[54/366] "assistive" tech

[cosmolinguist]

I got home from an intense night of TV-watching (Doctor Who and then Picard which contained an unfortunate eye-squick trigger for me right away so I wasn't quite right for the rest of what would've been a very dramatic episode anyway), tired and with sore eyes, to Andrew who was looking forward to going to bed.

"I'll just go have a quick shower and get ready for bed..." he said, as if I wasn't going to get ready for bed too. I had done all the things I possibly could today. "...while you write your Dreamwidth entry."

"Oh yeah, shit, I haven't done that have I," I said. And I sat down at my laptop but almost immediately it froze up so badly that even when I tried to restart it, Word gave me an error message that said I couldn't close Word because there was a dialogue box open and I had to click OK on it to close it, but there was no "OK" and nothing at all that I did was closing it! and now here was a dialogue box telling me about the dialogue box that meant I couldn't close Word! at least this one had a "OK" button on it, but nothing happened when I pressed it.

My magnifier/screenreader software has downloaded an update and it's borked everything. It's sometimes impossible impossible to use the computer at all, because both the keyboard and mouse aren't responding properly. Good news is that since it's hideous proprietary software, it's only a "demo" and it'll revert to the old version since I won't give them £395 to keep this one. But the bad news is I can't seem to force that downgrade, I guess I just have to wait for the demo to run its course. I hate having to use all this garbage software. Time to investigate what magnification and speech are like on Linux these days, once I'm done with uni...

Anyway, that's enough of me typing on my phone to complain about my computer, and I'm sorry you're not getting a better entry today.

Comments

[silveradept]

Ugh. That's the entire opposite of things going well with a computer.

[cosmolinguist]

I was about to say it's been a little better today but then it just did the keyboard thing again so...sigh. Definitely the opposite of how a computer should work!

[diffrentcolours]

Hrm, I didn't realise / remember you had the same eye-squick thing as me - I would have warned you about it if I'd known, because it squicked me the first time I saw it :/

[cosmolinguist]

I didn't realize it was, well, not the same (because the way I've heard you describe yours is something I'm way past being bothered by) but overlapping. It's okay; I never talk about it (because the less I think about it the better) so there's no way you'd know and I don't expect you to, don't worry.

[diffrentcolours]

I won't worry too much about the past, and I'll try to remember for the future.

[cosmolinguist]

That sounds sensible and wise.

Pretty much anything eye-related it's probably worth warning me about. Even if it doesn't end up bothering me, I'll appreciate the gesture.

[jesse_the_k]

Argghhhhhhh! Assistive tech that turns on you is the worst.