Re: Using braille: was Had enough with windows....going insane.....need advice

[Cheryl Homiak <chomiak@chartermi.net>]

On Sat, 12 Jan 2002, Dave Mielke wrote:

> Depending on what you want, once you have BRLTTY working, you can start it very
> early in the boot sequence and no longer rely on speech.

This is very true; I used to use speech solely, as what I had was a
doubletalk-lt. When I started using brltty and subsequently got
cable-modem access to the Internet, I put the doubletalk on ttyS0
and the braillelite on ttyS1. I still have the capability of using speakup
or emacspeak when I want to do so, and I tend to use speech when I have a
longer text file to read. For the most part, though, I use brltty by
itself. I love the way I can move around in an editor or among web links
with brltty and know exactly what I'm doing and where I am. I also very
much enjoy being able to listen to audio with my sound card and not
having to listen to my speech synthesizer at the same time, if I am doing
several things at once (which I usually am). I also was a
bit surprised to discover (though logically I should have realized it) how
much using the speech was sometimes slowing me down; the line I wanted
would be right there on the braillelite when the speech synthesizer was
still blabbing away.
This isn't meant to start a speech vs. braille war. For one thing, braille
displays are expensive and I wouldn't be using one if I didn't have the
equipment due to my job. For another thing, speech and braille both have
their advantages and disadvantages and, there are skills and tricks and
shortcuts one learns in order to make excellent use of either or both. I'm
only
saying that, after having used speech extensively, it was delightful to
discover some of the advantages of using braille. Since i've allways been
an avid braille reader anyway, and will in most cases choose braille if it
is available, my delight in using braille with my computer would come as
no surprise!
				Cheryl