Hello, everybody. Glen Gordon here. It’s FSCast for September of 2022. The day that this podcast releases, September 28th, is my birthday, and I’m pleased to announce that I am turning 40. That is, if you express years in hex, or Base16. Otherwise, I’m 64. So hex birthdays I think are the way of the future because we can all live longer that way. And I will be here that many more years hosting FSCast.
GLEN: As you listen to this, we have just released Public Beta 2 of JAWS, ZoomText, and Fusion 2023. The official release will be near the end of October, so we’re coming down to the final stretch and have put some additional new features and changes into the public beta. If you like notification history, you may have noticed that in Public Beta 1 we first introduced regular expression support. In Public Beta 2, we’ve added a way to rename notification rules. So if you create a rule that’s somewhat complicated to suppress or shorten particular messages, now you can give those rules names so that you can remember a long time in the future why you actually created them. That’s part of Public Beta 2.
And also, if you are German speaking, and in particular German braille reading, we have added the RTFC braille translator for German. That is the gold standard when it comes to German braille, and we’re very pleased to have that part of JAWS starting in Public Beta 2. If you have Public Beta 1, you’ll just get offered the new update automatically. You don’t need to do anything special. If you thought that Public Beta 1 was a little early, you didn’t want to install it yet, nothing is lost. You can go to FreedomScientific.com/downloads, pick either JAWS, ZoomText, or Fusion, and one of the options there will be Public Beta 3 of 2023. Just a reminder that you do not need to be licensed for 2023 in order to try the public beta. As long as you’re licensed for 2022, public beta will work fine, and you don’t need to be licensed for 2023 until the final release near the end of October.
GLEN: Time now for this month’s Power Tip, courtesy of Christopher Sims. I really like it when something we talk about on FSCast, or in this case FSOpenLine, resonates with someone who’s listening. And they have something to add to the discussion and write it in, often as a Power Tip. And that is the case with the tip that Christopher has sent in this month. It has to do with Microsoft Teams. On the August FSOpenLine we were talking about Teams notifications. And somebody was asking why and how to get those Teams notifications showing up in Windows Action Center or Notifications Center in Windows 10 and 11, respectively. And none of us on the panel really understood what controlled that. But Christopher does. And that’s his Power Tip.
If you’re running Microsoft Teams, there is a way to switch how notifications of new activity are actually displayed to you. One of the options is Teams Internal, or Teams Specific, and the other is to use Windows Notifications. I can’t figure out which is the default because on one of my machines it was set up to be Windows Notifications already, and the second one was Teams itself showing the notification. But either way, it’s a very simple thing to change.
As a reminder, to get Teams to work optimally, make sure that the Teams window is maximized and that Teams is zoomed to 100%. The easiest way to zoom to 100% is to press CTRL+0 on the number row. And Teams will either say something if it wasn’t at 100%, or simply zoom to 100% otherwise. And the reason for that is Teams shortcuts don’t always work as well when the window isn’t maximized or zoomed to 100%, mostly because they restructure what’s shown on the screen when there’s less screen real estate, and so some of the expected options aren’t there.
Once you’ve gotten Teams properly sized, you can press CTRL and then 1 on the number row to get to the feed tab. I’ve found in recent Teams versions that I need to press ESCAPE at that point to allow Tab to move me through that screen. What you want to get to is Profile and Settings. Press ENTER there. That expands that particular option. The first one is Settings. Then you will have a list of tabs. You want to arrow down to Notifications and press ENTER again. That makes the Notifications tab active. Tab until you get to Teams Notifications and expand that and make sure it’s set to Windows.
At that point, when you get a new Teams message or call or posting in a Team, that will all show up as a Windows Notification. In Windows 10, you get to those notifications with WINDOWS+A, and in Windows 11 it’s the Special Notification Center which is WINDOWS+N. But either way, once you get to the Teams Notifications, you can actually see the messages that have recently come in and, by activating one of those, get taken to the conversation in Teams.
I just changed my setting over this morning. So I can’t say how well it works for me. But Christopher says it works well. And for that Power Tip, assuming he’s not pulling our leg at all, he gets a year added onto his JAWS license. If you have a Power Tip you’d like to submit, write to fscast@vispero.com, fscast@vispero.com. And anything that’s a little obscure, something that most people don’t know about, and something we haven’t talked about in a podcast recently, is fair game: fscast@vispero.com.
GLEN: I first learned of Christine Ha through one of her TEDx talks. That was great in and of itself. But then I started doing a little more research. Her social media handle is @theblindcook. But that’s kind of really understating the truth of it all. Yes, she is a blind cook. But she is so much more than that. She won “Master Chef” Season 3 with Gordon Ramsay back in 2012, and since then has done lots of things in the culinary arts. She’s opened multiple restaurants in the Houston area, including The Blind Goat, based on her Vietnamese Zodiac sign. She has a cookbook out called “Recipes From My Home Kitchen: Asian Comfort Food.” She’s been the recipient of AFB’s Helen Keller Personal Achievement Award, hosted a cooking show aimed at folks who are blind on AMI Canada, and much more. Christine Ha, it’s a real pleasure to have you on FSCast.
CHRISTINE HA: Thanks for having me.
GLEN: So the thing that jumped out at me when I started doing a little research about you was that you didn’t even know how to boil rice when you started undergrad. Is this correct?
CHRISTINE: That is very correct. I did not grow up knowing how to cook really anything. I was quite spoiled by my mom’s home cooking and never really felt the need to learn to cook, nor was I interested in it. And it wasn’t until I went off to college when I was a sophomore, I had moved out of the dorms after the first year and had a little apartment with some roommates, and realized that I had to learn to cook, initially out of the means of survival because I couldn’t afford to always eat out, and I didn’t have the dorm cafeteria to rely upon anymore. So it was at that point that I decided to teach myself to cook.
And I realized being a young adult that I really did miss the foods that I grew up eating. And I had lost my mom when I was young, and she had never taught me how to cook. And of course, like many moms and grandmas, they didn’t write down any recipes. So I had no resource, I think, really. So it was just a matter of, I think, trying to teach myself how of cook by a lot of by memory and just kind of doing research and reading a lot of cookbooks. So that was how I really got started in cooking and how my interest began is because I missed the foods of childhood.
GLEN: This was the point where your vision started deteriorating; is that correct?
CHRISTINE: That’s right. It was the same time in college that I started noticing the vision in one of my eyes was becoming blurry. And initially I went to an eye doctor and thought it was just something wrong with my contact lens or something that was easily fixable. It turned out it was something neurological. And after many, many tests and years and seeing different doctors, I was finally correctly diagnosed with an autoimmune condition called neuromyelitis optica, or NMO for short. It’s also now called NMOSD for neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder. But it’s similar to MS where my immune system is overactive and attacks the nervous system. And so it primarily affected my optic nerves, and that’s what caused my optic nerves to atrophy over time. And that’s how I gradually lost my vision in my 20s, at the same time when I was really learning to voraciously cook and being really interested in cooking.
GLEN: So does this mean it was like three steps forward and then two steps back, and figure out how you’re going to do this without using your eyes?
CHRISTINE: Yes. Exactly that. It was, you know, I got good at cooking when I had full vision. And then I would lose vision, and I had to feel like I was kind of starting over, like how to use a knife with less sight, how to cut things with less sight, how to navigate the stove with less vision. And then I would get used to that level of vision, and then I would lose a little bit more vision. And I’d be like, I have to start over again reteaching myself how to cook with less and less vision. So it did indeed feel like I was taking two steps forward and then a step back. And then it was happening over and over again, and it was quite frustrating.
GLEN: What kept you moving forward? I mean emotionally is really where I’m coming from here.
CHRISTINE: I think part of it was the determination that’s just kind of built in me that I probably got from my parents’ DNA. And then the other part is my stubbornness, I guess people would call it, you know, and my desire to continue to be independent. And it was definitely a tough challenge emotionally and mentally. I think a lot of times I did feel like I had to give up, or maybe I needed to find an alternative on how to live alone and eat. But every day was kind of a new day, and I started learning that it wasn’t always going to be an easy day, but there was always the next day.
And then I started noticing the small steps of progress that I was making in reteaching myself how to cook, and then kind of taking pride in those small steps, in those small victories that I was able to achieve. Like looking back I could think, oh, a week ago I wasn’t able to fry an egg on the stove, or I wasn’t able to boil water and get it into a bowl. But then I could the following week. And then the following week after that I could do a little bit more. And then I started noticing these steps of progress that I was making. And I think that kind of validated my confidence and realized, it helped me realize that if I kept at it, I would be able to make, albeit small steps, I would still be able to make progress, and then eventually be able to feed myself again.
GLEN: What was your path to “Master Chef”?
CHRISTINE: At that time I was in grad school when I heard of “Master Chef.” So I was going back to school for a degree in creative writing. I decided to do something completely different after I began losing my vision. My undergraduate degree was actually in business, which has served me well. But then I wanted to do something more creative and in the arts. And so I was in school for creative writing. And at the time I was dating my now husband, and he had helped me start a blog called TheBlindCook.com. And it was really a space for me to be able to write in an unedited fashion, meaning in school, when you’re in school for writing, you’re constantly poring over every word, every paragraph that you’re using. And I wanted a space where I could just write freely and not have to edit myself so much.
And then I thought about what things affect me on a daily basis or what things am I interested in, and of course it was food, and cooking, and I am visually impaired. So that’s how The Blind Cook blog started. And so at that time there were auditions going around for this show called “Master Chef.” And my husband told me that there was this show that’s for amateur home cooks, judged by Gordon Ramsay. They’re coming to a nearby town to do auditions. And he, as well as some of my other friends, were really encouraging me to go audition for the show because a lot of people, I think they were always surprised at how I was able to cook pretty well for someone who’s visually impaired. And they all said that this is a story that America needs to hear about. And for me I really went for selfish reasons, thinking, well, you know, this might be an interesting experience, and I’ll go and have a funny story or humor essay to come home and write about.
GLEN: And what was their response to you? I mean, obviously it was positive because you were on the show, and you won. But what was the path to that? And I assume there were all sorts of logistical details to work out.
CHRISTINE: There were a lot of details that the producers had to put into place to make sure that they leveled the playing field for me, but not give me an advantage, per se. So, for example, they did provide me a sighted aide who would guide me to the pantry, and she would be able to help me find certain ingredients if I asked for it. But there were very strict rules placed on us on how we communicated. So they didn’t want her to touch my food, taste my food, cut my food. I had to be very objective in the questions I asked. Like, for example, I could ask like is this piece of meat in my pan, like is it black? Is it brown? Is it still pink? And that’s how I would determine if it was cooked okay, or burned, or raw still. I couldn’t ask, like, does this look good or anything subjective like that.
So I don’t think people really knew or understood the nuances that went into that producer’s providing me someone who was an aide like that. And if you really think about it, it’s still very challenging for me because I had to learn to communicate with someone I’d never met before. And of course, like if you think about it, you can look at an item and immediately identify it in your brain. But for me I had to ask a question, and then she would have to answer me back, and that added more time on the clock that it took for me to understand what was in front of me. So there were always lawyers on set from Fox, listening in to our conversation and how we communicated to make sure that we were following the rules, and that I wasn’t necessarily given an advantage because I had a sighted guide.
GLEN: How much material did they actually record versus the amount that’s shown on the show?
CHRISTINE: That’s a good question. Each one-hour-long episode of “Master Chef” was actually filmed over two days. So the days could last anywhere from like, I don’t know, six- to eight-hour to like 16-hour days of filming. And so a lot of that gets cut down into about 30 minutes. And then two days would be one episode of “Master Chef.”
GLEN: I’ve seen Gordon Ramsay present in some of his rather enthusiastic moments. He seems like a force to be reckoned with. If he’s yelling at you, even though it is theatrics in part in TV, it still matters. How did you respond to that?
CHRISTINE: In my show I think for “Master Chef” it was for amateur home cooks. So Gordon played more of a mentorship role, rather than how he is in perhaps some of his other shows where the contestants are professional chefs, and he expects more from them. So I think it’s definitely scary and nerve-wracking to be I think reamed by any of the judges, not just Gordon. But I think when you take the criticism and peel back the layers and don’t take it personally and take it more as constructive criticism and try to learn from it, then I think that’s when you benefit the most.
And I think that’s really the sort of mentality I had to take going into this, is knowing that, I mean, it is hard to not take things personally because the food you cook can be very personal. It’s like, we’re often cooking dishes that we grew up eating, and that remind us of our mothers, our grandmothers, our families. And so that can be very personal. But I think to understand that it’s a competition and understand strategy and try to take advantage of every lesson that you learn from each of the judges, I think that’s the best way to play the game. And you come out a better cook than you were the day before. And that’s what’s I think most important is trying not to take things so personally and taking the lessons that you learn from each of the judges objectively and applying it to the way you cook.
GLEN: I have a really bizarre question. As a blind person who does some cooking, I think I touch food more than sighted people do.
CHRISTINE: Oh, definitely. They say like when you lose your vision, and you learn to read braille, for example, your visual cortex in your brain starts rewiring itself so that your sense of vision actually comes from your fingertips instead of your eyes. And so essentially when you lose your vision of course like our fingers become our eyes. And so the sense of touch is very important. And I find myself after having lost my vision that I do touch my food a lot. You know, they say like you’re supposed to use gloves to be sanitary. But for me, that adds another layer in between my skin and the food. So I just have to wash my hands really well and then use my hands to touch the food because that’s how I can tell if, you know, the texture of food. And the texture helps you figure out like if it’s cooked all the way or not, and then when you’re dicing food, understanding if your vegetables are uniform. So I do use my hands quite a bit when I cook.
GLEN: Does the fact that you were able to see allow you to plate things in a more visually palatable way than those of us potentially who have never seen can conceive of? Because I would have no idea of how to plate my food.
CHRISTINE: Yeah, I believe so. I think when people ask me how I was able to plate so well, I do attribute it to the fact that I’ve had vision for about half of my life. So I have memories of what different colors look like, how they contrast with each other. I can picture things visually in my head before I set about creating it with my hands. So I do believe that because I’ve had vision for some of my life, that those memories served me well with how to present food.
GLEN: What opportunities did winning “Master Chef” open for you?
CHRISTINE: Oh, tons. I mean, I’ve been able to write a cookbook, share my recipes, teach cooking, do a lot of public speaking, inspire people to reach for the stars, show other people that they can cook in spite of their limitations, host cooking shows, judge “Master Chef Vietnam,” open two restaurants in Houston. All of these things I believe stemmed from, I mean, of course it took a lot of hard work. And it’s not like things were handed to me necessarily. But I did take advantage of having won “Master Chef” and then really I think working hard to make sure that it was something that I didn’t take for granted and just keep at it.
And, you know, I feel like some people expect that their lives will be completely easy and handed to them after they win something like that. And while, yes, it’s a huge advantage, I think one still has to work hard to make things happen for them. And I think for me it was both. It was luck and opportunity for being on “Master Chef” and winning, but it was also hard work and perseverance and grit to create the businesses that I’ve been able to create.
GLEN: When you were a judge on other cooking shows, did you find that your response to dishes was different than the other judges because you didn’t have any of the visual feedback?
CHRISTINE: I think so. I definitely did not place so much importance on presentation. For me it was about the experience of eating the dish, like how hard was it for me to enjoy a bite. So fussy plating is not really up my alley. Of course I understand most people are sighted, and they eat with their eyes first. So yes, a dish needs to be visually pleasing. But for me, I judge differently on how easy, the whole experience of eating a dish or eating a bite. That’s what I really judge a dish on. And so I think there’s different nuances that I can taste that perhaps someone with sight might be more distracted because of the visual plating. So I think about temperature, texture, the different flavors that work together. I think how hard is it for me to enjoy this dish. Does it fall apart? Is it a messy dish? Is it easy to get a bite? So these things all factor into how I perceive and judge a dish.
GLEN: You opened your first restaurant called The Blind Goat, which is a great name, by the way. It doesn’t sound like it was exactly a food court, but it sounds like it was in a building with other fooderies, as well?
CHRISTINE: That’s right. It was inside a food hall. So food halls were fairly new to Houston at that time. And I’d never had any experience running a restaurant or working in a restaurant before. And I know people ever since “Master Chef” were always wondering when I would open one. But I always have to explain, just because I’m a great home cook and that I can cook for two, four, 20 people, doesn’t mean that I know how to run a restaurant as a business, day in and day out. So it took seven years, I believe, before I actually decided to try my hand at my first restaurant. And I thought that opening as one small station inside a food hall would be easier in some ways and kind of allow me to dabble and get my feet wet, I think, in the restaurant industry and learn a lot from there. And so that was why I decided to open up just a small stall inside a food hall for my first concept.
GLEN: How much of the actual cooking day to day was you, and how much was you coming up with the recipes and supervising and those kinds of tasks?
CHRISTINE: That’s a great question because I think a lot of people assume that I will be in the kitchen, running the kitchen daily. But for me, that’s not really my dream. I like to give that opportunity to other people that I hire. So for me, my best strength is in conceiving the menu and the brand and coming up with the dishes and the recipes, and then teaching that to my staff. So at the beginning, of course, like you have to, when you start a business, you have to wear many hats. And so my husband and I were both in the kitchen quite a bit, like washing dishes, prepping, doing all of the unglamorous things of running a restaurant. But slowly we were able to build a team.
And then now my role more is like kind of the executive chef where I am coming up with the dishes and developing the menu. And then I would teach my staff, like my sous-chefs, how to make the dish. And then they would be able to figure out how to train the rest of the staff and how it works in the kitchen and on the line. So my strength is best done with kind of steering the ship of the restaurants and coming up with the menu and doing a lot of the overhead things that come with running a business or a restaurant. And then the daily operations of actually being in a kitchen itself and pumping out the food day in and day out for lunch and dinner service, that falls upon my sous-chefs and my line cooks.
GLEN: I may be misquoting you. But I think I’ve read or heard you say you live by “Expect the worst, hope for the best.” Is that an accurate paraphrase?
CHRISTINE: Oh, yeah. Yes, that’s very accurate. I always, I think, since I was young, have kind of lived by that mantra. And I think it’s because in life I’ve, you know, honestly I’ve been disappointed quite a bit, like having lost my mom when I was young, not expecting something like that to happen when you’re a teenager. And then becoming a young adult and losing my vision and being diagnosed with a life-changing autoimmune condition. I feel like I don’t lose hope because I feel like that would make me very pessimistic and not really want to wake up the next day and continue on with life. But at the same time I’m very much a realist, and I know that life can be hard, and there are things that can happen that seem unfair. But, you know.
So I think for me my best coping mechanism is to go through life expecting the worst, but hoping for the best. And that’s how I’ve dealt with everything, like whether it was being on “Master Chef” or opening a restaurant or going to through this pandemic and being a business owner. Everything is always, you know, hope for the best, but always expect for the worst. So you always need that contingency plan.
GLEN: You see, I think if I lived by that, I would never think about opening a restaurant because the odds of being successful are relatively small. I mean, fortunately you’ve defied the odds. But you don’t know that when you start.
CHRISTINE: Yeah. I think when you say that, looking back, I am surprised because I always thought and felt like I was a risk-averse person. I tend to like to play it safe. But my friends will be quick to point out that, well, you’re really not that risk-averse because if you were risk-averse you would have never gone and tried out for “Master Chef.” You would have never tried opening a restaurant. You would have never done the public speaking that you’ve done and put yourself out there and be vulnerable and do all these interviews and be authentic and honest.
And I will say that having lost my vision has made me take bigger risks. I think part of it is kind of realizing that life is short, and the answer will always be no unless you try. So I’ve noticed that after I lost my vision, that’s when I had the guts to, like, try to learn snowboarding, or do things that I would never have thought that I would have done before because I always wanted to play it safe all of my life. But I think losing my vision forced me into this new realm where I realized that, hey, like you just never know unless you try. And life is short. And the worst that can happen is the answer is no. And then you try to figure out a different way of doing things or figure out a different path.
GLEN: Are there specific things that you notice over and over again that those of us who are blind, when starting to cook, find particularly difficult?
CHRISTINE: Well, for me even to this day I find it challenging to bake, for example, because baking is such an exact science, and it depends on something as seemingly minor as the humidity in your kitchen or the climate that you’re baking in. Everything has to be measured very exactly on a scale to the gram. And then when you pop something in the oven, of course when you’re visually impaired you have no idea if it’s rising, if it’s turning golden, how it’s looking. You can’t really just open the oven because that makes the heat escape, and that changes the cook time. And then it’s hard to taste something that’s baking halfway through. So I would say like baking is definitely a challenge, even for me, to this day. So I, you know, imagine that would be something that’s challenging in the kitchen for anyone who’s visually impaired.
GLEN: How about measuring overall? I asked some of our other staff members what to ask you, and people were fascinated by the process of measuring.
CHRISTINE: Yeah, that’s a good one, too. I think measuring liquids is especially challenging. I do use a regular liquid measuring cup, and I use like this silicon putty that’s like, I think it’s called Sugru. And what it is, it’s like, it’s just like a little putty that my husband actually put on the half cup mark so I can use my finger to touch that marker and then pour liquid on the inside and then know when it reaches my finger level that it’s about half a cup. But otherwise, like my liquid measuring is not always exact. And I know there are tools out there that are like talking measuring cups and stuff. But sometimes they’re quite finicky, and I don’t have the patience for them.
So I tend to just kind of measure by experience. And a lot of it is also by sound. I think with more experience in the kitchen I’m able to, for example, pour some oil or drizzle some oil into a pan, and by listening to how much is pouring out and how long it’s pouring out, I can kind of gauge like this is one tablespoon, two tablespoons. This is half a cup. And of course it’s like I said, it’s not always exact, which is why I’m much more attracted to savory cooking rather than baking where everything has to be very exact.
GLEN: So when you’re doing wok cooking, can you tell when something is done by listening to it?
CHRISTINE: Yes. I think a lot of it also, though, lies in being able to taste it. So I can tell by using a tool, like your spatula or whatever, and you’re touching the food, you can tell when certain proteins seize up to a certain texture. Just by experience over time you’ll know like what chicken feels like when it’s cooked, what beef feels like when it’s cooked, what vegetables, how they kind of soften to a certain texture when they’re cooked. So I think it’s just over time and with experience you do learn how, by the texture of something, even touching it with a spatula or with like a cooking utensil you can tell how it’s cooked.
GLEN: I know you mentioned you don’t use tech for measuring. Is there any tech that you use in the kitchen that helps?
CHRISTINE: I use a lot of my smart home device to convert measurements, to set timers. And even my husband, who’s sighted, uses that to do the same. So I’ve found like smart home devices have been very helpful in cooking, whether it’s setting timers or just converting measurements or setting multiple timers, for example, if I’m cooking multiple dishes. That’s probably my main use of technology in a kitchen. And of course like I do use screen readers, and all of my recipes and my archived recipes are on my tablet or on my phone or my laptop. And my pantry list, too, for example.
So how I plan for meals at home is, because I’m not sighted and I can’t just open my pantry or my fridge or my freezer and know everything that’s in there, I have to make a list of everything that’s in stock in my kitchen on my phone. And so I use, like, grocery apps to kind of know, list out everything that’s in my kitchen, and that’s how I know, like, oh, I don’t need to buy more flour because I have all-purpose flour ready. And I can plan for like, oh, this is what I have in the freezer. I have some chicken thighs. I have some shrimp. And then I can meal plan according to that. So I would say my technology in the kitchen is mainly used with a smart home device, and then of course screen readers and my laptop, my tablet, and my phone.
GLEN: What do you do about spices? Besides, I mean, I always open the jars and smell them. But that’s not terribly efficient.
CHRISTINE: I mean, I do that, as well. But my spice drawer is all alphabetized. And then I use, like I mentioned, the same app on my phone that lists out everything I have in my kitchen. And so all the spices are listed out in alphabetical order on that list. And so I can always, like, go in there and say, like, okay, I need some oregano. And I can count down like this is how far down the oregano is on the list. And so then I count the jars, and then I just verify by smelling.
GLEN: Well, thank you very much for joining us. I appreciate you taking the time. You have lots of choices, and it means a lot that you can be on our podcast.
CHRISTINE: You’re very welcome.
GLEN: For those of you who listen to this podcast somewhat regularly, you have heard me undoubtedly talk about all of the training opportunities available through Freedom Scientific. And you can get to our webinars and other materials by going to freedomscientific.com/training. In fact, our live webinar earlier in September had to do with using Styles in Microsoft Word. So we cover Word pretty extensively. But now and then it’s often nice to have a whole book that we can use from either start to finish or to use for reference on a particular topic.
And I think that’s where Judy Dixon excels. She is quite the prolific author, having written eight or nine books about using iOS, a book a little over a year ago about audio description and how to take advantage of that when watching programs. And now she has one out about formatting documents for appearance using Microsoft Word. And although this is somewhat of a trepidatious topic for me because I don’t feel very competent at making things look outstanding beyond the basics of headings and so forth, maybe I will feel more confident by the end of this interview, and I hope you will, as well. Judy, welcome back to FSCast.
JUDY DIXON: Thank you very much, Glen.
GLEN: I really did not realize until my mid-20s, when a research paper I got back said “Great content, but it’s really hard to track this visually. And you should use headings, and you should have whitespace,” and three or four other big issues. I had no idea how important that was because I grew up reading braille. And with braille you have indented paragraphs; you have centered headings now and then; you have blank lines. There’s not much else. And so I didn’t know all the areas that one could control. How did you begin to understand the specifics of how to format and create compelling documents?
JUDY: I also grew up learning braille. I started learning braille at age five. But I think my relationship with print, I was a, what we call a low partial as a young child. I actually was in the sight-saving class for three weeks. I love this. And they decided my sight wasn’t worth saving. So I went and learned braille. But I continued to read print, I mean, I could see it. I understood that different characters looked differently, about fonts. But I stopped being able to see well enough to read print as probably a young teenager, maybe even younger than that. But I became an Opticon user. Do you remember the Opticon?
GLEN: I do, in fact. That’s how I learned what tables looked like, and tables with lines around the cells.
JUDY: Oh, yeah, that’s how I learned fonts. Especially fonts. I mean, that was – who knew that there were so many different ways to write a particular letter. I don’t know how sighted people do it. I really don’t.
GLEN: When you’re thinking about planning documents, what are the things that you consider now?
JUDY: Well, I talk about this in this book, in the chapter on planning your document. We talk about whitespace. And so many of these things, like whitespace, you know, don’t have too much, make sure you have enough, how much is enough, how much is too much. Who knows? But balance, you know, don’t have dense paragraphs on one page and then lists, wispy lists on another page. Directional flow, paying attention to that. Having some contrast, but having consistency. There’s another area that’s always very complicated, that you have to make sure you have enough interest, enough variety, but be consistent. Yes, okay. I mean, it’s a fine balance.
GLEN: Before your book, I did not know the term “directional flow.” At least, if I did, I’d long ago forgotten about it. Can you clarify a bit about what that is?
JUDY: Sure. There’s a lot of research on this, actually, and it is completely a visual thing, that the eye does a “Z” shape. It starts at the top left, goes to the top right, comes down the page and goes over to the left, and then ends up at the bottom right.
GLEN: That’s fascinating. So what does one do knowing that when it comes to designing?
JUDY: If one is designing a flyer, for example, you put the title at the top, which is something you’d probably do anyway. But let’s say you want people to take an action. You want people to call a phone number, visit a website. You would put that in the bottom right corner because that’s the last thing people are going to see.
GLEN: You make a joke about Arlo Guthrie and “Alice’s Restaurant,” which for those of you who were too young to remember “Alice’s Restaurant,” Thanksgiving is coming around. At least Thanksgiving in the U.S. and Canada. This would be a great time to go to YouTube and watch “Alice’s Restaurant.” One of the things he talks about are the circles and arrows.
JUDY: It’s, again, it’s drawing attention. You know, I want you to look at this thing that’s over here. And I want to make sure you look at this thing that’s over here. And I want you to know exactly where this thing that’s over here is, and I don’t want you to miss it. So you might put a circle around it. You might put an arrow to it. You might put a circle around it and an arrow to it. You know, anything that you can do to – and that was the point in “Alice’s Restaurant” was that he had pictures, the “27 8-by-10 color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and the paragraph on the back of each one.”
GLEN: And then the judge walked in with a guide dog to prove blind justice.
JUDY: And you know that’s true.
GLEN: Yes.
JUDY: That is absolutely true. There was a blind judge, and he – and, I mean, the whole story is more or less true. But the blind judge part is completely true.
GLEN: I think to a lot of people this is going to seem obvious. But I’m suddenly realizing the following: If I’m blind, putting together a document that I want to look good, I should talk it through with someone who’s sighted and get their ideas about how I could enhance that document. And then I have sort of the signposts to help me actually use the details of what you describe for doing it.
JUDY: You could do it that way. Or once you become more comfortable with doing it, you could use those details, put together your document, and then show it to a sighted person. What do you think of this? How did it come out? How well does this look? And the sighted person might say, well, you’ve got, you know, an awful lot of clutter here, or this is confusing and, you know. Hopefully you can find somebody who has a good sense of these things and give you good feedback. But I tend to do it first and then get feedback, rather than consulting first, “Gee, I want to do a flyer. How would I set this up?”
GLEN: I get to sort of a point of paralysis where I get very concerned about the formatting and less concerned about the content, and nothing gets done. So from my standpoint probably the consulting may work better. When you set out to do this book, did you have any of the same trepidation that I mentioned starting out?
JUDY: I did. Because I don’t know all of these things. I didn’t know many of these things. And I certainly didn’t know about templates and how to use a template. That was great fun. What I ended up doing to learn about the templates is I printed the ones I chose as examples, certificates and things like that. I printed it. I then used my tactile image enhancer and made a raised image of the template so I could see where the large print was, where the small print was, where the graphics were on the page, so that I understood it. And then I tried to reconcile that with what JAWS was telling me about where things were.
GLEN: What is a tactile image enhancer?
JUDY: It’s using swell paper and printed on swell paper, and then you run it through this heat machine that slowly pulls it through, takes about 30 seconds to do a page, to raise it.
GLEN: Ah. And so you’ll see, let’s say borders, for instance?
JUDY: You see anything that’s dark.
GLEN: Okay.
JUDY: So you see the print. I can’t read – regular print I can’t read tactilely. But I can certainly read probably 18-point print.
GLEN: Wow. I had no idea.
JUDY: Well, they’re very cool. The paper is ridiculously expensive. But it does work.
GLEN: I’m used to putting blank lines between paragraphs. And as I was reading your book, right around the time you started talking about this, I started thinking, I bet you I’m leaving extra white space in Microsoft Word. Because I’m guessing intuitively that Word already knows when you press ENTER to start a new paragraph to leave a little bit of extra space.
JUDY: It does. And I talk about that very specifically because I also leave an extra space. And the reason why we do it, I think, I know why I do it, is so that then, as I’m going back through my document, I can easily tell where the paragraphs are because there’s a blank line. But actually you don’t need to leave a blank line. But what you can do is go into Word and modify that extra space that it leaves. And you can set that to zero so that you in fact can leave your blank line, and it will look correct.
GLEN: If one is using everything standard in Word, do you ever need to leave blank lines? Or is it smart enough, for instance if you have a paragraph followed by a bulleted list, can that be right up against the paragraph, and Word will still leave the right amount of space?
JUDY: Yes. Word regards anything that’s more than a couple of words as a paragraph. And it treats paragraphs as lumps that have to have space around them.
GLEN: Got it.
JUDY: And you can – Word has settings for the space before a paragraph, the space after a paragraph, and but you would never hit RETURN more than once.
GLEN: How does a blind person who’s never seen color use color effectively in a document?
JUDY: That’s a good question. I actually talk about that in the book, too. And I don’t think I do a great job of this. I talk about color families. I think it’s helpful for a blind person to at least understand the color temperature, cool colors and warm colors. And I do talk about that in the sense of, you know, if you have a document where you’re using warm colors and cool colors, you need to have a sense that that’s contrast; whereas if you have a document where you’re using several cool colors together, then that’s not contrast. So if you have lavenders and blues and greens – green has a tendency, is on the border of warm, but it’s still considered a cool color – then that would not represent contrast. But I would be pretty judicious about color if I really wasn’t sure.
GLEN: I find it particularly hard to know when to use graphics. And once I decide to use graphics, I have no idea which ones to use. It’s completely foreign to me.
JUDY: That was really the most fun part of this book, and it was actually certainly the hardest because there are so many different families of graphics in Word. You’ve got WordArt. You’ve got SmartArt. You’ve got text boxes. I mean, a text box. Text box? I thought it was just a box with text. Oh, my gosh. They can be all different kinds of shapes, all different kinds of border styles, all different kinds of fill. And, I mean, there’s hundreds of possibilities, even with a simple text box.
GLEN: But I’m back to this roadmap question, which is, if I couldn’t hear, it would be very hard for me to know where to punctuate a podcast with music. And I feel like I’m a little bit in that zone when it comes to graphics.
JUDY: But if you couldn’t hear – this is a great analogy. I love it. If you couldn’t hear, would you not at least learn, if you didn’t intuit, that you’d probably put something at the beginning, you’d probably put something at the end, you’d probably put things in between major sections, but maybe smaller things. And you’d probably learn that, and that would be kind of close to right. And then, if you want to be that creative person who hears and is really comfortable, then you get into, let’s see, I’ll put some music behind this person, or I’ll fade the music out while this person is talking and getting started. And I’ll fade it out over a period of X number of seconds, and I’ll, you know, it’ll get quieter and quieter and so forth. But that’s the advanced stuff.
And the basics, the intro and the little transitions, that’s the basics that a blind person can be reasonably successful at doing in a Word document because, okay, we’re going to have headings. We’re going to use different fonts. That’d be kind of the equivalent. Maybe a couple of text boxes here and there, but nothing really fancy. And then the extra stuff is, okay, we’re going to start putting in photos. Now, sizing and positioning photographs is difficult and probably something, once you do it, you want to get the opinion of a sighted person to see how well this – did this come out? Does this look okay where it is on the page? That kind of thing.
GLEN: See, I think the analogy breaks down for me when it comes to do I use an oval, or do I use a circle.
JUDY: It has something to do with how much space do you have to put it in. Is that space square? Maybe you’d use a circle. Is that space long and narrow? You’d use an oval. Where is it going to fit best?
GLEN: Part of this I think all comes down to picking the right proofreader, the right person to look at your document from a visual standpoint.
JUDY: True, true. So, and somebody who’ll tell you the truth.
GLEN: How did you pick yours?
JUDY: Well, fortunately National Braille Press has a professional editor/proofreader to go through these things. And she was a publisher, worked for I think it was McGraw Hill, a mainstream publisher, for years. And she’s really good, and she understands all these things. So she was actually very helpful with some of the points that I did. And I felt confident at least I wasn’t going to say anything too terribly wrong.
GLEN: What do you find to be the most effective ways of verifying that you’ve created a document properly, and that you don’t have things standing out?
JUDY: I talk about the Hotkeys in JAWS. I talk about Text Analyzer. I talk about Speech and Sound Schemes, to use those tools to find out what you’ve got. And they’re great for reviewing and checking did it come out the way I intended. Text Analyzer is quite fun. It’ll tell you stuff you didn’t know. I’m also a braille display user, so to some degree I can see things, you know, extra spaces between words, things like that, that are always so hard to pick up with a screen reader, or two periods, things like that. I see, I just see that on my braille display. So I get a lot of information that way, too.
GLEN: I must admit that I was not judiciously using Text Analyzer for a while. And I realized once I started using it just how often I left extra spaces when I was copying and pasting things. And I assume to a sighted reader they will notice that.
JUDY: I would think so. Text Analyzer is actually very cool.
GLEN: You mention a couple of things in Word that I did not know a lot about. One of them is Word Find, where you can find things more than text. And the other is I guess sort of related, which is the Go To dialog box.
JUDY: The Go To dialog box is a really super easy to use and handy feature in Word. And I use it to find comments in Word. I see a lot of people whining about comments are so difficult to find. And I don’t think they are difficult to find. You can just use CTRL+G, and then you have this nice box with a fairly long list of things you can find. And, you know, comments and footnotes and section breaks, and I think there’s about 15 things that you can find with Go To. And it’s a great way to find stuff.
GLEN: You have another book in the pipeline, which sort of picks up where this one leaves off, about PowerPoint.
JUDY: Yes, the next book is about PowerPoint, and it is finished. In the PowerPoint book, though, I start much more basically with how do you, you know, you open PowerPoint, what do you do? What do you do first? How do you create your first slide? How do you create the second slide? How are slides different from one another? How do you manage slides? What are slides? What are they supposed to look like? What are your options for things you can do to them?
A lot of the things are similar to Word in that you can put different graphics elements and things like that into your PowerPoint slides. And you manage them in a similar way. And you have to also worry about color and balance, and even more so in PowerPoint than you do in Word because in PowerPoint, if you say I’m going to make a presentation to show at my next meeting, and you open PowerPoint, and you just write a few words in a few slides and show it, it would be extremely unusual. And that document would look very, very unprofessional.
So in PowerPoint it’s even more important that people who don’t see actually learn more about what kinds of things they can do to enhance the visual appeal of their presentations. You can find a lot of stuff about how to use Word. But you can find very little – actually, the best things I found were the JAWS Training things. Dan Clark did some lessons three or four years ago, and recently they did a couple of training seminars on advanced PowerPoint features, and they were very, very good. But there’s not much else.
GLEN: Well, thanks for filling the PowerPoint documentation void with your forthcoming book, “The Power of PowerPoint”; and the other book that we’ve been talking about, which is “Formatting Documents for Appearance” related to Microsoft Word. Judy Dixon, thank you very much for being with me.
JUDY: Thanks very much, Glen.
GLEN: I should mention that Judy’s books are available in braille or in digital form from National Braille Press. And if you go to that website, search for Judy Dixon. You’ll find everything that she has available.
GLEN: That’s going to do it for FSCast 221. We’ll be back next month with,
amongst other things, some demonstrations of the enhancements to Notifications
History. Until then, I’m Glen Gordon. Thanks for listening.