Hi,
My name is Jim Kitchen. I was born in 1957 and grew up in Kirtland, Mentor and Cleveland Heights. I now live in Chardon Ohio and have done so since 1987. I am totally blind due to Retinitis Pigmentosa. I was diagnosed with RP when I was 8 years old. At that time I had night blindness, but my sight was correctable to 20/20. I drove a car until I was 21 at which time I was declared legally blind due to tunnel vision. I could still see to read a newspaper etc until I was about 31. I have been totally blind since then. My hobby is creating and sharing blind accessible computer games. I took a one semester COBOL computer programming course in 1974 at Mentor High. The school didn't even have a computer at that time. We had to type our project out on punch cards and then the teacher would take them to somewhere that had a computer and bring us back the print out of the run. I knew though that I wanted to create computer video games every since I played my first one. It was a video game in the Mentor Mall pinball arcade. There was a cowboy on the left side and another cowboy on the right side of the screen. There were cactuses in the middle of the screen. You had to shoot around the cactuses and try to shoot your opponent. I got my first PC in 1980. It was a Texas Instruments 99 4a home computer. It came with a Basic programming language and the manual had programming examples. I typed in the programming examples and experimented with them trying to learn what the different Basic commands did and how to use them. I also bought an Microsoft Extended Basic programming cartridge for it. The Texas Instruments 99 4a computer had no hard or floppy drive. I bought a cable that connected to a tape recorder and that was how I saved the games that I created on it. My second computer was an Atari 800 XL home computer. I also bought an Microsoft Extended Basic programming cartridge for it as well as many game cartridges and an external five and a quarter floppy drive unit. My next computer was an IBM PC Jr. It had a programming language named BasicA as well as GW Basic. It also had two five and a quarter floppy drives built in. I bought my first talking computer in December of 1989. It was an NEC 286 16 MHZ with a 20 meg hard drive. It ran Jaws for dos version 1.0 with an Accent SA hardware synthesizer. I programmed in GW Basic and Quick Basic 4.5 on it. At first I didn't know how to make Quick Basic programs work correctly with Jaws, so I wrote Jaws script files to go with the games. Later I did learn how to make the games work correctly with all of the dos screen readers. In the year 2000 I started writing games for windows in Visual Basic 4.0. I couldn't figure out how to make the games so that all of the windows screen readers would read the text, so I started making the games self voicing by use of recorded Eloquence speech. I am now creating the games for windows in Visual Basic 6.0 and using the Microsoft sapi5 text to speech engine to make the games self voicing. All of my games have always been totally free. I have very much enjoyed sharing the games and hearing from those who enjoy playing them.
I am currently single and would very much like to hear from ladies of the Dominatrix or switch persuasion. If you don't know what Dominatrix or switch means, please disregard and don't ask.
My Email address is: jim (at) kitchensinc (dot) net
(440) 286-6920