From October 15 to 26, ATRIEV, our organization, held its quarterly
national trainer’s training program at the National Computer Center located within the University of the Philippines.
There were seventeen representatives sent by various elementary schools, high schools, and government and nongovernment organizations
from several regions in the Philippines. The said group of trainees
consisted of special education teachers, parents of visually impaired
children, volunteers, and executive directors.
The goal of this trainer’s training was to equip the said teachers,
parents, volunteers, and executives with fundamental knowledge
regarding the proper ways of teaching to blind and visually impaired
youths: the concept of the windows environment and popular applications
such as ms word. I, along with two other trainers of ATRIEV conducted
this two-week training.
The main difference of this training from previous ATRIEV trainings is
that instead of using JAWS, NVDA was used in teaching the participants about the concept of windows and ms word. The trainees, majority of whom were sighted, were asked to pay close attention to the voice output provided by the NVDA screen reader and minimize the use of the monitor screen in order for them to be able to have the perspective of blind students.
The first week consisted of topics about windows in general: the
desktop and its icons, my computer, files and folders, and file
management (cutting, copying, pasting, deleting, renaming). The second
week consisted of lessons regarding the commonly used functionalities
of ms word: reading text in ms word using NVDA, selecting text,
adjusting font styles, finding and replacing text, and the spell
checker and thesaurus. Although we saw that NVDA functioned well with
most of the work areas and dialog boxes, we saw later on, that being
in its early versions, NVDA had certain limitations in terms of
providing sufficient information to the user.
At the last day of the training, the trainees were asked to draft an
action plan wherein they indicated how they would apply the knowledge
and methodoligies they have learned in the course when they return to
their respective schools and institutions. Finally, through this
national trainer’s training, ATRIEV hopes that more and more blind and
visually impaired individuals would have access to
information-communication technology, thus bridging the digital divide
in our country.
Archive for October, 2007
ATRIEV’s National Trainer’s Training
27 October, 2007The Dimio’s Tools web site
24 October, 2007Hello again.
I thought I’d also post a useful web site.
Please click this link to visit Dimio’s Tools.
On this site, you can find lots of very good freeware programmes, which means that you can download them and use them freely.
Most of these programmes use speech.
One of my favourites is called DSpeech.
It lets you change a text file into an mp3 file so that you can listen to it on your mp3 player.
If you want to download DSpeech directly, then please click this link.
After downloading, you have to unzip the file into an empty directory and run it from there.
If you want to add a shortcut to DSpeech to your desktop, then
- Find the file called dspeech.exe
- Press the Application Key, and find the menu item called Create Shortcut.
- Next, find the file called Shortcut to DSpeech.exe, and cut it to the clipboard
- Finally, move to the Desktop, and paste the shortcut there.
If anyone wants more information about DSpeech, please ask me.
Using Skype on more than one computer
24 October, 2007Hello, everyone.
Some of you have asked if you can use Skype on more than one computer. For example, on your laptop and on a desktop at work.
The answer is yes, you certainly can.
All you have to do is
- download Skype from
the Skype web site - Install it
- Log in using your Skype username and password.
If you do this, then all of your contacts will appear on your new computer.
I use Skype on three computers, and it works well.
A new version of the Thunder screenreader is available
22 October, 2007Good evening.
A new version of the Thunder screenreader has recently been released.
In case you don’t already know, Thunder is a free screen reading package like NVDA, but it’s closed source, which means that you can’t see how it was written.
Still, it’s free, so I’d encourage anyone who’s interested to download it. Please go to the Thunder download page to get your copy.
Thunder works best with the WebbIE free web browser, so please download and install that too.
I haven’t used Thunder for almost 6 months now, so I don’t know how well it works with the latest versions of Vista or XP. However, when I last used it, it didn’t work well with Internet Explorer or Firefox.
Please try it and post your thoughts.
New links page
21 October, 2007Good morning everyone.
Please take a look at the page of links that I’ve just added to the blog.
You can go there directly by clicking here, or you can find it under the Pages heading.
The name of the page is “Useful Links.”
On the page, you can find links to free screen reading software, accessible web browsers, security software, and much more.
Please take a look at it and tell me what you think.
