Last month, July, I spent two hours trying to help a chap who is blind. He has very little sight - the computer screen looks bright white to him so he takes the Microsoft "Accessibility" option of a black background, but he relies on using screen-reader software and navigates the user interface by using keyboard shortcuts.

He was happy using Windows 7 and Word 2003, but yes...you've guessed it...Microsoft told everybody that they wouldn't support Win 7 after 2019, and he, like a lot of people, thought he ought to upgrade to Windows 10. Then, of course, he found his Word 2003 wouldn't play with Win 10 so he had to get the latest Word thing. He'd been very fluent with working the old drop-down menus by keyboard, but he couldn't make head or tail of "The Ribbon" of functions on Word 2016.

So he called me in to help. I struggled for two hours. I know very few shortcuts, simply because I don't need that many - I can see the mouse pointer and I steer that around the screen. The only shortcut I use regularly is CTRL (or Mac CMD) V for "Paste". I did have some success in helping him - I reckoned an hours-worth of success - and he offered to pay me by BACS. I promised I would do some research and get back to him.

So I went home and emailed him my bank details. Then I spent several hours over two or three days trying to practise keyboard shortcuts; that is, using no mouse at all, on my Windows 10 PC. I used my Mac (and a mouse!) to look up anything I could find for keyboard shortcuts for blind people, but to no avail. It seems that "keyboard shortcuts" are promoted as just that - shortcuts for people who can't be bothered to move the mouse, rather than for people whose sight is so limited that they can't see a mouse pointer.

I have emailed the Royal National College in Hereford to ask if they have any teaching material they could send me to help this chap. I mentioned that I knew of them through my living and teaching in Hereford in not too many years gone by. I heard nothing. I emailed them again last week... In the meantime, my client has yet to pay me £40 for my time with him. Perhaps he's waiting for the reults of my research. I have submitted the invoice twice.

Today in Sidwell Street, Exeter, I was chugged by the RNIB. Three (well-sighted) men stake out the wide pavement outside Sainsbo's and the bus-stands. They are very pro-active about it. So I gave my usual line about a one-off monthly donation from the business and yes OK this month It's You. And I mean it - I have come home and for the first time in three years I have written a cheque - My Computer Tutor's donation to the RNIB. The ironic thing is that my monthly donation is one hours-worth of my fees - to wit £40 - which my blind client still owes me.

As a post-script:
I don't know why the RNIB is happy to be an institute "for the Blind" but the RNC has dropped it.

As a footnote to other web-designers:
There really are people out there to whom pictures on websites are meaningless, and who rely on a screen-reader to read the text content. This is why every picture on a website should have an HTML "title" and "alt" text for the screen-reader to read to the blind or partially-sighted user.
End Of Lecture!

Taxman!

"There's one for you, nineteen for me.."
So George Harrison wrote, before I was old enough to worry about Income Tax.
Go on...have a listen.

Actually, it was a long time before I did have to worry about Income Tax, because until 2008 I'd always worked for some employer or other and had all my tax deducted at source. So having to keep accounts and set it all out every January for these last four years still seems a bit strange.

But I've learned on the way. I've been submitting my return a year in arrears - and leaving it as late as possible by doing it online at the very end of January. I was most indignant last year when HMRC demanded a payment "on account". I eventually worked out that this must mean "money up front", because I'd been earning money for nine months of the current tax year, which of course had to be taxed, and this was Mr Taxman's way of estimating what I might owe him. I have resolved to catch up with this, so I shall make another return on April 6th for the year 2012-2013.

I really want to clear the financial decks because I am retiring from Hereford Cathedral Choir at the end of March - Easter Day, as it happens - so one source of income will cease from then, but on the 'plus side' I shall have my weekends free, like normal people do, and I shall be able to spend more of my weekdays teaching, advertising and web-geeking without having to look at the watch to be in time for Evensong!

"Retiring from..." makes me sound terribly decrepit and incapable. Before anyone comments on that, I'd like to say "I'M NOT!" Or at least, I don't feel it - and it's how you feel that counts. It's just that I've done this cathedral singing at Hereford for just over 36 years and I really think it's long enough - and I want to go before someone tells me I have to go!


Colin

Annus horribilis

by Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR

Whoops! Happy Christmas and Happy New Year, Happy Epiphany and Happy Candlemas, Happy Queen's Accession......which brings us up to date with February 6th. I'm sure I must have missed some other festivals in other cultures in the time since I last "blogged" back in November last year.

I wish I had the excuse that I've been so busy with the computer tutoring, but it's been a very thin time so far. Until 2012, Autumn, Winter and early Spring had been my boom seasons, with March the "boom month". I've never been coy about publishing my figures on this blog, so this is what they look like:

Income from lessons in 2011 on the left, income from 2012 lessons on the right. March 2012 was the best for the year, but not quite making £1000. And there's an obvious decline all through the year. Click on it to get The Big Picture...

• Is this evidence of The Recession?
• Is my advertising failing?
• Have I been so successful that Hereford now knows all it needs to know about computers?

Having followed our government's advice that We Should All Tighten Our Belts, I realised that there wasn't much more that I could do to alleviate The Recession, but I did think seriously about my second bullet-point.

Perhaps my advertising was getting stale? So I wrote a newsletter to all my clients, past and present, although at any time a "past" client could phone and make a new booking. And this was the aim of the letter - to jog the memory banks and suggest that as Christmas was approaching it was a good time to get those address labels done for all those cards. I also included a mention of Windows 8 - in a positive way, you understand - just to say that it would be very different from what you'd seen before - and that My Computer Tutor could help - in a positive way, you understand!

I also had a good long look at my 5cm by 3-column wide advert in the local freeby paper and decided that I'd double the depth to 10cm, which would double the cost, but only have it posted every fortnight.

It certainly catches the eye now!

I was able to double the amount of info it contains and several people have phoned to say that they saw my advert in the paper.

But 'several' hasn't been enough. Maybe people are just as worried about buying a new computer as they are about having computer lessons, so they haven't discovered Windows 8 yet.

Charity

I felt so guilty about not having made a charity donation this year that I walked up to a young lady in Hereford High Town and almost introduced myself! She was representing Concern Universal, our locally-based charity. Yes, I know I've supported them before, but there I was at the end of January and I wanted to get the year off to a charitable start. And so I promised Tia I'd give her a mention on this blog

Colin

Dual boot

by Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR

I've cracked it!

After lots of research and then taking several deep breaths, I've managed to set up my laptop with Vista AND Windows 8. It's all a bit geeky-techy, but you can create a separate space on the hard drive (a partition) and then install Windows 8 on that.

This is known in techie-circles as a "dual boot". If you're keen to try it, follow the excellent instructions on Mashable tech

The link itself is:
http://mashable.com/2012/11/08/dual-boot-windows-8/#1006651-Get-Windows-8

I know it talks about keeping Windows 7, but it works for Vista as well. Having said that, I found that my Vista wouldn't open the Windows 8  .iso file that I carefully downloaded and saved to a DVD disc,  but when I did it again and saved it to a memory stick (OK..."flash drive", if you insist!), it worked easily.

No, I have no idea why. I'm not a techie!

So there you are. You can have a go at Windows 8 without losing your "old" operating system. When you start your computer, you are given the choice of the two systems. It will default to Win 8 after 5 seconds, but you can change both the default system and the time delay.

I just wish I knew about this earlier! As I moaned in my last post, Windows 8 wiped out my installation of MS Office 2007 - and some other stuff. Did I say that Microsoft are getting greedier and greedier? I think I did. Very little is "bundled" with Win 8. There's not even "Microsoft Works", the free office suite that they always provided in the past. It was a simple version of Office, but good enough for most home users. (Someone told me that "Microsoft Works" was a great example of an oxymoron.....)

Back to the Start

Another moan I had about Win 8 was the absence of the Start button, leading to the Start Menu. I find the Start Menu really useful, so imagine my joy at finding a download which restores a Start Menu to Win 8. This came from a newspaper cutting which a client gave me today, after I persuaded him not to buy a new computer but to stick to his ancient IBM running XP. 

The cutting was taken from the Daily Telegraph 24th November and if you read it, you can find the link to StartMenu8

Well, there y'go! I've given you the link anyway!

Once you've downloaded this, you also get the chance to turn off the Windows 8  "Metro" Play School desktop and those  "pointy-in-the-corner-peek-a-boo" gizmos that the poor gentleman in the video on my last post failed to find! You won't need them if you've got the Start Menu. In fact you can make the whole desktop just like Windows 7.

I'm very pleased with this, as it gives me an option to offer to my more-experienced clients who have to buy Windows 8 in the future. They can still have something that looks familiar.



Colin

Windows 8

by Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR

The Good Old Days....

When I first started this business four years ago, Windows Vista was the latest operating system from Microsoft. Anyone buying a new computer back in 2008 would have had to get to grips with Vista, and so I needed to be able to advise any clients who might be starting on a new computer. Although I'd been happy with Windows XP on my PC for the last 5 years, I invested in a laptop running Vista.

...and The Not-So-Bad Old Days

Well, by October 2009 - just a year later - Microsoft realised that the computing public were not entirely happy with Vista and so they brought out Windows 7. This was basically Vista without the annoying "gadgets". Windows 7 started up quicker than Vista, and Microsoft also made sure this time that the shut-down button on the Start Menu actually did shut the computer down.

I thought about upgrading my Vista to Win 7 but decided that it wasn't worth it. I adjusted the default "Sleep" to a genuine "shut-down" through Control Panel, turned off the "gadgets" and installed Windows Live Mail.....and near as dammit I had Windows 7. But after reading the promotional blurb about Windows 8 this Autumn I realised that this new operating system would have to be investigated. So I downloaded it and installed it over my Vista system.....

The Present Day

First, I was really surprised how cheap it was to get a new operating system upgrade from Microsoft. One should be surprised to get anything cheap from Microsoft!

£24.99 it cost me to download it. It installed very easily too, and I was left with the suspicion that Microsoft were really keen for me - and everyone else - to have Windows 8. Here's the logo that Microsoft use to promote Windows now:

After the colourful logos for preceding versions of Windows, this one looks as though it's still in draft. But that's a minor point. I'd done some preparatory reading about Windows 8 so what I saw on my screen wasn't a complete surprise to me.

I'd read that things were going to be very different.......

This is what greets you on Windows 8. Some of these tiles, anyway. Each one represents an "App" - that's "application" if like me you're comfortable with four-syllable words. You can get your "Apps" from the Microsoft App Store. Some of them are free - and others aren't! The tiles remind me of chunky Lego. As I remember, I was given Apps for Twitter, Facebook, News feeds.....but had to go to the Store to get the "Google App". One of the tiles said "Desktop" and when I clicked on it I breathed a momentary sigh of relief - there I was looking at a familiar desktop.

But.....

THERE WAS NO START MENU!

Now my preliminary research had prepared me for this, but it's only when you start exploring Windows 8 for yourself that you realise the implications of this. For years, I've made a habit of using my Start Menu for all the stuff that I use regularly.
(Microsoft put all sorts of unlikely things on the Windows 7 Start Menu but you could easily wipe those off in Control Panel/Task Bar and Start Menu and then "pin" your own preferences to the menu.)
The "old" Start Menu also contained "All Programs" so you could easily see what was on your computer.

I don't want to be labelled an old fogey - I'm going to have to face up to Windows 8 when someone gets a new computer for Christmas - or even before - and wants some help with it. After all, that's what my business is all about! I am going to have to be professionally encouraging about Windows 8 to those clients who are new to using a computer, They won't have known anything different. But anyone who's been happily  using XP, Vista or Win 7 will get a rude shock when they buy a new computer from the High Street stores. Windows 8 is designed with hand-held or "tablet" devices in mind, for people whose primary use of a computer is for "social networking". But for PC users it's going to be full of frustration.

See what this gentleman has to say about it......

I never thought I would hear myself say this, but I prefer my old Vista OS to Windows 8 and so I re-installed Vista after just two days. Perhaps I should have given Win 8 more of a chance, but I know I'll meet lots of it in the coming year. I wonder if it will last even as long as Vista did.

Incidentally, I had the complete suite of Microsoft Office 2007 on Vista. It wouldn't work in Windows 8. No doubt I would have had to buy numerous "Office Apps". My built-in microphone wouldn't work with Win 8 either, so using Skype was a frustrating experience - a mixture of text messages, exaggerated smiles and hand gestures on my part! The re-installation of Vista wiped out my Office suite completely.....and I had four days-worth of updates to install to get things back to "normal".

Grrrrrrrrrr!

Back up!

by Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR

I keep all my clients' info on an Access database and all my accounts on an Excel spreadsheet. I'm quite proud of the database - in a modest sort of way. I devised it after several months of self-imposed study of SQL Server so that I had some idea of relational databases, all part of a rather desperate strategy to add to my fledgling programming skills and make myself more employable. There's a whole story there which I won't bore you with now. Anyway, by the time I'd waded through a whole fat blue Microsoft "Self-paced Training Kit" I had the basics of how to set up a home database and make queries of it.

I'm lucky to have Access. Time was when you could buy the full "Microsoft Office Suite" for a reasonable price. I'm talking Office 2003 here, which included:

• Word
• Outlook
• Access
• Excel
• Publisher
• PowerPoint
• Office Tools

Since the 2007 edition of Office, Microsoft have been less generous - oh let's call a spade a spade, they've got greedy - and although you could get Home & Student editions of Office 2007 and Office 2010 which included Word, Excel and the PowerPoint Viewer, you would have had to buy Outlook, PowerPoint and Access separately - at considerable expense! 

When I bought my latest desktop PC in 2007 it had the Vista operating system installed, but I'd read some reviews by then and the first thing I did with my new computer was to wipe Vista off and install good ol' Windows XP. Although I didn't realise it immediately, this was a good move for my "Office" as it enabled me to keep my old 2003 suite, including Access. 

And since then I've been happily keeping my records on 2003 software....until last week, when I came home from a client and tried to open my Excel spreadsheet to record my acquisition of yet more hard-earned loot.

It wouldn't open! 

A little window popped up to tell me that something "couldn't be found" and please put in the Office 2003 disc. Well, the disc "couldn't be found" either - heaven knows where I've put it! -  and panic nearly ensued. None of my Excel spreadsheets was working, so all my accounts for four years were inaccessible. 

But it's not like me to panic - not immediately anyway. My Access database was working, so was Word, so was everything else, so perhaps I'd done something inadvertently stupid to Excel. I tried looking for answers on Google, and after browsing through several forums (fora??) someone mentioned "restore point". It's something I have very rarely used but I thought this might just save the day - or save four years, to be more precise! Excel was working the day before - and the day before that - and all through 2011....so if I could take my PC back a couple of days all might be well. 

And so it turned out. I used the System Restore and took the PC back. My spreadsheets are miraculously working again. But it gave me a scary few minutes and reminded me of the advice that I read on other tutors' sites: 

BACK UP YOUR FILES! 

For something as important as the accounts, I really should get in the habit of storing them on a disk......and I shall.

PostScript

After the initial panic, a little analytical reason kicked in and - before I tried the System Restore - I did successfully right-click on an Excel icon and "Open with..." OpenOffice.org 

I installed this suite some time ago and have worked with it, mainly so that I could help a client use it a couple of years ago. It's free to download and is generally very good. I'd recommend having this as a backup office suite - you might prefer it to Microsoft's. 

Colin

That was Summer

by COLIN MY COMPUTER TUTOR

Very slow over the summer. Well, you know - June, July and August, what we usually call "Summer". Looking back over my records 2009-11 I see that this time of year has been not quite as lucrative as Autumn and Winter and I put this down to the good weather that we expect. My clients get out in their gardens or just get out and about, but as the weather cools and the nights draw in business picks up dramatically through September and October.

Well, so I fervently hope! I thought that all the rain we've had would have kept people indoors and they'd be on the phone asking for lessons - something to do while the rain poured down! Maybe these same people left the country, seeking the sun elsewhere. Or maybe it's The Recession. Whatever the reason, it's been a bad summer for my business. How was yours, computer tutors?

Still, I haven't been idle. I'm looking to expand the web design side of my services and have been searching out techniques and practising them. I am determined to keep my websites "Web compliant", strictly in line with the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines. I'm not a SEO guru - huge books are written on the subject and people run businesses totally devoted to Search Engine Optimization - but I do know that the search engines favour webpages that follow the W3C. The basic good design principles are:

• Use W3C-approved HTML for your content mark-up
• Separate the styling from the content 
• Make sure each page has a relevant title

And then some 'Dont's':

• Don't use table HTML for the layout of your webpage
• Don't use JavaScript
• Don't stuff 'keywords' into the head metadata 
• etc
• etc

So I keep all the styling in a Cascading StyleSheet (CSS), or maybe use more than one. And I'm always looking for ways to achieve the effects I want by using "pure CSS". Google's wonderful for this. Recently I wanted to find a way to make a picture viewer, where the user can click on a little 'thumbnail' picture and the big version appears in a window on the page:

You can see an array of thumbnails on the left and the main viewer window showing the beautiful Monica Bellucci. Any pictures will do to experiment with - I found a gallery of the lovely Monica on the web and borrowed some of the pictures!

All done with clever CSS. You can make the thumbnails 'opaque' until you hover over one. Here, they are 40% opaque except one on the right (because I left the mouse pointer 'hovering over it)

This is a very useful technique which I'm longing to use on my next project - if it demands it, of course. Bed & breakfast and similar websites will benefit from this viewer showing pictures of the different rooms, for example.

Also found a way to make pretty coloured columns all the same depth, no matter how much content is in them, like this:

Most webpages are arranged in columns. The really good thing about this is that the columns are defined as a percentage of the total width available on your screen, so however small the screen is, you can still see the full width of the page.
Very pleased to have found this technique. I shall be using this a lot if I get the chance. Do contact me if you'd like to know more.


August Charity

Very briefly.....

Bumped into Sam in High Town, Hereford, who was toting Friends of the Earth. It was very near the end of the month and I hadn't decided on a charity, so I said hers would be it. Realise now that I did FoE back in the Spring, but never mind. Sometimes it's just first come first served!

Colin