Good morning Dave Your question fell right into my obsession so to speak. I decided to look up the two book stands that I have and spent the next hour doing my rabbit trail browsing technique on the Internet! J J And I sometimes wonder why I am 21 pages away from my original question??? Thanks for an entertaining morning, it was a good excuse not to do any work. LOL
I was able to find the book stands that I have, except that one is now plastic not metal, and Im pleased that they are not extremely expensive at $5.00 and $15.00. I do not know what level you are, but because reading is a passion for me and always has been, being able to read a book has been the necessity not an option so to speak. A friend of mine modified my hospital table and made a new top that is 4 inches wider and 10 inches longer than the standard top. We took the little wire stand, positioned it into different places on the table top (by the way, because I enjoyed woodworking so much before I broke my neck he made it out of curly maple so that I can enjoy looking at it) and then we drilled holes in the wood to push the feet into to completely stabilize it. So I can read in my wheelchair on the end position, and in bed using the side position. The other larger stand does not have any way to secure it, so we improvise in two different ways, by taking a piece of tape and stretching it over the bottom lip and taping it to the table or by using some of the sticky stuff that comes in a roll, a rubberized material to keep things from sliding around, cannot remember what its called can you guess? My old-timers is catching up with me. J My daughter has recently loaned me her Kindle to try, I really really like it. We are using the same metal stand and a wooden clipboard behind it and just tape the entire thing to the table as I do not want to knock it off. It is one thing to pick up a 99¢ paperback off of the floor and another to watch $140 gadget fall to the floor. I will still continue to read books and magazines but the portability of the Kindle and the fact that my eyes do not hurt as they do when I read on the Internet make it very appealing. I dont like mouthsticks either, but theyre a way of life for me because I am alone so much of the time. I usually have 4 to 6 hours or sometimes even more when there is no one around to help me so I have a mouthstick set up by the desktop computer which I do not use Voice Recognition on as it is eight years old, and I have a mouthstick on the roll around table. My cell phones voice activated and I use windows 7 speech recognition on the laptop. I have not taken online courses per se, but I do take online training for my job year round. The few times they have not been able to attach a file or a form for me (Iam contacted to the state of Nevada so most of the stuff they have is online) I have scanned the documents and then read them. It should be quite easy to take online courses I would think. Here are some of the resources I found during my morning travels. I think it is interesting that England offers so much for disabled compared to America. http://www.focusondisability.org.uk/read-write-aids.html http://www.bookandcopyholders.com/ http://www.bookgem.com/home.htm This looks as though it would work for the kindle for me if I decide to get one. http://www.livingmadeeasy.org.uk/products.php?groupid=1392 <http://www.livingmadeeasy.org.uk/products.php?groupid=1392&page=1> &page=1 http://bookstandworld.net/c022.html These are fabulous, I absolutely love the Thomas Jefferson model and they are so pretty to look at. Fellowes Wire Study Stand, Metal, 9.5 x 6 x 5.5 Inches Sold by Amazon and Office Depot-this is the one I got in rehab 20 years ago and Ive never seen any reason to replace it. Fellowes Booklift Copyholder,Platinum (21100) This is the other one I got in rehab, and it will hold larger books, magazines, and even the newspaper folded in half if I have someone around to flip the newspaper around. Thanks for a great morning this was a lot of fun. I hope you have a good day. Joan From: Dave Krehbiel [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, August 17, 2011 4:26 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [QUAD-L] do you read books? How? Several years ago in rehab, an occupational therapist attempted to demonstrate some sort of contraption which could be set up to read magazines and books. I think it cost about 1000 dollars and it looked to be very difficult and complex to set up. The Therapist also tried to teach me to use a mouthstick to turn pages, but at the time I found this quite difficult. I have not tried it since. Since my injury, I have used my computer for almost all my reading. I am sad to say that most of it has been from blogs and online articles and PDF files. I had downloaded the PC version of the Kindle software, and this works okay (controlled by Dragon NaturallySpeaking) but some of the books I want to read (e.g. Marketing textbooks and sales training books) do not seem to be available on Kindle. I bought a music stand, and I have had some success reading small books by asking a caregiver to turn the pages one by one. I've also asked caregivers to turn pages while I am up in my wheelchair, propping the book up on pillows on my bed. I also tried watching YouTube style videos... but it is difficult for me to control these videos using Dragon NaturallySpeaking because the audio portion of the video interferes with the speech recognition. I'm also interested in possibly taking online courses, especially in the areas of sales and marketing. Do any of you read books? If you do, how? Have you taken any online courses, especially free ones? Thanks, Dave
