Sunday Ramble: Technology and the Future

Posted on by Astrid

Hi all. I’m feeling kind of off today. I’m not sure it’s all in my head or I’m suffering with the early symptoms of a mild case of COVID. I haven’t had another lateral flow test, as I don’t feel worse than I did yesterday – in fact, I feel slightly better. On Tuesday, I’ll have a PCR test, so unless I develop really telling symptoms, none of which I have so far, I’ll wait and see until then.

Anyway, for my blog post today, I’m answering E.M.’s Sunday Ramble questions. Her topic for this week is technology and the future. Here are her questions.

1. Are there any applications on your mobile device, tablets, etc. that you cannot live without? Feel free to ramble about them! Maybe we will learn new apps that will become important in our own lives.
I am going with the more unusual apps here, as I doubt I’ll be inspiring anyone else to download Facebook or a web browser (I use Edge even on my iPhone, by the way) if they haven’t already. Apps I truly love on my iPhone include the diary app Day One. I previously reviewed Diarium, another diary app, but have since gone back to using Day One mostly because it allows me to have multiple diaries.

Other apps include MyNoise, an app that allows users to select soundscapes, the task management app Microsoft To Do and Seeing AI, an app that describes images. It most recently guessed my age in a photo to be 44 though. 😒 Admittedly, I pulled a rather odd face in a forced attempt to smile. And just so you know, no, I’m not going to post the photo here. 🙂

2. Do you prefer Apple or Android?
Apple for sure! It is far more advanced with respect to accessibility for the blind.

3. Windows OS or MacOS?
Windows. I tried a Mac some years ago, thinking it’d be easy to use with my being an iPhone user already, but I couldn’t get used to it. The only advantage of MacOS is that it comes with a built-in screen reader, like iOS. For Windows, you have to buy (or get insurance to pay for) JAWS.

4. What do you wish that you would have placed in a time capsule 15+ years ago to have access to now?
I answered a similar question already on another blog a few weeks back: I’d bring back the disability-related story-sharing websites we had in the early 2000s, like Tell-Us-Your-Story.com. I also would’ve put Diaryland’s diaryrings into the time capsule, but then I’d have hacked the concept and applied it to today’s blogs. Webrings are cool! I think the concept still exists, but hardly anyone participates nowadays.

5. When you think of the what the world will look like 50 years from now, what does that future look like through your eyes? Go as sci-fi and/or fantasy as you would like and ramble on however you wish to ramble When you think of the what the world will look like 50 years from now, what does that future look like through your eyes? Go as sci-fi and/or fantasy as you would like and ramble on however you wish to ramble.
I have absolutely no idea. I did a post on this topic some six years ago on my old blog, but I mostly focused on what my life would be like when I was in my late seventies. I really hope that image description and the like will be very much improved, so that the blind will be able to “see” this way. There already are glasses, such as the Orcam or Envision Glasses, which will describe things a person is looking at. I haven’t tried those, but if they evolve more, and they likely will, I’d love to try those someday.

What do you wish you could’ve put into a time capsule to take with you from 15+ years ago?

Frustration: A Vent Post About My Mac #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Welcome to day six in the #AtoZChallenge. Today, I’m not in the mood for deep discussions, so I won’t write about something too meaningful. Rather, just allow me to vent a little.

I am increasingly frustrated with my Mac. My iPhone is still useful, but the Mac is very hard to get used to. Yes, I’ve had it for over two months and am still in the getting-used-to phase. To be honest, I rarely use my Mac, because it’s so hard to work.

Particularly Safari, Apple’s default browser, is hard to use. Navigating web pages, particularly large ones, is a pain. I am not in the mood to explain it in English and had some trouble explaining it in Dutch to my husband too. Suffice it to say that the issue is because of VoiceOver, Apple’s built-in screen reader, so Chrome or other browsers give me the exact same trouble.

I have been doubting whether my choice to buy a Mac was right ever since I got it. I know I can’t get JAWS, the good but expensive screen reader, because health insurance is giving me a hard time on covering it. This was the main reason I got a Mac, since it has a built-in sc reen reader.

Now I know I could be idealizing my old Windows PC. It didn’t work well in the end either. Two keys were broken. My rather outdated version of JAWS was giving me increasing trouble with an increasing number of programs. I had NVDA, JAWS’s open source alternative, installed, but was struggling using just Braille. Now I can’t do that on my Mac either. I have to always have speech on. This is okay with me.

I was probably idealizing the Mac before I bought it and this may be one reason I’m disappointed now. I’m not sure it was wrong to buy it, but I’m not 100% sure it was the right choice either. Ideally, I would’ve tried Windows 10 with NVDA on my old PC first, but I didn’t. Then again, my old PC isn’t useful now because of the broken keys.

Today, as I was discussing my concerns with my husband, he offered me his laptop to try. I may have to buy a Windows license, but that’s okay. I don’t like it that I can’t make just one device work fully, but that’s probably the thing with accessibility.

My New Mac: First Impressions

Posted on by Astrid

One of Mama’s Losin’ It’s prompts for this week is to write about your most recent purchase. I don’t know what counts as a purchase, but I really want to write about my Mac, which I bought two weeks ago.

I started writing this post on my new Mac. It’s new to me, but it’s the MacBook Air 2017, so I didn’t expect it to be all that advanced. I also didn’t expect to use it much for the first while. I mean, even after fully installing my current Windows PC in July of 2014, it took me two weeks before I started using it and only because I had spilled tea over my old one. Each new version of Windows required me a lot of learning, so I expected that even more with my Mac.

My husband installed it last Saturday evening. I started exploring it and, within an hour, my husband asked whether I could browse the Internet yet. Safari is one of the clunkier apps on the Mac, so I wasn’t expecting it to work. That evening though, I was reading blogs and commenting using my WordPress account. Apparently, I had figured out some basic web browsing on Safari.

The next day, I explored the Mac further and was blissfully unaware of my incompetence with it. That awareness came Monday, when I couldn’t figure out Facebook or WordPress.com. In the evening, my husband tried to make the mail app work with my self-hosted E-mail account (is that what it’s called?). IMAP wouldn’t work, which caused me to melt down. I said I was going to buy a Windows PC the next day and go back to that. Thankfully, my husband talked me out of making any impulsive decisions.

The last few days have been better. I can more or less work any website that isn’t too chaotic, including Facebook. I finally figured out WordPress yesterday too, although I still prefer to type my blog posts on the iPhone.

Today, I spent my time on the Mac figuring out Apple Music. I have a Spotify premium subscription, but for some reason (them being competitors, I guess), Spotify isn’t available in the app store, or at least I couldn’t find it. I didn’t use to like iTunes on the PC, but so far, Apple Music is good on both iPhone and Mac.

I also decided to put my documents on my Mac. I rarely use offline documents nowadays, but I don’t want to lose them either. I have diaries dating back to like 1999 in my documents. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find Dropbox in the app store either, so I had to retrieve my docs from my external hard drive. That’s a lot easier anyway.

I haven’t installed many apps yet. The only apps I installed so far, that aren’t recommended by Apple, are Kindle and ReadKit. I am not using either yet, because Kindle has a visual-only CAPTCHA to register and I would like to sync ReadKit with a feed reader that also syncs to the app I use on my phone. The most sensible choice for that is Feedly, but I have over 100 feeds I’m subscribed to and then a subscription costs like $65 a year. Maybe I could try Feedly with just a few feeds though to see if it works well with ReadKit and if I can use ReadKit like I want to.

As regular readers know, I am blind and so I use a screen reader. One of the main reasons I chose a Mac over another PC, is that the Mac has a built-in screen reader called VoiceOver. I had read up a lot about accessibility before buying the Mac, but there wasn’t much out there about Braille displays, which I use most of the time. Thankfully though, except for the login screen, everything works fine with my Focus Braille display.

There are also a ton of keyboard shortcuts, both general and VoiceOver-based. I love that, but it is a learning curve. For example, when copying my files from my external hard drive to my Mac, I kept trying to press Enter to open the folders and then realized I had to press Command+O. I also keep trying to press Shift+F10 to open a context menu. I don’t know whether there isn’t such a thing or I haven’t figured it out yet.

This review may seem a bit negative, but it isn’t intended as such. Overall, my Mac is definitely useful. I’m pretty sure I’ll get used to it eventually.

Mama’s Losin’ It

Blogging on My iPhone

Posted on by Astrid

Man, it’s been so long since I last wrote! I really want to write, but I don’t know what about. I’ve been starting and restarting this blog post a few times. I write it on my iPhone to see if I can get the WordPress app working properly. So far, it seems to work really well. That doesn’t get me out of writer’s block though. 🤣

My husband said on Monday that he believes I’ll buy one more laptop before doing everything on my phone. He says smartphones are the future, so he recommended I try to do most of my work on my iPhone. Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to do this. Not just to satisfy my husband, but also because my rather outdated version of the screen reader on my laptop doesn’t support an increasingly large number of apps. Like, it doesn’t work with Kindle, Adobe Digital Editions (which I used to use for eBooks) or even Firefox or Thunderbird.

So I’ve been trying to transfer my stuff from my computer to my iPhone. I started with books, because my inability to read those on my laptop was frustrating me the most. Now I can read all my books again, yay!

Also, I discovered this afternoon when at my in-laws’ house, that I can actually work my mother-in-law’s iPad without any difficulty. Isn’t it amazing that I can now just use any iDevice without the need to install special software? I wish computers were the same.

I am not sure what else to share right now. It’s still a bit awkward blogging on my iPhone, but I’ll hopefully get used to it real soon.