 #87 (permalink) Sun Nov 02, 2008 7:00 am How fast can you type? |
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I learned to type when I was ten during a hot, sultry summer afternoon while I was living in the Philippines. I was ten years old and I was under pressure to learn to type on a typewriter that typed print words so that I could enter school in September. Prior to that, I had attended special classes for the blind in public school or schools for the blind and, in each place, there was always at least one teacher who knew how to read Braille, whether they read it gby sight, as many of the teachers who could see did, or whether they read it by touch as we blind students and some of the teachers did.
When I was five, I learned to write Braille on a writing device called a Braille Writer, with a keyboard composed of six keys, plus a backspace, a spacebar and a key which advanced the paper down one line. If you wanted to write double-spaced, you hit the "line space" key twice. But most people didn't do that because we didn't want to waste a line. When young children or new Braille readers first learn, they use double spacing between lines so that it is easier to distinguish the dots. But in the early grades that stops.
At eight, I learned to write with a Braille "slate and stylus", a much more difficult skill which took longer and required more hand strength and coordination.The dots were pressed into the paper by the stylus and instead of pressing the six keys, you found the appropriate position in the six-dot "cell" and pressed down with the stylus. The slate was a heavy rectangular metal device which was much smaller and more portable than the braille writer and much quieter. In many countries, blind people use the slate and stylus almost exclusively because Braille writers are expensive. When I was a child, a slate and stylus cost $2.00 but now they cost much more than that, probably ten times more depending on such variables as the number of lines and cells per line on the slate, whether it's plastic or aluminum (they don't make the heavier ones anymore) what kind of stylus (there are about five different kinds) and whether the pins that hold the paper point up or down. (I'm not kidding! But it's too much detail to go into in this topic.)
When I was ten, my father got a job in the Philippines. We had already lived in Germany when I was small but when I started school we lived in Florida. I did attend a German nursery school with seeing children. But we were not expected to write which is a good thing because German Braille is different than English Braille. the same dot configurations are used, as they are all over the world. But the symbols mean different things depending on which alphabet you use and how many contractions (something like shorthand) symbols you use, how they're placed etc.
There was a school for the blind in Manila but it only went through third grade and I was going into sixth. So my parents had shipped my grandmother's old Underwood manual typewriter, complete with heavy, unwieldy carrying case, ahead and it was waiting there for me when we got there.
We landed at one a.m. local time, right after a typhoon had hit. It was amazing that we were able to land at all that night. Trees were down everywhere. Moisture hung in the air, enveloping us in it like a heavy, wet blanket. But I was pretty oblivious to that. I was a kid embarking on an exciting new adventure.
But the next day, still dealing with jet lag since I hadn't slept the previous night, my energy and my patience were wearing thin. The morning had been fun. The yard was full of fascinating things to explore. But early afternoon, as my energy was waning, (there was a 12-hour time difference and my body thought it was time to sleep) my father, who had brought a typing book home from his office, deposited it, the typewriter and me at a small folding card table for the first of my typing lessons.
He had to go back to work, so the thankless task of teaching me fell to my mother. This posed a multitude of problems. First, my mother didn't know how to type, didn't want to learn how and really couldn't show me. The best she could do was read the typing book to me. It told me on which keys to place each finger. Then began the long succession of drills, first the "home" row, then moving up and down. I hated it. But I wanted to go to school and I knew there really wasn't a choice. Parents didn't homeschool their kids then as some do today. The teachers at the local school were not going to learn Braille. So I learned to type.
One good thing about being blind was that I didn't have to try not to look at the keys! (smile) Well, there is always humor to be found even when sweat is pouring down one's face, eyes are drooping, perspiration makes your fingers slide off the wet keys and the gleeful sounds of your sisters playing outside remind you that you're stuck at a bewildering keyboard with a key for each letter as well as each number, common punctuation marks and assorted other mysterious keys and the machine bears no resemblance to any writing device you've ever experienced. Added to that was the fact that I couldn't read the writing! I could feel where the keys had punched through to the underside of the printed page but there was no discernible pattern. It seemed that I could never write one line without making mistakes. Then there were the silly words, phrases and sentences.
I knew I had finally mastered the alpha part of the alphanumeric keyboard when I could type, accurately, 25 times (an arbitrary amount set by my mother) and with acceptable speed (probably about 30 words per minute), that immortal sentence:
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back.
That sentence contained every letter of the English alphabet. Relief washed over me as I'm sure it did my mother. I was ready to go off to school.
Several years later, when my father was stationed elsewhere and I was again studying at a school for the blind, my classmates had to start learning to type. Needless to say, I sailed right through that course. I tried to convince the teachers that I didn't have to take the class and it was a waste of time. They told me I could always use more practice.
In high school, even though I was in the "college bound" track, I took business courses anyway thinking they might come in handy. One of them was a transcription course. We used a device called a dictaphone. Letters of various kinds and other documents were recorded on vinyl "belts" (no, I don't know why they called them that, they bore no resemblance to belts worn around the waist or, come to think of it, to conveyor belts either.) and we typed what we heard. We had to be able to type at least 60 wpm with fewer than three typographical errors per page on a manual typewriter just to be accepted into the class. Then, immediately, we were introduced to the two "mega monsters", the dictaphone machine and the electronic typewriters.
Getting used to the electric typewriters was, like many things, a double-edged sword, which meant that there were good things and bad things about the situation. Electric typewriters had a much lighter touch so faster speeds could be achieved. But since the touch was so light, it was easier to press the wrong key and make more mistakes. In the beginning, we all had a hard time with most of our papers being rejected, necessitating repeated typing of the same material. Again, there was good and bad. The good part was that I memorized everything so didn't have to take the extra time to listen, stop the dictaphone by letting my foot up on the pedal, or change belts. this improved my speed and efficiency, at least until I had to move on to another assignment. But the worst part was adapting to the new touch. Eventually, it didn't pose a problem and I did, in fact, increase my speed from 60 to about 80 wpm.
Initially, one of my biggest problems, when I was ten and just learning to type and which is common among blind children, is that I had to learn to spell everything out. Braille uses 63 dot combinations but they are used in different ways, and they can mean many different things depending on context, position in a word, etc. Many words are contracted because it would take much more space to spell them out. So, for example, the letter k when it stands alone, stands for the English word "knowledge". The word "children" is written as the "ch" sign followed by the letter N. While this can seem terribly complicated, after you've learned it, it's harder to go back and learn the "real" English way to spell the words. It really wasn't that much of a problem to me because spelling came easily to me and, with few exceptions, such as the word knowledge, I had a relatively easy time of it. I always won the spelling bees. I think that I was ahead of the game compared to my high school classmates because I had learned to type at an early age and was forced to learn to spell in order to hope to compete on an equal level with sighted peers.
When I went to college, I typed my assignments on (you guessed it) my faithful Underwood that I had inherited from my grandmother who had had it for a long time but never had learned to type. That particular typewriter had additional keys on it for various accent marks, the tilde and other symbols so I could type Spanish assignments and some other languages fairly easily. The problem, of course, was that if a language had a totally different alphabet, one had to get a special typewriter that had the appropriate keys. So, for instance, when I lived in Japan, learning to speak the language was fun. Learning to write it was impossible and learning Japanese Braille was difficult and something I never did completely master.
Then, along came the computer. Eventually, "talking terminals" were invented so that one could hear the words and numbers as they were being typed. When PCs got more popular, software developers scrambled to come up with programs that would emulate the talking terminals so that the field of computer programming, which had suddenly become a viable employment alternative for blind people, could remain accessible. In the beginning, a PC user had a lot to learn. You had to learn which keys to press to make your screen reading software read what you needed to read and you had to know which keys to press and of course, there was the addition of function keys, the separate number pad, additional keys adjacent to the spacebar on each end etc. But I loved it! I could actually read what I had typed! Since I typed twice as fast as I wrote Braille on a Braille writer, that was great! But then . . . As soon as some of us blind people began to feel again that we were approaching equality of access to the written world, someone developed the GUI (graphical user interface), so essential to the Mac and Windows operating systems. While this made things quicker and easier for sighted people, it plunged the blind computer using community, particularly those who utilized the computer in academic and employment situations, into chaos. Even in the best of times the unemployment rate for educated, willing blind workers has been abysmally high, varying from conservative figures of 70% to around 90% and when a big change happens, like automation of jobs that once were done by hand, or a complete overhaul of computer operating systems, that rate plummets. Every time something gets updated, additional challenges in accessibility manifest themselves. Voice recognition programs such as Dragon Naturally Speaking are getting better, enabling entry of material via voice instead of keyboard. But I type a lot faster on a computer than I did on a typewriter and voice recognition programs, in addition to having to be "traind" to understand the voice of the user, can't accept input as quickly as a typist can type. My screen reading software can read a lot of what is on the screen. But it can't read everything and while I type quickly and don't proofread on things like a forum, when I do feel the need to proofread, such as on a document I am writing that needs to be of professional quality, I proofread word by word and sometimes letter by letter. In addition, I have to make sure the codes, things like underlining, hard returns (line breaks) italics, bold etc. are correct. Although I can vary speed, pitch, volume, amount of area read and other attributes, I can't, for instance, type the graphical symbols used so often to indicate emotions or physical body movements, such as a wink. I can use some of the abbreviations, such as "lol" for "laugh(ing) out loud" but generally, I have to try to paint word pictures. I can use sound editors to create MP3, wma, wav and other files, and I can use some of the media players, such as WinAmp, Windows Media Player and RealPlayer, but not RealAudio and I can't even listen to some of the mp# files on this site unless I enable JAVA, which can create additional problems. There are ways around that, thank goodness, and I will still be able to upload audio files. But it drives me nuts when sites ask me to install something like "adobe flash", a video viewer, when I can't take advantage of the material or when I download a PDF file and it's not text, it's a picture of the text which has graphical elements in it that makes it impossible for any of my PDF readers to decipher. I have had the unfortunate experience of paying for and downloading a PDF book, a book on teaching English, actually, though not from this site) and was unable to open or read the file because it was an image and it probably had a whole bunch of things embedded in it to prevent copying but it was unreadable for me and while the author had promised refunds, I never got a response to copious emails I sent. I learned my lesson well though. The next Ebook I downloaded, I asked if it could be sent as an attached file. It was a long book but the author did it for me. I am ethical so did not copy or distribute it illegally. As a musician who has written music and who has had material taken and copyrighted by one of my grad school professors, I know how that can be.
I used to type in chat rooms sometimes. But now I restrict my chatting to verbal chats unless it is a two-way chat where one person types something in, then types something to indicate that they're done, rather like amateur radio operators do when they say "over". Otherwise, when there are multiple people inputting information at the same time, I can't sort it out.
But, as with most things, the introduction of the computer and the Internet has brought me so much that, while I may sometimes complain, while every step forward in accessibility seems to be followed by two steps back as we try to keep up with newer, more complicated, less accessible technology (forget the I phones, and a software program that makes smartphones accessible costs several hundred dollars more and then only works on certain phones so I can't see the screens so I confine my use of the phone to making and receiving calls and voice mail. Blind people can't access the menus on many devices, or the information like weather emergency bulletins or stock quotes or other material transmitted across the bottom of the TV screens. But we are making strides. Twenty years ago, I would not have been able to communicate with people around the world in this manner. The technology is expensive and, had I not married a person who has the need of a computer in his business, I probably would not yet have or know how to use the computer. So I am deeply grateful. It is a wonderful freedom and I am glad this Internet is a place where, even when we have disagreements, we can share with respect and acceptance a widely divergent set of viewpoints, backgrounds and exxperiences and learn to know people for who they are while also protecting our mutual safety and, when necessary, anonymity.
For anyone who is still reading, I humbly thank you. I know that for many, it has been too long and difficult a message to read. I do not offer it in a self-pitying way. But I do know that I am often called upon to educate and advocate for people in all kinds of situations, particularly people with disabilities, many of whom can not have their voices heard.
Thank you all for this wonderful forum where we can all learn from each other and share a bit of our lives while improving in communication skills. As a native english speaker, I want to be able to clearly communicate with non-native speakers as well. If I say things that seem unclear or incomprehensible, I am always willing to learn from that and try to do better.
It is getting late and, though we set our clocks back an hour tonight where I live (daylight saving time, something I wish we didn't have to deal with) it's still late and I've pontificated too long. Hope I haven't been too pedantic or excessively verbal.
Laura |
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Laura Bright
I'm new here and I like it ;-)
Joined: 07 Sep 2008
Posts: 12
Location: Austin, Texas, U.S.
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Sfjenn
