Yesterday evening I went on and finished the touchscreen and 2-switch access (for mouse buttons and keystrokes). Now before I get too excited and code on like a maniac, I think the best step now is to document what I’ve got so far and put it in cvs.
That brings me to the question if anyone is interested in joining. If so, just drop me an email and I’ll give you committer rights on the repository.
Posted on 29 juni '06 by Jouke, under English. No Comments.
I couldn’t just leave the code to rest yesterday, so I went a little further. I started working on the (accessible) Event handling.
To make everything as easy as possible, a programmer should normally only worry about one event, namely EVT_OA_SELECT (I’m using OA as the prefix for everything…it stands for Open Accessibility, and currently it’s also the name of the module, better suggestions are welcome). EVT_OA_SELECT($object, \&OnSelect) will work like you would expect: if the $object has been selected by the user (in any of the ways that will be defined), it executes the sub OnSelect. If you already have an event handler associated with any control, you can simply use this one beside it and it will do the same.
Tonight I’ll implement OA::Config, where you can set/get the configuration of your accessible application (what kind of input device, how many switches, etcetera).
Posted on 28 juni '06 by Jouke, under English. No Comments.
I just sat down, looked at my screen and the only thing I thought was “wow”…
I hadn’t thought that I could make such progress in so little time. The module set I’m working on is really getting there now. I can tell you a bit more now what it’s supposed to do…
When I started working on pVoice more than 5 years ago, I had a specific problem for a specific person that had to be fixed. Therefore the AAC::Pvoice modules that came out of pVoice, were never really useable for any other type of application, which limited my possibilities quite a bit. Especially since Krista is getting older, and I want to write more ‘grown up’ applications for her.
The ideal situation would be to have any kind of GUI application accessible for people as limited in their physical abilities as my daughter. And then preferrably without any modifications to the original source code. I realize of course that that’s not really possible.
The second best situation is that I could make it as easy as possible for a programmer to adjust their existing GUI applications, so that disabled people can use them. Therefore I’m writing an extension to wxPerl that will
If this subject interests you, and you know how to write wxPerl applications, watch this journal in the time to come. I’ll be releasing code soon
Posted on 27 juni '06 by Jouke, under English. No Comments.
Slowly but surely I’m getting up to speed with pVoice related programming again. I’ve been working on a brand new ‘thing’ (call it a thing for now, it doesn’t really have a name yet) that will allow you, as a programmer, to write easily accessible GUI programs, with hardly any modifications to your existing Wx code.
Although I have plenty of hurdles to take, so far it’s looking pretty promising. As soon as I’ve got something useable (and given my limited free time it may always take longer than I hope), I’ll put it in cvs and tell you about it here.
Posted on 26 juni '06 by Jouke, under English. No Comments.
It’s pretty hard to make time to work on pVoice it seems. My daytime job has been extremely demanding the past year and it looks like it won’t be less demanding any time soon. Besides that, the family life eats up a lot of time too.
Krista has been in the hospital the beginning of this month to have surgery that is meant to repair the shortening of the muscles in her legs, which also caused her back to curve. This has been a painful and stressful operation, and as you can imagine, when your child is in the hospital, you don’t get much work done (being a project in your free time, or your regular job).
However, the YAPC::Europe programme committee has accepted all three of my talks, and the more technical of the three talks depends on the work I will be doing in the time remaining until Y::E. I really need to make time now, instead of hoping I will get the time automatically…
this will be hard…
Posted on 18 juni '06 by Jouke, under English. No Comments.
Today we got a call from the hospital (University Medical Center Groningen) that they have a timeslot available. So tomorrow we’ll take her there, and she’ll be treated on Friday.
This surgery is more or less the same as she has undergone two times before already. Because of the high tension in her muscles in her legs, the muscles get shorter. They have cut these muscles before to make them longer, but this time everything is much worse than before. This time her back is starting to curve because of the strain the shortened muscles are putting on it.
She has to stay in the hospital until at least Monday.
We’ve got mixed feelings about it. We know it’s nessecary, but it’s quite a heavy and also painful operation. After the sugery there’s 6 months for rehabilitation….not something to really look forward to. On the other hand, it will certainly relief the pain she now constantly has.
Let’s hope for the best!
Posted on 31 mei '06 by Jouke, under English. No Comments.
For a number of reason I’ve been keeping quiet for a long while. No journal posts, no visits to monger meetings, and most importantly no work on any of my private projects, including pVoice.
Most of the reasons are history now, and I’ll get restarted on pVoice development tonight. I’ll be going to YAPC::Europe in August and Euro OSCON in September. Now what’s left is making time to go to mongers meetings again…
I’ll keep you posted
Posted on 18 mei '06 by Jouke, under English. No Comments.
As a part of the constant monitoring of how Krista is doing, we have regular meetings with doctors at the Hospital (the University Medical Center Groningen or UMCG) in the so-called CP team meetings and with the therapists, rehabilitation doctor and school personnel at her Rehab center (Beatrixoord, which recently became a part of the UMCG) in the so called OBT (“Ouders bij Team” or “Parents with Team”) meeting.
Last week was the bi-yearly CP team meeting and this week we had the OBT meeting. At the CP team all involved doctors come to see Krista in one afternoon, talk to her, talk to the parents and after that they talk to each other about what possible steps need to be taken. We discussed a lot of options this time. First of all, Krista needs to gain more weight. We tried several diet-drinks, but these caused her to eat less normal food, so that didn’t work. The next possibility is to give her a gastric catheter and give her extra food through that during the night. Another thing is that her spinal curvature is getting worse, the flexibility of her legs is getting less and in the morning her right knee is hurting and cannot be stretched immediately. We (the parents) prefer to have that treated with botox. However, one of the doctors seemed opposed to that idea and would rather do surgery and cut some muscles to correct it. Somewhere in the first week of February we’ll see one of the doctors again and hear their proposal. After that we can decide wether or not we agree with that and have it done or not. It’s hard to make these decisions. On one hand you don’t want your child to go through all kinds of surgery, on the other hand, sometimes there are no alternatives left and you have to take drastic steps. We’ll see what the doctors propose.
Then the OBT meeting. Unfortunately only two of the therapists and none of the school personnel was present. This however meant that there was more time to go into more depth on certain issues. One main issue was the adaptation of Krista’s wheelchairs, which is done in a very bad way. We’re struggling with that since last august and it’s still far from done. Krista has three wheelchairs. One powered, one manual and one “relaxing” chair for in and around the house. On all three she is supposed to be able to work with her Mercury computer. Hardly any of the adaptations on the chairs is done right and the supplier doesn’t seem to be able to understand how it should be done. We decided to get the technical manager of the supplier to come over to the Rehab center for another meeting, and we will get all chairs to that meeting too and try to explain once and for all what needs to be done. It’s a very frustrating situation.
Another thing we went into more detail about was Krista’s psycho-therapy. She has improved so much on that, that her psychologist proposed to work towards an end of the therapy. We agreed. She indeed has improved so much, that it’s not really needed anymore. Actually, more therapy seems to worsen the situation, since she has associated coming to therapy with trying to come up with things that bother her in any way. She needs to learn to work out issues herself with people around her, instead of saving all problems for a session with the psychologist. If she has an issue with anyone, she needs to learn to discuss that with the person involved, not complaining to a third person. That is of course a learning process, but we’re confident that she’s able to pick that up.
Next Wednesday we’ll have the second “parent training” about learning how to deal with ADHD and PDD-NOS. We had our introductory training the a week before last Wednesday and it went well. Let’s see what the next one brings…
Posted on 21 januari '06 by Jouke, under English. No Comments.
The parent council of Krista’s school was looking for new members, so I volunteered. Not that I have too much time on my hands. On the contrary. However, I think it’s good to be(come) involved in your children’s school if you have the opportunity.
Now, the weird thing is, I sent an email to the chairperson saying that I’m interested. I don’t hear anything back for a week, and next thing I know Krista comes home with a general invitation for all parents for a parent night (or whatever you call it in English when parents go to the school in the evening to talk with the teachers), and as a part of that, there are a few people who will be introduced as new members of the parent council. And yes, amongst them I find my name on the list.
Now, I don’t know if there will be an election or not (there’s no election on the programme)….we’ll see. It’s the 26th, so I’ll let you know wether or not I will be in the parent council from then on
Posted on 18 januari '06 by Jouke, under English. No Comments.
Around new year there was quite a bit of snow over here, but it’s always hard to get my kids to go out and play on their own. Nikki is always bored very quickly, Krista just gets cold quickly (no wonder because she’s just sitting in her wheelchair all the time) and Tom always gets the idea in his head that other kids only exist to pick on him (but that’s just his perception of things). I was thrilled to see that finally they had found a way to play outside in the snow in such a way that all three of them had a wonderful time. Tom came up with the idea to tie a sleigh to the back of Krista’s powered wheelchair. After some fiddling he had tied it in such a way that he could stand on the sleigh and drive the wheelchair for Krista (because she’s not really good at driving it herself yet), and Nikki sat on the back collecting snow as they drove.
It was such a great sight to see! And they went fast! None of them got tired of having to pull the sleigh and Krista was having a great time too, and totally didn’t mind the cold. They drove this way for about an hour…
Posted on 16 januari '06 by Jouke, under English. No Comments.
Welkom op Jouke's blog. Er zijn niet veel Jouke's in de wereld, en zeker niet veel die actief zijn op het wereldwijde web.
Deze Jouke kent u wellicht als Perl programmeur, hardloper, Groninger, vader van 3 kinderen, auteur van pVoice
of als "die lange". Ik ben geen kunstenaar, geen (geboren) Fries en geen schaatser. Ik heb ook geen klussenbedrijf, ben geen kokkelvisser, en Pieter is niet mijn eerste naam... (dat zijn allemaal andere Joukes).
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