Podcast Summary:
Learning assistive technology isn’t just about memorizing shortcuts—it’s about building skills that open doors to school, work, and everyday life. In this episode, Cheryl McIntosh and Sree Roy share how mastering screen readers like JAWS, NVDA, and VoiceOver can turn frustration into confidence. They break down why fundamentals matter, how learning why something works makes skills transferable, and why patience and practice are the real superpowers. From sending that first text message to managing spreadsheets for scholarships or work, these tools connect students to the world in real ways. The conversation also highlights free and low-cost resources like BITS, iBUG Today, libraries, and training programs that help students learn alongside supportive communities. If you’re in high school, heading to college, or just starting your tech journey, this episode shows how assistive technology isn’t limiting—it’s empowering, practical, and absolutely worth exploring.
Useful links from this episode:
Cheryl on the Blind Abilities podcast:
Sree Roy on the Blind Abilities podcast:
BITS – Blind Information Technology Solutions
BITS on the Blind Abilities Podcast:
BITS Has the Solutions: Empowering Blind Tech Users Through Community, Training, and Opportunity
iBUG Today – i Blind Users Group
iBUG Today on the Blind Abilities podcast:
WSB – World Services for the blind Career Training Programs
DC Public Library – Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Accessibility
NVDA – Non Visual Desktop Access Screen Reader software
Apple’s VoiceOver Screen Reader Support
Full Transcript
{Music}
Cheryl: I teach people remotely assistive technology.
Jeff: From JAWS to NVDA to voiceover screen readers.
Sree: What we try to focus on is really teach the fundamentals of VoiceOver.
Jeff: From desktops to laptops to iPhones.
Cheryl: I would just say be as familiar with as many as you can, because you never know what you’re going to need and what tool is going to work for you.
Jeff: Two teachers doing what they do best, and that’s teach.
Jeff: Welcome to Blind Abilities. I’m Geoff Thompson. Today in the studio we have two teachers of the blind visually impaired. They volunteer and do contract work, all sorts of stuff. Good stuff for people who are new to blindness, beginning their journey and want to learn assistive technology. In the studio we have Cheryl McIntosh. Cheryl, how are you doing?
Cheryl: I’m doing wonderful. How are you?
Jeff: I’m doing great. And we have Sree Roy. Sree, how are you doing?
Sree: Doing great. Glad to be here. How are you guys doing?
Cheryl: Great.
Jeff: Good, good, good. Well, Cheryl, why don’t you give a little introduction and what you do.
Cheryl: So I’m Cheryl McIntosh. As Jeff just mentioned, I am an assistive technology student instructor right now, but hopefully at the end of next month I will be. I’ll just be assistive technology instructor and drop the student part. And I teach people remotely assistive technology. And then I do some volunteer work in my state through ACB. They have a chapter here, but it’s like a tech committee. They do different trainings to help people in the state.
Jeff: And Sree?
Sree: My name is Sree Roy. I am in Northern Virginia. I am a volunteer at two organizations. One is called iBUG Today. It’s a non-profit organization based in Houston, and I am a advance member. And what I’m responsible for is to services that they provide. I’m the coordinator for the Jumpstart program. That is where someone who’s new to VoiceOver on their iPhone, I pair up with a mentor and we offer that service. I’m also the facilitator on the iBUG Cafe. That is where I take an in depth look at an app that’s related to the iOS. And I’m also a volunteer at the DC Public Library at the Martin Luther King Jr Center for accessibility. I started a program, intro to VoiceOver, probably around 2017, and we do about four sessions each year. There are about ten weeks long, and I also support individuals who have questions about voiceovers in the DC area.
Jeff: Great. So my first question goes to you, Cheryl. Screen readers, it’s one of the most important things. I think that was the first thing that I learned when I went to training. There’s a voice inside that computer, and I was so excited because I couldn’t read the words anymore, and I didn’t want to learn the computer because of that. And all of a sudden it started talking to me. I think I had a DeckTalk device back then, and it just opened up the doors to it. What’s the importance right now about screen readers and the technology that people are learning to help them access stuff for college and jobs?
Cheryl: I think the main thing about a screen reader is one access, but also it provides you a lot of other things as well, like efficiency. You may be able to see it, like for example, when I was losing my vision, it would take me ten minutes to read a page and by the time I got done, I had no idea what I had even read, because I was so focused on seeing that I didn’t retain any information. And so when I started using a screen reader, it changed that, because now I can just do a see all command, read that in a few, you know, 3- seconds or whatever, and move on with my day. Gives you a lot more time back.
Jeff: And what kind of screen readers are you teaching? Mostly.
Cheryl: I mostly teach JAWS. I like working with JAWS, but I also can teach NVDA, and I haven’t taught anybody yet, but eventually Voiceover. Well, I have taught VoiceOver on the iPhone, but I haven’t taught anybody on the Mac. That’s my next goal, so hopefully I’ll get a Mac student someday.
Jeff: Are you addressing anybody using tablets?
Cheryl: Not really. Most people use, like, either the iPhone. I mean, some people do use the iPad. There’s a lot of similarities with the iPhone and the iPad as far as like, gestures and things.
Jeff: So now I know in high school a lot of students use like a Braille note taking device, and that’s great for their access and all that. But as they head up towards a college level, what do you suggest that they do concerning like PCs and computers?
Cheryl: I would just say be as familiar with as many as you can, because you never know what you’re going to need and what tool is going to work for you. Braille displays can definitely be paired to the PC pretty easily and the Mac as well. In Tahoe, they just added a whole bunch of new Braille support, which is really awesome. So yeah, I mean, just take advantage of as much as you can and especially like I mentioned earlier, that efficiency. Like that’s what we need to do things as fast as we can do them to keep up. And sometimes, you know, if we learn it the right way, like we can actually be faster than some people that use the mouse because they have to take their hand off the keyboard to go to the mouse and then come back to the keyboard. So if our hands remain on the keyboard and we can do it through the keyboard, we can do it pretty quickly.
Jeff: I heard statistics, but you know, they can be made up on the spot. Really. But I heard that 90% of the businesses out there are going to be requiring you to at least access a computer, and you won’t be able to be using your Braille note as your computer at that point. Refreshable Braille, probably, but not as a computer.
Cheryl: Yeah, and I would think too, sometimes the formatting on a Braille note, you can’t format it in the way that you may need to format it for like a work environment, like adding headings and, you know, all that special styling and things like that. So that would be my concern with that as well.
Jeff: Mhm. Yeah I just had two students on an interview and they’re talking about scholarships. And both of them said that they opened up Excel spreadsheets to keep track of the applications that they’re doing. And I was thinking, there you go. There’s a use case right there. it was neat that they didn’t even hem and haw about it, that they just knew that that was a tool that they were going to use, and they had experience at it. So that’s great that they’re at that level of using that tool because it’s a good skill to have.
Cheryl: Yeah. Excel is actually like I teach Excel. And so it is one of those tools that you can use it for like a whole bunch of different things. I have a student who needs to track some medical information for her doctor. She has to write down different things each day. And I taught her how to do it in a spreadsheet. And you know, they’re all like, wow, this is really neat because now they can just look down the row or the column and see that information. So you never know when you’re going to use these things. It may not seem like something you might need today, but down the road you may never know.
Jeff: It was just a little while ago. I actually explained algebra to my kids and I used it And I was thinking to myself the same thing. I used it later in life.
Cheryl: Yeah, I think it’s like one of those things where you use it and you never know that you’re using it or, you know, because like my daughter, I taught her geometry. And, you know, when we were going through it, she was just like, oh, this, she saw no relevance. Now where she works, she actually has like a protractor. And she’s using geometry every day, so you never know, might come in handy.
Jeff: Mhm. Now when you’re working with students, whether they’re older or younger or whatever, when it comes to technology, do you suggest to them certain technologies or do you find out where they’re headed, what they’re going to be doing and suggest the technology for them?
Cheryl: Yeah. So we use what they call the SETT Framework. So it’s the Student Environment Task and Tool. So you want to make sure you evaluate all of those things before you suggest a tool. Because sometimes it’s like oh here are these tools. Use those. But maybe that doesn’t fit the student’s needs or what environment they’re going to be working in. And we just had to do a case study and this person didn’t have internet access. So you can imagine a lot of these tools are not going to be used in an environment where the student doesn’t have reliable internet access. So you have to find something that’s going to work for them and those types of environments. So it’s more based on the task, based on the environment and the student. And then you figure out what tool would work in all three.
Jeff: That’s great that you do that assessment because that’d be a lot of wasted time.
Cheryl: Oh yeah.
Jeff: And Sree with the iPhone, yes that’s a game changer in the accessibility world I believe for me at least it was. Tell us about the experience you had with students learning the iPhone.
Sree: Well you know we get anywhere from someone who just got their brand new iPhone and have no clue what to do with it to someone who’s used it but don’t know all the gestures. So what we try to focus on is really teach the fundamentals of voiceover. That’s predominantly what I try to do is find things that make the journey of learning how to use it in a very simple learning process. We start by explaining the phone, the layout of the phone. You know what all these buttons do outside the phone? Talk about the screen layout and just start with simple navigation. We start with the one finger swipe, tap, and then work ourselves all the way down to four fingers and then go with the rotor. And then we start explaining the different apps, because everything on that screen with VoiceOver, it tells us what it is. So we have a very good understanding of what we touch. It tells us what we touch, so we can truly use the phone to all what it offers.
Jeff: What’s it like when you have a student realize that they’re opening up a new world to themselves?
Sree: I think part of it is they feel the freedom. I’ve had students where this one person wanted to send a text message to her granddaughter, and that was her desire. And we worked on swipes, we worked on typing, and then eventually when she sent that first text message to her granddaughter, it was just an amazing feeling. I cannot put it into words, how I felt and how she felt, how her daughter felt and how the granddaughter felt. And so I always tell people, it’s not how fast we get to the finish line. It’s the joy of the journey, getting to the finish line.
Jeff: That’s really neat. I remember the first time I sent a response back by an email, and the kid that I sent it to said, you have to be one of the slowest typers I’ve ever heard.
Sree: We always say it’s not how fast, it’s just getting to the end line and enjoying it.
Jeff: To me, it just felt good to be connected in a sense of I’m connected to, you know, this internet, you know? This was back in 97, 98. So it was fairly new, but it seemed like I was now hip in a sense that I could do something. I mean, there were ListServs and different types of communication apps that we were using at the time. We didn’t have all this stuff, you know, we didn’t know what SMS and all that stuff was going to be coming down the line here that we use today without blinking an eye.
Sree: Yeah, I completely agree with that. I mean, there’s not that much that the phone can’t do now. You know, it’s amazing that this phone was more powerful than the ship that took people to the moon and this very small device. It does so many different things. It allows us to read. It allows us to understand what we’re looking at. It gives us information. We’re able to search just like a sighted person is able to do so. The phone is an extension of myself now.
Cheryl: I really like what you said about like building upon with the technology, because I feel like that’s most of it. It’s like you can teach somebody that, you know, when you go into this app, you press this or you do this gesture, but they have to understand why they’re doing it, and that’s when it’s going to be repeatable, is understanding what it is that they’re doing and why they’re doing it, rather than just you press this keystroke and if they don’t really understand why they’re doing it, then yeah. And they do get faster. I had a student who, when I first started working with him, it took him a while to do the keystrokes and stuff, and then it was just like it just started coming, and he was like getting through stuff really quickly, you know? And you could just hear him getting so much better. And he was so excited about it too. So yeah, I definitely agree with what you said about that.
Sree: I know, like for me, when I first learned how to use voiceover, I spent the first two weeks just learning my gestures. I didn’t even want to learn how to use apps. And I’ll go to these classes and people say, okay, I want to know how to create a contact. And I said, I’m only going to teach you how to learn to create a contact once you understand the gestures, because it’s very difficult to do something without understanding the basic gesture movements of the phone. And I always tell people, once you learn your gestures, you can pretty much do everything on the phone. So, you know, you just got to be patient. I have a saying in my class when I teach two peas in a pod, it’s a very common phrase that we’ve heard before, right? Two peas in a pod. And I say, the pod. The POD is Proficiency Of your Device. That’s the POD. But in order to achieve that POD, you need to have the two P’s. Which is Practice and Patience. And so I talk about that. I said we’re going to go as slow as we need to go, because I want you to fully understand the fundamentals. And then eventually we will learn how to be more efficient as we navigate.
Jeff: That’s good. I can see the t shirts coming out now. Two peas in a pod.
Sree: I should trademark it, right.
Jeff: Practice and patience. Now you both do volunteer work. I believe it’s volunteer work. Cheryl, tell us about BITS.
Cheryl: Yeah, I became a BITS lifetime member actually, at the beginning of last year. And it’s a really good organization. They have a lot of different trainings, a lot of different knowledge. Like right now they’re doing remote training. So like we went over JAWS Tandem and now tonight they’re doing RIM. So they give you a lot of information. And I think that can also really help out with your career and getting into things.
Jeff: How can people find out more about BITS?
Cheryl: I believe their addresses BITS.ACB.org.
Jeff: Yeah, we’ll put a link for that in the show notes.
Cheryl: Yeah.
Jeff: Yeah. When I found out about it I went to look for it. And they have topics and they gosh, they covered a lot of different things. And some things are like six weeks long one day a week. But like they did the NVDA thing for a while, then they did this and that. So there’s a lot of good information being shared.
Sree: Yeah, they recently had HTML class, which was I think it took like six months or something. It was a very long class, but it was very in-depth. They had a lot a number of students stuck with it. I think they had over 80 students that stuck with the whole program to learn HTML. I also agree with Sheryl. BITS is a great service that they offer lots of different things you can learn. I attended they have a Mac Bites that I’m involved in. They’re definitely a great resource.
Cheryl: Yeah, and they also have what they call Basics with BITS. I think it’s on like every other Saturday in the afternoon, but they have the archived as podcasts to that you can find. But those things are really good as well. Like just if you’re new to all that, like JAWS, it’s really helpful. And I even tune in sometimes just to listen to see how other people are teaching different concepts. And sometimes I’ll pick up on a keystroke or two that I either forgot about or maybe thought, hmm. So yeah, those are really good too.
Sree: And I think, Sheryl, you have a lifetime membership. I have an annual membership, which I think is about $20 a year, so it’s very reasonable membership fee. And what you get from it is you’re going to get much more than what you would, you know, try and learn on your own because they do offer many different services. On the technology side, it covers from the Mac to the phone to JAWS to NVDA to programming, you know, all different types of technology. And they’ve done a really, really good job of really expanding that service or services.
Cheryl: Mhm.
Jeff: Yeah. Cheryl, tell us a little bit about iBUG, iBUG Today.
Sree: So I’ve been with iBUG since about 2018 and they offer 25 different services each month. They have three core values, which is individual independence, social integration, and educational development. And within those three core values, these 25 different services offers those core values in different ways. So we do a lot of Mac classes. We do iPhone, mostly Apple, but we also offer the Amazon devices as well as Google devices. They offer a Mac class where you can sign up. It’s a Intro to Mac with Voiceover. We also have a mentor program where if you just recently got a brand new iPhone, as I mentioned before, and you want to know how to use VoiceOver, we’ll pair you up with one of our mentors and we’ll give you the basic foundation on how to use VoiceOver. We’ll give you some basic Siri commands, as well as all the basic finger gestures, so you can pretty much use the phone when you’re done with the class. They also offer a movie night on Friday. It’s an audio described audio track, so if you like to watch movies, they offer those and all the services are free. If any of those things are interesting, definitely check out iBUGToday.com to get more information. And we also do a every Monday night. If you have an iPhone and you want to know how to use VoiceOver, we offer a two hour open forum where you can ask any questions about how to use your iPhone, which you can find more information on the website.
Jeff: Yeah, they keep quite a tight ship. You know, you might have 30 – 60 people on the call at one time, but they got rules and regulations and only one person speaking at a time. The other thing is, and I do it all the time, if you check out the show notes, it’ll list most of the topics that are talked about in the entire show. So if something catches your interest, check it out.
Sree: Yeah, I think one of the reasons we do that is because all our sessions are recorded. So you can access it through any of the podcast platform or the A lady or on the website. So that’s why we kind of try to keep a strict guide in that so that we can get a good recording. And one of the things that I’m also involved is on the Cafe. That’s where we take a very in-depth look at an app that’s tied to your iOS. I call it my cradle to grave. Kind of a I wouldn’t say training, but just showing you how to use the app from start to end with all the bells and whistles that’s behind that app.
Jeff: Yeah, they’re pretty thorough.
Sree: Yeah, we’ll spend about anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half on that particular app, letting you know how it all works.
Jeff: I also like at the end of the demo, how you have open discussions, so people who are attending the call can ask questions and find out more.
Sree: Yeah, I think that’s one of the fundamental things that we have with this organization, which also attracted me, is it’s very open forum. You know, we want to hear from you. We want to understand your questions. We’ll try and get you the best answers. If we don’t have the answers, we’ll make sure we do our homework and try to get the answer the following week.
Jeff: Cheryl, what got you interested in teaching?
Cheryl: I’ve always loved to teach. Like my kids, I’ve just always been a teacher. And I think for me, I really like what I’m doing because I work with a student for a while, you know, from the beginning to the end. And I see that progress. It’s like you hold their hand and then eventually you let go, and then they keep backing up, and then eventually they can do it on their own. And that’s kind of what I like about it, is that, you know, to see these people succeed. And in my previous role as a dietician, half the time I would meet somebody and I would work with them for maybe 30 minutes and I would never see them again. So I never knew what happened to them. And I like to know what happens to my student and watching them succeed and learning what they need to learn. And a lot of students come to us, and maybe they’ve had training before. One of my friends who works at a college has noticed the same thing, but they’ll come out of school and they know how to tab. They know how to get around the screen by tabbing, but they don’t know, like how to do things more efficiently. Like one of my students didn’t know how to send an email other than, you know, tabbing over to the send button. And that takes a little bit to get there. So once I taught him alt Ss or control enter or whatever keystroke he uses, He’s like, wow, you know? So just to kind of see that a lot of times when students come to you, they have this view that maybe it’s going to be like super hard. And then you show them and they’re like, wait, that’s it? And they’re like, yeah. And they’re like, but I was expecting, you know, like so.
Jeff: Tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab.
Cheryl: Yeah. Like that. It’s going to be like, you know, launching the nuclear codes or something. But it’s just, you know, a keystroke here or there. And then they move on. And I don’t know I just like seeing them succeed.
Jeff: HOw about you, Sree?
Sree: Yeah. For me it started when I was in one community call. It was actually in person. And a lady said, I have an iPhone, but I have no idea how to use it. And I was just thinking to myself, well, I kind of know how to use the iPhone. Maybe I could help someone. And then I was at the Martin Luther King Library just in a Monday night tech support where, you know, people would come in and ask questions. At that time, there was a professor from South Carolina, and he was just observing me, and he said, you know, Sree, maybe you should think about teaching this. Kind of mentioned that to me after the session and I said, you know, I’m not really sure about teaching a whole session, you know, and he goes, you know, I think you can. And then I talked about maybe a simple syllabus on how to teach the class. And then I brought that to the library and they said, yeah, yeah, this sounds good. And that’s how it all started, just going out there and showing what I knew, which was not a lot at the time. But, you know, I had a little curriculum of how to do voiceover, the gestures that I learned before. And that’s how it all started. And then it just kind of grew and grew and grew, and it led me to places like iBUG Today, led me to you and Blind Abilities and other places around the Washington, D.C. area.
Jeff: Yeah. I think that bug about teaching that something that’s inside you is realizing that you have something and you can help someone on their journey by sharing it.
Sree: Absolutely.
Jeff: That’s what happened to me with woodworking. I went to a training center and they had woodworking, but I told them, I said, I gave that up. I don’t do that. So I didn’t do it. And then I wanted to get refreshed back into my skills and stuff. So I went to another training center and I had to take woodworking. Ten minutes after I was there, I was playing with the Click Ruler. I started showing the student next to me how it worked, and then I was showing another student another thing, and then I realized I could use this to measure. I could cut on this, I could do that. All that was just coming back to me because something just clicked and happened to be the click ruler. So that led me to teaching. Four months later, I was hired to teach a class because they saw that teaching that was in me that was just being busted open. And this was in a blindness situation where, you know, I was fairly new to it. But as soon as you you don’t change whether you’re sighted or blind, if you have that teaching thing in you, you’re still a teacher no matter where you go. So I’m glad you guys found it.
Sree: Yeah, I think you said that really well there. You know, to me, it’s just when you see the end result of something that wasn’t there in the beginning and you just see how they grew and develop something and they’re able to do these things on their own. Now, I truly understand when you hear teachers say, there’s so much joy in their class or just being a teacher, you know, I’m not a certified teacher or anything, but just that small aspect of joy that I get seeing somebody go through this process and learn voiceover, it brings joy to me. I can’t put it in words. I just love it. And I’m glad that I have this opportunity to do it.
Cheryl: Especially in our community, because I feel like a lot of times people just never get those resources. I mean, that’s really unfortunate. Like I mentioned, you know, graduating high school and not doing anything beyond tabbing.
Sree: Yeah, I always tell myself I give so little, but I get so much back, you know, just I’m giving a little bit of my time and my skill that I know. But how it impacts someone else in a much larger scale. It’s just it’s a great feeling.
Jeff: I was at a convention one time and a gentleman that was, you know, 17 majors or whatever credentials to his name or whatever was speaking. And they said that they wanted to create a manual for teachers. And I just sat back and went, okay, this guy is missing the boat. And my point is why I thought that was I may have taught 100 200 students, but I think the manual for each student is different. Not one person did I teach the same way at all, and I don’t even know what the framework of that is. I think the framework is just the natural thing that you recognize a student where they’re at and you start there.
Cheryl: Mhm.
Sree: Yeah. You talk to them for a little bit in the beginning and you kind of can figure out, you know, where their skill set is. And you know some people will say you know I’ll never be able to do that. I said we’re not going to use the word never. We’re just going to keep trying and trying and trying and eventually you’ll succeed. And a lot of this finger gestures are just muscle memory. You don’t even think when you do it. It just eventually becomes muscle memory. It’s like my sister, you know, when she went from an iPhone with the home button? Without the home button, she goes, I’m never going to learn this. I said, you know, just give me ten minutes. I am so sure within ten minutes you’ll figure this out. And, you know, in the beginning she was like frustrated. It’s not working. It’s not working. I said, it’s all right. Keep going, keep going, keep going. And about the fourth or fifth minute mark, it just start happening. You know, it just naturally happens. So a lot of these things, you know, you kind of work with someone and they’ll say they can’t do it. And you give them the positive reinforcement. Yeah you’ll be able to do it. Don’t worry. We’ll just keep practicing and practicing. And then eventually they get it.
Cheryl: Yeah. It’s kind of like a coach in a way. Like. Or just like band. You ever heard like students when they first start band class and they try to play and it just sounds horrible. And then by the end of the year, it’s like music, right? Like it’s something you actually want to hear.
Jeff: But yeah, the first day of recorder class.
Cheryl: Oh yeah!
Jeff: I think one of the things I learned about the iPhone right off the bat was do not try and learn the iPhone while eating Cheetos.
Sree: Cheetos? Are you gonna elaborate on that?
Jeff: Oh, no. It’s like I remember one time I was listening to a thing, and I. The Cheetos were sitting there, so I ate a few Cheetos and I went to make a swipe. Doesn’t work. And it doesn’t help if you try and lick your fingers, because then it’s all. It’s just a mess. Yeah, that was back. I think it was a 3 or 4 S. I can’t remember.
Sree: One thing about voiceover also. You know, we learned these gestures, but it’s also so important to listen. I always tell students, you know, your ears are your eyes and you have to listen then react. A lot of people react and listen. And I always tell them, you know, you got to listen because voiceover is giving us so many clues to let you know what kind of movement to perform. And if you just listen to it and really pay attention, because not only it gives the verbal information, it also gives us sound alerts, every gesture that we perform on the phone. The sound has a unique meaning, and when I’m teaching the class, I’m actually listening for the sound because I want to see if they perform the gesture correctly or not. And so I let them know that not only are you going to get some verbal, but you’re also going to get some sound hints too. And definitely the important thing I let people know is listen then react.
Cheryl: Yeah. And I think that’s one of the biggest things for us. You know, people can learn on their own. I learned on my own. But I think sometimes somebody’s pointing some of these things out to you because our brains are so good at filtering. If it doesn’t make sense, it just filters it out. But maybe that information does make sense. Maybe it is important, and then we can, if we teach them, you know, like on the Mac, for example, there’s a specific sound that it makes when you get to something you can interact with. And if you don’t know what that sound is or you don’t, you just kind of filter that out. You know, that’s giving you like that really crucial piece of information. So I teach my students that all the time, like when we get to web pages. Earlier today, I was actually working on this with one of my students. You know, when you go to press one of the keys like H and nothing happens and it doesn’t say no more headings on the page or JAWS doesn’t give you any type of feedback. And like there’s probably a pop up. Let’s see. And almost all the time there is. So sometimes it’s just what do you expect to hear? And if you’re not hearing that, then there must be something else going on and just kind of hearing that and then start to troubleshoot.
Sree: Yeah, that’s a good point too. And I know on the Mac, always when I teach people, I don’t just give them the keyboard shortcuts, I show them the long path. So I want them to fully understand the flow of where you’re going, because there is some logic to all of this navigation. And if you can kind of understand it, then the whole process will be a lot easier down the road. Instead of just hitting keyboard commands, eventually you will get to the keyboard commands, but also understand the process of getting from start to end.
Cheryl: Yeah, definitely the understanding why? Why am I doing this, I think is so important because anybody can just tell you to press this, this and this, but why are you pressing that, that and that. What is it doing and how can you use that somewhere else.
Jeff: Yeah, transferable skills.
Cheryl: Mhm. And sometimes it’s just like you might not know. But like for example in Microsoft a lot of the commands you can do in one application, you can do in another. So like for example, you might not know how to make comments in PowerPoint, but you know how to make them in word so you can just, you know, control alt P. Let’s see if it works. And sometimes it does. And sometimes like we were doing something in teams one day and they’re like well how do you do the meeting. I’m like I just started pressing buttons. I’m like well this is how you do an outlook. Let’s see if it works and control shift Q works, so it’s just trying it out. What do you know from other applications. And try it here. I mean the worst thing is going to happen is it doesn’t work.
Jeff: Yeah. Being able to self troubleshoot and problem solve. That’s key. Good job. Well I want to thank you both for coming on and talking about teaching because that’s one of the first things that I did when I was losing my eyesight. I wanted to find someone to help me learn the tools of the trade. And you guys are doing a great job at what you’re doing, and you’re with some great organizations that are doing it. So thank you very much.
Sree: Great to be here. Thank you.
Cheryl: Yeah. Thank you.
{Music}
Jeff: Such a great time having Cheryl and Sree on the show. Be sure to check the show notes, because I’m putting all the links to everything mentioned in this show. Not everything, but mostly everything. And plus I’ll put two links there from the previous shows that I interviewed Cheryl and Sree separately. So check it out.
Jeff: For more podcasts with a blindness perspective check us out on the web at www.blindabilities .com. And if you want to leave some feedback give us some suggestions give us a call at 612 367 6093.
We’d love to hear from you. I want to thank you for listening and until next time bye-bye.
[Music] [Transition noise] –
When we share-
What we see
-Through each other’s eyes…
[Multiple voices overlapping, in unison, to form a single sentence]
…We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities.