Editing and Printing Graphics as a Blind User

Mike Sivill is a blind employee here at ViewPlus Technologies. This is what he had to say about how he used a Tiger embosser to see the coloration of his new dog guide! Read along to see how easy it is for a blind person to emboss a graphic!

"I just got my new dog guide about a month ago. The training school sent me her picture so I could show my friends and family what she looks like. I wanted to emboss a copy for myself on my Tiger embosser, so I brought up a new Word document and brought the picture into it via the Insert menu. I checked the dimensions of the picture first to be sure it would fill up the page. I hit shift + left arrow to select it, pressed the key to open the context menu, and arrowed down to "format picture." Next, I arrowed left to the "size" tab and noticed that the dimensions were only 3.35 by 3.99. I didn't want a tiny 4 by 4 inch picture because I wanted it to be as large as possible to feel as much as I could, but I didn't want to warp the dimensions of the picture in the process. To do this, I tabbed down to the edit boxes where height and width are adjustable by percentage and I upped it to 200%. When I shift tabbed back to the dimension they were 6.71" and 7.98", pretty good, for 8-1/2 by 11 paper. Since this was fine I hit OK and went back into the main Word document. When I printed it came out like a giant black square. It felt like a napkin pattern rather than a German Shepherd dog. To solve this issue, I went back to the "format picture" dialog and I changed the contrast on the Format tab to 85%. That was so much better! When I printed it out that time I could feel her big pointy ears, her legs and even the coloration of her head, which, of course, I can't feel on the actual dog. It was exciting to be able to see this part of her with my fingers after hearing about it from other people. Awesome!"

– Mike Sivill

NFB Convention 2009

The July 4th holiday marked this year's National Federation of the Blind's (NFB) convention. Almost 3,000 people attended this year, which was a great turnout. Mike Sivill, one of our marketing representatives attended the conference and also represented us at our booth in the exhibit hall. I had a chance to sit down with him and ask him about what his experience was like.

Mike worked long and hard for us at the booth, nearly 4 days of exhibiting. According to him, there was never a dull moment. The people who visited our booth were really interested in our products and how they worked. Parents in particular were really happy about how easy it is to use the Tiger Software Suite (TSS), and braille transcribers were impressed with how easy it is to make tactile graphics with the Tiger Embossers. Mike said that he really enjoyed talking with visitors about the different ways to make tactile graphics and how our technology is different and easier to use.

Mike is one of our blind employees. He really enjoyed representing us at the conference because he feels that going to NFB is very valuable for our company. The NFB conference in particular brings out more parents and students who are often the end users of our embossers and translation software. He hopes that by representing our company at the conference that he was able to connect with our end users on a more personal level.

Some of the highlights of his experience included making braille examples for visitors, showing off the Emprint SpotDot (our ink and braille printer), connecting with old friends and new people, and talking with a Doctor of Linguistics since that was his major in college.

If you attended NFB, what was your favorite part? If you visited our booth, what did you learn?