Welcome to the cluttered web page of the Rasmussen household in Kensington, Maryland. Our dining room table is usually covered with papers, envelopes, books, tools, tapes and other stuff. If you're looking for something useful, it's bound to be here somewhere.
Judy and I are active members of Presbyterian Church of the Atonement, Silver Spring, Maryland, part of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church.. Lloyd enjoys playing congas with the praise ensemble, Alternate Melody, which has released its second CD, "May His Name Endure Forever."
God is the real Webmaster. His web is not just worldwide; it extends throughout the known universe and beyond. "In Him we live and move and have our being." "He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together." For more Christian resources, one good starting point is Gospel Communications Network.
Judy and I are both blind people. If you want to know our world view about blindness and how to deal with it, your best source is the National Federation of the Blind, the nation's largest consumer organization of blind and visually impaired people. Our local chapter is the Sligo Creek Chapter of the NFB of Maryland.
If you are looking for textual information in a form blind people can read, (Braille and audio tape) you might check out Lloyd's employer, the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped of the Library of Congress, NLS. If you are curious about the digital talking book work which Lloyd does, a good starting point is public documents of the NISO Committee AQ for Digital Talking Books, as well as our planning document, Current Strategic Business Plan for the Implementation of Digital Systems, September 2006.. There is more current information about DTB development in the "Flash" newsletter and archives.
Judy is a vocational rehabilitation counsellor with the Office of Blindness and Vision Services, Division of Rehabilitation Services, Maryland State Department of Education.
You can find a large quantity of fiction and non-fiction from elementary school through grad school from Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic. More e-text materials are available from Bookshare. Finally, if you are into programming but have questions about how blind people do this, check out the Blind Programming web site and e-mail list.
If you want the DOS command-line calculator I put together using PowerBASIC and Tom Hanlon's calculator library, it is here at CALC.EXE, about 52K bytes And if you would like to try a command-line PowerBasic program which speaks the contents of its command line through a SAPI 4 text-to-speech engine, download Speak.exe, for the Windows console.
Lloyd's longest-standing hobby is amateur radio. He has an Amateur Extra license, with the call sign W3IUU. General information about ham radio can be found at the American Radio Relay League. An interesting local club is the Potomac Valley Radio Club, which is active in ham radio contests.
Although Windows web browsers such as Netscape 4, Internet Explorer 5 and above and FireFox can be used with screen reading programs for access to the web, a better choice is the text-based Lynx program for Unix, DOS and Windows 95. The people who continue developing Lynx deserve thanks and help from all citizens of the Internet. A Windows 95 binary of Lynx can be found at a site maintained by Wayne Buttles. If you are using the Vocal-Eyes screen reader, try out my Conagent SET and attribute files for Lynx/32 in Windows 95 or 98. Another browser of interest to blind people is Home Page Reader, from IBM Access Center . If you would like to learn more about making the web more accessible to blind and visually impaired people, check out the Web Accessibility Initiative and the accessibility pages of the Web Design Group.
Tools used in creating this page include: GWMicro's Window-Eyes screen reader, and Earthlink's Sprynet service.
This page continues to be under construction. If you have comments or flames, you may mail them to Lloyd at home.
Last modified, 07/31/2008.