One of the pleasant surprises about lockdown has been how good technology lessons can be when done remotely. They have been much better than I would have thought possible! I have really enjoyed the lessons, and they have been nearly as good as having them in person.
My top tips are:
Zoom is great, and it’s really easy for me to share my screen so that I can also share audio from JAWS.
NVDA Remote and JAWS Tandem are also very helpful so that the person teaching the lesson can understand where you are in a window and even take control if needed, as well as just hearing the speech.
Some sighted people may prefer you to use TeamViewer, but this is not accessible to a blind person if they are on the receiving end (for example a blind person can share screen but not read someone else’s screen). So don’t use TeamViewer!
If you have a Windows computer, the temp folder very quickly fills up with temporary logs which are not needed, which makes your computer much slower, and this can be a pain during remote tech lessons. If you can, it is good to periodically empty your temp folder. This might seem like quite a long process the first time, but the more you do it the quicker you will get!
To empty your temp folder:
1. Press Windows+R to open the Run dialogue.
2. Enter %temp% and click enter.
3. Your temp folder will be shown, and it will likely contain over 500 files.
4. Select everything using Control+A, and then press Shift+Delete to permanently delete the unused files.
5. Click Yes on the warning screen.
6. If it says Error, file in use, use Alt+A to tell the computer to do this for all files currently in use and then Alt+S to skip the file.