Projects

I got BORED out of my mind during quarantine. One of the things I used with my spare time was how to make a website, leading to this site. It was a great experience, as I learned about how to host sites, use Git, CI/CD concepts, as well as practice my Web Development skills, particularly for accessibility.

The name of the game for IT management is automation. It is not practical or reasonable to manage a computer lab of any size by setting up each computer individually, you have to think in scalable terms. While this leads to some innovative solutions, they often come at the cost of accessibility options for users. For this project, I tried to think about how techs can manage their stations in an optimized way, but not sacrifice any of the accessibility options for users.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR), has come a LONG way in the last few years, and with this AI stuff (that I have no idea how it works), it's only getting better. We don't have to pay an arm and a leg anymore for OCR solutions, as we have free, open sourced solution available to us now. In this write up, I go over some of the solutions I've found, how well they work, and how to set them up.

Another quarantine project, I tried to replicate a workflow made I saw on youtube (link to the developer's original video), where I could upload a PDF or word doc into a cloud container, perform OCR on that document, dump the text into a text document, and then convert that text into an MP3. Long story short, I came no where close to what the original developer made. But since then coding has gotten much easier (shout out Claude), and there are many platforms that have prebuilt solutions in them, that can make a process like this much easier to implement.

Coming from a political science background doesn't exactly prepare you for the IT field. There was a ton of stuff that I had to learn, and two of those were Intune and Systems Center Configuration Manager (SCCM). These are IT management solutions that can do a TON of really cool stuff, but they are not the most intuitive thing to learn (also it is really intimidating when you go from zero access to seeing all the stuff you can see in SCCM and Intune). I realized I needed to learn this stuff, but in a safe environment. This section talks about the set up process for both labs, and what I learned from them.

Look I know this particular project title is probably the least interesting of all the other ones above, but it's also the project that made the biggest difference for a user, and helped my team out the most. If you work in accessibility, and especially if you work in instructional materials, you should know what an SBL file is in JAWS, and how it can edited to properly read special characters for students.