HP TouchSmart

When you ask anyone who is visually impaired, what is the one adaptive “tool” that aids in their everyday quality of life, I am almost certain they will say it is the personal computer. When I lost almost 80% of my vision following glaucoma surgery gone bad, I shuddered at the thought of having to learn Braille, something that seemed as elusive to me as an adult as it did when I was a Brownie almost thirty years earlier. When I was told by my CNIB (Canadian Institute for the Blind) mobility instructor that they didn’t usually teach Braille to adults who became visually impaired at a later age, an audible sigh of relief escaped my trembling lips.

Having only recently acquired a PC with internet capabilities the year before, I didn’t yet realize the wondrous tool that lay at my eager fingertips, but in the years to follow, I soon discovered how indispensable it would prove to be. Around this time, digital cameras were also making headway into the hands of amateur photographers, though  they were still quite pricey for the majority of consumers, including myself.  When I did finally buy one of these modern marvels, it was at a time when I most needed one, and when coupled with my own home computer, a complete photographic assembly line lay at my fingertips.

I am not going to talk about digital cameras in this article – having just finally acquiring a digital SLR late last year,  I am not at a place where I feel totally at ease with its’ operation just yet, so I will leave that one to other “Blind Photographers”. What I have found, and am utilising as I write this, is what I believe one of the best PC’s on the market for visually impaired amateur photographers such as myself – the HP TouchSmart Desktop PC.

It was the iPod Touch that inspired me to try out this PC. It is the only PDA that I can use, with its’ onscreen keyboard with pop-up letters that I only had to touch to make the letters a size I could actually see. The HP TouchSmart has the same type of keyboard, as well as a wireless, sleek desktop version that has letters I can also see without having to apply large print stickers as with all of my past keyboards.

You can also use your finger to write text that gets converted with the hand-writing recognition software. It even has voice recognition that allows you to do almost everything you can do with your keyboard and mouse, just with the spoken word.

This is important to me, since in the past I have had to abandon my PC because I couldn’t see the mouse pointer. I never want to experience that again, but I also don’t want to have to learn to use a DOS command loaded program such as JAWS in order to write an e-mail.

The other attractive feature of this computer that stopped me dead in my tracks the first time I saw it, it the high contrast monitor that has the appearance of being glass coated, also much like the iPod Touch. Everything displayed on it looks so crisp and clear, I almost forgot that I have an impaired ability to see colours, text, and even photographs as vibrant as most of the population. When I first saw this PC on display in a store, the background picture seemed to leap off the page, and all I remember is thinking “This will be mine, oh yes, this, some day, will be mine!”

This PC comes in two sizes, the 20 inch, and 25 inch version. It is an all-in-one, meaning the heard drive is located behind the monitor, as well as the disc drive, and all the connecti0ns for peripherals. This makes it very compact with no more crawling on the floor with flashlight between my teeth trying to find  a free USB port!

There is a built in webcam, which I use as a daily video journal. Anything that saves me from having to write by hand as with traditional journals, is more than OK with me!  You can use this camera to chat with others using such messaging services as MSN and Windows Live Messenger. This feature is also found in laptops, but you won’t see a seeing impaired person using one of those – they are, for me anyway, an elusive commodity since everything is so teeny-tiny, proving to be nothing but an exercise in frustration!

Photo editing is a breeze with this PC – the thumbnails are all huge when you use the Windows Photo Gallery, a Vista program that comes installed right out of the box. The high contrast monitor makes all photos crisper and cleaner, always a bonus when viewing and working on any image be it from any type of camera. My vision is much like viewing the world through Saran-Wrap, but with this PC, I see everything better than I do in real life!

Did I mention it is also a TV? Yup, it sure is, and one that I can actually watch since I can sit so close and view a picture so clear, it puts my last LCD TV/monitor to shame! I don’t watch hours and hours of TV, but now I can watch only what I really want to using Windows Media Center as a PVR to zip through programs without the mind-numbing commercials as I yield the remote control that comes with it and allows me to skip through them with the greatest of ease.

What took me by surprise when I started using this PC, is that I can use my touch on every program I have loaded on here. I can even paint around an image in my photo editing program with my index finger. I can open/close, mini/maximize, and even stack into a 3-d image, all of these programs with a quick flick of my digit. When Microsoft unleashes its’ newest version of Windows in the near future, even more touch capabilities will be made available, as well as a new and improved on screen magnifier that will not make you sea-sick if you choose to use it.

There is so much more to this PC than I have time and space to write about here, but trust me, it is a treat to use, not to mention fun as all get-out!  Here is the link for some dem0s, so you can see for yourself  just how this computer looks in real life.

Seeing is believing with the PC, so make yourself a believer by checking it out, and hopefully, you too can join the future of personal computers, today!

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