RantWoman likes to visit a place she often calls her friendly neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing and today's visit featured The Big Red Button!
The Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing is not really about gaunt sleep-deprived and well-refrigerated geeks in worn-out T-shirts from Value Village tending some massively parallel supercomputer and crunching algorithms with millions of variables. RantWoman could theoretically be at least mildly interested in the doings of such a place but she suspects feeding all of that through a screen reader would be more fun than even she can handle.
Despite wanting to hold forth all over the internet RantWoman also feels protective of the people involved in the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing so RantWoman is going to pick gingerly through the actual doings there and leave key details to her readers' imaginations. For the last few days whenever RantWoman has visited, one of the denizens of the Friendly Neighborhood... has been working away on a computer using only a big red button. Well, there is a connection box and some wires and the option of adding a small rainbow of other equally enormous buttons, but there is one button and it goes up and down. The big red button is huge. It is something a Dr. Strangelove would swoon for.
RantWoman thinks that other things happen on the screen too, but it did not really occur to her to investigate that. The point is that everything that a user makes happen on the computer happens through the big red button. Forget launching a nuclear attack! This is for people who cannot even take for granted being able to move much. A few years ago it would not have occurred to RantWoman to think about such things. Now she is both humbled and awed in the presence of such realities.
Today when RantWoman went by the Big Red Button Tester was working with another neighbor. This neighbor is the sort of person who, in fact, really cannot move much except a hand up and down. She and the Big Red Button Tester were trying different things and moving the big red button around on the table. Rant Woman came back by a little later and was asking the Big Red Button Tester how things went. He said, well for today they had one simple goal: to decide where on the table it would be best to put the Big Red Button. Amd the genius of the Big Red Button Tester is that he knew where to start. RantWoman would not have had a clue.
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Are any of the denizens of FNCFEC so limited in mobility that even a big red button is not workable? Do any of them use Dragon? I think their speech rec software is called Naturally Speaking.
ReplyDelete--Curmudgeon
Long ago at Large Local Healthcare entity, RantWoman used to work with a programmer who used a sip and puff device. RantWoman thinks but is not certain the sip and puff device works on principles similar to the Big Red Button.
ReplyDeleteRantWoman also notes that Mr. Sip and Puff sometimes got called on to test whether software really worked as advertised in terms of interacting with accessibility issues. RantWoman thinks this might have been a sort of thankless task because sometimes the software had to be bought regardless of whether it worked with his devices and the vendor might have to promise to provide lots of tech support or to fix the problems in the next software release, but at least testing was done and promises were extracted.
At the Friendly Neighborhood Center... they deeply heart Dragon Naturally Speaking. Indeed the Big Red Button Tester is the official Dragon Naturally Speaking guru, and RantWoman keeps meaning to make appointments with him about lessons.
RantWoman got to play a little bit with Dragon at an event last summer. RantWoman thought Dragon was really, really fun. RantWoman thinks she could really really easily get used to having an electronic love slave hanging on her every word. RantWoman is even a little bit afraid that if she plays some more, she will be hopelessly seduced and will then have to figure out how to fit Dragon to her life.
RantWoman supposes she should be glad she has pretty clear speech patterns that Dragon can generally handle. RantWoman knows of some people who have difficulty with speech and for whom Dragon Naturally Speaking is anything but natural.