AT Explorer

The personal blog of Mohammed Al-shar'

NVDA receives Arabic contributions

Mohammed

NVDA An open source screen reader for Windows has finally received some efforts to translate into arabic. Mr. wael Zakareya has started this by contributing a translation of the user guide , the readme, and the licence.

I am so excited about this, and I hope I will chip in and cooperate with him on this wonderful project. I wished blind Arabs have access to an open source TTS engine to enjoy the great world of open source.

Frustration with ISP customer care dept

Mohammed

people all over the world have got to envy us in Jordan for the amazing staff at our ISPs who are well trained to drive a customer crazy.

this afternoon I called my ISP to complain that not all web URLs open at my end unless I type the IP address of those I know, assuming that it is a DNS problem at their end. Of course, he said that they had no such problem at all, and he started to offer me some useless advice to manually input their dns servers, something I had already tried before I called.

Vote for Palestine!

Mohammed

Vote for Palestine now!
http://www.israel-vs-palestine.com/gz/

You can vote every 2 hours. yes, every 2 hours!!! remember it's:
http://www.israel-vs-palestine.com/gz/

The AT Explorer website is now running on Drupal 6!

Mohammed

Only one day after its release, AT explorer
website has been upgraded to drupal 6.0.

The upgrade went very smoothly. Congratulations to
the Drupal team for making Drupal 6.0 the best CMS release ever!

To learn more about all the new exciting features
of Drupal 6.0 read this excellent
post.

blind with vision

thanks to my friend Mohammed khawaja for this post about me on his blog:

Blind with vision

Orca

I have recently started experimenting with Orca, an open source screen reader designed to work with Linux distributions using Gnome.

this has been a big challange, because it not only meant dealing with a new assistive technology envention, but it also meant a whole new experience with Linux as a totally unexplored area.

I must admit that the learning curve has not been easy, and rather very challanging, but as usual, it has been very rewarding.

blogging right from the comfort of my email client

Mohammed

hi people.

drupal is really powerful. It never fails to make me admire its flexibility and underlying strength.

this post is edited and published right from my email

Yet another Web site?

Mohammed

Welcome to my personal space on the net.

I realised that since I have participated in maintaining - building websites for others, that it's time that I have my little place, where I will keep those interested updated on what is going on in my world.

I will try to keep updating this space, so that I don't disapoint those who care to check it out.

Feelings Of Happiness and Content

Mohammed

I am so happy, yes I am. This is the first time I feel so happy on a birthday, specially that I never celebrated any but this year.

actually, in the few times I do attend birthday parties, I, must admit, often do it out of trying to be sociable.

Today is my best friend’s birthday, and it certainly feels different, very different this time. I really do feel so happy and content. have you ever imagined
yourself wanting to collect all the happiness known to humans and sort of pour them into your friend’s heart? this is exactly how I feel!

My First Encounter with a Screen Reader

Mohammed

I am often asked how can I use the computer although i am blind. Often times people will even doubt that it’s doable. The short version of the answer is that I use the computer through a screen reader. which is basically a software that tells the blind user what is displayed on the screen at any given event, through either speech or braille. That event may be a dialogue box, an edit window, a hyber text document, a VB project, etc. But what is it really like to use this screen Reader?