Salon post: May 11

[jenett]

Welcome to this week's salon post! Did this week go really quickly for anyone else?


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Topic of the week
You know, I'm stalling on posting this because I can't settle on a good question to ask, so what kinds of stuff would you like to talk about? Either here, or what would you suggest for future weeks?

What I've been up to:
Up too late reading, and with weird dreams, mostly. I also watched the latest season of Midsommer Murders via BritBox, as one does. Well, if one is me.

Beyond that, my first regular round of allergy shots went well, and I'm cat sitting for a friend on FMLA leave for a family medical issue, so I am expecting to spend an hour or two sitting on her couch tomorrow to see if I can lure her cat into coming out.


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Comments

[julian]

Potential topics: Summer plans? Do you garden? Do you have hobbies? (was that already a salon question?) Do you want to build new habits and if so, what? Do you like games? What kinds? What's your favorite leisure activity? How do you like to help people? What did you enjoy doing in school? How do you learn best? Dogs, cats, or fish? Read anything good lately?

(This week went mildly fast, mostly because I was in final exam stress-mode.)

[jenett]

Thank you! These are good questions.

Yay for finals being over or mostly over, I hope?

[julian]

Thank you! I can come up with more, of course, but I figured A Few was better than A Surfeit.

And yep, finished up with work Wednesday. Have to go over to campus to get some stuff today, and then am Done like a Done Thing.

[jazzyjj]

Here is something I just thought of, inspired by the experience of purchasing my iPhone, setting up training, and then attending said training. That is, what is your learning style?





I must say, this whole experience with the iPhone has been much better than I or my parents expected. First off, the store employee who assisted my father and me was great. He was very patient with us, and let me touch some iPhone cases and choose one. The 2 in-person tutorials I attended were very helpful, and I have been practicing what I learned thus far. I've run into some hiccups along the way, but those will no doubt be sorted out very soon. For those not familiar with the situation, I am visually impaired and not many people would consider it easy for us to even use an iPhone, due to the flat-screen nature of these things. But thanks to Apple's ingenuity, this has been possible for awhile. My brother is totally blind, and is on his second iPhone. I'm very impressed with mine thus far.

[silveradept]

It sounds like Apple put some serious consideration into the accessibility features of the phone. Any particular standouts that we should learn about?

[jazzyjj]

I think 2 things that stand out for me are Siri and of course VoiceOver, which is the screen reader that is baked into Apple's products. I have been able to accomplish a lot on my iPhone just by asking Siri. It will even turn on/off VoiceOver for me, but there is also a keyboard shortcut to do this at least on the iPhone and MacBook. There's also a feature which slows down the gestures for people with any kind of a physical or perhaps cognitive disability. I haven't found it yet though.

[silveradept]

Those do sound like very useful tools - to be able to talk to the phone and have it talk back and read things would be wild science fiction of not too long ago.