Between the Rock and the Sand
Return to Blindness and Visual Impairment
Speech given at the ICEVI European Conference 2005
Date: 16/08/2005
Venue: Chemnitz Technical University, Germany
Article
Usually I hate the detritus of promotional events but in 1979 I was given a key ring by Sagem, the French producer of the first computer driven braille embosser that I ever saw. I remember the presenter saying that anything that could be produced digitally in text could be rendered by this embosser in faultless braille. Sadly, the key ring, which was solid metal and beautifully tooled, was stolen; but the secret of the braille embosser never has been stolen; it is still largely a secret. I have seen wonderful output from embossers, including spread sheets and bar charts, maps and sketches but, by and large, the impact of the computer on tactile material has been pathetic; blind people are still expected to be satisfied with 4% of published books and less than 0.4% of other material. About the same time I saw a Clarke & Smith refreshable braille display which I quite reasonably thought would save the cost of a great deal of braille embossing. Unfortunately the cost of cells for braille displays has remained prohibitively expensive. So while the basic processing and storage capacity of computers has improved beyond recognition in the last 25 years, braille output devices and their use have got stuck in a time warp.
In the last month I have been looking at the specifications for a computer being built in Japan which will, by March 2011, be able to process the whole of the world's meteorological system or all known astronomy; at the other end of the scale, I have been working on computing networks that are created by aerosol sprays. In a few cases computing will continue the tradition of the 1940s Turing main frame, the impenetrable rock in the corner, but in most cases computing will be like sand. Embracing both these phenomena of the very big and the very small there will be the seemingly immutable laws of increasing processing speed and intelligence, widening automation; and falling processing and storage costs.
What have all of these done for us? Well, I am sorry to say that the answer is, next to nothing.
Let me first explore this idea in its digital ecology. All major technological breakthroughs advantage early adopters, the rich, the powerful and the competent; just think of the influence of railways or electricity. Although everybody ended up better off from these developments, those who lived near lines or received power early were at a tremendous advantage over those who did not. Look at that principle in our field and you will see that although blind people will ultimately benefit in absolute terms from computing they will suffer increasing comparative disadvantage; in other words, the gap between them and their sighted peers will widen comparatively even though those on both sides of the divide will be absolutely better off. That is bad enough in respect of static and moving pictures, graphics and animation; but when this means that we cannot even maintain our percentage access to mainstream publishing, the sector is in severe difficulty. While Microsoft and Apple, IBM and Sun Microsystems, have forged ahead, the monastic orders of braille code legislators have stood out against one braille symbol to one print character code with no governing context rules. For two decades there has been a struggle to find a single braille code for English and this has unnecessarily held up agreement on a unified braille code for all Roman script so that blind people can download any HTML from the Internet and read it in a universally recognised code. At the last count I had learned five braille embossing codes and four braille computer codes. This is madness. It reminds me of the speech I made at the ICEVI World Conference at Wurzburg in 1987 when I described a childhood of writing backwards and using a frame with pegs where number value was determined by the angle of a square pin which only had eight positions for ten digits; a situation which was relieved by the introduction of the abacus so that I had the pleasure of learning to add from left to right having spent years adding from right to left. It is difficult enough being a blind person without being subjected to all this nonsense. Sagem demonstrated that coding wasn't a serious problem but for 25 years we have known that automated braille layout has been a serious barrier to the production of high quality braille. You can't tell that to the code freaks. While a universal character code is not possible, as it will have to vary to deal with different scripts such as Cyrillic or Arabic, this is no bar to a universal set of braille layout macros. That may be a little ambitious but, in the meantime, we need a unified braille code for Roman script; and that means Grade One, uncontracted, standard braille as a default, for the embosser and the refreshable braille device; any additional coding or rules should be an optional extra. Full stop; end of story.
As for the context of braille, we still view it in a technological vacuum. Very few children learn their braille simultaneously with synthetic speech and screen magnification. It isn't difficult to press dot one and be told "A" and shown a massive A on a screen. It would be even more helpful if such instruction could be fortified with pictures and sound. Remember, sighted children, even in a classroom setting, do not learn to read print in isolation, they have picture books; and outside the classroom they learn to read in everything they do because they are subjected to so much incidental print, on shop fronts, in magazines, on television, on clothing. Another feature of learning to read that must be borne in mind is this; a sighted child's incentive to read is that it is subversive, giving the child autonomy and access to material adults forbid; for a blind child learning to read reinforces authoritarian uniformity; it gives no freedom unless the act of reading leads to the act of surfing with sighted peers or unsupervised surfing with the ability to download and consume. I have yet to see a blind child below the age of 12 surfing, downloading and producing braille, synthetic speech or modified print. If we are not going to fight for our children's right to read what their sighted peers read through standard production systems then the least we can do is to give them the equipment and let them get on with it. Or would it be too subversive quite deliberately to introduce subversive elements into the reading curriculum? If learning to read actually widens the gap between sighted children and their blind peers, what incentive is there for the blind children to imprison themselves further? It might be argued that learning to read opens the way to knowledge but for growing children the question of control is crucial. For seeing children information technology has widened autonomy way beyond shop fronts, fashion logos and the limited choice of analogue television to embrace the hundreds of channels of digital television and the whole internet. What are the educational implications of this widening gap for children and what are we going to do about them?
We also need to distinguish between the ability to read braille and the ability to write it. It is vital that blind children read braille but not so vital that they write it; there is no reason why they should not input on a standard keyboard while receiving output in braille. Braille is a means to an end, not an end in itself and our children spend far too much time on it for very little return; I have already noted the poor return in respect of available content to read but most blind children never write Braille well and in any case will only need it for private notes and labels. All this would be made a great deal easier if we could bring ourselves to look at producing different accessible media from a single source file. Braille is a natural and cheap by-product of a source file which is processed through templates (cascading style sheets) primarily to produce different kinds of print and synthetic speech. The persistence of silo braille production makes it prohibitively expensive because the production cost is centred on a niche product for a niche market. There is a massive potential market for modified print but the sector has too often articulated a false choice between more braille and more modified print when both should come from the same source file.
Of course, it doesn't matter how good the technology is if you can't use it effectively. I have already outlined problems within the sector but we have been terribly hampered by the disgraceful refusal of the European Union to exclude access to alternative formats from its most recent Copyright Directive. The sector campaign on this issue was decidedly patchy but we can no longer allow a situation to continue where governments legislate curricular requirements for our blind and visually impaired children but will not support legislation to give them rights of access to basic text; and provide the funding to pay for it. We need a Europe-wide campaign to force Governments to pay for what they legislate whether this is a right of access to curriculum materials or basic education itself.
So much for text. In an increasingly visual world we must look carefully at the effect of the graphics explosion on our children. The first thing to say is that the ability to describe is an art form primarily exercised by authors and journalists. Teachers of blind children and their carers are unfortunately not usually trained in it. I am frequently limited at what I can eat from a buffet because specialists in work with blind people cannot even describe an array of food. So what chance do children have if what they hear is muddled and imprecise? And just as our children like well read stories, audio books and high quality radio, they also need a rich describing and interactive environment. If we will not train our teachers to describe and use language beautifully and effectively then we must import authors to add some spice to a linguistically dull environment. And while we still struggle for some kind of global agreement on an alternative format text archive, it is time for us to establish a global audio archive.
A few years ago I went to an open air exhibition of memorial sculpture which contained many kinds of calligraphy and relief sculpture. I thought that it would be interesting to gather a group of blind and visually impaired children and see how they got on with the exhibits. I was appalled that none of them had been taught how to approach an object and use their touch effectively. Asking questions, I found that the children, aged eight and over, had never been taken to a sculpture exhibition nor taught about roman script and its variants. They were unfamiliar with the conventions of relief sculpture and their only really effective interaction was with the human figure where, even then, their unfamiliarity was both sad and enraging; how can we allow nine year old children not to know what their fellow human beings really feel like? I am sure that this deprivation is not universal but since that experience I have paid special attention and have been struck by how poor most congenitally blind people are at using their hands. So what does this have to do with technology?
Well, there are two areas which are crucial to our field but seem so far to have been almost universally ignored; they are 3D printing and haptics. Most of us think that a piece of paper containing ink print is a two dimensional object but ink, of course, has thickness. It is therefore easy to see that if you stack a massive number of print specifications on top of one another instead of sequencing them, which is what you do for a document, you will, with the right chemical polymer, produce a solid object. This methodology is already being used to produce solid objects from scanning devices, notably the skulls of mummies have been produced without unwrapping them. This technology will free us from the prohibitive costs of the sculptor, the model maker and the carpenter and it should bring massive new model and artistic resources to our children. Even more exciting, however, is the prospect of using the kind of processing power of the Japanese computer I mentioned earlier so that massive stacks of specifications used for 3D printing can be sequenced to produce haptic objects so that you not only create a model of a cow, you create a cow with a heartbeat; such a cow is already been used to provide vets with practice in calving without needing live animals.
Here we have two technologies of overwhelming importance to our children but most people I talk to in the field say they have never heard of them. I think that both of these technologies offer immense potential and if you want to be short term and pragmatic, at the very least they will introduce reality and take the embarrassment out of sex education. These two topics raise important questions about those in our sector responsible for information technology. In my experience most of them are struggling with the basic functionality of Microsoft Office and how special access devices relate to it without any conceptual framework about what computing is and what computing can do.
I have spent a great deal of time on one of the two major areas of deprivation faced by blind and visually impaired children, namely, information and communications. The other area is physical mobility about which I want to say just a few words because what we need to do in this area is not all that difficult; the policy makers, not the technology, will be the problem. At the high technical end, it is already possible for blind people to travel strange streets alone using data from satellite systems which can tell them where they are to within five metres. With the ubiquitous computing networks I mentioned at the beginning, that resolution will reduce to five centimetres so a blind person will, literally, be able to locate a shop door handle. This sounds as if it is great stuff for the few who want that kind of independent mobility but the corollary of such fine grained networks is the ability simply to gesture by waving your computer chip woven sleeve or shouting in order to get instant help. Ubiquitous computing, in your clothes and in every paving slab will offer safe environments and also the two major attributes of normal life which blind people most lack when they are in unfamiliar surroundings, serendipity and flexibility. For most people, however, the key technology has been with us for two decades, namely the mobile phone; what blind people, including blind children, really need to break their isolation is a mobile phone account and a taxi account. The guide dog and long cane technique are as iconic and as narrowly relevant as contracted braille. At the very least, these new technologies associated with text generation and processing on the one hand and orientation and mobility on the other hand pose serious questions not only for curriculum designers concerned with the needs of blind children but also for those who design the curriculum for the training of their teachers and instructors. If there were more than 24 hours in the day and seven days in the week then it would be possible to argue that trainee teachers should continue spending huge amounts of time on Braille skills with instructors spending huge amounts of time on independent mobility besides learning all the new skills associated with powerful, network computing but we all know there are not; and some difficult choices will have to be made. All that can be asked for at this point is that professionals put the interests of children ahead of the icons that define their profession
In the next section of this presentation I want to look at some more general technological trends and their implications for our sector.
First, we usually think of digital technology as having three integrated components: the input device, the processor, and the monitor. Traditionally these were integrated into one hardware lump in a television or a radio but the first division came with the remote controller, separating the input device from the other two. Now the monitor component, usually a screen, is being disconnected from the processor. Soon we will have a personalised input device which will drive everything digital, a tiny processor of our own just in case we end up in a place that lacks public processing, and a monitor. For many blind people this will mean a discrete braille display which can be Bluetoothed to anything; for even more of our children it will mean a portable screen of whatever size suits them, or the use of everyday objects like dining tables as screens; think of those children who can currently only access print by crawling on the floor. As the devices we think of as televisions, radios, CD players, games consoles, computers and mobile telephones all converge into one massive networked environment where we will only want our personalised input device and our own monitor; the prospects for information access are truly amazing. In theory, but on a much larger scale and in much greater variety than the Sagem, you will be able to have what you want, how and when you want it; but we must not throw away the next quarter century as we have thrown away the last.
Which brings us back to the concept of comparative disadvantage. The immediate and overwhelming consequence of information technology is that we will have to be realistic about where our children can compete and where they cannot. They will not be able to compete in autonomously accessing and processing masses of information at high speed; but they will be able to work in teams as a new kind of division of labour emerges from the information explosion. At the moment, because of the novelty of the new technologies, you see business executives processing their own email on trains and running their own diaries from their mobile phones; but ubiquitous networking and the shortage of highly skilled managers to make sense of an increasingly complex environment will mean that team working will again become central to efficiency. Because high speed, portable processing is a novelty, powerful men want to show off with it; but when it is ubiquitous and free, they will turn to something else.
What defines us as human beings in general and our directive activity in particular is pattern recognition: High speed processing produces very useful, instant pattern recognition; more deliberative processing can produce more profound pattern recognition. We ought to be able to strike a balance between relatively superficial pattern recognition and the more profound sort so that the more of the first is taken care of by automated processors, the more time our children will have for the second. This kind of change should be part of our fundamental debate about the curriculum, the importance of syndicate rather than solo learning, and a processing specialisation which is the 21st Century digital equivalent of the switchboard operator or the physiotherapist.
Finally and even more fundamentally, we need to think carefully about content creation. So far I have concentrated on content reception and processing but we must find an environment in which our children can talk and create for themselves. In spite of our deep and lifelong commitment to improving their lives, we have largely failed to represent them so effectively that they are socially valued and accorded the equal concern and respect to which they are entitled. Congenitally blind children who grow to be adults are largely marginalised and what expression they have is through well meaning intermediaries like us. What we need to do in our new environment is to think of our world as a communications network and enable all our people to communicate; every organisation that is connected with blind children and adults should be a broadcaster and publisher of original information created by or at least with blind and visually impaired people. In the information age we are competing for audience as an absolute precondition of competing for attention and resources. The importance of new information technology is not the technology itself but what it is doing to society. Look at the millions of images created by cameras in mobile phones, think about the massive volume of text messaging, count the increasing number of channels on your television and radio, think of how much time you now spend on the mobile telephone and using email; think of the number of web loggers and the volumes of information now being poured onto the internet in measures designated as LOCs, or Libraries of Congress; and think of how much more information will be poured onto the internet when the global entertainment corporations abandon spectrum-based television and offer all their goods in catalogue form on a broadband internet. 100 years ago the problem was information scarcity, now we are facing a world where we are short of information processors and synthesisers, brokers and aggregators; but right down at root the only way to compete in an information age is to create, alone or, most likely in the case of blind people, collaboratively; we have to ask ourselves whether learning braille and keyboard skills is enough; how much labour do we save through voice input and how much creativity do we allow through the use of recording and editing facilities?
It may well be that we will be able to leverage the new situation to find new employment opportunities for blind people in such areas as community radio, sound engineering and spot trading but one underlying trend which presents us with serious challenges is the erosion of the value of basic skills because of automated processing. Think for a moment about the kind of things you do for yourself on the internet that 10 years ago involved visiting a shop or an office. The truth is that as the need for high end processing skills increases, the need for low end skills is decreasing because of automation. So we have to be very clear about why we are teaching children (and adults for that matter) certain skills. It is important that everyone learns IT skills to the greatest degree possible but we have to think of these as life skills and not job skills. Some of these skills may help with the job and applying some of these skills may constitute a job in itself; but I doubt that many blind people will be able to compete successfully for IT jobs per se although they will need IT skills to enable them to occupy most jobs.
For many years we have been in denial about the under employment of blind adults and we may have to design fulfilling lives for our people without a paid employment component. Preparing children for a life of unemployment is something that we have not so far dared to face.
But underlying this I have a much deeper concern. Data production, transmission and processing are all becoming democratised and integral not just to work but, to borrow a phrase from the American Constitution, they are becoming integral to our understanding of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and of these three, to parody St. Paul, the most important for our children is the pursuit of happiness, particularly if they cannot find paid work. No matter how important it is for all of us in the sector to work with children to equip them for training and work, in the end it is fulfilling citizenship and a happy family life that count for most. For the last three decades we have been struggling with the three curricula: the mainstream, standard curriculum; the additional curriculum of communications and mobility skills (braille and canes); and the hidden curriculum of socialisation. The new technological paradigm will force us to think again. We never could impart these three curricula to children because concentrating on any one marginalised the other two; but as we look forward we must not make the same mistake again. Our task, confronted by this new technological paradigm, is to skip the 20th Century altogether, to jump from Louis Braille and the Heidelberg press of the 19th Century into the 21st Century as if the typewriter, the fixed line phone, the analogue television and the cinema had never existed. We will need a great deal of courage because in all technological change the barriers to success are the people not the technologies; but let us also wish ourselves luck; we, and our children, are going to need it!