Now, that's communicating.
Maria Campbell
[email protected]
When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.
--Attributed to Jimi Hendrix
On 1/30/2016 12:21 AM, Brad Martin wrote:
We seem to have some challenges of late comprehending one another on
this list. It happens, especially in written communication. But if you
all will forgive the intrusion, I feel the need to explain a
fundamental concept of communication theory so we can get back to the
business at hand--which is helping one another with our JAWS issues.
So please forgive me for what I hope will be helpful to all in terms
of promoting constructive communication. Although much of the
following answers Brian's prior message, I hope we can all learn
something from the following--I know I did just in writing it.
My "sighted response" comment was more of a slightly sarcastic way of
saying, "But you're missing the point. We can't get there from here,
or at least, we don't know how to get there from here."
Point #1: I want to say that your descriptions of things are generally
useful, at least for someone like me who appreciates understanding
what my sighted friends are seeing. As I have explained, what JAWS
says and how it says it doesn't always replicate the layout that you
see, and since I do what you do in reverse--that is, teaching sighted
people while being blind myself--I find the visuals useful. Having
said that, they're not always relatable--not because you're not good
at it, but because of something called frame of reference, which I
will describe below.
Point #2: I think some context may be helpful. While I don't presume
to speak for anyone on this list because people are all different, I
think it's probably fair to say that most of us have experienced
well-meaning people who want to help, but keep forgetting on some
level--conscious or subconscious--that our reality is not theirs. Case
in point, I spent an hour showing someone my issues with the ribbons,
and no matter what I did, she kept trying to solve the problem with
the mouse. As you know, that's not an option for me, but she couldn't
break the habit. In the end, I got my point across, but it was an
intensely frustrating hour in which my blood pressure probably went up
twenty points.
So as I read your response to Adrian's questions, and you kept going
back to the icon at the bottom of the screen and the popup menu, my
reaction was, "But he can't, or doesn't know how to, get there from
here." It's like I told my friend with the ribbons, "It's great that
you can see it and you can get there, but how does that help me?"
Your subsequent answer was helpful, as Adrian pointed out, because I
never think to try Shift F6. In my limited experience with the afore
mentioned problem, when I opened a PDF, I was trapped and could go
nowhere. But I never tried F6 or any variant thereof.
My degree is actually in communications, not computers or taxes or
anything I do now. But the first core concept we're taught, both in
communication theory and in interpersonal communications, is the
concept of frame of reference. Basically your frame of reference is
the sum of all experiences you've had. So while I have no direct
experience with having sight, I do have knowledge of things that
people have told me or described to me over the years. Each person's
frame of reference is going to be different. Some of us have sight.
Some of us used to have it. Some of us never had it. Some of us have
had things described to us in a way that we have a pretty good idea of
what it looks like, while others have no such concept.
So when I say, "That's a sighted response," it's really not a slap in
the face. It's actually supposed to be a joking way to say, "There's a
piece of that puzzle that I'm missing because you're talking in visual
blahblahblah that's not in my frame of reference, although every
sighted person in America would probably have gotten it; hence, a
sighted response'. Try again." Your second effort was much more
successful as Adrian pointed out.
Likewise, sometimes we forget that you're not working directly with
JAWS all the time, and there are things you can't relate to because
they're not in your frame of reference. As an example, for me on all
of my computers, Firefox will lose focus and JAWS will say, "Netscape
Dispatch WND." I don't know why or what it means. It just happens.
You've probably never seen that, because as far as I know, that phrase
is never on the screen. I just live with it, hit the tab key to regain
focus, and go on with my life. But if I asked how I could get rid of
this "Netscape Dispatch WND" message, you'd probably think my computer
was on drugs, because "Netscape Dispatch WND" is probably not in your
frame of reference and certainly not on your screen.
So to Brian, I apologize if you took my remark as a slam; it was never
intended as such. There may have been a touch of frustration in there
because it does get tiresome when people recommend things you can't
do, no matter how well-meaning the intent. And to the rest of us,
we've got to realize that every person on this list has a different
frame of reference. So something that's a part of your daily existence
may never have been experienced by the other person across the
keyboard, and that's not just because we're blind or sighted. It's
because our collection of experiences is unique to us.
I really don't intend to start a thread with this. It just seems that
these kinds of miscommunications seem to be happening with greater
frequency, so I thought a little communication theory might help.
Please note that any responses to this message or any other probably
won't be read until late tomorrow night, as I'm working a full day in
a tax center tomorrow.
So back to JAWS, and remember that my frame of reference is not and
never could be entirely yours.
Brad
[email protected] (for anyone who wants to contact me off list)
On 1/29/2016 9:30 PM, Brian Vogel wrote:
On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 05:59 pm, Brad Martin <[email protected]>
wrote:
Sorry, Brian, but that's a sighted response. We don't often have
good luck with "pop-up menus" and "file icons." If we're lucky we
might hear JAWS read them, but it's less common that we can get
there from here and actually do something with them. If you know
of some sort of keyboard command that can get us to where those
notifications go, awesome. And I'll confess right now that I
haven't read the rest of the day's mail yet. I just got home.
Brad,
My initial response when I read this was indignation and I
was all prepared to go into high dudgeon about "how unfair" your
opening line was. After spending about 20 minutes folding laundry
and thinking about it my reaction is now an amused, "Duh, that's
because I *am* sighted!!" What I can, and I think do, bring to this
conversation are some things that only vision makes "instantly
obvious" that may be utterly opaque for a variety of reasons to
someone using screen readers. The way that downloads are being
presented by various web browsers keeps changing, seemingly
constantly. What I always presume, and I'll be the first to admit
that the presumption is sometimes wrong, is that it's possible that,
for reasons you allude to, a screen reader user may not "be able to
use" a given feature because they literally don't know it's there. I
also couple that with a presumption that once they know it's there
they're more likely to know how to get to it and use it than I am,
particularly without research. Sometimes one or the other of these
presumptions is simply not so, and I have no problem being called out
on that. That being said, I don't exactly consider presuming much
greater expertise on screen readers, and how to use them, among
screen reader users while I'm tossing out "things I can see and that
may be helpful and that may not be known about," to be "a sighted
response" in the purest sense. I'm trying to collaborate.
As you know from some of our private correspondence, I
seldom accept that something "can't be done" and tend to take the
attitude that I/we don't know how to accomplish a given thing but
there's got to be a way to do it, and then I dig in to figure out
how, often with assistance from "the network" that I have.
No one, prior to yourself, in this specific thread has
indicated that anything I've mentioned is "something I can't get to,"
or I would have paused and tried to figure out how to remove that
obstacle, if possible. You can be assured when someone says, "I
can't do that," which is different than, "But that's not happening,"
I won't be saying, "Well, tough, you should know how to do that." A
"but that's not happening" leads me to, "I'd have to be there to see
what is or is not happening," when I cannot replicate the issue in
any of the environments I have to try to replicate it in. In that
sense I am definitely completely dependent on sight, or as close to
completely dependent as can be (I can envision some stuff, but there
are limits).
Now it's time to play with NVDA and Chrome and downloading
something to see exactly how I can (if I can) gain access to the
downloads bar at the bottom of the screen or to the same context menu
via the downloads menu.
Brian
--
Brad Martin
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
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