John Martyn said,
Just thought I'd throw this one out there since there are some braille
users
still.
What is meant by "still"? Is it the contention that being read to, whether
by machine or human, is an adequate substitute for reading? Blind people are
putting their foot in their mouth all over the place because of
misunderstandings created by speech and are generally blissfully unaware of
it. Examples? All of these are from other lists; speech users will have to
use the SpellWord function to make this intelligible:
Somebody was talking about establishing a partnership using ActiveSync. He
said he chose the Guess option.
Somebody talked about words containing apostrophes, like childrens' and
her's.
I even had one argue with me about how to spell "yeah."
Note that in this message I even spelled Martyn correctly.
Speech is a great advancement. It's faster, generally much faster, than
braille and sometimes it's more accurate; but it's also frequently less
accurate. People have been screaming about the death of braille since the
'sixties. Let's hope they don't succeed in killing it until we have a better
substitute than speech.
I am not a member of any blind organization. <grin>
--
Lee Maschmeyer
"Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to
others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you
had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise."
--Lewis Carroll
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