Welcome to a new series called Take Back Your Tech. In this series I want to talk about how to take control of the technology you use everyday. We will explore beyond the hardware and software itself and dive into the systems and people that we support with our choices. I hope to help people discover how their technology choices relate to the greater world beyond who wins the great tech of the moment popularity contest.
I will be talk about as many brands as I know about. I am not a brand loyalist and no one is supporting me. In fact, I hope to introduce readers to new options. I choose functionality over branding so if I mention that I consistently choose one brand over another it is because it has won the comparison race up until the time of that writing. This equation may be rebalanced at any time when I find something better.
As an example: When I started using Apple computers, Microsoft barely had a graphical operating system and they didn’t have a fully functional magnification program until 1998 when it was included in Windows 98 and even now I feel that the Apple magnification works slightly better because it is built into the operating system and is not a program that runs on top of the operating system.
If I were a beginning computer science student like I was back in the early 1990’s, I most certainly would have chosen a computer running Debian Linux because now all three operating systems have functional accessibility suites, including magnification which is the accessibility feature I use the most.
I started studying computer science at my first university back in 1990. I learned how to program on a supercomputer. Even though I did not finish that degree, I took what I learned and applied it to everything else I have done since. I constantly use computers, the internet, and have direct experience with a lot of the material I want to cover in this series. I am a constant tinkerer and explorer. I am always looking for new ways to make my life and work easier, spurred on by the fact that I am a visually impaired person and technology is not adapted for people with disabilities in general but especially not for me and how I want to work.
Since it is likely that anyone who is reading this probably owns at least one phone, and they are such an important part of our lives, the cellular phone is where I want to start. We could talk about landline phones too but the number of people who own them is going down dramatically, though there are good reasons to keep them.
There are so many places to go and we could totally fall into giant pits of exploration and explanation on some very narrow topics. I will try to keep each article fairly brief and I will share resources that will allow you to look deeper into things if you wish. I am certainly no expert on everything that I want to talk about but there are many others who have covered many of the same topics in the past.
Feel free to read as much or as little as you like of each. Of course, if you have questions, comments or counter arguments to something I say, please do let me know and I will address them in future posts.
