Vince's Parallax: Introductory Page

Yes, this site has done us well, but it's time to move on. I can't add anything more to this site without getting quota problems, so I'm trying a new approach. The new Blind Buzz Blog will cover the same sort of territory that this site does, but in a more rapidly-updated form. At the moment, it's a major operation to update this site at all, and sorry, life's too short.

[1] Introduction

This site mainly deals with blindness, and ways that a blind person may find life easier to deal with through technology and personal skills.

Topics I cover include

podcasting and radio
photography
affordable assistive software and hardware
making the most of Windows
the effects of blindness, and some possible ways to deal with them

I hope to make the site as accessible as possible, so if you have any problem reading it, please let me know the details. Development does take time, so please be patient.

Partially sighted people sometimes feel left out of things, and you can understand why. There is one promising new site that you could try if you have partial sight - www.partially-sighted.com/.

Access Keys

Each page on the site has a number of keys that take you to particular features. These are usually Alt-key combinations, such as Alt-1 or Alt-6. The exact keystrokes depend on which web browser you use.

I have tried to make the keys consistent, so that Alt-0 always takes you to the main page menu, and Alt-9 always takes you to the colour scheme changer. Some of the numbers in the middle may not be used if there aren't enough sections on a page.

RSS News Feeds

This site is peppered with RSS feeds, but you may be wondering what they actually are.

To put it simply, an RSS feed can pull in information from the Internet and allow you to read it on your computer or other device. This means you can gather a lot of information without going to the original web sites and you get the latest first - hence you can call them 'news feeds.

These feeds can carry plain text (that's a news feed), or they can include 'enclosures', which may be audio (that's a podcast), video (sometimes called a vodcast) or pictures.

To use these feeds effectively, you need some kind of program that can read them in a format that's accessible to you. For news feeds that bring in mainly text, I use Snarfer, which I find fast, efficient and very accessible. It presents the material from feeds much like an e-mail program, with folders on the left containing the feed names, headlines on the right, and a preview pane underneath, unless like me you turn the preview pane off for the sake of speed. To install a new feed, you simply copy its address and paste it in. New stories from the feed usually appear within a few seconds.
Snarfer Free RSS Reader

In my opinion RSS is a gift for us blind people, and makes the whole business of getting news and audio amazingly free of hassle. You might have a small learning curve to go through if you haven't used RSS before, but it's well worth it.

There are plenty of articles and tutorials on reading RSS feeds, so it's worth Googling for them. One you might start with is RSS: news you choose on CNET.