Introduction

1 What is this Tutorial about?
2 The Structure of the Tutorial
3 Writing Conventions
4 Accessibility Settings

1 What is this Tutorial about?

It becomes ever more indispensable for blind and partially sighted persons to know how to use a computer. The computer is a great tool which enables the people with special needs to access information worlds which formerly were unreachable to them, to enter and easier manage public schools, and to work independently side by side with sighted colleagues in many jobs.

This computer beginners tutorial was developed in the Accelerate Project of the Leonardo Programme of the European Commission. Its immediate aim was to enable blind and partially sighted users of public libraries to use the workstations equipped with the special accessibility hardware and software as well as to learn how to use the computer as independently as possible.

This tutorial trains the users in basic usage of the Microsoft Windows operating system and introduces the most important applications for text and data processing and telecommunications via Internet.

Why Windows?

We concentrate on Windows and other Microsoft programs not because we would consider these programs and this operating system to be the best ones. Our choice was not really free. There are two main reasons to teach Windows in this tutorial:

All the world uses it, and blind and partially sighted people should be able to co-operate with their friends and colleagues
The special accessibility software works best with Windows and other Microsoft products.

The most important feature of this tutorial is its main focus on keyboard usage. There are lots of Windows tutorials written for sighted persons where all explanations and action lead-ons base on graphics, screen shots and on mouse usage.

This tutorial tries to explain all in words. When explaining how to do an action, we always show how to do it by using the keyboard and only if necessary by using the mouse.

Because our aim is to train blind and partially sighted users only, we present in first place the handling of Screen Readers and Screen Enlargement programs.

2 The Structure of the Tutorial

The main part of the tutorial begins with this Introduction and consists of electronic texts in so-called HTML format (hypertext mark-up language). The main characteristics of HTML text is its linkage ability. That means that some parts of the text or some graphics in the document act as active references - links to some other text passages in the same document or even to some other documents and their parts. Since the computer can reach all referred documents and their parts over the network, activating a link brings the referred text on the display. This feature favors especially the authors of manuals and tutorials giving a tool in their hand to simplify the searching for subjects of interest and looking up forgotten or yet unknown components during the learning of a complex procedure.

This tutorial uses of course only simple features of HTML because its users do just their first steps in browsing through Web pages.

In addition to the electronic texts of this tutorial there is also a part of it available as Braille output containing

the most important keystroke commands of the documented Screen Reader programs
the very basics of using Internet Explorer, to make the reading of this tutorial possible
Braille graphics of screen shots which should "visualize" different types of graphical objects for blind users.

If you have an Index Everest Braille printer at your disposal you can here download the printable files "accelerate_printout.exe" as a self-extracting ZIP archive. That means you have only to run this file, and all the necessary files will be installed on your hard disk.

There are also some example and exercise files as mandatory addition to the tutorial.

Please download "exercises.exe" here. It is also a self-extracting ZIP archive.

If you have an Index Everest Braille printer at your disposal, you can print the file "Tutorial.brl" in the Print Sub-folder of your Accelerate folder (probably c:\Accelerate\Print\Tutorial.brl).

There are also some examples and exercises as mandatory addition to the tutorial.

You can find them in the Exercises sub-folder of your Accelerate folder (probably c:\Accelerate\Exercises).

3 Writing Conventions

We believe that these simple conventions are enough to guarantee the intelligibility of the text.

There are three kinds of subject overview listings in this tutorial:

A big Table of Contents including all headings in the Tutorial
Quick Contents: listing only the main sections of a Tutorial chapter, and
Contents: listing all the contents of a single chapter.

The keys to be pressed

are written out with their full names. For example, you will find CONTROL instead of CTRL, INSERT instead of INS. This convention was made for convenience of speech output users.

Encoding of key combinations:

To say that one key, for example "Y", has to be pressed, we simply write Y.
To say that several keys have to be pressed simultaneously, we use a plus sign "+" to connect them. To press for example Control key, Alt key and O together, we write CONTROL+ALT+O.
To say that several keys have to be pressed after each other, we separate them by commas ",".
Example:
Press first the Alt key together with the key F and afterwards the key X: ALT+F, X.

4 Accessibility Settings

All applications introduced in this tutorial give the user the possibility to adapt their appearance and many other features according to his/her wishes. Some of these options are built especially to improve the accessibility for the sake of the persons with special needs.

It is recommended to follow up this offering and to adapt your system and your applications before starting with this tutorial. Draw on an advanced user to help you doing it.

Here you find the most important changes which you should accomplish to improve the accessibility.

Comments

Previous Section

Level Up