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Accessiblity #

If you are an accessiblity designer, I highly suggest you install and mess around with a program called NVDA. It is a very robust but simple text to speech program that allows those with low vision navigate the web. The program is a good way for you to A) see how someone completely blind might navigate your site and B) see just how well built your HTML is.

I found using NVDA to be very edifying as an armchair web develooper and it has motivated me to better learn Semantic HTML. Text to speech basically uses HTML to read the page to the blind. You will see why all elements should not be shoved between divs. I recommmend NVDA over the more well known JAWS because JAWS is both expensive and also large. Althugh if you have a lot of time on your hands, you should also take a look at JAWS as it covers more accessibility features than just speech.

Aside from NVDA and JAWS, Microsoft has two native apps: Magnifier and Narrator. These are good apps to learn as they come pre-installed in Windows.

My problem with overlay accessibility programs isn’t necessarily them so much as people use them to be lazy or because they don’t know how websites work and therefore believe these quick fixes are improving access. Even these overlays require a bit of fidgeting to actually make them useful but people don’t seem to know that (try using the invert color feature that many of these programs offer).

Language #

I haven’t done much with learning Spanish. I’ve been listening to El Hombre De La Mancha once in a while and also learning bank terms (I can ask you if you’d like a tarjeta de credito). I’m slugging through Language Transfer but have forgotten about Forge and Speakly. I haven’t listened to Spanish After Hours either. This is for a few reasons. Let’s go over the weird ones. A few weeks ago I decided to read a lot using text to speech. I think I overdid it and now I don’t want to hear talking for a few years. I also got an OLED phone so don’t enjoy learning on my phone anymore because it hurts my eyes. These are good excuses for not using Forge (which is mobile exclusive). Everything else though can be done on a computer. I need to get myself together (haha).

Speakly is, unfortunately, not a good app. When it works, it is brilliant. However it rarely works. It’s prone to frequent crashes.

Oddly enough, it is hard to find audio based lessons in Spanish. Currently I’m obsessed with Chess so I’ve been watching a lot of ajedrez videos. I am a huge believer in language input.

Media #

I said I was going to try to log all the books and movies/TV shows but that has not happened. Here’s a list (* means completed):

Books #

  1. The Broken Earth Trilogy* by NK Jemisin
  2. Getting Even* by Woody Allen
  3. Something Happened by Joseph Heller
  4. Foundations of Rehabilitation Teaching: With Persons Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired* by S.V. and P.E. Ponchillia
  5. Moby Dick by Hermin Melville
  6. Predator at the Chessboard and The Chess Quizzer by Ward Farnsworth
  7. Adventures of Rabbi Harvey by Steve Sheinkin
  8. We Don’t Eat Our Friends* by Ryan T. Higgins

Tv shows and movies #

  1. The Queen’s Gambit*
  2. The New Pope*
  3. The Man of La Mancha*
  4. O Brother Where Art Thou? (haha I slept through a good portion of this, not because the movie was bad-it was good-I was just tired)

Music #

  1. Brian Eno (I was aware of him but someone gave me a list of his discography with the order I should listen to it in)
  2. Bruce Springsteen : Born to Run (album) (Similar to Eno, I heard the songs Born to Run and Born in the USA a trillion times but not much else. Pitchfork compared his work to The Killer’s album Day and Age so obviously I had to check out his other stuff).
  3. The Strokes : The Adults are Talking (song).

I have been reading Someting Happened for almost 3 months now and at this point should resign myself to not completing it and just give up, casually drop it into one of those Free Book drop-offs and quietly continue with my life.

I don’t like how I’ve been reviewing the past few books I’ve been writing about. My reviews should be more detailed and thought out…maybe less casual or more? But my review system of esoteric marks is still solid.

Foundations is unique in that it is the only book I read exclusively using text to speech. I have so many thoughts on this book (haha I have many thoughts on most of the completed books). My ears are still not used to this reading format. I find this method is really bad for remembering small details but overall comprehension isn’t lost (maybe).

I caved and bought an ereader. It is on the large end at around 10". It is incredible. I can read ebooks with 22px font. And my eyes don’t fatigue in 4 seconds. Amazing!

Conclusion #

I am incapable of writing well thought out blog posts. This reads like a hot jumbled mess. Unfortunately that is all this site contains. I do want to get better at longform cogent writing though (haha this will not happen).