I got out of the apartment today, which is admittedly a rare occurance. It was a big deal, as I was going to replace my old, cruddy mattress with a new, soft comfortable one. I look forward to finally getting to sleep in a comfortable bed.
So, how did I go bed shopping? With vision ranging somewhere in the 20/400 range, even when corrected (Really, REALLY bad), I'm not getting a driver's license any time soon. Well, my mom still goes out of her way to look after me, and after months of planing, we finally settled on this date, and so we went.
Furniture stores are scary places. The lighting may or may not be good, and they may or may not have dedicated walkways. This one didn't. It was an obstacle course. Luckily, despite having partial vision, I bring my cane with me where ever I go. Admittedly, I don't always use the techniques taught to me so long ago for the proper use of my cane, but I get by.
The salesman on the show floor was a rather nice man, I'd say, and he had a vague understanding already of partial vision. When he noticed I was navigating by cane, he asked if I was 'Fully blind' or 'shadows'. It was an odd question for me. I understood quickly what he was getting at, but I wouldn't describe my vision as shadows. My vision doesn't really seem dark or shadowy to me. I told him it was more blurry than anything, and I'm not even sure that is a good description either. I just don't see detail... it's like blurriness, but often the outlines of things seem decently clear to me. It's what's on the interior of those outlines that I'm not getting. Also, I'm a bit color-blind. I often have to shove colors into two main catagories: dark and light. Sometimes, I can distinguish that something is blue, or red, or green, or yellow, but I can't often count on it. The dark colors are the hardest. Certain shades of blue, green, purple and gray all blend together for me. I can hardly tell them apart. The same can be true for some reds, pinks and oranges. Yellow and white can also be hard sometimes. I tell people that it's all about contrast.
The salesman told me that diabetes is common in his family, and that those who've suffered the visual effects of the disease refer to their partial vision as 'shadows' and that is where he got the term. I have met others who had vision I thought could be described that way. I knew a girl who had lost practically all her color vision. She saw the world as mainly only light and darkness. I'm glad my vision hasn't degraded that far yet.
Incidently, I did end up buying a new bed, and it will be here in two days. The only other part of the whole adventure pertinent to this blog was buying new sheets and such afterwards. I was rather disappointed that none of the sheets that were offered were very beautifully colored. They were all dull and flat-looking, and I wonder if it's just me, or if they really were all dull and flat-looking. I still appreciate seeing beautiful vivid colors when I can.
That's all for now.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Introduction, and Creating This Blog
What you should know about me is that I'm a 30-something man living in upstate New York. For those of you not from New York, that means I'm from that fairly vast area of land which is part of New York State, but not the city of New York.
I'm not starting up this blog to bore you about my opinions of things. I'm not an important person, so my opinions are irrelevant. Maybe I'm doing this blog for me. I want to record and share my unique experiences of the world.
I have the condition Retinitis Pigmentosa. Wiki it for more details, but the TLDS version is that my vision is bad, but I'm not completely blind. The problem cannot be fixed with glasses or laser surgery. As of this date, there is no truly viable treatment that I'm aware of to combat genetic RP. If I'm lucky, something will be devised within my lifetime.
I think people are baffled by the concept of 'partial vision'. They can't wrap their heads around it. They think of vision as an 'all or nothing' thing. I, and many like me, don't fit into that conception of vision. We have been painfully aware of the fact that there is a spectrum of vision, and it can be an amazingly wide spectrum, from normal, to beyodn normal, to blurry, to shadowy, to non-existant. My vision is a bit closer to the 'non-existant' side of the spectrum than the normal side, so I'm going to try to give my readers a window into my world, to try to put into words what it is like living the way I do. Like I wrote above, maybe this is mostly for me.
/introduction
My first example will be the very act of creating this blog. My computer is my gateway to the outside world. Technology has done wonders for expanding the capabilities of people like me. Even still, it's not perfect. I don't take advantage of every program or option that I could. For instance, I avoid screen-reading programs. I find them annoying. I use a text-to-speech program, but I generally use it only to read long blocks of text. Thank you, people who made ReadPlease, for your product.
What I mainly use is a part of Windows that has been a part of every Windows OS since 95, at least, which very few people know about. It's a Magnifier, which these days can take several forms, but I use it as a small window in the upper right hand corner of my screen which magnifies everything near my cursor, and everything I type by 5x. The magnification can be adjusted, of course.
While this solution generally works for me, it has some drawbacks. I can only example a small portion of my screen at any given time in any significant detail, so when I went to create my blog, I found the 'create your blog' option in the middle of the Blogspot cover-page easily enough, but failed to realize that because I already had a Google account, I really should have just logged in, and it just made the process yet more complicated. Obviously, I eventually figured it out.
Choosing my template was also a shot in the dark. I could tell the examle boxes were there, but could not see well enough what the templates really looked like. I decided to go with the Simple formet, though I was tempted to go with Awesome Inc. What do you think, did I make the right choice?
That's it for this entry, but I have another one coming right up soon.
I'm not starting up this blog to bore you about my opinions of things. I'm not an important person, so my opinions are irrelevant. Maybe I'm doing this blog for me. I want to record and share my unique experiences of the world.
I have the condition Retinitis Pigmentosa. Wiki it for more details, but the TLDS version is that my vision is bad, but I'm not completely blind. The problem cannot be fixed with glasses or laser surgery. As of this date, there is no truly viable treatment that I'm aware of to combat genetic RP. If I'm lucky, something will be devised within my lifetime.
I think people are baffled by the concept of 'partial vision'. They can't wrap their heads around it. They think of vision as an 'all or nothing' thing. I, and many like me, don't fit into that conception of vision. We have been painfully aware of the fact that there is a spectrum of vision, and it can be an amazingly wide spectrum, from normal, to beyodn normal, to blurry, to shadowy, to non-existant. My vision is a bit closer to the 'non-existant' side of the spectrum than the normal side, so I'm going to try to give my readers a window into my world, to try to put into words what it is like living the way I do. Like I wrote above, maybe this is mostly for me.
/introduction
My first example will be the very act of creating this blog. My computer is my gateway to the outside world. Technology has done wonders for expanding the capabilities of people like me. Even still, it's not perfect. I don't take advantage of every program or option that I could. For instance, I avoid screen-reading programs. I find them annoying. I use a text-to-speech program, but I generally use it only to read long blocks of text. Thank you, people who made ReadPlease, for your product.
What I mainly use is a part of Windows that has been a part of every Windows OS since 95, at least, which very few people know about. It's a Magnifier, which these days can take several forms, but I use it as a small window in the upper right hand corner of my screen which magnifies everything near my cursor, and everything I type by 5x. The magnification can be adjusted, of course.
While this solution generally works for me, it has some drawbacks. I can only example a small portion of my screen at any given time in any significant detail, so when I went to create my blog, I found the 'create your blog' option in the middle of the Blogspot cover-page easily enough, but failed to realize that because I already had a Google account, I really should have just logged in, and it just made the process yet more complicated. Obviously, I eventually figured it out.
Choosing my template was also a shot in the dark. I could tell the examle boxes were there, but could not see well enough what the templates really looked like. I decided to go with the Simple formet, though I was tempted to go with Awesome Inc. What do you think, did I make the right choice?
That's it for this entry, but I have another one coming right up soon.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)