And is Access to Work available to anybody in work, not just in the health service?
Yeah, yeah, oh yeah. It's a government, it's, it's not actually called Access to Work now. I'm trying to think what it is called. Anyway, it, I'll, I'll look it up later, you know, on the website.
Yeah, apparently there's loads of money lying around to pay for this stuff, and nobody knows about it. So they paid originally for the voice activated software. Then, then they paid for this, this keyboard the, the ergonomic keyboard is fairly new. It's 'cos I, I got another assessment from them. They, they send someone in to assess you, decide what equipment you want and then they pay for it. And they pay for training to use it as well if necessary. So I had three 1/2 days, somebody came to train me how to use the voice stuff, but all that was paid for.
And you know, this, [Ergonomic keyboard] this is actually quite a good, 'cos if I've only got to type something short I don't want to be, you know, put, you don't have to put all the whole thing on [Headset]. I can just do it on there, you know, but people don't know about it. So the guy who did the project that I've just given you the report on, he's a wheelchair user so he got, he actually got a back up wheelchair on the back of Access to Work 'cos he has to have a wheelchair.
Yeah, the, the headset, that's the telephone headset, that's, that's the headset for the thingy [computer]. This is, this, 'cos at one point I was in an open plan office so I had I've got this loudspeaker thing anyway so, [demonstrates loudspeaker] so I could just do it by loudspeaker but obviously in an open plan office that's not a very good idea. So yeah, so if I have a long telephone conversation I can put that on. I don't use this much now. At one time I did a, a lot, when my wrists were bad 'cos just holding your phone up to your ear is a bit much. It's actually handy anyway 'cos if you want to make notes you can when you're on the telephone conversation. But, yeah, now if it's likely to be long I'll, I'd say, “Hold on now, I'll just put my head, headphones on.” |
