I’ve got one maybe a bit better. Sometime before 2012, 2008 maybe, a friend had just clicked to restore her Windows laptop. Moments later the power went off. Her laptop battery didn’t last long enough and she suddenly had a corrupted system, she couldn’t restart, it was toast. She called me, told me what had happened and asked for help. I had a very special DVD on hand and took it with me.
A little back story; My friend is totally blind. My friend teaches Windows basics and several common programs to other blind people along with how to use the keyboard to navigate and how to use JAWs, the very expensive but excellent screenreader for the blind and even the deaf-blind to work with Windows PCs. Surprised that even deaf-blind people can use a PC when it’s hooked up to a Braille device? The DVD I took along had Vinux, Linux for the visually impaired on it.
I popped that DVD in, booted up, adjusted the BIOS and booted into Vinux. Susan was floored! She listened in pure awe and between the two of us, me coaching and her doing at least half of the keyboard work, we transferred all of her personal files onto several USBs. She had a lot of audio and even quite a few videos for her teaching as well as a lot of class documentation stored. Then, the time consuming chore of reinstalling Windows and her accessible programs like that JAWs. Hours later we transferred her files back and she was a very happy camper! I’d saved the BIOS settings and left the Vinux DVD with her and encouraged her to learn a whole lot more about her Windows file system and to use the Vinux DVD. Her training others got a lot easier as she could now learn and explain in much better detail how Windows and some of the programs worked under the hood. I also explained how she could install ufw and its graphical front end, update it and scan a shutdown Windows system much more effectively than using even safe mode in Windows. I made a document detailing the processes and she saved it to her Windows for future use for herself and others.
The Vinux project folded after 2012 because it was based on Ubuntu and Ubuntu switched to the Unity DE and it was beyond a suppository pain for the developers to switch from the Gnome DE to Unity. Gnome has so much more accessibility friendly themes, settings and features. They’d thought about switching horses to Linux Mint with the Gnome DE but for some reason crap-canned that route. At any rate, Linux pulled another rabbit out of the hat and I passed that hat on to someone who just couldn’t get over how fantastic Linux can be. If her career hadn’t been solely about Windows, she would have gleefully dual-booted.
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