Toastmasters - Collected Wisdom

These are summaries of the collected wisdom of contributors to alt.toastmasters.org a Toastamsters newsgroup which operated between 1995 and 2008 and ToastmastersPrime, a Google group which commenced in 2008. This is not an official Toastmasters site, but is an edited collection of posts from the newsgroup and the Google group. These groups provide an unofficial means of communicating for an enthusiastic group of Toastmasters from throughout the world.

Friday, May 25, 2007

Making it easier for the visually impaired.

Jen, who is deafblind, joined Toastmasters two weeks ago and found the newsgroup while looking for ideas for her first Table topics assignment. She is able to hear extremely well with hearing aids, and uses a guide dog, Nixon.

She uses JAWS for Windows which reads any and all information that is available on the screen via voice. She finds it confusing when people top post in reply to emails and newsgroup postings, because she has to wade through all of the earlier posts.

So if you are posting to newsgroups consider a possible 10 million other readers in the United states - that's 1 in 30 people - who will "see" your message a lot more clearly if you help them by placing your message at the top of the post, rather than underneath.

Jen's contribution to the newsgroup was posted on May 24 2007 under the thread New Member and expanded into a thread of its own O/T Using screen readers suggestions/recommendations

Jen also posted some examples of reading through a screen reader at
http://tinyurl.com/2ybwh3
This one is still in Mozilla reading a web page, I think.
http://tinyurl.com/2hv2gu
I am in my Outlook folder, flipping through mail, and I believe at this stage, I show how I access the Start menu to open a program.
http://tinyurl.com/25rn36
Here's JAWS reading one of my e-mail messages, that is very short. This is when you really get a chance to hear how fast he really reads!
http://tinyurl.com/2a8ktt

My stat of 10 million extra "readers" for your message is from http://www.afb.org/Section.asp?SectionID=15#num

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