The Digital Plunge : Have teachers of VI children ever learned to swim

Return to Blindness and Visual Impairment

Presentation given at the RNIB View Conference in Birmingham, UK on 3rd March 2006

Date: 10/02/2006
Venue: Birmingham, UK

Abstract: The visual impairment sector in general and its education component in particular have been slow to benefit from developments in ICT. This Presentation summarises current developments associated with text, images and objects and then looks at processing issues such as autonomy, collaboration and supervision. The presentation concludes with recommendations on content creation, research into autonomy and the establishment of a national resource for accessible materials and teacher support.

For all kinds of reasons that I don't really want to go into, not least because of the laws of libel, the VI sector in general and its education component in particular, has been slow to realise the implications of information and communications technology (ICT). There has been a good deal of frantic paddling near the steps at the shallow end but feet have rarely left the tiles. In this presentation I want to describe a range of possibilities which might encourage us to be more adventurous.

In the history of mankind, reading and writing have had relatively short and narrow histories compared, say, with learning through direct observation and broadening that learning through travel. Rich people wanted to travel not simply out of what we might call 'idle curiosity' but because it gave breadth and experience from which better decisions might emerge. What the printing of books brought about was the encoding of that experience; but books did not cut down the travel; rather the opposite, so today the use of the internet and teleconferencing has not cut travel budgets but has increased the desire for people to meet each other face to face. We might be living in the digital age but it is also the age of cheap travel and the conference.

This year is the first year in history when more cameras will be sold inside phones than alone; it is the year when Minolta has vanished. We are about to move dramatically back into the world of the picture, of the graphic experience, of travel brought home. Instead of the famous, iconic Attenborough documentaries we will have movieblogs by the million; if you want to know what a place looks like, click here; if you want to know about a cathedral, do you want the architecture, the artistic inventory, a bat's eye view of the bell tower? Clock here.

What are we going to do for our blind and visually impaired children in this digital graphical age?

Well, the first thing to say is that we are not going to close the gap between our children and their seeing peers. In spite of the very positive absolute advantage that our children have enjoyed since the invention of the radio, they have suffered immense comparative disadvantage. Think of it this way: the radio and the telephone gave blind people shared social, communications assets that made them no worse off than their sighted peers; but while they also gained from cinema and television, their sighted peers gained much more; thus, blind and visually impaired people suffered from comparative disadvantage.

This has happened in a less obvious way in computing. Remember the days when every blind person with two "A" levels to rub together was going to be an ace computer programmer? When it was all strings of symbolic language our people could manage; but it began to go wrong with the graphical user interface (GUI) and it has been going ever more wrong ever since with the explosion of digital television, the world wide web, the VCR and the DVD. Soon our 3g phones will be alive with the sex and violence of soft porn and football. As our language culture steadily fragments through imprecision and multi culturalism, it is the picture that will bind. We will no longer be united by Shakespeare but by pictographic symbols; that is why logos are so powerful; you might think it is the meat that matters in Macdonald's but it is the golden arches.

It has ever been thus, to some extent at least. We have always struggled with the question of how far it is worth trying to describe the Mona Lisa to a congenitally totally blind child. Only now it is much worse and about to become worse still.

So what can we do? Let me repeat, for the final time, what we cannot do. We cannot completely close this gap and it will probably continue to widen. So, having accomplished the gloomy part of the analysis in five minutes, I want to spend the rest of my time explaining how we can take advantage of new technologies to help our blind and visually impaired children develop and prosper as fully participating citizens.

I want to start with the non technological issues:

First, we have to be stringent in deciding what we can and cannot do in the available time. As a profession we really have to call time on denial. For forty years we have known about the standard curriculum, the additional curriculum and the hidden curriculum. We have known for almost as long that teaching children Grade Two Braille gives the brightest a marginal advantage but uses huge amounts of time that most children could use better in other areas. We will all be sorry I have said this; but it must be said!
Secondly, the reason we need to make peace after forty years of civil war over integration and segregation is that we know more than we ever did before that children learn most from other children; so blind children do not learn very much about the visual world from other blind children. Segregation may be fine for braille literacy but braille may be marginal for most blind school leavers.
Thirdly, those who have problems with integration must, at the very least, insist that visual description is as important an element in the special education curriculum as braille. If we are to live in this world of pictures then it is about time that we learned how to describe. I said this at a lecture in Birmingham a decade ago; and nothing has happened.
Finally, at the non technical level, we are wasting the precious resources of our children if we concentrate on autonomous achievement when they will almost always function, and almost always function best, in collaborative environments.

Which leads me to my one and only political point. The National Curriculum is a tightly defined input system but what our children need is a system geared to output. For children, like ours, with necessarily narrow skills bases, the only real means of survival is collaboration. The competitive scoring of autonomous learning exacerbates the inbuilt disadvantage which children suffer from disabilities. We should never have allowed it to happen; and now that special education is rising up the agenda because of the interventions of Mary Warnock and George Osborne, we need to make the case for equality rather than uniformity, with the emphasis of equality of outcome not input.

In looking at current technology - and I mean current; I do not mean future technology to which I will come later - in looking at current technology, I want to split the topic into six units, the first three

The word
The image
The object

Deal with outputs. The second three:

Autonomy
Collaboration; and
Support

Deal with processes.

1. The Word

One of the most disappointing aspects of digital technology has been its lack of success in expanding text availability for our children. True, the old metal plate origination of text has given way to digital origination; but there has been an obsession with code accuracy rather than layout intelligibility. There has been an ignorant and futile rivalry between braille and modified print production which should always have come out of the same digital file. There has been a really poor understanding of how print files can be manipulated as sources for braille and modified print; and, most recently, in spite of a decade of global, corporate posturing, internet accessibility is still, depending on which research you use, somewhere between 3% and 19%.

In 1980 I was writing about the use of a single file to produce different kinds of braille (contracted, uncontracted, capitalised, uncapitalised) and about print size and font choice, with digital information searing through the networks. My experience of itinerant support for our children is that nothing of the sort is happening. The global simply has not had an impact on the local.

As usual, the problem is not fundamentally technological at all. The real issue is how people who value local autonomy and difference can call upon a central resource. That resource should be pioneered by RNIB and funded by the DfES. I will return to the proposal in more detail at the end of this presentation.

Another very strange division has arisen (strange in the world of seeing people) between braille and modified print on the one hand and audio on the other. Too many advocates for braille have undervalued audio; and those who value audio have not thought enough about its methodical pedagogical use. The contrast between arid braille and print books and unedited audio reading material is not only false it actually undervalues the potential of all these media. If special teachers cannot interpolate standard text, what are they for? The art of interpolation, linked as it is to the art of description, has hardly been explored.

2. The image

In 1990 I went into a school for blind children in Malaysia and talked to a child who was using a magnifying glass to draw with a standard pencil. As a short term measure I suggested the use of a felt tipped pen and art paper. At the same time I headed off a campaign for CCTV technology by showing teachers how to use commercial, full colour video cassette recorders.

Digital imagery is wonderfully plastic and we seem not to have been alive to this property as we should. We have also been a little too loud in our statements that blind people need text-only web sites when 95% of legally blind people can apprehend some information from pictures.

In parallel, however, we should make ourselves aware of the development of portable flat screens which can be linked to processors by wireless. It is already possible to carry a portable screen that will interface with a mobile phone. Facilities for our children - and adults - should be plastered with plasma screens but I detect no real enthusiasm.

Perhaps there is still something of the legacy of sight conservation here; but there is a clear advantage in seeing for yourself rather than relying on graphical description. What is true for the single frame is even more true for the moving picture. The replacement of the linear video cassette with the non linear DVD presents us with immense possibilities, as does the replacement of linear television with catalogue television; this year the BBC will offer all its television programmes for viewing up to seven days after initial transmission. How much of this material will you be using in the Autumn term?

3. The Object

Nonetheless, there will be those who can make no sense of pictures and not much sense of description. Even for these children there is hope. Since the decline of widespread craft skills, the cost of models has been prohibitive. Currently, 3-dimensional printing is largely being used to produce prototypes; the most famous example is the use of ultrasonic technology to capture Egyptian mummy skulls which have been printed as solid objects without unwrapping the original objects. This sounds rather amazing until you realise that of course all printing has depth; ink is not ethereal. You can produce a 3-dimensional file by superimposing layer upon layer of print specification from which a solid object can be produced using a special polymer.

Alternatively, solid objects can simply be defined by reference to their surface characteristics from which computer models can be made. These can then be accessed through using force field technology which, literally, produces solid objects in thin air. This haptic technology is now moving on from making solid objects accessible to making moving objects accessible. For this to work, compression technology is used as it is in the storage of moving pictures, to differentiate between what is the same in each haptic frame and what has changed.

Any technology officer working with blind or deafblind people who does not know about 3-dimensional printing and haptics requires re-training.

There is one more technological observation which might help at this point. The television has already disaggregated into a receiver, a remote controller and a flat screen, following the computer's disaggregation between processor, screen, keyboard and mouse, and soon all other digital technologies will disaggregate so that they will be re-configurable in new ways.

So much for the outputs; now let us look at processes:

4. Autonomy

I have already noted in passing the limits of autonomy but we all want as much autonomy as we can get; whether we are thinking of the private car, the remote controller or the takeaway pizza, we all want to exercise our autonomy. This is a particularly important issue for blind and visually impaired people for it is both a practical and an ideological issue. Easy autonomy plunges with decreased vision. By the time we reach total blindness, autonomy is very limited indeed which explains why there is so much pressure for it. Look at how much time wasting and frustration our students are prepared to put up with in order to be autonomous. Look at the risks they take, quite often with their lives.

No amount of collaborative strategy - and I am deeply committed to that - should obscure the need for us all to exploit to the very last degree the potential which ICT offers in the sphere of autonomy.

Perhaps I should just give one example. For seeing children, learning to read is the route to rebellion, to accessing forbidden material; for visually impaired children the prospects are limited; for blind children almost non existent. If anything, learning to read for a blind child increases the sense of entrapment because of quite proper comparisons he draws with his peers.

Here there are four topics which I want to mention briefly:

First, if we can successfully promote genuinely multi media material, we will greatly enhance autonomy. It is no longer appropriate to ask a visually impaired child what is her preferred reading medium. She should have access to a file which will produce braille or modified print in hard copy; and braille, modified print and voice out in real time simultaneously. She should have audio description, customisable sub titles; and She should also have customisable pictures and haptic objects. If you are going to make educational objects which can last indefinitely, you might as well make them properly.
Secondly, computerised pattern recognition systems, search engines, rule-driven data ranking and so on, will radically cut down the huge amount of time which our people waste on autonomous internet searching. Perhaps the most important skill which a blind or visually impaired child can have is to learn how to define a search as precisely as possible.

Ranking tools have been available for years now but seem rarely to be used. My favourite is an email ranking system that works on the basis of user behaviour; so if you always read emails from your illicit lover before those of your boss, that is how the messages will be ranked.

This is a fruitful area for practical research. How will our children deal with data gluts when our tradition has been quite properly concerned with making the best in an ecology of data scarcity?
Thirdly, satellite and robot technologies will revolutionise independent orientation and mobility. Again, in Birmingham, some five years ago, I called for detailed discussion on the future of independent O&M in the light of the mobile phone and the taxi account but the professional self identity in the icons of the long cane and the guide dog are almost as powerful as the sacred mysteries of Grade Two braille. How much more relevant is this re-evaluation now that we have satellite navigation systems. They are already widespread in cars and they are being progressively refined for pedestrian use.
Fourthly, I promised that I would distinguish the present from the future. The personal robot is on the horizon but has not yet arrived in a retail form that is worth the money; but it will come. With satellite navigation and a robot escort, the guide dog and the long cane will be redundant.

In the meantime, we should embrace satellite technology instead of being frightened of it.

Finally, on this subject, I want to propose that we should establish a major research programme into the potential of ICT for broadening and deepening autonomy.

5. Collaboration

Nonetheless, in spite of my passionate appeal for expanding autonomous opportunities, the paradigmatic activity of blind and visually impaired people, as it is for their peers, will be collaborative.

There are two introductory remarks which I think ought to be made here:

First, our students need a much stronger sense of self worth which will allow us to train them in empowerment and negotiating skills; collaboration depends, fundamentally, upon self esteem. It is no accident that poor people are poor askers.
Secondly, having said that, collaboration in cyberspace puts less pressure on social performance than the face to face encounter. Conversely, this arms length transactional situation has its own, sometimes subtle, etiquette. Perhaps I could permit myself the somewhat controversial comment that blindness and visual impairment bring an insensitivity both in transmitting and receiving nuance which, if not guarded against, easily turns to tactlessness, social coarseness and even callousness.

Oddly, the greatest obstacle to collaboration in the technological field has been the capacity of the humble, domestic telephone. Until recently we have had to choose between being on line and being on the telephone. Now, with broad band, we can talk to a colleague while we are both looking at the same material. This will become even simpler with the universal availability of voice telephony on the internet (VOIP). This will lead to quite proper pressure for our students to be taught how to collaborate effectively on line with other students, visually impaired or otherwise.

High speed networks will reintroduce the digital division of labour which was lost with the first generation of computers. The first generation paradigm is still with us. One of the more surprising production lags since the introduction of broad band has been the scarcity of collaborative facilitating software. Perhaps, too, this is also the place to make a reference to the lack of on-line games for our students.

Blended learning will have a massive impact on the whole of the educational process. Broad band networks, however, will not only massively improve collaborative content creation and criticism; it will also finally break the physical monopoly of the classroom. Wireless broad band will allow both mobility and flexibility, autonomy and collaboration, isolation and clustering.

6. Supervision

Which leads naturally into the area of supervision and support. The same technologies which enable collaborative working can also be used for support and supervision.

Using blended learning technology, support teachers will be able to help students to troubleshoot; but if the student is also under quite legitimate webcam surveillance, support workers will be able to view problematic classroom and playground situations.

Of course this raises all kinds of professional and ethical issues. At the professional level, patterns of qualification and support will need to be reviewed. Should support teachers and workers work traditional hours or should they cut down on their travelling and increase their virtual support?

In respect of remote surveillance, as a society we have stumbled into ubiquitous surveillance; we have experienced the unpleasant phenomenon of slapping; and web camera use is bound to increase. What sort of balance should we strike between effective support and intrusive surveillance?

Of course the same technology the allows surveillance provides support; it just depends who controls the camera. Just as support teachers and workers will have altered work patterns if they are providing virtual support to students, so their working patterns will also change if they are being provided with virtual support.

I have left this topic until the last because it is the most difficult area and the one where the outcome is least clear; but we must not wait for existing niche technologies to overwhelm us before we start thinking seriously.

7. Creativity

It is almost time to draw some conclusions but there is one more topic which requires some attention. Almost the whole of this presentation has been about accessing and processing information but what about creativity? In a society based on information, those who only consume but do not produce run the high risk of unemployment and poverty.

I only have time to make three brief points but I intend to take this matter further at the Mary Kitzinger Trust conference in July 2006:

First, there has been very little progress in making web authoring tools accessible to blind and visually impaired people.
Secondly, never has there been so much money to be made in producing audio content. The death of radio is confidently predicted in every generation but it has survived television and thrived on the motor car; it is now on the internet and will soon be on your mobile phone. The Office of Communications (Ofcom) will issue 80 community radio licenses in the first year of the scheme and there are more to come; but the big explosion will be on the internet. RNIB's VIPONAIR made a good start but its early promise has been somewhat curtailed in the usual way; it has become bogged down; it is in danger of being remembered as the infant prodigy that could not survive puberty.
Thirdly, while the money to be made from processing will continue to fall as machines become ever more efficient; the money from content creation will continue to rise for high quality.

8. Conclusions

In conclusion, let me simply register my passionate support for research into autonomy and confirm my promise to consider creativity in more detail later this year; which leaves me with my main, substantive proposal.

There will, if human beings follow their usual course, be more of a row over the name of my proposed institution than what it does; so let me try to get the two aspects as closely aligned as I can: I am proposing the establishment of a national centre for accessible educational materials and teacher support.

First, materials. Even with a National Curriculum, teachers and children will want a large amount of locally produced accessible content but there is no reason why they should each have to learn about file processing and formatting. In such braille production as chess, music and mathematics, we are accustomed to centralised high quality production; we should now expand this kind of service to all alternative format source file manipulation.
Secondly, teacher support. Again, although support teachers and workers will have their own very personal approach to the way in which they help individual children, there is surely a middle way between isolation and the annual conference. High quality educational and child development advice should be available on line, either open or secure.

What ICT can do for us is to crystallise and distribute the excellent while allowing it to be adapted for the local and particular.

The hour is growing late. Some of us will have to take diving lessons. It is time to take the plunge.