Life Chances for Blind and Visually Impaired People in the Information Age
The Role of Information
Now one of my major rules in making presentations is to offer solutions to problems; so now that we have got all the bad news behind us, I want to turn to what I think is good news for blind and visually impaired people.
What I want to look at in this section is the role of VIPs in the new world of information, so let me, once again, start with some fundamental observations about ourselves:
- We resent censorship and broadcasting and publishing monopolies so we want a choice of information suppliers; but,
- Secondly, although in theory we want unlimited information, in practice most of us are bewildered by what psychologists call the "Tyranny of choice"; so
- We rely on other people to take in huge amounts of information and reduce it to what we find manageable.
In theory we think the news is biased or that newspapers carry too much rubbish; but we prefer this to sorting out our own news selection. This is why broadcasting and newspapers are so popular; they fulfil a natural need.
- Finally, even those of us who are clever and think we can digest what we are told rely to a certain extent on experts and pundits; even if we disagree with them, they help us to sharpen up our own arguments.
Now let us look at what blind and visually impaired people might naturally be good at. Well,
- First, when properly trained, we are good listeners
- Secondly, we are not easily distracted so we can develop levels of stamina and concentration
- Thirdly, although we may not be particularly good at using keyboards and facing cameras, we might be very good at radio broadcasting and sending reliable messages via email and text messaging.
Note immediately that I do not describe these three skills as natural to blind people, as if we were given special compensations for our disability. There are many things which we cannot do but in this area of information processing I am suggesting that we have a niche but that to take advantage of it we will need proper training. Distilling the essence from a variety of sources is a very definite skill; mental concentration and stamina must be developed in much the same way as athletes develop themselves in training; and although some people are natural broadcasters, most do need training.
So what, then, is this world into which we can introduce the talents of blind people. to answer this question we have to take another quick look into the world of technology.
Until quite recently radio and television were broadcast using frequencies which were the sole property of governments. This meant that a government could choose to keep all the broadcasting spectrum to itself; or it could make spectrum available on various economic, censorship or public broadcasting conditions. In Africa most governments have used broadcasting as a tool of political monopoly; but this era is coming to an end. You no longer need this valuable analogue spectrum to broadcast. Broadcasting is now possible through wireless networks, cable, satellite and even a standard Internet connection. Simple forms of broadcasting will be possible via hand held computing/telephone devices, an extension of text messaging.
So I see two clear paths for blind and visually impaired people in an increasingly liberalised communications market:
- Media production
- Presentation
5.1 Media Production
There are few advantages in being blind, or, as one of my mentors, John Godber, once said, none of us go on "Glad to be blind demos"; but I do think that we may have advantage in one area and that is our ability to focus and compress. If you have never seen it is difficult to imagine the vast amount of visual information that seeing people constantly process without thinking about it. Much of that processing has gone on in the past outside the reading range, outside 6 metres, and that is why, for example, vision is measured as if we were all agricultural workers; but the explosion in information delivery inside six metres has been massive since the advent of television, the duplicator, the photocopier, the fax, the computer, the email and the text message. Indeed one information phenomenon which is emerging is what I call the information soap opera; I use the illustration here of the mobile phone but it could equally apply to email.
There are two men on different trains and in the course of a conversation they realise that they will be arriving in the same station in the early evening and may be able to meet; but Mr. A has to change a meeting to make this happen. He changes the meeting but meantime Mr. B has had to commit to an emergency meeting; so could Mr. A be a bit later? Mr. A changes his initial meeting back to its original time; and Mr. b finds out that the emergency meeting has been cancelled because its subject has been overtaken by events. They agree that it is too complicated to meet. The winner is the mobile phone company.
Now this kind of media soap opera goes on at all kinds of levels, from the high octane delivery of news channels through to the 'always on' interactions between teenagers trying to meet on a Friday night. We are producing and consuming huge quantities of data but most of it actually doesn't change anything very substantial. So there is a valuable role in society for people who can distil everything that is going on and compress it into something significant and understandable. This is where our lack of distraction comes in; we tend to have to absorb less casual data and although we often quite rightly claim as blind people that we are information starved, if we can get that status changed to information rationed, and if we can get the right kind of information, then we can play a valuable role. This is not just true of news and current events, although I think that this is a really significant area, it is also true of developments in science and the arts and in all areas of factual broadcasting. You will all have heard reports from rather bogus, self serving research; and it is easy to exaggerate complaints from a couple of people into general outrage; and I'm not saying that blind people will necessarily be any more moral than their sighted peers; but what I am saying is that we do have the capacity to absorb and condense.
Carrying on from that, one of my part time jobs is as a broadcasting regulator where I have to adjudicate listener complaints and one of the factors which my sighted peers frequently spot less readily than me is the ironic voice; they are so busy listening to the actual words being said that they don't hear the tone. Conversely, we can introduce good natural tone into radio and television sound production. When I started out in radio I have to admit that I wasn't particularly self-confident applying razor blades to magnetic tape but we don't need to do that now that there is digital editing.
So let me summarise this point. What I am asking you to do is not to think of how radio is now, this minute, but to look into the future and see where traditional broadcasting merges with computing and telephony. There will be countless opportunities for local and community broadcasting and there will be a need for reliable, balanced, information intermediaries. This means that we will have to concentrate on listening skills, comprehension and compression.
The other side of this coin is, of course, presentation. Here we have to be a little cautious and I will illustrate this with a personal story.
One of the central pillars of factual television production is the 'piece to camera' where the intrepid reporter delivers the goods, full on. When I was once cast to present a television series we did most of the core of the shows first and then near the end we went into topping and tailing, including the pieces to camera. I recorded these over and over again; but there was something wrong. The producer rang me days later to say he couldn't use them but could not bring himself to say why. I was very upset for a while and then I realised what the problem was. You are delivering the key message at the beginning of a show so you have half a minute to get over the point; but the viewers are wondering what's wrong with you; are you on drugs, or something? Your eyes (in my case artificial but they might just be blind) look funny; by the time the viewers have either figured out what's going on or got bored with it, they have failed to pick up your key message.
Now some people may think that this is a perfect example of prejudice; but you're not going to win this one. You may be perfectly usable on television in a discussion programme but the piece to camera is iconic. So there is a role for us in television but it needs to be negotiated.
Where there is no need for negotiation is in radio, scripted and improvised. There is plenty of evidence that blind and visually impaired people thrive in this area but what is about to change is the size of the opportunity. Until recently to succeed we have had to be recruited by major broadcasting corporations, often state monopolies but soon radio will be down at the neighbourhood or village level.
A third area of opportunity is the production of the sound component of multimedia, of home grown video and DVD. This links in with music selection and mixing. I have to say at once that I am not very much in favour of blind musicians entertaining people and not making a living from it; but I am in favour of much more back room mixing. When I lived in Trinidad many years ago I was able to engineer on a 16-track desk when the meters were broken; and as the meters usually were broken this was a valuable skill. I am in no way saying that we should allow ourselves to be typecast but we must be much sharper at playing to our strengths.
Now there is one major objection to this set of solutions; it really does not take any account of those with average or below average communications skills. It certainly does not; and does not claim to. But what we must bear in mind to begin with is that no employment strategy for blind people in history has been effective for more than 1/4 of the overall blindness population, except in the Communist Bloc and there very special conditions applied. In this strategy I would initially settle for much less; and this is because media production and, even more, presentation has a very high profile. There may be some recognition of a blind computer programmer but it's nothing to the recognition of a blind television newscaster.
So this is not a mass strategy; there isn't a mass strategy. Te reason why there isn't a mass strategy has complex historical origins and I don't want to spend a huge amount of time on it now as we covered it in part yesterday but just for completeness I want to say a few words about what I regard as the global rehabilitation disaster of the past half century.
After the Second World War there were many blind war veterans who commanded the respect of their country; and after the outbreak of retinopathy of prematurity in little babies, blindness was a common phenomenon in rich families of the Western world; but the opportunity for establishing equality was dashed because of the emphasis in rehabilitation for veterans and education for children on teaching them mechanistic techniques, what I call the climbing stairs and boiling eggs school of rehabilitation. What both groups were not taught was how to establish sound trading positions and how to negotiate. So instead of developing self esteem, self respect, identification of strengths, assessment of negotiating position - where to give way and where to hold out; when you are strong and when weak - blind children and adults were taught mechanical processes; but as they were poorly equipped to negotiate the use of what they knew, what they knew was useless.
Let me leave that for another day and close with a couple of remarks about realistic process. Given that blind and visually impaired people acquire communications skills, can we imagine them using these in an open employment environment. well, to be honest; no. I have three different models, or approaches, that I think people ought to consider; they are:
- Senior partner status
- The Social Firm
- Networked collaboration.
The first, senior partner status, recognises the role of self employment but says that the only way this will work is that if a blind person is in business he or she needs to control the technology that defines the business so that he or she has the leverage to command respect and the command the bulk of the earnings. In this model we provide technology and training and ensure that there is a binding partnership agreement which defines the role of senior and junior partners, or employer and employees. On that basis you just might get a revolving loan fund to work; but I doubt it.
The second model, the social firm, also combines blind and non-blind people but this is a co-operative. In this model whatever subsidy would go to the blind people, from government or NGO, goes into the co-operative to reduce its overall overhead and give it a competitive edge in the market; this would fall foul of some trade agreements but not in Africa.
The third model, using networks, is like the other two but does not involve everybody being in the same place at the same time. This allows house bound and rather isolated people to be involved in an enterprise. It also can cut centralised overheads.
In summary and conclusion I simply want to say this: what I have been talking about may seem like science fiction to some but I am travelling into the future facing in the right direction. People are also likely to be a little bit apprehensive because the VI world isn't good at talking to multinational business, it's much more comfortable complaining to social services; so we will have to get used to asking the satellite companies for some space, working with broadcasting regulators and lawyers, asking for concessions on broadcasting equipment and, equally important, working out what we can give in exchange, such as good PR for donors and an ongoing story for promoters.
This is a frightening prospect; it's full of risk; it will be full of drama and we will often face disappointment; but it can't be worse than what we've gone through in the last 50 years. Let's get away from all those metaphors about light and vision; blind people can be the voice of Africa.