Blind People in the Information Age

Return to Blindness and Visual Impairment

Keynote address at the opening ceremony of the 2005 BGM of the Caribbean Council for the Blind (Biennial General Meeting)

Date: 28/07/2005
Venue: Grand Barbados Hotel, Barbados

1. Introduction

It is a very strange feeling to be standing here at the place where my career in work with blind people began, now old enough to be invited to accept an award for 25 years work in this field. Let us just remind ourselves how different it was then, when Viv Richards was at the height of his powers and nobody on either side of the ocean would have anticipated a comprehensive England victory in the Caribbean. Perhaps connected to the recent decline, perhaps not, that was the time when cable television had not quite arrived, when the media on most islands was comfortably if narrowly provincial; and it was the time when the impact of Bob Marley was still new and exciting.

When I left the Caribbean Council for the Blind in the substantial and capable hands of Aubrey Webson and Arvel Grant, I was convinced, rightly as it turned out, that I had helped build something that would last; like a Rolls Royce it had turned out to be rather expensive but it has stayed the course. And I want to say how lucky we are that these two giants in this field have stayed with us. This is also a good time to remember overseas friends of the Caribbean Council for the Blind, Ross Purse of the Canadian National Institute for the Blind and my old mentor and boss, Sir John Wilson, the founder Director of what is now Sight Savers International; but, above all, I think we should bring to mind today the enormously formative work of Cyril Monsanto, who oversaw the transformation of the CCB from being a Sight Savers outpost to being an executive body for the region; and finally, as we're in Barbados, let us remember Doctor Anthea Connell and Irvine Wilson.

When I left here, having made my youthful mistakes and had some successes, I first worked in East Africa and then my remit steadily expanded until I became the Overseas Director of Sight Savers in 1987; but in many ways everything was a come down after the Caribbean for here you enjoy a level of climatic felicity, sociability and political argumentativeness unparalleled anywhere else in the world. Indeed, I might argue that it was cruel of Sir John to send me here as a young man in 1978 because every other posting after it was a come-down.

Still, I learned much during my 15 years with Sight Savers but finally decided that I needed a change, so I went into computing, focusing particularly on its accessibility, before setting up a charity which specialises in digital inclusion which has inevitably brought me back into the world of visual impairment but from a completely different perspective and it is that which I want to share with you today.

Bearing in mind that things will happen at different times and speeds in different places, I want to start by setting out some generalisations which have held good in the history of technology and look like holding good for as far into the future as we can see. The first three rules are broadly socio-economic:

First of all, throughout recorded history, the cost of communicating has been falling and this fall has accelerated in the telephone and computer age. The comparative cost of a sailing ship compared with a jumbo jet was enormous, particularly if you take into account the number of lost ships. In our own day, too, the cost of telephony has fallen sharply to make it, for example, much cheaper than the messenger who was customarily killed for bringing bad news.

Secondly, Nonetheless, in periods of rapid change the gap widens between early adopters, the rich and the powerful on the one hand, and late adopters, the poor and the weak on the other. Think of the benefits to major cities of electrification or think of the economic distribution available to those who lived along a railway line.

Thirdly, although in the end all sections of society benefit from technological change and economic growth, the first group enjoys absolute and comparative advantage but the second group only enjoys absolute advantage. In other words, computers will make everybody better off in the end but the poor will be less better off from this development than the rich. In a way this is the most difficult concept of the three to grasp; but just think of the blind man with braille produced from a computer, the sighted child with a picture downloaded from the computer; and an architect designing in 3 dimensions on a computer and you will see the point; all three are better off than they were before computers so they are all absolutely advantaged but the distance between the three has widened.

The next three rules are much more technology oriented:

Fourthly, there is always a potential functionality gap between people and systems; and the wider the gap is, the more expensive it is to overcome it. This is the situation in which blind people find themselves with computers, mobile phones and some consumer electronics where they have to pay for extra training and accessibility hardware and software. In addition, when you combine different devices the mean time between faults increases geometrically, not arithmetically, so you don't add the two factors, you multiply them.

Fifthly, training results from poor design and is a cost shift from the producer to the consumer. This is quite a difficult idea for those who spend so much time lobbying for training funds; but there has never been a Government sponsored course to teach people how to use their televisions and telephones; and people who find computers horribly difficult don't seem to have problems passing their driving tests; and people who can find everything they need in a supermarket seem to have problems with the Internet.

Finally, according to the famous Moor's Law, The speed of processing doubles every 18 months, or, to turn this on its head and put it into economic terms, the cost of processing and data storage halves every 18 months. This is partly, though not wholly, because the technologies become ever physically smaller. Computers used to fill whole rooms and now a 386 processor is about the size of a little fingernail.

When we think about blind people, much of what I have said is obvious enough, particularly the problem that Accessibility devices and software are expensive, difficult to install and often present incompatibility problems with mainstream systems; but, on the other hand, specially manufactured, turnkey solutions are even more expensive and present even worse incompatibility problems.

And while I don't want to ignore these negative factors I want to:

Concentrate on some developments on the horizon which will come to our assistance;
I then want to say a little about how we might do better with what we have got; and, finally,
I want to say a few words about a legislative framework within which we should try to operate.

So, in summary, I want to deal with:

Convergence
Rendering; and
Intellectual property

2. Convergence

I think we are already beginning to grasp the meaning of convergence at least at the hardware level. Once upon a time we used to produce our information using analogue formats such as celluloid film and magnetic tape; we sent our telephone messages down copper wires and stored dour music on LPs; and we talked to our primitive computers through punch cards. In the area of visual impairment we produced braille mechanically on plates and large print on different plates, quite distinct from the magnetic tapes we made for talking books.

Now our publishing and broadcasting, our text, pictures and audio, are all digital information made up of computer code which can still be pumped down bits of wire but which can also be flung into the air and dragged back down without the use of any wires at all. In principle we should be able to receive computer generated pictures on our television and television on our mobile telephone and telephone messages on the computer; and in fact this is beginning to happen. At the hardware level we still buy computers, televisions, radios, telephones, CD, MP3 and DVD players but it will not be long before all this redundancy disappears. You can already buy a computer with an integrated television and a television with an internet connection; and it is only a matter of semantics whether your Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) grows into a lap top or whether your lap top shrinks into a PDA. The central driver for all this convergence is the perception that if you have enough band width and enough wireless coverage you can send everything through the same way without special things called televisions or radios.

Our hardware devices will slowly be reduced to three pieces that can work together without integrated engineering or even cables:

A controller, something like a remote controller for a television with a numeric keypad and SMS facility with an optional qwerty keyboard add-on;
A data processor that can 'talk' to all other data processors, about the size of a mobile phone;
A monitor. For most people this will be a lightweight folding screen and an ear piece but some blind people will need braille displays about the size of a packet of butter.

We are already seeing this development. The remote controller has parted company with the television screen, the ear piece has jumped away from the mobile phone, a folding keyboard can get over the problems of minute mobile phone keypads and we are now using separate screens from our television receivers.

What this means for all of us in general but for blind people in particular is that we will reduce the money we spend on all that hardware and we will instead have a programmable controller with its own software which will match our needs. When we are in a new environment we will not have to change our personal controller, we will still have our little processor and some kind of monitoring device; but no cables and no compatibility problems.

Behind this convergence, however, there lie two much more profound convergences which I have already referred to:

The first, is the convergence of data creation so that it is usable across all channels, platforms and user interfaces;
The second is is the creation of a single transmission and reception mechanism, based on an advanced wireless protocol.

These developments mean that at all three levels, making information, sending it and receiving it, there will be a converged way of doing business.

For blind people this will not eliminate cost differentials but it will bring universal access well within our grasp. At the same time, this convergence of traditional computing with consumer electronics will reduce complexity and the need for training. A simple illustration of this is the much more sophisticated but simple searching provided by cable television than by the world wide web; the motto for the commercial supplier is: if you can't find it, you can't buy it. This will radically cut down training costs, particularly when there is widespread use of search systems that adapt their behaviour to user behaviour. Such systems are in use now but like all other systems they will become cheaper and more powerful, taking all the time wasting out of repetitive keying and searching; you might think of it as personalised Google.

Let me give you a very simple example. I am deeply in love with Samantha; and every morning when I get to work I read her emails even before I read those from my boss. My 'clever' computer learns to put her emails at the top of my in-box. But one day, I see Samantha in the street holding hands with another man. I ignore her emails and slowly my computer lets them slip down the ranking. And then I meet the stunning Jackie and, before no time at all, her emails are at the top of my in-box list while Samantha's languish, unanswered, at the bottom.

The ability of machines to learn from our behaviour will become ever more important as the amount of data available to us goes on increasing. although you might find it hard to imagine, having lived through an era of information scarcity for blind people, we will have to come to terms with these new systems that will help us to overcome information inundation.

3. Rendering

Rendering is a rather dry word but it is the core of what we need to do for blind people. In converged content creation, a single computer file can be rendered through a series of style sheets or templates so that different outputs are made from the same file. This means that a piece of data which is prepared on a standard word processor can be turned automatically either into braille, large print, synthetic speech or a Web page. Since the birth of computer generated documents, perhaps our biggest mistake has been our failure to use this template technology to produce different kinds of documents for blind people from the same file. If you look at the demographics it is obvious that braille should be a useful, cheap by-product of large print production but, all over the world, organisations have established highly inefficient, computer driven systems devoted solely to braille which have given the impression that braille is terribly expensive to produce; only the paper is expensive, the production is cheap. Look at it this way; if you are making a braille book for an individual child from scratch it is expensive; if you are making a braille book for an individual child as a byproduct of producing ten large print copies of the same text from scratch, the cost falls radically; if you are producing large print and braille copies of a text from the Internet, the cost is tiny. You can see that producing from the Internet is the cheapest option but it has some international intellectual property rights implications which I will look at later but the thing to bear in mind is that the Internet is crammed with non copyright information, from Shakespeare text to hobby sites. The key skill here is defining a search and knowing how to assign weight and value to what you find.

Let us look at the more exciting manifestations of rendering computer files which are not entirely concerned with the production of text..

The most obvious thing to notice is the steady improvement in the automation of text to speech and speech to text; the first opens up possibilities for blind people to receive much more non braille information as an option, particularly in the areas of learning and employment and particularly when they are walking down the street. If you get an email on your phone from a friend while you are in a bar you don't really want to get out your portable braille display, no matter how small, you just want to listen to it. The second route comes the other way and opens up the door for those who have poor keyboard skills; remember, blind people, all things being equal, have poorer keyboard skills than seeing people because they lack hand/eye co-ordination, so this is a not insignificant development. You also have to bear in mind that many keyboards are so small they are operated by a pointer or stylus rather than the human finger; so unless you have a portable keyboard, as I described earlier, you want to talk to your device instead of typing.

Incidentally, and somewhat controversially, this should lead us to think carefully about whether we should teach our blind children to talk to computers and use SMS and qwerty for input, learning braille simply as a language for receiving information. It is always much easier to read a language than to write it. I won't go on with this subject now as it will engulf any rational consideration of the other things I have to say; but this debate cannot be put off indefinitely by traditionalists.

But man cannot live by text alone. The rendering that excites me most is the use of computers to store and realise 3-dimensional objects. Let me start with a very simple idea. When you use a printer driven by a computer to create a hard copy document, you think you are producing a 2-dimensional artefact, a bit of paper with a few marks on it; but in fact ink has depth; you are actually imposing a coded layer of solid chemical on top of an even, blank piece of paper. If you instruct your printer to make a line more bold than the others, the height of the ink on the paper will be proportionately greater. On this principle, through instructing a printer to increase ink density and ink overprinting, you can create ink objects. Taken further, what if you give a printer an instruction to repeat print over the same surface but with variations, dropping the printing bed by the same height as the ink each time you perform the operation? Say you tell the printer to print a square in solid ink and to reduce the area of the square every five overprintings by 100th of a millimetre; suddenly you are creating a printed pyramid of ink. well, of course, this now happens with 3d printing but not with traditional ink but with special chemical compounds. We now have the opportunity of using global libraries of 3-dimensional objects stored in computer files to give blind people sophisticated models without calling in sculptors or even carpenters.

Even more fascinating is the prospect of making solid but active tactile models through the use of haptics. In this technology a computer file of a 3-dimensional object is rendered through the use of force fields. This technology works like the familiar experience of bringing two identical magnetic poles together which holds the two magnets apart, creating a space between them which is, so to speak, solid thin air. The same thing happens when you use a haptic generator to render solid objects specified in computer files. Currently this technology has got as far as allowing you to poke simple geometrical objects like spheres and cubes, using a thimble on the end of your finger; but it will develop so that we will be able to grasp much larger animate objects with haptic gloves. Research is still needed to discover how refined we should make such objects, given the tactile limitations of blind people; but the actual technological idea is simple; you 'stack' frames, so to speak, to render a solid object, as in 3-d printing; and you sequence stacks of frames to create moving objects in a haptic environment. This is the tactile equivalent of the moving picture, taking advantage of compression technology to keep the files within reasonable proportions.

4. Intellectual Property

As usual, when we come to look at the future the problem is not the technology; there will always be people who want to 'push the envelope', to extend the scope of the human race; the problem will be human response in general and financial response in particular.

In an information age it is difficult to argue that information should not have economic value; just as difficult as to argue that iron and steel should not have value in the industrial age. So the movement in the visual impairment sector to obtain priced information free of charge has horribly complicated the copyright issue from which it is separate. We should be prepared to offer authors and brokers the equivalent price that everyone else pays; but note the word "equivalent". What we do not want to do is to buy a print book, for example, and pay the cover price for permission to braille it because buying the print was the necessary precondition for brailling it.

More important, however, is the assertion of copyright. It took the United Kingdom more than a hundred years after the established dominance of braille as a reading medium for legislation to be passed allowing the automatic right to braille transcription for blind people. There are still problems with tape and electronic copying is a minefield, in spite of read/write DVD and the South Asian piracy industries. Publishers still have this mad vision of blind people copying poor quality talking books and selling them on market stalls.

But no matter how unreasonable publishers are they have to be tackled; and as the Caribbean has a long history of collaboration with Canada, the USA and the UK, copyright should be handled in an international context so that we can establish a global digital library with global digital rights for blind people.

I want to go one step further. The lesson of the separate, protracted campaigns for the right to reproduce text in braille, large print, on tape and in electronic formats is surely that we must campaign for one, generic right of blind people to access all information in the public domain, either free or at an equivalent price. This will be a long and difficult campaign but it will be much better than starting a new one every time there is a new kind of technology; in addition to the formats I have already mentioned, you don't want to get tangled up with video, DVD and MP3.

5. Conclusion

In conclusion, I just want to say a few words about our people themselves. This presentation has been rather technical but I don't actually care very much about digital technology; what I care about is what it can do to improve the life chances of our people. If we can get ourselves to think in the flexible ways that I have indicated; and if we can realise some of the exciting new possibilities, we will vastly improve the lives of those blind people we work with; but to do this we have to be as open and generous with our brains as I know we all are with our hearts. We also have to remember - and this is my final major point - that the technologies I have mentioned are not only about receiving information; they also allow us to create and to publish. For blind people in particular, the challenge of local and community media is exciting. So is the opportunity to work in a flexible way with mobile communications technology. The days of the extended secretarial letter are over; now people want a short, sharp, rapid answer with documents to follow. If we can simply get our blind people to be effective listeners and talkers, to master the basics of human communication, it may just be that the role of text in their lives will be radically reduced. And that will make it easier and cheaper for all of us.