Questions and debates about blindness:

my cts physical therapist says i have a head tilt and position myself as if i am leaning forward. we are currently working to improve this. one of the techniques she gave me was to imagine a piece of string on top of my head and having someone pull that string up so my head moves in an upright position. this has been a challenge for me, but i'm working on it.
 
I have an acquired head tilt. I have better vision in the top part of my visual field so I tend to tilt my head down to make the best use of my vision. When I was sighted I had the same head tilt for different reasons -- because of my squint, my eyes were more closely aligned when I looked up than when I looked down. When I looked down my eyes would wander father outwards, and my left eye would wander too far downward and twist inwards, which could also be painful on my eyeball muscles. When I looked up, they would just wander outwards a bit.

Some people with double vision have a sideways acquired head tilt. Because if you turn your head far enough to the side, your nose blocks the vision from one of your eyes, thereby eliminating the double vision. Some people with double vision will often even end up resting their head on their hand in a way that their arm blocks the vision in one eye -- and not even realize it! I used to do that a lot too until people pointed it out to me and I got self conscious.

There are actually a lot of reasons someone may have an acquired head tilt, nystagmus only being one of them.
 
i didn't even know i had a head tilt or positioned my body forward until my physical therapist told me last week. i guess 38 years of old habits die hard. :giggle:
 
Hear Again said:
actually society's_child, you are correct. nystagmus can't be controlled because it is an involuntary movement of the eyes. (in my case, i've had circular and horizontal nystagmus since birth.)
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Are there any side effects that come with your nystagmus?
 
society's_child said:
Are there any side effects that come with your nystagmus?
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in my case, no because i'm totally blind, so there is nothing for me to "see" when it comes to my eyes moving the way they do.

however, for someone who has some residual vision, they can experience headaches, dizziness, nausea, vertigo and/or vomiting.
 
Nika said:
Mac is much more accessible. I don't like PC magnification cause they leave the screen display at the typical size and use a tiny bar across the top as the magnification portion. Mac just magnifies everything. Plus you can only invert the colors on the PC in the magnification portion, so you still get black on white for the rest of the screen, which hurts my eyes. Mac lets me invert the colors on everything. I keep my computer as black on white with the minimum screen brightness. When I'm on my screen reader I turn my screen to 0% brightness, which basically turns the screen off. Also for a screen reader on PC you have to download JAWS or WindowsEyes whereas on Mac, VoiceOver comes with it absolutely free.
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Now I really miss my Mac. :cry: I have a vista machine now but one day I will have a Mac again. It got stolen last year.
 
actually, there is some debate as to whether the mac is more accessible than the pc. there are more screen readers available for windows compared to the mac (for instance, JAWS, window-eyes and windows narrator). making a blanket statement that one computer brand is more accessible than the other is misleading. i've been using wordperfect and windows since the early 90s and have never had any issues regarding lack of accessibility.
 
actually, windows vista has a built in magnifier that allows you to see in color. it can be placed on the top of the screen or the bottom.
 
windows vista comes free with windows narrator -- a screen reader. furthermore, one does not need to pay for JAWS to use it on a pc. freedom scientific offers a free version of the software that can be used 45 minutes at a time before your computer needs to be rebooted.
 
I've no doubt that Vistia is an excellent machine and all. I'm just partial to Macs.
 
deafskeptic said:
I've no doubt that Vistia is an excellent machine and all. I'm just partial to Macs.
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that's fine, deafskeptic. i'm just pointing out that one computer brand is no more accessible to the blind than the other. the first computer i ever used was an apple IIe. i then moved onto a mac and then finally in the late 80s, an apple gs. from there, i've always used pc's -- an ibm 286, windows 95, windows 2000, windows xp and windows vista.
 
Hear Again said:
windows vista comes free with windows narrator -- a screen reader. furthermore, one does not need to pay for JAWS to use it on a pc. freedom scientific offers a free version of the software that can be used 45 minutes at a time before your computer needs to be rebooted.
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I mean no offense to anyone, but narrator is horrible.
 
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