Life Chances for Blind and Visually Impaired People in the Information Age
The Technological Environment
During the past two decades, since computers came out of specialist data processing departments and landed on work desks and in the spare rooms of richer houses, there has been an intense debate about their value. Their benefits are superficially obvious:
- They cut down the cost of making mistakes such as typing errors;
- They make it easier to amend standing documents such as spreadsheets;
- In principle they save the cost of paper though in practice they do the opposite;
- They allow instant messaging through email.
On the other hand, until quite recently their performance level has been notoriously poor compared, say, with broadcasting and standard telephony systems; and the combination of systems crashes and virus invasion has cost companies billions of Dollars. Added to this, however, there have been three efficiency questions:
- First, we may have saved on the cost of secretaries by allowing the boss to type his own email but doesn't this make a boss a very high paid secretary? This is an important question for those who plan to seek work as secretaries and personal assistants.
- Secondly, how much of this instant communication actually forwards the business process? Isn't most of it like soap opera with scores of messages being interchanged while nothing actually changes?
- Thirdly, have we been duplicating vast pieces of system without the computer really saving us money? How many Departments of Government or major corporations have radically down-sized their human operations because of the use of computer systems?
All this is about to change so we must not fall into the trap of seeing the future in terms of the past. We are already beginning to see machine operations taking over from humans in the airline booking and financial services industries. We are finally beginning to learn that the great benefit of the computer is not in helping us with minor processing operations like letter writing but in major processing operations like searching the whole of the Internet for the simple piece of information We want. As this trend progresses, through the use of code which allows computers to 'talk' to each other, millions of jobs will be lost in those areas which require what OECD countries call basic skills: reading, writing, counting and the operation of computer input systems, usually a qwerty keyboard with a mouse. Very soon now we will see the decline of duplicate systems; computers will begin actually to fulfil their potential for labour saving. So in spite of the fact that computers during the past two decades have been seriously non intuitive, they are about to make a much larger impact on the labour market than they did in the 1990s.
At the same time, there have been two major technological developments which have attracted less attention. Broadcasting, through satellite and cable systems has vastly expanded the range of channel choice for television and radio users; and there has been an explosion in the use of cellular, or mobile, telephones. I will go on to say why I think these two developments are as important if not more important than the development of raw computer processing power; but it is vital that we note the underlying assumption that currently rates computing above broadcasting and telephony. this is an entirely Western cultural problem which sees computing as worthy and serious but sees broadcasting as vulgar and frivolous and telephony as something we all take for granted.
What I want to do in this presentation is to explore the underlying technological trends in the West which will have a major impact on Africa, though the time 'lag' will differ as will the overall impact from country to country. I will then go on to explore how these technological trends will influence the way we need to think about the education and employment of blind and visually impaired people. The first part of my presentation will be rather grim but don't worry, there is a very hopeful counterbalance in the second part; IT, like football, is a game of two halves!