The retinal issues are unlikely to be fixable in the immediate future (though the latest developments on that front seem potentially promising). There may be a treatment for the more annoying issue, but I don’t know if it’s too late/what I should do to learn more, and so I’m waiting until life in general is more favorable to dig into it further. (Which I expect means I’ll be putting it off until 2015, since I expect to be fairly occupied during most of 2014.)
For using the internet/computers in general, I use Nonvisual Desktop Access, a free screen reader which only recently attained comparable status to Jaws for Windows, which I’d been using prior to 2011. These work well with plaintext, and have trouble with certain types of controls/labels and images and such (I had to Skype someone a screenshot to get past the CAPCHA to register here. I was using a trial of a CAPCHA-solving add-on at the time, but it was unable to locate the CAPCHA on Lesswrong.). Since NVDA is open source, users frequently develop useful add-ons and plugins, such as a CPU usage monitor and the ability to summon a Google Translation of copied text with a single keystroke. (It supposedly includes an optical character recognition feature, but I’ve never figured out how to use it.).
I touch-type. I’m not much of a fan of dictation, though I’m not sure why.
The retinal issues are unlikely to be fixable in the immediate future (though the latest developments on that front seem potentially promising). There may be a treatment for the more annoying issue, but I don’t know if it’s too late/what I should do to learn more, and so I’m waiting until life in general is more favorable to dig into it further. (Which I expect means I’ll be putting it off until 2015, since I expect to be fairly occupied during most of 2014.)
For using the internet/computers in general, I use Nonvisual Desktop Access, a free screen reader which only recently attained comparable status to Jaws for Windows, which I’d been using prior to 2011. These work well with plaintext, and have trouble with certain types of controls/labels and images and such (I had to Skype someone a screenshot to get past the CAPCHA to register here. I was using a trial of a CAPCHA-solving add-on at the time, but it was unable to locate the CAPCHA on Lesswrong.). Since NVDA is open source, users frequently develop useful add-ons and plugins, such as a CPU usage monitor and the ability to summon a Google Translation of copied text with a single keystroke. (It supposedly includes an optical character recognition feature, but I’ve never figured out how to use it.).
I touch-type. I’m not much of a fan of dictation, though I’m not sure why.