Category: Let's talk
While looking for information on the Speaqualizer, I found this fascinating article on blindness and technology. It presented a viewpoint that I've very rarely seen and I'm curious as to what all of you think.
http://www.nfbnet.org/files/nfb_literature/TECHNLGY.TXT
The author discusses several pieces of adaptive technology and points out their flaws as well as their benefits. He then goes on to explain that basically, employers, agencies and even the blind themselves tend to rely too much on technology. We view it as a cure all and an answer to all of our problems as blind individuals. He demonstrated this by telling the story of a blind programmer who almost lost his job due to certain technology not arriving for four months. Neither he nor his employer considered hiring a sighted reader to help him during that time. To be honest, it would never have occurred to me either.
This article was written quite awhile ago, before the explosion of the world wide web. Today, as more and more technology enters our lives, making it easier for us to do things that were previously frustrating at best and impossible at worst, I can't help but think that the points made here are still valid. I was born in 1983 and grew up in the age of technology. I started seriously using computers when I was 13 or so. Today, people start at five. I've never had to carry a heavy brailler to school (I only really used it for maths), to use a slate and stylus to take notes in a classroom, a typewriter to hand in printed work (before the Braille Lite, I used a Braille N Print) and so on. I've never looked in a real dictionary or encyclopaedia because I had my Franklin Language Master from a very young age and by the time I even approached an encyclopaedia, we had the IBM Abtiva with Grolier on it. Even going to the local library, from my earliest age, consisted of someone going to their computer to see if a tape or book was checked out, where it was located etc. Most of my braille books and tapes came in on time and in college, I got my first scanner and had access to a huge number of printed materials. Today, I'm constantly on the internet. Everything from shopping, to chatting, to researching, to reading the newspaper to paying bills, is done online. I've never written a cheque in my life. I really couldn't imagine my life without technology. And of course, there are people even more into high tech things than I am, those who keep abreast of all the latest gadgets.
Yet has all of this technology made us lose our ability to function without it? If I were faced with that real encyclopaedia or library catalogue, I wouldn't know the first thing to do. How many people today even have problems making simple phone calls? when you call a company, what are the odds that you'll get a real human on the other end instead of a computer? Moreover, is this a blind issue or a generational one? Have agencies for the blind come to depend so much on the tools that we use that they forget to insure that we're well-rounded in other areas, most especially resourcefullness? What do we do when something fails or when it's truly inaccessible and we have to get that assignment done by tomorrow? It seems that potential employers (and people in general) either think that there's a device for every problem or that we can't do anything as blind people. Those who take the former approach might fear that such things cost alot, and that without them, we can't function at all. They may not realise, as we may not, that some things only require simple modifications or temporary ones until the specific problem is resolved. I've been wondering why I've taken to my slate and stylus so strongly, and I think I finally know the answer. For me, coming from a world of computers and electronics, it's a pleasure and a novelty to know that I never have to worry about the power going out, the keys not working, a program failing, the batteries going dead or the program not speaking when I'm using one. I am, for once, in complete harmony with the sighted as they use their pencils and I can take full control of everything.
So this brings me to my final point. How do we find the balance between not being able to live without technology and selling everything we have, between realism and idealism? This is an especially difficult challenge today, more so, I believe, than when that article was first written. Many people consider certain things, like a talking phone with the ability to text, a pda, an mp3 player or an all-in-one device to be essential. Some prefer the practicality and ease of use provided by portable ocr and gps systems. Keeping that in mind, where do we, the blind community, go from here and can we even consider alternatives or have we come too far for that?
I see it as that with some stuff tech may be needed to a point while in others it isn't. like with phones and stuff like that i see taht it's needed as some of us have more than just blindness against us, some of us have hearing disabilities too, and phones and hearing aids have advanced a lot. i remember the days i could barely stand to use a phone because of the feedback caused from the phone and my hearing aids. now, almost any phone works, to a point.
Texting isn't a luxury anymore: any of us with kids use it, my wife texts me and asks me to get something or put something in the oven or whatever.
A sighted reader to help a programmer do his job? Poor reader.
As usual, the anti-technology folks are back in style, and, like my 70-plus-year-old mother, want to revive some forms of life that havent't existed for a very long time. This is the luxury of either the rich, or taxpayer-paid-for, I guess: The rest of us working stiffs do what we must to get the job done, keep the kids in school, one foot in front of the other. Most people are bustin' their hump just to get by, if that, and so use the tools it takes to get there.
I see both sides of this. Technology is incredible stuff ,and I think it's important that we keep up with it as best we can. It has enriched our lives both as blind people, and as a society in general, immensely. But I do think it's also important to learn some of the less technological ways of doing things. The tech we loves so much can crash, break, or otherwise malfunction. And when it does, most people are at a total loss what to do. I know I can be, for one. I love my computer far too much, and when it's malfunctioned before, I've gone crazy. I had tech crash on me when I was in school, too, and was glad that I, like Eleni, had grown up using some of the less technical things like a perkins, even a slate and stylus, to get things done. That way I had work-arounds in school when it all went to hell.
i agree with the last post, it's a balance between having and not having tech.
I didn't even mean it was a matter of having and not having technology. More a balance between knowing how to use tech, as well as ways to function whenever that tech might break down.
There are things for which a paper and a slate simply serve best. I only don't like the beliefs-oriented ideology stuff where people refuse to use technology for the sake of refusing it, and the rest of us pay for it, since they're not working. If you're independently wealthy you can pick to do whatever you want. Else, join the rest of us ...
SisterDawn, you understand my point completely. It's not that I want all blind people to suddenly give up technology. I just think we should learn, as you said, how to do things both ways. If I were still in school, for example, and my BrailleNote or laptop broke, I could always bring my tape recorder to class for notes. If the battery in my watch died, I could always set my manual braille alarm clock from the time in my computer or just ask someone sighted for the time. Right now, I label my foods in braille, but when I get the ID Mate Omni, I'll be able to simply scan the foods and have them identified. Yet if something happened to id, Gods forbid, I could go back to brailling because I have a braillewriter, a slate and stylus and a Braille Blazer.
And, FWIW, all those things are technology. The same could be said if your tape recorder broke: you'd then have to use a slate and stylus. Or if that got misplaced, you'd use something else. This supposed overdependence on technology is probably the results of somebody's petition for a grant. We're human: We don't have fur, fangs, claws or any other truly natural ways of doing things. Ya think when people first started wearing clothes or building fire, there was a movement said we'd become too `dependent? Probably there was. Even if you go live in the hills and flint knap your own tools, you're depending on technology. One of many things that separates us from the other creatures out there.
Perhaps, I should specify. These are forms of technology but they're low tech, for the most part and they're affordable and easily findable. It's alot easier to buy a new, or even old, tape recorder if I misplace or break mine than to buy a new computer or BrailleNote. I can easily find paper for the slate and stylus but if I lose the cd to an ocr program like Kurzweil 1000 or if NVDA didn't exist and I decided to buy a mainstream reader, it would make things alot more difficult. As I've said in other boards, I have a mobile phone that's extremely simple, durable and that only cost $30. But some people get the expensive phones and then buy talking software and still others get the whole bundle of gps, phone, reader etc. But for just making calls, my $30 phone is alot easier to replace and is less delicate.
I'm another one who walked the divide in school between computers and hardcopy braille. I still love my perkins and keep up with the slate and stylus just in case. I think those of us born in the early 80s have something that younger generations don't. Yeu point out that you'd find ways around when tech fails. I won't say though that I don't love my braillenote too much I do. When I don't have it I'm lost without it.Yes we can become too dependent on tech and the tech itself becomes a mini world unto itself. Designers and programmers want it that way and now that blind folks can have gagits galore we create our own worlds too. I love libraries and still remember patiently labeling the card catalog so I could find books for myself. I loved my language master because it meant I didn't have to bring home 2 or more volumes of the dictionary or the encyclopedia to finish homework. I think the perkins is great for getting frustration out. Who doesn't like the crunching pounding clic-clack of the perkins. Keep using your brain it's the best computer you have. Tiffany
I love my tech, and this is not a blind issue, but everyone uses it and depends on it. I make a point of leavingt it alone sometimes though. I read real books, take a walk instead of a bus, or car, I try to buy natural products instead of things already packaged, cooked, and ready to serve or use. So hopefully I'll keep a perspective, but who knows. Smile.
I'm with Sister Dawn on this one. I think technology is great, and of course, adaptive tech is wonderful, and can be very useful. It has gotten to the point now adays where many jobs require certain technology, so I can see how many workers would struggle to do their jobs without it. However, alternatives do exist, and I think it's important that we keep up with those as well.
There are few tech risks I am aware of, and they are all more general in nature.
One has to learn to do things low level to begin with, to rad braille for instance, not always rely on screen reading. It is proven many times over that braille reading is associated with more successful people, professionally (of course I am not saying that you canot be successful without reading braille, some have managed, but you are more likely to be successful if you read braille).
For math, it is often good to learn to work out the problems by hand, to understand the unerlying principals (calculating averages,distributions and such, though you can easily do it with the push of a button in Excel).
There have been criticisms lately though that math has become boring because we do not allow technology as part of the teaching and force people to do everything the old fashioned way and it makes people lose interest, because a lot of math is repetative and drawn out.
But some of the suggestions here for, how we used to do it, has to do with getting a sighted person to help. That is not a solution to me, that is a problem. An employer is not willing to go and pay extra money so that the bloind employee can hire another person to do the job he/she is supposed to, the solution is to solve the underlying technology problem.
If I need a sighted reader so I can do my job, my job is not efficient and I need to find a better way.
May be sighted person can help, but I would limit such assistance to extremely few hours a week, no more than 4 or 5, and then there has to be strong justification for that.
Sighted programmers can do the actually user interface with a few ouse drags and clicks in a few inutes, but a blind programmer would do it less efficiently and less estatically pleasing in much longer. But the solution is simply to have the blind programmer do all the underlying work and then have his sighted colleague set up the UI and connect it to the underlying classes and function calls already defined in the code.
This was before the gui came into play. So at that time, there was more of an equal playing field, since both the sighted and the blind programmer were using the keyboard. Of course, it wouldn't really make much sense today, since the employer would see how much faster the sighted programmer would be etc. At least, that's what I've heard. At any rate, I've always found mathematics (with the exception of arithmetic and cooking) to be confusing, frustrating and abstract. I'd much rather write it in a calculator or just leave it to someone else. I don't personally need to use most of it in any case.
I am torn on the issue. I feel technology is important but also learning to go without it is important.
Well, the point is that, for some things, there is no such thing as "going without technology".
Stylus or Perkins only write in Braille. If you want to write something a sighted person can read, either learn to write with a pen or pencil (will never be good, you can write basic things and words, but not text), or use technology.
Technology, more than anything, brings us independence. There is no non-technological way to pay your bills, review your bank statement, write reports for sighted teachers/peers/others and read your mail. The alternative is called a sighted person helping you, which is invasive and annoying, if you ask me.
I do not understand this need for "no technology" solutions, simply because they do not exist for a lot of things.
OK gonna date myself here.
Good perspective some of you born in the 1980s.
I was born in 1970, and into a family with no money and limited government resources plus parentage that was afraid of the government for the most part.
I did learn to use a typewriter, at age six. While I don't resent it in the least, I don't ideologize it either: it simply was. It meant Brailling out all of my math, and I do mean the whole thing, and then retyping all of it. Otherwise, how would a sighted instructor possibly be expected to grade it? I spent a year attempting to learn to handwrite, and was an utter failure at it. That's not how my parents or teachers would put it, but here's the deal: you write so it can get read. If someone, without knowing it's the blind kid wrote it, can't read it, there's a fail.
When you're on your fifteenth page on the typewriter, and the ribbon has been out for ten pages, that's a real drag.
In short, once I got into computers, I began exploring things that previously were a drudgery, very repetitive and all the effort was spent making sure I didn't make typing mistakes and that papers lined up properly. I am no super anything, you can go someplace else to read up on your blind person with all A's who went to school in the 70s and would gladly do it all over again ... I made it with B's in about everything, barely B's in math though I did fail it for one year.
We didn't have any better. This wasn't idealism. In fact, when my parents went out and got an electric typewriter with a digital memory you could erase up to a single line in 1985, all my friends teased me and called me 'rich boy' for a couple weeks. None of us had even seen anything like it, not even imagined it. Naturally that typewriter made my work enormously easier, though I still carted the manual one off to school.
There isn't any market advantage to me having written with a manual typewriter on raised-line checks. There's no reason a company will pay me more because at one time in my life I could type a whole page with no more than one error.
No, instead of working on the schoolwork, far to often I worked on the mechanics of getting it done and printed out right. After all, what good is a page load of errors? The teacher's not going to know if you simply can't spell or you're making typing mistakes.
Imagine, you who were born later, you're sitting there thinking and thinking on what to put down, your mind drifts, and you forget where you are on the page. You can't go back and read, because you're in a classroom and need to be typing so the rest of the world around you can even be expected to read it. At least I could type and didn't have to depend upon my failure of handwriting.
I realize the thing about tapes: They suck. Speech is a pain in the ass we all have had to learn to deal with, but even now I've learned it's quicker to just type with speech rather than stop and check the Braille. I still use Braille for programming of course, and proofreading, and still prefer a Braille book for pleasure. I don't even own a talking book player. Naturally some of this will change when I switch over to using an iOS device, but anyway. Tapes for books were terrible. You had to skip around and if you missed something they said, back up, you couldn't just flip pages like a Braille book, or cursor up on the computer.
Really, guys, I can really seriously tell you weren't there. There isn't a market advantage for being nontechnological. I think it was KaylaCookie on here who, when I was describing what I was trying to help my daughter with in Geometry last year she just put it all out there in two quicknotes. Life is what you make of it, technology or otherwise. Skip the stories about people. Life's what you make it, nothing more nothing less. I'm the first to admit I'm pretty much your average guy, earn a lower-middle income, have taken my share of losses along the way. But that's just it: I'm average. This is your average guy's perspective, I imagine what most blind people in my era dealt with.
I say all this because whenever people are discontent they start saying: "Maybe if we had ..." or "Maybe if we didn't have ..." I think it's all in what you do with it.
Here's another example then I'll blow this joint: In the past few months I've been taking online courses with the Coast Guard, since I joined. Now, I'm like a lot of new members my age: not a lot of water experience, but in a post-9/11 world looking for a way to serve, and the Coast Guard has it's volunteer arm, the Auxiliry. However, like everyone else now, I knew virtually nothing when I got in. But because all the classes were online and I could use a Windows reader plus the flash player to view the multimedia content - movies with them lecturing us and stuff, I participated fully. Does that mean I couldn't have in the early nineties? No. However, I can participate far more as an equal because I simply have to ask far less of others. I can take resourcefulness all of us already have and combine it with tools. Then again, what else does any of us do anyway?
I hear all this talk about technology breaking this, or people can't do that anymore, it's no different than what people said when we were kids, or my parents were kids ... only coming from young people who should be instead leveraging it to get ahead, that's rather strange. Pretend you're right, and I'm wrong, I just made up a boo-hoo misadventure for everyone's entertainment, and before it was all great / wonderful / everyone got so much more out of everything ... then what? You're still here now, we are interconnected, people's employability depends on their understanding of technology not because of ideals but because of what it takes to get 'er done. Some of you are acting like a flint knapper showing up in Henry Ford's factory in the 1920s - not a real flint knapper who dealt with real broken flint and hours of frustration, but someone who just loved the idea of flint knapping. Ford would've turned them out.
The most frustrating part of any job search or job in the latter part of the 1980s / early 1990s was how I was going to use the increasing computers, even time clocks, that were there. How much memorization? How much could I keep up? Ideals were far from my mind: paying rent and tuition for college was far closer.
Two more points from me on this topic:
A sighted reader for a programmer? Who are they kidding? Is this another hyped-up fantasy from the Parents of Blind Children rag mag publication or what? They must be on crack! Seriously!
In my early days as a tech weenie I had to deal with the occasionally faxed MSD report. Go ahead hobbyists, look up MSD, generate a full report on your system, use your reader to taap around on the screen and get acquainted with the diagram ... you may find it better than Device Manager ...
But most people then faxed their reports to us because they couldn't get online among other things, hence they called us.
I had a sighted reader read mine to me for awhile before somebody came up with a 'job sharing' type thing, basically I handled a different load and someone else did MSDS.
But that sighted reader constantly said she was intimidated just looking at it. She was no technician: if you had a technician looking at it, they may as well be doing it. I was one of their server people, so obviously, I knew what to tell her to look for, could describe what she should find, I was generally the one who labeled the ticket in need of an MSD report. And, as often happens, what we thought was going on with the user maybe wasn't, so the Memory table, or the I/O stuff looked different because they had a card in there they forgot was there, or something.
She always had trouble with them. She finally came out and told me she had always had trouble with diagrams in school, hated graphs, tables and stuff, but they had put her on the job as reader for these, because she was a low-paid gopher type that did lots of things for us, paperwork, talking to people, basically receptionist stuff.
An MSD report is pittence compared to a lot of things I could think of right now:
What reader would you use to look at a program, with several hundred files, thousands of lines per file? I thought of this today while working: You open a file here, run a Grep (expression for finding stuff) across a whole project full of files, click the one I think is the right result, look through there, enter a paragraph or several of quick and dirty debugging code just so the program will barf variable data so I can see what's wrong with it.
To a non-programmer, it all looks like junk. Yes, you could tell the sighted reader, OK I'm doing a Find, tell me if this window goes away, ok now we should see a big window with maybe hundreds of lines, some of them will be green colored, looking for this name inside this block ... yes it's way scrolled over because it's several levels deep, here let me scroll over so you can actually see it ...
Making a sighted reader try and follow something like that is way beyond reasonable I think.
Now the other side you bring up: Literacy:
I have literally read more material since the mid 1990s when I got access to the Internet than two or three of my lifetimes before then, counting all the books I read for school as a kid.
I haven't had to wait for some organization to deign to transcribe what they may or may not deem blind-worthy. No, just like people right after the invention of the Printing Press, I was no longer a peasant waiting on whatever written material the elite would deign to schling our way. Websites and online repositories contain such a vast array of information on a massive number of topics, owner's manuals, text descriptions of how-to guides, all sorts of things. What I would do if technology were gone or taken from me? I'd survive. Men survive prison, some men even survived Alcatraz. But it's not pretty: there is so much more you either don't participate in, or you have to ask others to do far more for you in reading or explaining stuff than you guys born later can even imagine!
Oh and for what it's worth, people were lazy before technology: Half my classes showed up high sometimes, and I mean really high, bonk your head on the ceiling high. People cut school before there was technology, only they didn't post about it on Facebook so their parents or uncles could read about it. People still got in fights, gave the new kid a swirly, misspelled words and had to write 'em fifty times or whatever they make you do now, misused punctuation, all sorts of things. Only then they blamed it on other things, because, after all, it's easy and even fun to blame it all on something, and make believe the world was better at a time in the past. If you're eighty years old, retired, and living out the rest of your days, it's even completely understandable, and the rest of us will just nod and go along with it. What's a little illusion at the end of life anyway? But ... young people doing it? Now I am gonna sound old, but what the hell are things coming to if young people are bewailing what is and looking backwards? That's unnatural on so many levels, the least of which being, nothing that has ever been invented has subsequently been uninvented.
I dare you, if you really think it was better: Go without any Internet access, no online bill pay, pay extra money for sighted readers for all your bills, use your slate and stylus to write everything down, use your manual typewriter to type on raised-line checks: they are the best for lining everything up square and stuff, since you'll have to. Don't forget to type a bit on a sheet of paper once in awhile and have someone look at it to see the ribbon didn't die, or you could mail someone a blank check by mistake. Assemble stuff without instructions, or have someone read them to you who knows less than half of what you know about it, may be overly intimidated by tables and part numbers, may get frustrated trying to find the English. And when it comes to professional or specialty material, unless you're a lawyer or some other 'approved' profession, good luck getting any of that information in Braille. You'll be lucky to get a "vest pocket dictionary" which nobody uses because it's too small, and it comes in 22 volumes.
When that's all we had, I know I made the most of it. I'm sure most everyone else did too. But why would you want to go back? You can never just reshape an ideal from some distant time, remove all the 'yucky' parts, and create a paradise existence: all the parts made it what it was.
Oh, and you won't play with your kids as much in the park on Saturdays as I got to: you can't shop online, so you have to spend hours going from store to store. Nope, in this terrible era in which we live, one in which all people supposedly do less, we work harder, some of us even work from home / are there when the kids get home, we can make time to do things we previously could not, and we can engage in ways that were either impractical or unrealistic before.
But for all my manstruating on this board, you'll probably continue to believe what you want: it's easier to sit at home and imagine a universe with less technology, where supposedly there were more opportunities to engage, be successful and participate.
Well, the man in the example was only using a sighted reader temporarily until his technology came, at which point, he'd be doing everything on his own. Prior to that, he was just sitting around doing nothing. I think it was very nice of his employer to consider that instead of simply firing him. I normally don't agree with the NFB but this author seems to be very intelligent and he's not just an outsider like me. He was very well acquainted with technology when he wrote this. The link is in my first post.
While I literally have hundreds of books in my computer and never could have had even close to that number in the past, I still recall listening to all sorts of wonderful books from both the Library for the Blind and the local library. Most were even unabridged. That and being read to when I was younger was how I learned to love fiction. I didn't care whether it was the most current book or not, so long as it was good. Yes, you could argue about manuals and things for school or work but not all life revolves around those two. There are people who enjoy reading simply for pleasure, and while the amount of things available was certainly less, that didn't make them any less enjoyable. If even the young are looking backward and questioning things, that only tells me that there is a serious problem out there.
Okay, I'll play devil's advocate for a moment. Mom would have no problem helping me pay my bills, though it is far easier to do things online, since no one answers the phone today and it's a pain going to the post office to get everything done. My manual typewriter from 1908 needs it's inside keys lubricated but it would be a good idea to use it, just for finger exercise. Writing cheques with it is a whole other matter, since, like you, I couldn't see what I was writing, and as I said, I never deal with those in any case. I usually use debit, cash, money order or credit as a last resort. I use my slate and stylus every night and am loving it, but I don't see a problem with a tape recorder for quick notes. They were around since at least the 60s. I even have a very portable one from that time, a Creg, though I have no clue where that particular machine is now, though I have two more modern ones that work nicely. I've never assembled anything serious on my own and would have no clue where to get instructions for doing so, even today. Most of it comes with diagrams, which even modern scanners can't handle. I also get confused with tables and the like. I have a Braille Blazer, which was also available in the 80's, and though it wasn't as cheap as it is today, it was still relatively cheap compared with the other printers of the time. There's also NFB Trans, a DOS translator which is free. Of course, there's Megadots, but now you're talking serious money, even today. My Language Master is from the late 80's and works fine.
But seriously, to go back farther, to the time that you're referencing, would be beyond difficult. Yet to be fair, there's one man who did it all with nothing. He's the most amazing blind man that I've ever heard of in my entire life. Even if he stillh had some sight (not sure), and despite the fact that he lost his sight at eight and wasn't blind from birth (that does make a difference), his accomplishments were amazing!
http://www.csb-cde.ca.gov/History.htm
Look for the section titled Newel Perry. Now we're not talking 1980s, but 1880's! Dr. Perry was a mathematician, teacher and director. He travelled abroad to teach and to study before returning to America and greatly influencing the lives of hundreds of blind people both in and out of the California School for the Blind. If nothing else, that page is definitely worth reading. But I think it's safe to say that Dr. Perry, who died in 1961 at the age of 87, was an extraordinary man for any time.
For the rest of us, as I've said many times, I'm not advocating that we all completely give up technology and become Aimish. I'm just saying that there are certain small things that we should retain such as braille literacy, including writing with a slate and stylus, the ability to use an abacus for when calculators aren't available or don't have batteries, to know how to look things up in a phone book if we're not near a computer and happen to be near someone who can help us (perhaps a child who has never done so), to know how to use a stove if the microwave breaks,, to be able to think of other ways of taking notes if our notetakers crash, to have a system to fall back on if our colour identifiers run out of batteries, to know how to label foods if we left the bar code scanner at a parent's house etc. We need problem solving skills, enjinuity, the ability to look at things from another perspective and to have a plan B incase plan A fails. Sometimes, it involves substituting one form of technology with another and sometimes it means needing to ask for help. But if we're only used to one way of doing things, of believing that our tech will never break, what are we to do when it does?
Okay.
Skip the story about the amazing individual. there are enormous amounts of amazing individuals, Edison, Babbage, ford, Whitney, Gutenberg of course of course.
However, they used what they had at the time to the fullest extent, and built upon it. In other words, amazing human beings *do* stuff.
The technology may have been around in the 1980s I will take your word on that. It was certainly way beyond the price range of most people. And unless you were near a system from which you could acquire it, you were shit out of luck.
But at its core, your arguments, and my mother's, make zero sense. Trust me on this one: This old dog's argued this one while repairing something of my mother's on more than several occasions.
People are always always always more limited before technology not afterwords. Technology only acts as a tool to leverage the resourcefulness they already have. Any of the great leaps have served to decapitate hierarchies, provide more systems for more people to use.
As an example, I already gave the printing press for sighted people, the Internet could easily be said to be the same for the blind.
Farmers in Europe for over three thousand years used the same technologies to farm: They all lived a subsistance lifestyle, their plows were excruciatingly primitive, the list goes on. Read any of Brian Fagan's books if you want to know more.
When new methods came along, birthrates went up, death rates went down, they didn't lose the ability to farm: they simply enhanced what they knew and build bigger and better systems.
Nowadays, you can work from home, if you can manage it, work over the Internet, your sight or lack thereof can be less of an issue. Hell your time zone can be less of an issue. Every time there is a revolution, or a spike in human development, there is a loss.
We lost the tail once, in order to balance properly and move upright. I suppose if people would have been cognitive then, there'd be those that would decry the tail's loss.
For all the funny stories about people becoming lazier, the only thing in real life that's happened, is previously used energy gets spent elsewhere. There is always a gain and loss factor.
But all too often people look at an "amazing" figure from the past, and think it's so amazing what they did then. In many cases, especially real inventors like Bell, Edison, Westinghouse, people that made things which improved other people's lives, they took what was and built on it. Nobody has ever been called "amazing" for holding tightly to an era, or trying to abnormally and unnaturally bend it backwards.
Nobody loses skills. If you can read, you can read. So, use Braille when you have the ability to, and when convenient use a slate. Yes, it is incredibly convenient for some things. So is pen and paper for sighted people.
In fact, much to my surprise, when I was in the food program I got myself an old manual typewriter from the local thrift store, bought a ribbon from Office Depot, took the whole thing apart on the counter and cleaned it, put a ribbon in, and used the thing in the kitchen to write things down. I didn't want a PDA or some other equipment near industrial washing equipment plus I needed to make labels that others could see.
What surprised me was how well I could do not having touched a manual typewriter in over 15 years. You don't lose skills, not that kind.
People are just making that stuff up to support an ideal.
When I was a little boy and used to make fake robots with anything that could pass for electronic components (safely and otherwise), my grandmother gave me a rather stern talking to about how by the year 2000 "boys like me" would have "robots like these running around all over the place!" And then what would we all come to? Those robots would try and run everything.
Ironically, she's still alive, and no closer to understanding the basics of AI ...
Still people always make up things about concepts they're afraid of, and the claim of everyone becoming useless and lazy is at least as old as Ray Bradbury's science fiction of the 1950s.
I'm sorry, but the "use the stove if the microwave breaks" one made me laugh. I use a stove almost every day, and many of us do. Just thought I'd point that out. You can't use a microwave for everything. maybe that was your point, but, anyway, I'm getting off topic here.
People can only read braille if they know how. If, for some reason, it is decided that people don't need it anymore due to the advancements in technology, then that skill, which is still valuable, will be lost. Some losses don't matter. No one will seriously be in trouble if they don't know how to use a turntable or a vcr. But if, for example, their phone breaks and they don't know that all-important number to the person who could help them get home because they always relied on their phone to have it, that's a problem. This is whyI memorise important numbers. Having skills that you can't lose is one thing but if you're never taught them, or if it never occurred to you to use them, you can't rely on them as an alternative when things go wrong. What is AI?
The stove thing was just an example. I could've used that with a coffee maker, as I personally have both a stovetop and electric coffee maker. But some of us, myself included, cook so many things in the microwave, that it seems as if we hardly use the stove or the oven.
to tell this in short, too much of anything is good for nothing.
as per me, I do say the same. we've to learn and if possible, creat more and more advanced technology. that's our human power. On the other hand, we shouldn't depend upon something entirely. like if we wana move to the toilet, just picking the GPS and looking at where we are at present. this is just an example. but I heard some people are doing it and got addicted to the technology that much. I can say that's not fair.
Eat raw vegetables as well sometimes. lol.
Raaj.
Actually, the GPS is a really good example, and plenty of sighted people rely too much on those as well, and they're often not accurate.
What do you mean GPS is often not accurate?
We've used GPS to drive for 3 years now, sometimes across 3 or 4 states, it has been 99% accurate and always got us to within a mile of where we meant to go, where street signs and commonsense could get us the rest of the way.
Agree with Tiff on some points i.e. memorizing phone numbers, basically technology enhances and compliments our basic skill set, but we need to have that skill set in order to appreciate and maximize the usefulness of that technology.
It must be very hard to be a programmer without relying on braille (I know plenty of people who do it, and claim it is faster, but I disagree), abacus is fine for understanding how numbers work, how math works and how sighted people think of mathematics (at least to some degree).
It also makes a cool nonelectronic calculator. *smile*
GPS, like anything else, is only as good as the handler. Better said, technology is only as useful as the handler makes of it.
If you hit your thumb repeatedly with a hammer, that doesn't mean we should all stop using hammers.
You could recursively take your argument all the way backwards in time. Microwave to stove, (which are inherently different and solve different problems), well my mother used to complain nobody knew how to cook food on a wood stove anymore. That was a skill which was necessary at one time.
If people gave up Braille in favor of technology, or print in favor of pictured icons, that isn't a reader's fault or a GUI's fault: that's just stupid miss-application of technology.
And, from what I've read, Braille books were becoming less easy to get in favor of tapes. And that was in the 70s. You got it: tapes, not readers, replaced Braille.
Praise your tape recorder if you must, but as annoying as readers are to use now at times, at least we can check the spelling of a word if all we have is speech. With a tape, you could be forced to listen to a book for school, write a report on it, and completely misspell a character's name. Not because you 'have no skils', not because you 'have issues', but because there is no way from a tape to gather how something is to be spelled.
It wasn't Windows readers, Dos readers, Mac readers, or any other computer that began the reduction in Braille - it was tapes. Tapes and records, which are grossly less efficient for reading than a computer reader.
You say there are more things than "just work", but at least for most of us, work is one of our greatest challenges, and most of the population is supporting the population who is not working and on assistance. You sit there and make choices about industries you think you want or may make. You have all these choices because we pay for you. Yu can believe whatever you want, create whatever fantasy you want about supposed blind trades, look for schools that don't do this, try and try and try to force-fit this all together to match a let's-blame-technology perspective, and all because since you're blind there are exceptions to allow you to be paid for by the rest of us. Yay you, I guess.
My daughter sure won't have these options. She'll graduate, and work whether she believes in something or not, she'll have to pay rent with her own money she goes out and earns. To do that, she'll find work where work actualy is. Why, even now, she's preparing because she has a dream of being a photo journalist. Since that's hit or miss, she's looking into other options she can be prepared for once she's finished high school and college which will allow her to survive while working on her dream.
So make no mistake about it: anyone out there trying to get a real job where the water is really moving, will quit the pipe dreams and fantasies, join the rest of your younger crowd on here who's out looking, bustin' their humps as hard as we working people are, only they're trying to find real jobs. And, as far as I'm concerned, the rest of us owe it to 'em to support them while they try. I know: you can't just go down the street and grab a cab driving or store job. However, do what everyone else on here is doing: apply to something that really does exist. Attempts at revitalizing something that's dead and gone are useless. Making odd connections between strange corners of the Internet and constructing fantastical illusions about pasts that match a profile of something you wish existed, won't get you employed or self-sufficient.
Pull your own load, then maybe you'll prove all the rest of us cuckoos while you're wildly successful using a model based on illusion. Obviously if you set your mind to it you can. You've posted posted posted a zillion times on that Blind Trades thread, the common thread there being for all your efforts, there's nothing there. I'll sooner be employed as an Arctic diver than you will become successful / pay all your expenses / off the government making soap and brooms. And why is that? Well, for all the fantastic soap and amazing brooms you can make, the market for homegrown items like this is small and mainly for the luxury purchaser. So what you have is the fifty-dollar golf ball: A great ball, but who's gonna pay fifty bucks for it? Basically, unless you're rich or someone else is paying your way, you're not going to pay a premium simply to support an ideal / fantastical illusion.
Nostalgia, especially false nostalgia when you weren't even there, is a royal mess!
The old ways will never die tiff. I still use braille and always will, technology just makes life more doable.
Even in the pleasure reading department. I can fit all 14 books of the Wheel of Time onto a 32gb flash card and in my mp3 player of choice (that with about 8 gb to spare). I have copied them to mp3 so I can actually go by chapter (not as efficient as by page I admit, but still good), I could put book marks in if I had the right mp3 player (primitive technology but the player just records the file and the playing time elapsed as a book mark).
The books total over 11000 pages which would equate to around 34000 braille pages, which probably will require more than one truck to pull with me on a plane if I want to get some serious reading done.
Ths all fits in my pocket.
With the popularization of audio books I can go to audible and buy thousands of titles for down to $10 a copy and start listening to it instantly.
Compare it with wanting a book in the 70s where you had to find a volunteer to read it and record it onto a cassette which you will start etting later on.
There is no competition here, technology is the reality and it has done more for us than any volunteer or amazing individual, not even mr Braille himself, though braille is technology, just a comperatively (by today's standards) primitive one, and one we built a lot of the later inventions on.
It's a tool, use it smartly.
True, if you're reading for school or work, tapes and records are less efficient than a computer. But they're still good for pleasure reading. It's alot more convenient for me to take a walkman out than a laptop. But that still is a valid point and I have had it happen in school. I have, as I said in another thread, hundreds of books in my laptop and would like to find an affordable and portable reader of txt files so that I can listen to them. It would certainly make things easier.
Due to the fact that I now have some money, I will be able to afford the supplies to make the soaps and candles. My friend will be abailable in the new year to help me, and once i've learned to do it on my own, which shouldn't take long at all, since I have plenty of advice to follow, I won't even need her assistance. The candles we've never done so that will be something new for both of us. In the meantime, I'll be able to sell the soaps through Pathways to Independence and through other outlets. While you're right about brooms, the number of soap and candle makers out there is huge. This can be a good and a bad thing. But there wouldn't be so many if the demand wasn't so high.
While I'm testing the market and learning the skills for the various trades, I'm also working with The Commission on finding other employment. It was suggested to me that I try supportive employment. This is not a sheltered workshop, but rather, an agency that is used to helping people with disabilities find jobs. They usually work with developmental disabilities but can help the blind as well. They'll help me find a job and coach me through training. There's also the NIB, which I still haven't forgotten, even though they're quite far from me. I don't think that it's impossible to find a job that doesn't involve computers or an office, just more difficult than it used to be.
"used to be?" People - particularly blind people - working those jobs lived a subsistance lifestyle.
Do you mean factory work or trades. In the first, I can't do much except have an open mind so that I would eventually be put on jobs with a higher pay and also try to finish as many tasks as possible so that I get paid extra ontop of the base sallary, though each factory is different. As for the latter, I can't say how things will fair today versus in the past. We have the advantage of being able to use the net to advertise and to do business, which wasn't available then. But we also have the drawback of the bad economy. This is why I want to learn more than one trade, so that if one thing doesn't sell well, I can try to sell another.
I see both sides of the issue, but I'm more oriented to the technology side. I love reading braille books, but sometimes that just isn't feasible. I can't take a bookshelf into my small room and put two books on it. (I don't have that big of books anyway except for textbooks) I can't put the bookshelf in even if I have five books on it. It's not possible. After all, most of my books come from the library of congress anyway. So I use a book sense. I have to use a GPS because I can get pretty lost if I don't. The braillest messes up the maps so much that I might as well be in Mongolia for all I know.
I used a Perkins brailler, and I could fall back on it if necesary, but the blind and the sighted should be on par. The average sighted person has no typewriter, and doesn't know how to use it. Perkinses and slates produce "fields of dots" illegible to sighted people. It is time to be connected, and do things as close to the sighted population as possible. Software is better than hardware that is bulky. It is much easier to carry a laptop than a brailler, and your options are much less limited one a computer than a brailler. The mechanical age is over. The information age is now. And tiff, you'll have to live with it. It is OK to play arround with dos and early operating systems. But for the current era, it's computers we have to go with. And hopefully, they'll be durable enough to be the devices we use all of the time. That's why those delicate computers with one hour batteries are not used anymore. Now is the day of computers that can survive drops, and have batteries designed to last the maximum. I normally agree with you, but I think you're partially wrong here.
Oh, and Rat, I never new you used hearing aids.
Braille has it's place, though I was thinking more along the lines of jotting down quick notes, reading signs, labeling foods and so on, not of lugging around huge braille books. GPS is a wonderful thing and I'd love to own The Kapten if I had the money. But why would the braillist mess up the maps? I've used some fairly good maps in my time and they weren't even professional but were written on a raised line drawing kit by my history teacher. So I'd assume that an actual braillist, using a computer and embosser capable of producing graphics, would do an even better job. That said, I'm not sure how well I would do if I had to read an actual road map or corelate said map to my actual surroundings. How on Earth can someone not know how to use a typewriter? Both manual and electric ones are extremely simple and easy to understand.
I've actually found that most older laptops etc. last far longer than modern ones, particularly now that there are so many cheap imports from China. Most break if you drop them once or twice and only recently has their battery life begun to improve. I know of DOS palmtops with huge amounts of battery life and most modern machines don't even come close to them in that regard.
The reason the braillest messes up the maps is because they have an I.Q. of aproximately negative 18889273461856263656273471238483958203571667342665347185626346657384727173582646366634411. I have some very good atlases, but a map of Asia is not what I want when I'm going somewhere. The only problem with my old HP laptop with that great five hour battery is that it weighed thirty pounds. That didn't make it easy to carry. No compare that to some of the other laptops out there. Mac book: ten hours. Dell notebook, seven hours. HP thirty pound brick 8580, 5 hours (on a good battery). The other problem is the batteries die out quickly. Believe it or not, I still have that thirty pound laptop. It's not a laptop anymore. It's just a lighter desktop. The power chord must be connected at all times because one hundred percent battery is twenty three minutes. Before I got the battery replacement (with a used one) 100% was 18 minutes. And that's not useful. By the way, the used battery was like five dollars and now I know why. And yes, I made up the name hp brick 8580.
Red alert! Did I hear records mentioned? Why oh why does anyone still listen to those things?
Any sort of blind map is extremely limited in terms of what information it can give the user, and all maps lack an important feature .. the ability to tell you where you are.
For a blind user, this is even more important as it is hard to figure out a street name without having someone sighted to ask.
If you have an iPhone the LookAround app costs a whooping 6 dollars and can provide a lot of information for the lost blindy.
Its battery life is fantastic and its feature set and hardware out performs any ancient dos tablet by a considerably considerable factor.
Plus, you know, it is even a phone too and it has speech and braille built-in, out of the box, no ancient hardware synths to install.
And the whole package costs all of $199 for the U.S. user with AT&T contract and 2-year commitment.
Doubt you can find Columbus era dos tablets for that price, plus they do not have internet, do not have GPS and are not accessible without external synths and some software, and would external synths have a good battery life?
True about maps for the blind. I actually read a fascinating article on the haptic sense versus vision and it explained the difficulties of translating a visual map or image into something that a blind person can understand. I don't have it available but will see if I can find it. That's great about the IPhone but not if you're already locked into a Family plan with TMobile. I'm not even sure if it works with said company. Is it a GSM phone? In any case, I'm sure it's more expensive if you don't commit to a two-year contract with ATnT. I've never used the Master Touch, though I do have all the equipment, disks and manuals. I should try it out one day. I do know of Atlass, the program that allows you to download a map and put it in a laptop or notetaker and Strider, a very early gps system that works with DOS, but that's about it. I've never tried these either so can't comment. But to be fair, I've heard that Strider was a bit heavy and bulky. The Kapten sounds very interesting, since it's voice-activated and talks you through everything. Plus, there are no contracts involved. It's just a one-time purchase. I have an early version of the Trecker and a receiver for use with my Braille Note but I'm not sure where I put the compact flash card and haven't really looked into using the program. As for synthesizers, the only ones that I've delt with extensively are the Echos and the Braille Lite 2000. The Echo, which runs off a standard 9-volt battery, has an excellent battery life. The Braille Lite is okay, though I don't think it lasts as long.
If you have an old trecker, you can still upgrade. As long as the device isn't broken, it should still work. I have the latest firmware and the royaltech 2100 reciever they send with it. It's (though not the best in the world) moderately good for walking and riding a bike.
Do they put the new stuff on compact flash cards because that's what my Braillenote uses. I actually never use that device anymore, since I'm always using my laptop. I also need to try upgrading Keysoft or something, because the battery no longer holds it's charge. I think that it's a software rather than a hardware issue.
When the Sendero group guy demoed the Kapten in San Diego last year, it found one restaurant within a 35 mile radius, and this was downtown San Diego with 4 or 5 restaurants on the premises. Of course, Sendero is a competitor so they probably like to point out the most negative facts, but I would definitely check on the map quality before purchasing something like the Kapten and, personally, I would just buy an iPhone with built in gps maps and the LookAround app for $6 and be done with it.
Not as good as the Trekker, but probably good enough, or get a Nokia phone with MobileSpeak 4.6 and the Ovi maps from Nokia, though it may end up being 400 or 500 dollars, not sure exactly how much.
The compatible phones should be $150 or less through Craigslist, the software is, I think, $200 new, but you might be able to get it on contract or used or somehow lower price, and I am not sure of the Ovi map price, may be it is built in already.
This way you definitely have a phone with gps and maps for less than a very specialized device.
I firmly believe we should go after mainstream tech and demand it be made accessible, rather than have special things made just for us blind people.
That way we end up paying more, risk getting inferior quality products and are left behind.
Why should we have to pay someone up to $40000 to manually transcribe our math books into Nemeth, just because the publisher refuses to expose the Math ML code that they have already, in the eBook format. Sure A.t. would have to catch up a bit and make sure the embossing is accurate, but currently they are hesitant to do so because everyone seems to think the current manual transcription is the only way to go and no one dares ask for something new.
When I buy an eBook, shouldn't I expect to be able to read it, emboss it or do whatever I want with it?
Shouldn't it be my right to expect that?
Should I have to buy a special eBook player for the Blind that only plays HumanWare coded eBooks (just a random example, not an actual product).
No, we need to demand to be a part of technology and innovations, and have our needs considered, we can't sit behind and hope for some government sponsorred kindly hearted engineer with good skills to one day make something just for us, and for some fund to pay the extra $5000 it costs to make the thing because it is produced in very small numbers so the R&D costs have to be recouped on much fewer units sold.
Of course we need special technology, such as braille embossing braille displays and screen reading, and there will be specialized apps that, perhaps, one canot expect software and hardware companies to always consider, but the current mind set seems to be favorring special solutions for the blind retrofitted after the fact, not to consider us when making the thing in the first place, and it is up to us to change that.
This is the reason I really applaud what Apple is doing, even if VoiceOver is not my favorite screen reader on a PC platform.
I hope this is more than just a temporary fad, and represents longterm commitment to accessibility, but being able to buy an iPhone and turn on a screen reader immediately, isn´t that a really awesome feeling?
Thanks for sharing the down side of this device. I had no idea that it could be that inaccurate. Not everyone has $600 to shell out on a phone, especially if all they want is a gps unit.
On the other hand, if they want all the other features, it might be worth it. One of the advantages to mainstream tech is that, since so much of it is made, it's easier to get older models. It's almost impossible to do that with the adaptive devices. For instance, this is one of my absolute dream machines. It sounds extremely modern but I just learned it's no longer available.
http://www.maxiaids.com/store/prodView.asp?idproduct=8863&idstore=6&product=MobilEyes-Basic-Portable-Reading-Machine-for-the-Blind-and-Low-Vision
But this may mean that if I can find one, it may be much cheaper. I have mixed feelings on mainstream tech. While I think that it's important to use it, I'm also the type who won't buy something unless it's 100% accessible. My microwave is totally mainstream but it's the kind with one dial so it's easy to use. I see no point in buying an expensive microwave specifically made for the blind while I could have this fully accessible one for a fraction of the price. The same holds true for my laptop, which I got for $284 and my free NVDA screen reader versus a laptop or notetaker that's entirely designed for the blind.
Despite my dislike of the touchscreen interface, it seems that Apple has made their products completely accessible. But I'm not sure how far other companies are willing to go in that area. Many just slap something on a device and call it good. So then, you have to buy extra software or hardware to make the product accessible. Furthermore, if you need technical assistance, it's far less likely that your average person in tech support will be able to help you resolve your issues because either they don't know how to use the software or hardware that you bought, or as in the case of Apple's products, they don't know the blind way of doing things. So they may tell you how to fix an IPhone or a Macbook but their instructions might not be compatible with Voiceover. As for other companies, if it's a software issue and you call the company that makes the accessible product, if your speech is down but everything else is working correctly, you have no way of fixing it on your own.
But with adaptive technology, everything is built to work together. It costs far more, which I realise can definitely be a factor for those of us on a budget, but the people specialise in helping the blind and can offer more assistance. I also like the fact that they make the interfaces truly accessible, with real buttons, dials and other tactile features so we don't have to deal with touch screens and makers of adaptive tech are more likely to listen to their customer base about adding or subtracting certain features from their products if they relate to blindness. If you tried that with a mainstream company, they most likely wouldn't do it unless it benefited a large variety of people, most of whom are sighted.
Why not just have them give you the book in rtf so that you can run it through a translation program and either give the customer the braille file or emboss the book for them? It should be your right to expect the same level of equality when buying an ebook. But they should provide them in regular txt, rtf and doc instead of specialised formats. Even if you signed up with a service for the blind, to insure that this feature isn't taken advantage of by the sighted, it shouldn't be that difficult to make two versions of the ebook. That way, it can be read by everything and not just a specialised reader.
I must admit that, when I went into the Apple store and tried out the Macbook for the first time, I was really impressed. This is before I knew about interaction and the fact that there are system-wide keyboard commands that they neglect to mention in the Voiceover tutorials, only giving us one way of doing the same thing, which is often more complicated than the mainstream variety. In any case, I liked the fact that I could just turn on the computer and have it speak to me. But now, NVDA and a few other screen readers have the option of portable installation onto a card, a thumb drive or even an mp3 player, so you can just plug one of those into a Windows machine and try it out without having to install anything on it.
The trecker pda unit has a keyboard that fits over a touch screen. The maps are stored on SD cards, but there is a compact flash slot on the divice. The gps program is very good. The program doesn't run on a braille note, so we may be talking about something different.
Mine is specifically designed for the Braillenote. I thought it's name was Trecker but could be wrong.
The device I have is a small PDA with some software. It has a good gps, but Humanware just discontinued it. Reasons unknown.
As for math, math is a non-linear and non-ascii based language. In other words, you need something like LaTeX (not to be confused with latex, though latex is certainly a wonderful material). In math the relatitve location of the symbols matter (subscripts, superscripts, roots, integral signs, fractions etc).
There are two ways to encode mathematics:
a. LaTeX, which is an html type language. It is very good and it can be used to consume and produce nice math, but it is wordy and there are various flavors of it, so it is not entirely standardized, so it is hard to write assistive technology around it or
b. MathML, which is an html like standard for displaying mathematics, and published by the World Wide Web Consortium, now in version 3. This is more standardized and already software has been written to speak math expressions and to emboss them in braille, or to display them with LaTeX if the user prefers. If we got more publishers providing the MathML we could have more technology vendors put more work into accurate transcribing it into braille, thus saving tens of thousands of dollars and getting the math into users hands on time, instead of months late.
And, even with regular text, text and rtf files have significant draw backs. You can't easily skip between chapters, use the table of contents, create links on words with special meaning explained in an appendix, go to a given page number (in a plain .rtf file the pages do not necessarily correspond to a printed page in a book), so there are a lot of drawbacks for providing text in such a plain format. If there weren't people wouldnot bother inventing Daisy or ePub or all of these standards.
Yes, you may get better interfaces (though you definitely judge touch screens without ever having tried them really, so it is a dangerous road to go down), but you pay twice or ten or twenty times the prices, you rely solely on one, or a handful of companies to provide all the software and functionality you want. Is that worth the tradeoff? And you run a risk of software being discontinued like the WayFinder access, and 3000 users almost being powerless to do anything about it. Fortunately CodeFactory and Nokia picked up the slack after blind folks got together to complain and provided a new solution, if WayFinder had been a commercial product with millions of users they could not have discontinued it like they did.
So you have more security.
I still think, and I know, interfaces need to be adjusted, accessibility solutions need to be found, and that is where blind engineers and companies come in. I think there's room for Jaws and Window Eyes and such, for making Excel accessible, or custom scripting music production software or providing custom scripting and consultancy, but I like seeing mainstream companies take accessibility seriously.
I love the old stuff, yes, but it's slow, cumbersome, and no longer that efficient. why use the slower method when you could do the same task just as well faster with better equipment?
Out of date is out of date. That's for sure.