I’m not-quite completely blind; what little vision I have tends to fluctuate between effectively nonexistent and good enough to notice vague details maybe once or twice a year. I could see better up until I was 14, but my vision was still too poor to get out of using braille and a cane (given thick glasses and enough time, I could possibly have read size 20 font; even with the much larger font used in movie subtitles, I had to pause the video and put my face against the screen to read them).
I don’t know my official acuity/diagnoses (It’s been a few years since I saw an eye doctor), but I appear to have started out with retinal detachment and scarring, and later developed uveitis. The latter seems to be the primary cause for the dramatic decline starting from age 14.
Most of my medical everything is handled by my parents, who are unlikely to do anything unless it is brought to their attention (though sometimes they do ask to make sure nothing’s quietly going horribly wrong). My vision was awful enough when last I went, and the doctor only aware of a full-on bionic eye as a possible method for improvement, and what little I had left vulnerable enough to damage/severe discomfort from the sorts of things needed to examine my eyes (holding them open and shining a light in, basically) that it’s mostly stopped being worth it.
I did discover a possible treatment for my specific condition recently. I am unsure as to if it would be of much value with my vision as it currently is, but it’s something I aim to look into further when I’ve sorted out enough of this basic life stuff.
Are these problems likely to be correctable/improvable with medicine, but you have no money/insurance to get medical help? Or are they of a kind that basically can’t be helped, and that’s why you haven’t been to a doctor in years? Or is it something else?
Do you use a reader program to browse the web and this site? Do you touch-type or dictate your comments?
(I realize that my questions are callous; please feel free to ignore if they’re too invasive)
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.
How blind are you, in layman terms of what you can/can’t see? What’s your prognosis?
I’m not-quite completely blind; what little vision I have tends to fluctuate between effectively nonexistent and good enough to notice vague details maybe once or twice a year. I could see better up until I was 14, but my vision was still too poor to get out of using braille and a cane (given thick glasses and enough time, I could possibly have read size 20 font; even with the much larger font used in movie subtitles, I had to pause the video and put my face against the screen to read them).
I don’t know my official acuity/diagnoses (It’s been a few years since I saw an eye doctor), but I appear to have started out with retinal detachment and scarring, and later developed uveitis. The latter seems to be the primary cause for the dramatic decline starting from age 14.
Why is that? No healthcare policy? It seems that you have good reason to frequent an eye-doctor.
Most of my medical everything is handled by my parents, who are unlikely to do anything unless it is brought to their attention (though sometimes they do ask to make sure nothing’s quietly going horribly wrong). My vision was awful enough when last I went, and the doctor only aware of a full-on bionic eye as a possible method for improvement, and what little I had left vulnerable enough to damage/severe discomfort from the sorts of things needed to examine my eyes (holding them open and shining a light in, basically) that it’s mostly stopped being worth it.
I did discover a possible treatment for my specific condition recently. I am unsure as to if it would be of much value with my vision as it currently is, but it’s something I aim to look into further when I’ve sorted out enough of this basic life stuff.
Are these problems likely to be correctable/improvable with medicine, but you have no money/insurance to get medical help? Or are they of a kind that basically can’t be helped, and that’s why you haven’t been to a doctor in years? Or is it something else?
Do you use a reader program to browse the web and this site? Do you touch-type or dictate your comments?
(I realize that my questions are callous; please feel free to ignore if they’re too invasive)
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.