Ricky Buchanan

My name is Ricky Buchanan, I'm 36 and I am bedridden with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, orthostatic intolerance, and severe CFS/ME. When I'm not writing ATMac I compose music, listen to audio books, do other disability advocacy, watch TV with my flatmate, and foster cats who don't have a home yet.

I have been using computers since 1987, when the "state of the art" PC for my Dad's business was a 286 with no hard drive, just two 5 1/4 inch floppy drives. At my school around that time, we had a very small storeroom with about four Apple IIe computers. There were no classes that used the computers but there was a bunch of us that hung around and taught each other Apple BASIC programming at lunch time and after school. I was the only girl in the bunch, if I remember correctly. I have loved computers ever since, and one of the majors in my degree was computer science.

My current computer/assistive technology setup is documented in depth on the Ricky's Environment page. The short version is that it involves a Quad-Core Mac Pro named Myke. He has a 20 inch Apple Cinema Display and is generally tricked out as much as 2007 technology allowed, with 4gb of memory and 3 x 500gb hard drives. Myke was generously donated to me by the people at Lifeworks Photography and Next Byte Computing in Melbourne, Australia where I live.

Without assistive software and hardware I could not use this computer, much less run this blog and my other websites. I use - and also beta test - both VisioVoice and KeyStrokes from AssistiveWare as well as using their Infovox iVox voices for text-to-speech.

For hardware input I use a Magic Trackpad and a Kinesis Advantage ergonomic keyboard which I use with the Dvorak keyboard layout.

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