Stephen_at_work
A few weeks ago I introduced you to Stephen Steppens, who works at Clarity. Stephen told us about his current favourite gadget, the trekker breeze. Here he explains a little bit more about his work and other gadgets that he uses.
“I work on the switchboard, so I let people in the building, work on the phone system and that kind of thing. I’ve done this particular job for seven years and before that I was on the factory floor for 19 years. I started work when I was 21. I was one of the lucky blind guys who got work without having to struggle.
“There’s more pride in having a job than living on benefits and you can’t buy any expensive gadgets. I have expensive tastes and you can’t buy any good stuff unless you’re working. I’m the world’s worst – it’s gadgets, guide dogs and Dr Who conventions for me!
“For work, I have a Daisy bookreader, which I use as a note-taker here, it’s a Viktor Reader Stream. It’s an SD card machine that I use for quickly taking notes when people phone up and it’s really fast and useful.
“The other thing I use a lot is a Penfriend. I use it for labels – so all our computer disks here have labels and I change them every day. You just re-record the labels using speech, let’s say the disk number. That’s a very useful gadget. I use one at home as well for all my food containers and I’ve done about 300 CDs with it.
“We get computer training once a week at work, but most of my knowledge is self-taught. We use a screen-reader software called Jaws, which you type into and it talks to you. You can go on the internet, say internet explorer, or Firefox, and it opens it up and you find your web page, and it reads what’s on there. And it reads your emails and everything.
“It’s important to keep blind and disabled people in work, as the government is likely to cut benefits and things are going to get harder. We want to stay employed, we don’t want to be on benefits. And it means I can go and see my Mum in Hastings and can afford the rail fare!”
Want to know how a Daisy reader works? Watch this video...
