Hello everyone, my name is Norman Banta and I'm very pleased to receive
and be a part of MMD.  My wife Cindy and I reside in East Hartford,
Connecticut.  I heard about the Digest from Herb Lindahl, my colleague
and our good friend.  Herb and I work closely together as piano
technicians.  His specialty is player pianos.  It is fun to work on
them, and get a good understanding of how they function.

I've been totally blind all my life.  From nursery school through 12th
grade, I spent my years at the Oak Hill School for the Blind in
Hartford, Connecticut.  Beginning in the fall of 1968, I studied piano
tuning and servicing.  After graduation, in 1972, I attended the Piano
Clinic and Training Center in Batavia, New York.

I spent some of the most wonderful times in my life there.  Those 11
months really flew!  After graduation from there in 1973, I worked hard
building my business.  I joined the Piano Technicians Guild as a
Registered Craftsman in March, 1975.  I'm very proud to be an RPT in
PTG.

One of the many pleasures my wife and I get out of life is the
computer.  Cindy is totally blind, too, and the computer has
revolutionized our lives.  We pay our own bills, write all our checks,
read our mail, enjoy different kinds of reading, surf the net, send
E-mails, etc.

How do we accomplish this, you may ask?  First of all, the speech
synthesizer is our eyes.  With this synthesizer Windows 95 runs, our
Hewlett-Packard 4P scanner operates, a text browser uses it, and good
old MS-DOS works just fine.

As long as there is text on the screen, or macros are set so Windows
talks, we can use the computer just like you do.  I got the computer
bug back in high school, when there was no such thing as a PC.  In
1985, our friend Chris got his first computer, an Apple II-E.  I was
amazed at its speech, but we have come so far since then.

I was thrilled to read in MMD yesterday the articles about producing
books and information on CD-ROM.  Scanning is certainly wonderful
because it speeds up the process of getting material transferred,
instead of typing it.  We find, with our scanner, that sometimes it
scans better than other times.  It seems to do the best when the
computer is defragged and Scandisk is run.  I know that within a few
years scanning will be a household procedure.  You can ask any blind
person who uses a scanner how wonderful it is to read magazines,
newspapers, etc.

I wanted to make one more comment on something I read in yesterdays
Digest.  Alexander's Ragtime Band was written in 1911.  I asked Chris,
my friend I told you about with the Apple computer.  He is a devotee of
this type of music.  Hope that helps.

I'll close for now, but you'll hear from me again.  I haven't had a
chance to read the material I received this morning.  So long for now.

Very sincerely,

Norm and Cindy Banta

 [ It's great to have you with us, Norm and Cindy.  Please tell us more
 [ of the special senses of the blind: your fingers!  It seems to me
 [ that the tiny, intricate pieces of the piano action and the player
 [ action need a sensitive touch more than keen eyesight.  You guys do
 [ it all the time!  -- Robbie