Dear                                     Ms. Heuman:

It was suggested that you are someone who should know just how much some of
us appreciate the funding that allows the Iowa Department for the Blind
Assist With Windows project to produce their many tutorials.

I am an assistive technology trainer for blind people and a partially blind
speech userr myself.  Part of the difficulty we have in the never-ending
struggle to keep up with  the technology that blind people must confront at
school, in their jobs, etc. is that what is designed to be increasingly
more intuitive and easy to learn for the sighted user is increasingly more
complex for us.

As someone who is self-employed, in order to remain competitive, I need to
keep learning to use  as many applications and access packages as I can and
sometimes with little advance warning.   As it is, there seems to be a
shortage of people like myself who can provide good training,, and we
ourselves must struggle to learn on our own as much as we can as quickly as
we can.  In the short period of time they have been out, I have  come to
depend on the Iowa tutorials to help me quickly transition from one
combination of products to another before I must work with a client who is
using something I haven't worked with in a while.     I have also used them
to get a quick start with a new product.  These well-structured and
thorough tutorials are just what an instructor needs as an aid to the
lesson planning we never really have time for.  I can't emphasize how
important this project is and how critical it is that their funding
continue well into a future that doesn't promise to get easier


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