A new toy

It’s been a strange summer. The last two weeks of school went by in a hurried flash. I spent quite a few long nights in the business college while finishing up a project. Then suddenly, six years of school were over. I enjoyed the beginning of the summer as I was able to sleep late and spend my time doing the things I was interested in (like Web design!). Unfortunately, updating this blog was not something I was able to do easily. If you read this blog much at all , you might remember my posts about my writing troubles. I’ve been trying a few things.

One of my tools is voice recognition. Since I’m on a Mac, I’m using MacSpeech Dictate. But it doesn’t work well. It’s buggy, for one. And most of the time there is someone in the room with me, which is just weird. My other tool is the on-screen keyboard called KeyStrokes. It’s actually been very useful, especially for writing code. But typing long form can be tedious and not fun. And I think writing these blog posts should be fun!

So I took some of my newly acquired graduation money and bought a tablet. The Bamboo Fun tablet by Wacom to be exact. The tablet takes my handwriting and turns it into type. It’s also cool to use in Photoshop for drawing and sketching. In fact, I’ve been writing this blog post with it. My hand is a little bit tired and I’ve had to go back and correct it a lot, but overall it’s been nice. It takes some time getting use to. My handwriting was terrible at first, but it has improved some during the course of writing this post.

I still don’t know what the final solution will be, but between voice recognition, an on-screen keyboard, and this tablet, I’ll find a way to keep writing.

cheers-signature

About the author

Blake makes websites and plays with WordPress. He has spinal muscular atrophy type 2. Blake is a volunteer web designer with Stop SMA and he writes about disability topics on this very website. Read more about him and follow him on Twitter.

One Comment

  1. gautam
    Posted August 30, 2011 at 7:43 am | Permalink

    how to use this bamboo fun to convert handwriting to type in ms word?

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