Transcript: Go ON Gold video, Mary Furby

Mary Furby, who is partially sighted, has never been on the net. However, the 72-year-old artist is convinced that technology could help her continue with her creative interests, if only she could find the right advice.

 “They’ve got so much now, you know, iPads, iPods, iPhones, i-this, i-that, and they’ve got all the Apple ones and all the Macs, and you think ‘How do I choose? How do I decide what’s best for me?’. And I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t want to spend out anything upwards from three hundred pounds – which is probably the cheapest laptop – up to two thousand or more, buy something, come home, think ‘this is rubbish’, and throw it in the bin. I don’t want to.

“I would like it if I said ‘Well, can you put that on loan with me for a week?’. A week is the smallest amount of time, really, and then I could try to do things with it, and then I would say ‘Yes, I think that’s very good for so-and-so, but I tried doing this and that and the other with it and it didn’t work properly for me. Have you got something that would do that?’ And then they would switch it for something that they said, ‘Well, this does that’. And by trial and error, I’d get exactly what I needed. 

“I’ve always got ideas, and they come to me best when I’m in the bath or when I’m relaxing and doing nothing in silence, and I’d like to be able to record my thoughts, and with those ideas I could create perhaps articles or a book, or when I’m on holiday I think maybe I could write a bit of travel writing or something, and I used to do that using a pen and pencil. I can’t do that anymore, I cant type, I’m a bit useless really! And so I need aids, I need the answers to get around all these problems.

“If there is somebody around who said, ‘Look, here’s a laptop. I will show you how to do Skype, I will show you how to email, I will show you how to plug it in to your television so that everything is magnified on your television,’ (those are the only magnifiers I would use) ‘and I will show you how to record your thoughts and put them onto the screen in large print, so that you can read your thoughts, as if you had a book’, and then you press a button and say ‘This is… I want to do corrections, I want to delete some of that, or I want to print.’ Now, if I had all that I’d be very happy.”

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