
Something clicked, and they saw they were losing customers. Their attitude
changed, and they fixed what was the single most user reason why people
didn't get a pac mate. They listened, and made their product better.
Let's see what key soft on features high on hipe 8.0 will bring us. We've
only till Monday to wait, unless I missed a press release somewhere.
Looks like we'll get a chat feature. Now you can play more.
A bookshare fix. So you can read more. Purely a fixer upper since bookshare
changed their site.
Audible support, so you can listen better. Ans audible has been aroung for
how long?
Get a taste of GPS, so you can travel more, and buy more from Humanware.
More printers available to students, so you can propagate your messages to
the masses. Wonder how long it took to support more printers.
While responding to customer needs is very good, I still wonder how
Humanware will manage to keep selling, if people flock away.
I wish I could wake up tomorrow, and Humanware be this angel of a company,
but since it's been years and counting of bad reputation, it probably will
stay the same for some time, unless someone with real vision take it over.
Try and reason with a humanware support person on the phone, and come back
to tell me.
Antonio Guimaraes
If an infinite number of rednecks riding in an infinite number of pickup
trucks fire an infinite number of shotgun rounds at an infinite number of
highway signs, they will eventually produce all the world's great literary
works in Braille.
Shop online and support the NFB of RI at no additional cost to you.
http://www.givebackamerica.com/charity.php?b=169
Givebackamerica.org, America's Online Charity Shopping Mall
----- Original Message -----
From: "Terri Pannett" <[email protected]>
To: "Antonio Guimaraes" <[email protected]>; "BrailleNote List"
<[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2009 1:23 PM
Subject: Re: [Braillenote] Problems editing easy files
Hi, Antonio,
I'm sorry to hear that you are having trouble learning how to use the
BrailleNote. I was able to use mine straight out of the box, but I was
familiar with Keysoft since I'd used a VoiceNote and a Keynote Companion.
The answer to your first question is no. The "review previous options"
question is always asked when you open any file which isn't a KeyWord
file.
The answer to your second question about navigating files and folders is
most of us find the folders and subfolders awkward at first. The secret
of
using subfolders is to press control with t to bring up the directories
list. (I think the BT command is function with t.) Then navigate through
the list of directories by pressing the space bar and to get to the
subdirectories you would press the right arrow key (don't know what right
arrow is for the bt keyboard). When you find the subdirectory you want,
press enter.
Another way to access directories and subdirectories is to simply type the
directory/subdirectory's name. For example, if you had a directory called
customers and it contained a subdirectory called John Doe, you would type
/customers/john doe.
The BrailleNote will allow you to set the line length to be whatever you
want. Go to the page settings menu. Press space until you get to page
width. Type a number between 5 and 250. The default margins in a braille
document are 0. 250 characters should be enough for anyone! You can also
change the page length so that a page can be from 5 lines to 250 lines.
The BrailleNote has commands for reading letter by letter, word by word,
sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph and line by line. I don't
know the BT commands, but others on the list could help you. The default
boundary for a paragraph in a braille document is a new line. You can
change the paragraph boundaries to anything you want.
You can also see the format indicators by pressing the previous and next
thumb keys together until you reach "edit mode."
You can even turn off word wrap and the BrailleNote will behave like a
Perkins brailler or manual typewriter. If you have speech turned on and
your keyboard voice is spell or words, you will hear a tone when you are
10 spaces from the end of the line.
I'm also wondering why, if you are happy with the BrailleSense, you are
"transitioning to a BrailleNote." Is your employer making you change?
For me, the BrailleSense would be harder to learn to use than the
BrailleNote and I prefer a QT keyboard over a bt keyboard.
I hope my explanations help you.
Terri Amateur Radio call sign KF6CA.
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