Reflections on Technology, Access To Books And Other Things

[chelseajmunoz]

Yesterday morning I received a text message from someone who works at the company who hires assistants for people. In the text message that the hiring company had sent me they told me that they'd found an assistant who could start working for me the following week. While I texted back and forth with the lady who works for that particular company I was also texting back and forth with one of my close friends. I told her that I wanted to read a book called The Body Keeps The Score because my therapists as well as some friends of mine have suggested that I read that book. However a while back I'd asked the Texas state Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped whether they had that book in Braille or audio format. The Texas state Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped told me that they had The Body Keeps The Score in audio format so I wanted to keep searching to find a way that I could read that book with a screen reader or in Braille. That's why I asked one of my close friends if she knew of a way for me to make that happen for myself. Fortunately she said I could use her Bookshare account to read The Body Keeps The Score if I wanted to. Before I go any further though let me explain what the Texas state Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped and Bookshare are. The Texas state Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped is a part of congress which was created for people who are not able to read printed materials. Each state has a state Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped that provides this free service to people who can't read print. Bookshare is an online library where people who can't read print can sign up and read whatever books are available on Bookshare's website. Bookshare is not free though so I personally don't have a membership with that particular company right now. So yesterday morning when a close friend of mine said that I could use her Bookshare account to read books I was kind of hesitant to do so. The reason I was hesitant to read books off of Bookshare's website was because several years ago when I had an account with Bookshare I remembered that the quality of Bookshare's books was piss poor. What I mean in saying that the quality of Bookshare's books was piss poor was that parts of sentences would be cut off in books which for me took away the book as a whole because I wasn't given the full text of the book. Since a close friend of mine told me that Bookshare had gotten better about the quality of books that were available on their website though I felt a little more comfortable trying Bookshare out again. Once I'd gotten my friend's login information I searched Bookshare's catalogue for The Body Keeps The Score. Fortunately Bookshare had that book as I'd hoped they would. Before I go any further though let me tell you all what The Body Keeps The Score is about. That particular book is about how when people are repeatedly traumatized throughout his or her lives, the repeated traumatic experiences literally cause people's brains and bodies to be rewired in such a way that people often still relive those traumatic experiences long after those traumatic experiences have stopped happening to him or her. Although I'd never thought about how one's mind and body can be so deeply connected and feed off one another it makes sense to me that that's what happens because our bodies are inter-connected. So if one part of a person's body is negatively reacting to traumatic experiences that he or she has been through, it makes sense that other parts of his or her body will likely follow and negatively react to traumatic experiences that he or she has gone through. Reading The Body Keeps The Score though has truly given me hope that it is possible to move on from the traumatic things that people have experienced in his or her life. Whereas before I started reading this particular book I was unsure if there was such a thing as people being able to recover from trauma. Interestingly though when I read The Body Keeps The Score on my iPhone I slow VoiceOver's speaking rate down quite a bit so that I can focus on the book's contents and absorb the book's contents more fully than I could if I kept VoiceOver's speaking rate fast. This morning I played around with the iPhone app that allows me to do my banking online. I played with my banking app because I wanted to make sure that I could easily receive money from people. However it took me some time to finally get to the bottom of why I couldn't receive money from people. Even then I only got to the bottom of the issue because I called my bank and spoke with someone who works there. It turned out that the reason that I was unable to receive money from people was because the bank account that had been selected to be my default bank account was no longer an active account. The thing was though my screen reader VoiceOver didn't even alert me to the fact that my old bank account was anywhere on the screen. Thankfully the bank representative I'd spoken with caught that not-so-small detail and from there she told me that once I'd changed my default bank account to my current bank account, receiving money from people would not be a problem. So right after I'd gotten off the phone with that bank representative I used the bank's iPhone app to change my default bank account. Thankfully I was able to change my default bank account without any issues. I write about this seemingly simple experience because when my screen reader is not able to read me all of the information that is present on the screen, sometimes like in this case, that means I have to go through extra steps just to find out how to resolve whatever problem I'm having. Given that the world we live in is not made with people who are disabled in mind, it's quite frequent for me to have to use my resourcefulness so that I can still get the things done that I need to get done. As I've mentioned in my blog entries before there are apps for our phones nowadays that allow blind people to take care of tasks somewhat easier than used to be the case. Those phone apps connect us with real human beings who are able to use our phone's cameras to see whatever it is that we need help with. There are also apps for our phones that use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help us read bar codes on products, to tell us what dollar bills we have in our hands and so much more. That is why I say that I'm glad to have been born in this particular time period: because even though it's sometimes difficult to navigate the world as a blind person I have hope that the world is learning the importance of having things accessible to everyone every day that people who are disabled speak up about the ways in which the world is not easily accessible to or for us. I believe it's also on us as people who are disabled to give this inaccessible world possible solutions as to how they can make their products or places of business accessible to everyone. Going back to hope though: hope is a very powerful thing. Although I'd never thought about the power of hope until I started going to therapy last August. Hope is what's gotten me through life though. All those years that I was physically and mentally abused by my mother and many of her family members I had hope that somehow things would get better for me someday. I had hope that my dream of wanting to move out of my mom's house and into an apartment of my own would come true someday. I had hope that most people in the world would not be like my mom or like many of her family members. I had evidence of the fact that some people in the world would not be like her or her family members and that evidence also gave me hope of having a better life someday. The kindnesses that my grandparents and other people I interacted with showed me, allowed me to develop at least some sense of safety some of the time. Hope does not just have to be a feeling that people can experience in his or her life. With determination and a desire to stop the vicious cycle that his or her family has had, a person can do what it takes to create a better life for his or herself. I'm by no means saying that it will be easy to recover from such trauma. What I am saying though is that as adults we have the ability to make choices that we didn't have the ability to make as children. As adults we are free to decide who we want in our lives and who we do not want in our lives. As adults we have the beautiful gift of freedom. It's up to us to choose whether or not we want to take advantage of that precious gift. A little while after I'd resolved the online banking issue I received a text message from the company who hires assistants for people. The text message the company sent me told me that the weather is supposed to be horrible early this week. So the company wanted to know if it would be okay with me if my assistant came sometime later in the day. Of course I said that would be fine so we'll see how things play out. My guess is that since we've planned for horrible weather, horrible weather won't even happen. LOL. Shortly after I'd texted back and forth with the company who hires assistants for people I talked to a friend about a show I'm watching called Once Upon a Time. My friend asked me how many seasons there were of the show and I told him that I'm on season 6 of Once Upon a Time right now. I then told him that season 7 of Once Upon a Time is happening on TV as we speak. I made a comment like "I hate having to wait a week to watch shows on TV. I prefer to watch shows on Netflix because I can binge-watch any show that's available in Netflix's catalogue." My friend then said "Do you remember when we didn't have a choice whether we wanted to wait a week to watch shows we liked? Because when stuff was on TV we'd watch it. Then we'd talk about said show then wait until the next episode of the show aired the following week." I told him that I did remember those days, the days when we actually knew how to be patient with things. LOL. On a somewhat similar note it truly is interesting to me how as technology changes, some of the changes in technology are taking some valuable things away from humanity (face-to-face contact and the ability to know how to properly construct sentences) just to name a couple examples. When people use Siri to dictate things many people don't know that you have to actually say the punctuation marks to Siri because if you don't you'll have a huge run-on sentence. I can't tell you all who don't use screen readers how awful VoiceOver sounds when people don't punctuate sentences. When that happens VoiceOver sounds off because it's as though the screen reader can't even take a breath.