Richard E. White

Hello, this is R. E. White. Sooner or later anyone who reads my work will find a word or spelling mistake. There are two reasons for this. The first is I am blind. Not totally. I can see light and shadows from a few scattered pinholes. This is due to two genetic conditions which have been slowly killing off the retina cells. At one time I could see and drive. However, well before the year two thousand I was designated as legally blind. I stopped driving a few years before that. Just after losing track of where I was on a four lane road. It only lasted a few seconds, but let me tell you when you can't even tell up from down for two seconds and everything just becomes different colors with no perspective, it makes you want to park and never drive again. Well, I wanted to but never did. That was one of three big steps I had to go through when going blind. Waiting for someone else to drive me rather than just go. The next was when I had to get someone else to read my mail. The last was when I could no longer understand what was on a TV or computer screen. This meant no more video games.
In the case of computers, I shifted to a talking one. This includes learning to type blind. Listening to the computer tell me which key I just tapped, and learning how to get it to read things to me. There are other things a talking system can do. Unfortunately, there are few sights which pay attention to making things work for text only systems, and fewer good, sound only games. Even My smart phone which has a voice mode, never remembers to check out the apps for whether they will work while in voice over mode. I have a lot of books from audible dot com and even though I have repeatedly informed them there is no way for me to rate their books, they keep asking me to do it. When they came out with an app. for my smart phone, the rating screen doesn't work at all in the voice over mode. Still I can get many good books from them. Just not rate them or delete them when they go corrupted. I have to have a sighted person take over and get rid of them. Strange how most of their helpers never even know about the voice over mode even though it is built in to the phone, but then it was true for the helpers who built the phone as well.
Anyway, back to the writing problems. The wrong word problems are due to one, not being able to tell the difference when my computer reads it out to me. So two, too, to, and 2 all sound the same to me. This means a window which has been shuttered, and the word for a person who shuddered will pass my inspection. For this reason, I do use my computer to do a grammar check. However, it isn't that good at checking. I do have other people who edit the book for me. However, several of their mistakes have been pointed out to me, so they aren't catching everything either. As I have seen several similar mistakes from sighted writers who are making very good profits, I don't think most will worry too much about miner problems they can figure out if they remember I am blind and it all sounded right to me.
This brings me to the next problem. I happen to have something similar to Dyslexia. It means I am a very bad speller. Therefore, I go more by sounding things out.
Then there are a groups of words people might have problems with. I went with some words which I found by playing around with my speech system. If they sounded interesting coming out of my speech system, I sometimes added them in. Others I found in dictionaries. Both of these sounded all right to me, but the computer doesn't always use how humans would do it. Sorry if any of this causes problems with understanding my stories. My advice is, if you like exact wording and never want to think, then go read someone else's books. There are a lot of other options out there.
As to other things. I like animals and helped out at a wild life rehab place before my sight became to poor for the insurance. Even then I dropped off food for the different critters. However, now I only have a cat which is more often called fuzz ball than its true name of Sphinx. She has been trained to jump up to be petted as I didn't want to accidently step on her. Oddly, she tends to stop in front of others. Me she either leads or hops up and calls for attention. At least when she isn't trying to dance on my key board.
I have other story lines which will probably show up here when I give up sending them off to hard print publishers. I did the world of spellmarks to be released as a E-book to see how this market works.
Hope you all find something good to read or for the other blind, something to hear.
Remember beauty is in the ear of the beholder.
Later from Richard, a blind typer.

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