Well, I feel ashamed that it has been so long since my last blog. Put it down to old age, being too busy and…whatever; but there is good news to report.

Screenreader.net has received a grant from UK Children In Need to make the software available to families where there is a child with little or no sight. We have funding for three years and can employ someone to run our Telephone helpline. So we will be setting all this in motion, hopefully starting in June.

On Wednesday, I am going for an interview in the hope of getting some funding from Unltd to lay the foundations for a better organised admin process here. We began this business many years ago and just kept working and never set up a proper database and management system etc. Better late than never. Its only in the last two years that we have moved over from thinking of ourselves as a helping charity to what we are now – a business which delivers software on a large scale and needs to up-scale its presentation etc.

We have updated our manuals, yet again. There is no standing still in this game. I now use a Windows Vista machine and its great; but not easy for a blind person in the early days. Nothing is where you expect it to be but once the new habits and key strokes are in the auto-pilot of the mind and fingers, its plain sailing again. So I have written up a brief manual which teaches others with little or no sight how to migrate from Windows XP to Windows Vista.

Thunder continues to gather still more users. Nearly 80,000 have visited the download page and we will soon be up to 30,000 registered users. We could do with more feedback from happy or even unhappy Thunder users. We learn most when people tell us what needs to be improved.

Margaret and I actually had a short holiday last week and enjoyed a wonderful long weekend by the sea. The weather was fine and warm and we walked a lot and listened to a talking book in the sunshine. Its great to be able to listen to a book and share together. We have worked hard on the Thunder project over the past three years and now its all coming together. On Wednesday evening, I shall be in Frankfurt at the last EU partners meeting and very soon Thunder will be up on the web in five European languages as well as English. The EU website is www.screenreader4free.eu. So its onwards and upwards for Screenreader.net.