My History with Tech

I lost my sight at the age of 12 in 1966. Without going into gory details, it was messy.

After some time at a school for the blind where I learned Braille reading and writing with both the Perkins and the slate and stylus; including a single line slate for labeling things with Dymo tape, cane travel, plus cooking, using tools in the woodshop, etc. I used the slate and stylus for taking notes through all my education. After the school for the blind, I was mainstreamed into public school. After high school, I went to college and received a Bachelor of Arts. During my freshman year, the OPTACON came out and with an uncle's help, my dad purchased one for me in my sophomore year. The OPTACON was a great help for some things during my college years and after. I used the OPTACON for reading my bill statements, my checks that I typed on a manual typewriter, and letters I received that were type written.

After college, in 1977, I volunteered at a 24-hour crisis line, where I was hired full time with the help of the State Commission for the Blind with a CETA slot in April of 1978. They also bought me a $15 light probe so I could tell which line was ringing, being used, or available.

A few years later, the Commodore 64 computer came out and I figured out how to read the screen with my OPTACON, so I bought one.

A while later, I honestly do not remember when, a speech cartridge came out for the Commodore, which worked reasonably well for that time.

Then, I heard about a guy named Ned Johnson who had developed a screen reader for MS-DOS. I was in Salem Oregon at this time, and he was in Portland, Oregon, about forty-five miles away. I got a friend to drive me to his house, he lived on a houseboat on the Columbia River. He showed me an IBM clone computer with a Freedom One speech synthesizer and his ISOS software. I was quite impressed. I bought the package: computer, synthesizer, and software. This was around 1986. The computer had two floppy drives and was called a Transportable computer. Transportable because it had a screen and the two drives built into a case, and the keyboard could fit in the lid that you then clamped on over the drives and screen. The thing probably weighed 40 or 50 pounds, but it could be carried by the handle on the top of that lid.

I think I gave the Commodore to a friend, and after 2 or 3 years, maybe 4, I bought my first computer with a hard drive. This was still using MS-DOS, so the hard drive held the astonishing amount of ten megabytes. Yes, megabytes, no one had heard of gigabytes for home use yet.
I think it also had 3.5-inch diskettes.

I began playing Infocom games with friends and co-workers on the weekends. Great times!

I ended up being the manager for the crisis line and convinced the powers that be that if we got a computer for client files, we could keep much better records.

I also purchased Vocal-Eyes for DOS to replace the ISOS software as it wasn't keeping up with the changes in MS-DOS. That was the first software from GW Micro.

I found a guy who did lots of volunteer work for non-profits helping with their computers. He worked for over 30 years for IBM, and he was a huge help in getting me/us set up with a spreadsheet, database, and word processor. All of them worked with my screen reader at the time, and I learned how to use the database to create an excellent system for our client files with passwords and the lot and taught my staff how to use it all, thanks to his tutoring of me. He was a genuine curmudgeon, very old school, and was amazed that a blind person could do any of this. At the same time, he was a great guy.

I also figured out how to design a spreadsheet for our timesheets. That took hours of my own time, but I won't bore you with that.

We had an old-fashioned teletype machine in our little room that allowed us to work with people who were deaf. We were able to take crisis calls from folks using the TTY. I, of course, couldn't use it unless someone was there to read what the other person typed. The thing was huge and extremely noisy. About as noisy as a couple of commercial sized braille embossers. So, when that was being used, it was very difficult to talk on the phone.

Somewhere around 1990, 1991, someone came up with a TTY for a DOS computer. It was an old-fashioned card that fit in the desktop and with a lot of work, my screen reading software could work with it, though slowly. The best thing about it was it was quiet!

Also, around 1989 or 90, I bought my first accessible book player with speech, it was the Road Runner. It used the Double Talk speech synthesizer and could read txt files.

I began dating an old friend from college in 1990, and we took a car trip to the Oregon Shakespeare festival. On the way home, we listened to the book, Skipping Christmas by John Grisham, on the Road Runner, using a cassette adapter that allowed me to play it through her car's speakers. She got the hang of listening to the synthesized voice very quickly.

We got married in 1992. We moved to Seattle where her job was, she is a United methodist Pastor, and I started graduate school at the University of Washington's School of Social Work.

Up to that point, the only help I had from the State was the CETA slot that got me the job. The CETA slot lasted for 15 months, then I was put on the non-profit payroll. So, when I got married and moved away, I had worked there for almost 15 years counting my volunteer time.

When I started graduate school, I contacted the Washington State Services for the Blind to see about getting help to pay readers as getting the books in an accessible format was a nightmare at best. They were very helpful. Before I was to get my MSW, they provided me with a computer, a scanner, and the Arkenstone software as I would need to be able to scan papers when I started working as a counselor.

Arkenstone, as many may know, became the Openbook software purchased by Vispero, and now no longer being actively developed.

Along with the scanning software which required a component of Windows 3.1.1 to run, they provided me with Window-Eyes.

As time went by, I purchased the updates to window-Eyes and gradually changed over to just using Windows.

In 2000, I stopped working for a time and focused on figuring out what I wanted to be when I grew up. In the meantime, I taught myself HTML and developed a web site mostly focused on Window-Eyes Set Files, and such. I learned how to customize set files and did some set files that I put on my web site for anyone to grab. I started helping people I learned about in my area who were also Window-Eyes users, and then stumbled into a job with the Oregon Commission for the Blind teaching Braille, which morphed into teaching the portable devices, Braille Notes, Voice Notes, etc. I had never seen any of these devises until I went to work for the Commission in 2003.
I wrote Window-Eyes set files for our software at work for myself because everyone else used Jaws, and I of course, had to use Jaws for the client database because it was scripted for Jaws, but everything else I did at work, I used my own copy of Window-Eyes. My set files for a program called Groupwise became the set files on the Window-Eyes CD. By that point, I had become a beta tester for GW Micro and had gotten to know several of their staff.

When the iPod Touch came out in the fall of 2009 with VoiceOver, my wife took me and a coworker, who was the head of the Tech Center, to the Apple store to check them out. I was thinking in terms of a device clients could use to take notes, or record classes, etc. To make a long story shorter, I bought one with the understanding that if it didn't meet my needs, I could return it without a restocking fee. I didn't return it.

I not only learned to use it for myself but figured out how to teach it to others and convinced my boss to buy them for our clients, which fit in nicely with my job of teaching assistive technology.
That was January of 2010. I believe we were one of the first services for the Blind to begin teaching the Apple devices as a standard part of the Vocational Rehabilitation program. Of course, as people started buying the iPhone, it was easy to teach that because it worked the same way as the iPod Touch.

I didn't get my own iPhone until 2014 when we got a little extra money due to my Mother-In-Law's death. We spent our share on iPhones, and my wife bought herself a much nicer sewing machine.

Since then, I have kept up with the Apple devices and reluctantly switched to using Jaws for the most part and NVDA or Narrator in certain situations.

My current tech (2025) is an Orbit Reader 40, a backup Braille Edge 40, an Orbit-Speak, an iPhone 16 pro, an Apple watch series 6, an iPad Mini 6, along with a couple echo devices and a Sonos sound system with Alexa and the Cosori air fryer which can be controlled with Alexa. And, a Dell Windows 11 laptop with Jaws 2025 and lots of software and apps.