Meet Sue at Oxfam - Using SuperNova Magnifier & Screen Reader

Sue:  I’m Susan Ray, I’m the shop manager at Oxfam. I have a visual impairment called Macular dystrophy. I’ve lost all the central vision, I’ve just got the peripheral vision left.

I have worked with Oxfam for twenty-four years, starting as a volunteer, and then getting a paid job ten years ago as part-time shop-manager. It was through the RNIB that came out to do a report on my condition and what aids I could get, and they referred me to Dolphin. 

I use speech and magnification, mostly magnification to look at pictures and things like that. I use round about several times magnification, sometimes more.  

I use the Dolphin Cursor, it goes through the whole of the online shop by speaking all the titles, letting me know if there’s an image, to show that wherever it is on the screen, so I do highlight sentences for when its reading. I know where the actual cursor is on the screen on the page. I think I got it highlighted in pink at the moment. I use to have it in yellow, but you can actually have the cursor as a big arrow, and that’s useful as well. 

I use SuperNova on everything on the screen, which is Microsoft Word, Excel, Power-point; I actually created a power-point presentation for an assignment, when I was doing the institute of leadership and management, and I won the prize for the most creative, innovative, and colourful power-point presentation. 

I use it for the webmail, I use it for researching on different websites. We use e-bay quite a bit for research, and we use Oxfam website, quite a lot, and with the help of SuperNova, these are made accessible to me on the computer.

SuperNova: Internet Explorer, Oxfam, awaiting to dispatch item. 

Sue: We got the online shop computer, which is part of the Oxfam network of online shops. I do oversee that, I oversee the volunteers that price the items and research the items, and put them on the shop. 

SuperNova: Monthly sales summary, 2012 to... 

Sue: The spread-sheet shows quite a lot of things, it tells you the number of sales, per item, per category. So we got all sorts of different items, women’s, men’s, children’s, books, home wares, accessories. I was the first shop manager in the organisation, to successfully put in a business plan, for a closure on a shop, and I keep it open.

Within Oxfam, because I’m in the diversity champions’ group, I go to different meetings, and instead of struggling with a large laptop, I actually took the Dolphin Pen, so which was a lot easier.

SuperNova: SuperNova Access Suite, loading. Magnification on, SuperNova Control Panel. 

Sue: It’s extremely important, because it gives me a lifeline of contact. You can look normal, and people treat you as normal, and that’s what we want. 

The Department of Work and Pensions, Access to Work, are there to help you to get funding and if it is a new job, you get a hundred percent funding for the job. There are no restrictions to a visual impairment.

SuperNova: Dolphin SuperNova, for every visual impairment. 

www.yourdolphin.com