How the Blind Use Computers

I'd like to thank another AC content provider, Tonya, for suggesting I write this article.
As a totally blind computer user, one of the most common questions I hear from sighted friends, associates, or people I deal with at work is "How can a blind person use a computer?" In this article, I will attempt to answer that question.

First, let me offer a little background as to why I feel qualified to answer this question. I am 29 years old, have been blind since birth, and have been using computers in some fashion or other since I was in the third grade. My first experience with computers came with the Apple 2E (Remember those?), and I now use a variety of PC's running Microsoft Windows, and a wide variety of applications.

The question "How can a blind person use a computer?" has been asked of me many times, especially in my job as a readers' advisor at the Washington Talking Book & Braille Library. The primary technology which allows me, and many other blind people, to use a computer is a screenreader, which translates the text you see on the screen to speech, thus allowing me to hear what you would see. There are several screenreaders available, the most popular being JAWS for Windows, made by Freedom Scientific. At home, the screenreader is enough to allow me to do things I enjoy doing such as surfing the internet, using email applications, word processing, downloading music, and burning CDs. At work, however, I also have a braille display, which outputs the spoken words and screen text into braille. This is handy because most of what I do involves talking to people, either in person or on the phone. The braille display allows me to listen to the person I'm working with, while at the same time giving me access to information from the person's patron profile so tha we can find the books the person wants to read.

The second part to the question is usually "Okay, so the screenreader reads everything and the braille display lets you read it in braille, but how can you navigate programs without a mouse? The keyboard doesn't let you do most things in Windows, does it?".