4448 lines
252 KiB
Plaintext
4448 lines
252 KiB
Plaintext
THE BRAILLE MONITOR
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Barbara Pierce, Editor
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Published in inkprint, Braille, on talking-book disc,
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and cassette by
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THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND
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MARC MAURER, PRESIDENT
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National Office
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1800 Johnson Street
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Baltimore, Maryland 21230
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* * * *
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Letters to the President, address changes,
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subscription requests, orders for NFB literature,
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articles for the Monitor, and letters to the Editor
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should be sent to the National Office.
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* * * *
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Monitor subscriptions cost the Federation about twenty-five
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dollars per year. Members are invited, and non-members are
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requested, to cover the subscription cost. Donations should be
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made payable to National Federation of the Blind and sent to:
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National Federation of the Blind
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1800 Johnson Street
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Baltimore, Maryland 21230
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* * * *
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THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND IS NOT AN ORGANIZATION
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SPEAKING FOR THE BLIND--IT IS THE BLIND SPEAKING FOR THEMSELVES
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ISSN 0006-8829 THE BRAILLE MONITOR
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A PUBLICATION OF THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND
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CONTENTS
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JANUARY, 1994
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PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2ND U.S./CANADA CONFERENCE
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ON TECHNOLOGY FOR THE BLIND
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NOTE FROM THE CHAIRMAN
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by Kenneth Jernigan
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LIST OF CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS
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THE 64 SQUARES OF THE CHESS BOARD
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by Raymond Kurzweil
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EMERGING RESEARCH GOALS IN THE BLINDNESS FIELD
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by T. V. Cranmer
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INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION IN THE FIELD OF TECHNOLOGY: AN AGENDA
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FOR ACTION TOWARDS THE 21ST CENTURY
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by Ruperto Ponz
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OBSERVATIONS ON THE STATE OF TECHNOLOGY FOR THE BLIND
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by David Andrews
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PRIDE AND PROFIT: OBSERVATIONS OF A FREE MARKETEER
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by Tony Schenk
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LISTENING FOR EFFECTIVENESS
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by James Morrell
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SUMMARY OF THURSDAY AFTERNOON DISCUSSION
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PROBLEMS AND CHALLENGES OF THE GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE
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by James Thatcher
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A QUESTION OF WINDOWS
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by James C. Halliday
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PROBLEMS AND CHALLENGES OF THE GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE
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by Curtis Chong
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SUMMARIES OF PRESENTER REMARKS
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SUMMARY OF FRIDAY CONFERENCE DISCUSSION
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SUMMARY OF SATURDAY CONFERENCE DISCUSSION
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Copyright National Federation of the Blind, Inc., 1994[LEAD
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PHOTO: North-South view of the International Braille and
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Technology Center for the Blind. CAPTION: On November 16, 1990,
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the doors of the National Braille and Technology Center for the
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Blind opened for the first time. The facility was located in the
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central courtyard building at the National Center for the Blind,
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and was so spacious that it was hard to believe that Braille
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production and speech technology would ever fill it. During the
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first U.S./Canada Conference on Technology for the Blind, held at
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the National Center for the Blind in September of 1991, the
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National Braille and Technology Center for the Blind became the
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International Braille and Technology Center for the Blind
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(IBTCB), reflecting the growing worldwide significance of the
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operation. But time and technology march on, and by early 1993 it
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was clear that the array of embossers, synthesizers, computers,
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and related hardware and software was about to outgrow the space
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available in the central courtyard building. The decision was
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made to devote the street level, Johnson Street wing of the main
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building at the National Center for the Blind to an enlarged and
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expanded facility, complete with specially designed display
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tables, spacious offices, a museum, a large conference room, and
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a kitchen. Pictured here, the IBTCB covers 20,000 square feet of
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prime display space. It opened just in time to be the symbol and
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centerpiece of the 2nd U.S./Canada Conference on Technology for
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the Blind, which occurred November 4-6, 1993.]
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[PHOTO/CAPTION: Euclid Herie (left), Mary Ellen Jernigan, and
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Kenneth Jernigan stand talking in the International Braille and
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Technology Center for the Blind.]
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[PHOTO: Conference attendees seated in 4th floor conference room
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at the National Center for the Blind. CAPTION: Approximately 65
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people filled the large fourth-floor conference room at the
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National Center for the Blind for the opening session of the 2nd
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U.S./Canada Conference on Technology for the Blind.]
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PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2ND U.S./CANADA CONFERENCE
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ON TECHNOLOGY FOR THE BLIND
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November 4 to 6, 1993
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Planned and Hosted by the National Federation of the Blind
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Conference Chairman, Kenneth Jernigan
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Note from the Chairman: In September of 1991 representatives
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of four organizations, all members of the Committee on Joint
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Organizational Effort, planned the First U.S./Canada Conference
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on Technology for the Blind, which was hosted by the National
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Federation of the Blind and held at the National Center for the
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Blind in Baltimore. (See the January, 1992, issue of the Braille
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Monitor for a full account of that important meeting.) The
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gathering was significant in part because those present, senior
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officials of service-providing and consumer organizations and
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technology producers in the blindness field, all had the
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authority to make policy decisions and set their own
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organizational goals based on what they learned and on what the
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group decided. One of several decisions made at the close of that
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meeting was to reconvene in two years. That gathering took place
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November 4 to 6, 1993, and again the National Federation of the
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Blind hosted the event.
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It began Thursday morning with greetings from Marc Maurer,
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President of the National Federation of the Blind, and Dr. Euclid
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Herie, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Canadian
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National Institute for the Blind, followed by the conference
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keynote address. After coffee the remainder of the morning was
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devoted to presentations by four speakers, and following lunch
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there was another panel discussion. The second half of the
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afternoon was devoted to tours of the newly completed facility
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occupied by the International Braille and Technology Center for
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the Blind. A reception and dinner completed first-day conference
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activities.
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Friday morning began with a panel of speakers discussing the
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Graphical User Interface. Following coffee and again after lunch
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there were lively general discussions. The remainder of Friday
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was devoted to informal, small-group or private discussions, and
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on Saturday morning consumers and service providers discussed
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issues of mutual interest to them.
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In my view and that of a number of other participants, this
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conference was, if possible, even more productive than the first
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one two years ago. Much will now depend, however, on what occurs
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as a result of the discussions begun in early November. It is
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extremely important that the technology experts among us settle
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down to work on the software and consumer-product access problems
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identified during our meetings and that the consumers and service
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providers then use our joint strength and creativity to influence
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mass-market computer program producers and consumer-technology
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manufacturers to insure that blind people have continued and
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increasing access to their products.
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Gathering to become better acquainted and to exchange ideas
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was an important step. But the crisis facing the blindness field
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today is as serious as any we have ever faced. Blind computer
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users increasingly find that their inability to access the GUI-
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based programs being used more and more in the workplace is
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costing jobs. Unless something is done to counteract the trend,
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the situation will only get worse. As if this were not bad
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enough, household appliances and publicly accessible information
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terminals are increasingly unuseable to anyone who cannot read
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the LCD or CRT screen displays. Therefore, the future jobs of
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thousands of blind people and their ability to use household
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appliances and deal electronically with the rest of the world in
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years to come may well depend upon our capacity today to work
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together for the common good. The challenge is great. Let us all
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hope that we are now in a better position than ever before to
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meet it successfully. Here is the list of participants in the 2nd
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U.S./Canada Conference on Technology for the Blind:
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Kenneth Jernigan, President, North America/Caribbean Region,
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World Blind Union, Baltimore, Maryland
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Euclid Herie, Treasurer, World Blind Union; President and
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Chief Executive Officer, Canadian National Institute for the
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Blind, Toronto, Ontario
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Marie Amerson, President, Association of State Educational
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Consultants for the Visually Impaired, Macon, Georgia
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David Andrews, Director, International Braille and
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Technology Center for the Blind, National Federation of the
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Blind, Baltimore, Maryland
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Laurie Bellefontaine, National Director of Technology,
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Canadian Council of the Blind
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Deane Blazie, President, Blazie Engineering, Forest Hill,
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Maryland
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Geraldine Braak, President, Canadian Council of the Blind,
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Powell River, British Columbia
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John Brabyn, Program Director, Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research
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Foundation, San Francisco, California
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Curtis Chong, Senior Systems Programmer, IDS Financial
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Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota
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Charles Cook, President, Roudley Associates, Owings Mills,
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Maryland
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Neil Cooper, Software Engineer, Syntha-Voice Computers,
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Inc., Hamilton, Ontario
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Tim Cranmer, Chairman, Research and Development Committee,
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National Federation of the Blind, Louisville, Kentucky
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Frank Kurt Cylke, Director, National Library Service for the
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Blind and Physically Handicapped, Library of Congress,
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Washington, D.C.
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Suzanne A. Dalton, President, Association of Instructional
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Resource Centers for the Visually Impaired, Tampa, Florida
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Judy Dixon, Consumer Relations Officer, National Library
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Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Washington,
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D.C.
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Frederick Downs, Jr., Director, Prosthetic and Sensory Aids
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Service, Veterans Health Administration, Washington, D.C.
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Shirley Dupmeier, Member of National Council, Consumer,
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Canadian National Institute for the Blind, Toronto, Ontario
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Paul Edwards, American Council of the Blind, North Miami,
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Florida
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Carl E. Foley, President, Blinded Veterans Association,
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Washington, D.C.
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Paul Fontaine, Specialist, Clearinghouse on Computer
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Accommodations, General Services Administration, Washington, D.C.
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Jim Fruchterman, President, Arkenstone, Sunnyvale,
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California
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Ritchie Geisel, President, Recording for the Blind,
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Princeton, New Jersey
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Greg Guidice, Vice President of Marketing for Adaptive
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Products, Xerox Imaging Systems, Inc., Peabody, Massachusetts
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James C. Halliday, President, Humanware, Inc., Loomis,
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California
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Ted Henter, President, Henter-Joyce, Inc., St. Petersburg,
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Florida
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Raymond Kurzweil, President, Kurzweil Applied Intelligence,
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Waltham, Massachusetts
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Mary Frances Laughton, Chief, Social and Informatics
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Applications, Industry and Science Canada, Ottawa, Ontario
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Jose Luis Lorente Barajas, Technical Advisor, Spanish
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National Organization of the Blind (O.N.C.E.), Madrid, Spain
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Greg Lowney, Senior Program Manager, Accessibility and
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Disability Group, Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Washington
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Gary Magarrell, Executive Director, Ontario Division,
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Canadian National Institute for the Blind, Toronto, Ontario
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Vicki Mains, National Manager, Technical Aids, Canadian
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National Institute for the Blind, Toronto, Ontario
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David Mansoir, Chairman, Information and Technology
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Division, Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the
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Blind and Visually Impaired, Mountain View, California
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Marc Maurer, President, National Federation of the Blind,
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Baltimore, Maryland
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Barbara McCarthy, President-Elect, Association for Education
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and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired, Richmond,
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Virginia
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Dale McDaniel, Vice President for Marketing, Artic
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Technologies, Troy, Michigan
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Peter Merrill, President, The Betacom Group, Mississauga,
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Ontario
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James Morrell, President, TeleSensory Corporation, Mountain
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View, California
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Caryn Navy, Vice President, Raised Dot Computing, Madison,
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Wisconsin
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Gilles Pepin, Director, Visuaide 2000, Inc., Longueil,
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Quebec
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Ruperto Ponz Lazaro, Chairman, World Blind Union/Committee
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on Technology, Madrid, Spain
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Lloyd Rasmussen, Senior Staff Engineer, National Library
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Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Library of
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Congress, Washington, D.C.
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Rachel Rosenbaum, President, National Council of Private
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Agencies for the Blind, Newton, Massachusetts
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Noel Runyan, President, Personal Data Systems, Campbell,
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California
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Mohymen Saddeek, President, Technology for Independence,
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Inc., Boston, Massachusetts
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James Sanders, National Director, Government Relations and
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International Services, Canadian National Institute for the
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Blind, Toronto, Ontario
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Leroy Saunders, President, American Council of the Blind,
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Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
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Tony Schenk, President, Enabling Technologies Company,
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Stuart, Florida
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Elliot Schreier, Director, National Technology Center,
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American Foundation for the Blind, New York, New York
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Larry Skutchan, President, Microtalk, Texarkana, Texas
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Yakov Soloveychik, President, BAUM U.S.A., Encino,
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California
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Susan Spungin, Associate Executive Director for Program
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Services, American Foundation for the Blind, New York, New York
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Joe Sullivan, President, Duxbury Systems, Inc., Littleton,
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Massachusetts
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Marc Sutton, Access Products Manager, Berkeley Systems,
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Inc., Berkeley, California
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Stephen Tappin, Technical Aids Coordinator, Ontario
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Division, Canadian National Institute for the Blind, Toronto,
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Ontario
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James Thatcher, Researcher, IBM Corporation, Yorktown
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Heights, New York
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Tuck Tinsley, President, American Printing House for the
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Blind, Louisville, Kentucky
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Jocelyne Tremblay, Director, Direction des Services
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hors-Quebec et programme d'aides technique, Sillery, Quebec
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Louis Tutt, President, Council of Schools for the Blind,
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Baltimore, Maryland
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David Vogel, President, National Council of State Agencies
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for the Blind, Jefferson City, Missouri
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Dennis Wyant, Director, Vocational Rehabilitation and
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Counseling Services, Veterans Administration, Washington, D.C.
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____________________
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Following are the texts of the presentations made at the
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conference. Summaries of those remarks not submitted in writing
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for publication as well as highlights of the discussions held
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during conference sessions are also included.
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[PHOTO: Portrait. CAPTION: Raymond Kurzweil.]
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THE SIXTY-FOUR SQUARES OF THE CHESSBOARD
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by Raymond Kurzweil
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From the Editor: Dr. Kurzweil was the founder of Kurzweil
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Computer Products and the creative genius behind the Kurzweil
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Reading Machine, which in the mid-seventies was the first
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successful attempt to scan printed text and read it aloud using
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computer technology and artificial speech. Dr. Kurzweil has gone
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on to pursue other interests and now heads another company,
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Kurzweil Applied Intelligence. He continues to be interested in
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computer access for blind people, and he accepted the invitation
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to keynote the 2nd U.S./Canada Conference on Technology for the
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Blind. This is what he said:
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Having been in this field for many years, I was impressed
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with Dr. Jernigan's ability to gather together all the leaders of
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this field in the first of these conferences. That was certainly
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a stirring and unprecedented event. This meeting actually marks a
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personal milestone for me. This week marks exactly twenty years
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that I have been in this field. I started Kurzweil Computer
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Products to develop a reading machine for the blind exactly
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twenty years ago with a $33,000 grant from Johnson and Johnson.
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The discussion at that meeting and the recommendations that came
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forth were quite substantial; and, given the expanded prominence
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of this group here, this is a very propitious meeting as well.
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Dr. Jernigan asked me to talk to you today about the nature
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of information technology and the impact it is having on our
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world. We live in a world today in which all of our knowledge,
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all of our creations, all of our insights, all of our ideas, our
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cultural expressions--pictures, movies, art, sound, music, books,
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and the secret of life itself--are all being digitized, captured,
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and understood in sequences of ones and zeroes.
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I speak to many different groups: computer scientists and
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engineers, librarians, musicians, magazine publishers, doctors,
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graphic artists, architects, researchers of different kinds. All
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of them, in diverse ways, are experiencing the same thing: the
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digitization of their knowledge bases, their methods, and the
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expressions of their work. Those of you who are working with
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information technology to help overcome communication barriers
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understand the significance of these developments all too well,
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and that's one reason I've been looking forward to speaking with
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you this morning.
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As we'll discuss a little later, we will have the technology
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in the next ten to fifteen years largely to overcome the
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handicaps that are associated with visual, auditory, and other
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disabilities. What I like to call the age of knowledge is also
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transforming the nature of wealth itself and affecting deeply all
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of our political and economic institutions. So I'd like to talk
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to you today about the changing nature of wealth. I'd also like
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to share from my own experience a strategy for fostering
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innovation in this emerging information age. And then we'll talk
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a little bit about the impact of all this technology on the next
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decade and the next century.
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Now you may have noticed that there seems to be an intense
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preoccupation of late with the economy; and, if you've paid
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attention to the news in recent months, you know that economic
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issues have been dominating the national consciousness. But for
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all of the attention, I think most people still find the subject
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confusing. I'm reminded of the economics professor who year after
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year has the questions to his final exam stolen by his students
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and explains why he's really not upset about this. "The questions
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are always the same anyway," he points out; "it's the correct
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answers that keep changing." A lot of people feel that's why
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economics differs from science. But if you pay close attention to
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computer science, you know that the correct answers keep changing
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here too.
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Today the correct answer to the question of how to advance
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economic competitiveness is to foster the creation of
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intellectual property, which is information--that is sequences of
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1's and 0's that have economic value. That has not always been
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the case in human history, and I would like to share with you my
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view of why the world has changed in this way.
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Now I'm not an economist, but that won't inhibit me from
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sharing with you economic opinions. Very few people are inhibited
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from expressing economic opinions. That is, I am sure, very
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frustrating to economists. My own background is in signal
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processing and pattern recognition, and very few people express
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opinions about signal processing and pattern recognition, which
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is another reason I have been looking forward to talking to you
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today, for you are a group that understands the importance of
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accessing patterns of information.
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In this field we recreate worlds inside the computer. And
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the ramifications of doing this go far beyond mere pictures and
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sounds but are part of a transformation of society the
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implications of which we are only beginning to understand. They
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say that war is too important to leave to the generals; I've
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always felt that signal processing and pattern recognition are
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too important to leave to us engineers. Ours is the first
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generation to live through the early stages of what I've called
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the Age of Intelligent Machines.
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Translating information from one medium to another,
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transforming visual information to auditory information, for
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example, has always inherently been on the cutting edge of
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computer architectures, so we have perhaps a clearer vision than
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most of the importance of this era, but do we truly understand
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the significance of the invention of the computer?
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When the telephone, another communication technology, was
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first invented, the chief engineer of the British post office
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dismissed the news with the statement, "This is no big deal; we
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have plenty of messenger boys." The mayor of Philadelphia had
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considerably more insight into the importance of this new
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development. "This is of great significance," he said. "Someday
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every city will have one." The first programmable computer ever
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built was the Zuse-3, built by a German tinkerer named Konrad
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Zuse. He presented his invention to his original sponsor, the
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German Aircraft Research Institute of the Third Reich. The chief
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engineer in charge explained to Zuse, "The German aircraft is the
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best in the world. I cannot see what we could possibly calculate
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to improve on," and they withdrew their funding.
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The first commercially produced electronic computer, the
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Univac, was built by Remington Rand. They commissioned a market
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study which concluded that eventually, someday, a worldwide
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market would develop for fifty computers. If I look back on my
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own career, I think I have bought those fifty computers myself.
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Today we may have more vision than the chief engineer of the
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British post office or the chief engineer of the German Aircraft
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Research Institute, but the common wisdom is, I believe, perhaps
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more akin to the view of the mayor of Philadelphia. Society today
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sees the computer as a mere facilitator of information, as a tool
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that provides some added efficiency. But I see it as something
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quite different. To me, the emergence of machine intelligence can
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be seen from two perspectives: as a turning point in human
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history and as a major milestone in the evolution of life on this
|
||
planet, more significant than when animals first left their
|
||
watery habitats and took their first steps on land.
|
||
Let me first share with you the former perspective--the
|
||
significance of machine intelligence in the history of mankind.
|
||
This will lead us to the latter perspective, the view from the
|
||
flow of evolution.
|
||
The industrial revolution of the last two centuries, the
|
||
first Industrial Revolution, was characterized by machines that
|
||
extended, multiplied, and leveraged our physical capabilities.
|
||
With these new machines humans could manipulate objects for which
|
||
our muscles alone were inadequate and carry out physical tasks at
|
||
previously unachievable speeds. As a result the world during this
|
||
period was hungry for natural resources and labor.
|
||
Mao said that "power comes from the barrel of a gun." And
|
||
that statement was true when he said it. But he said it in the
|
||
last possible decade in which one could make that statement,
|
||
because through physical coercion you could control natural
|
||
resources. If you could control natural resources and compel
|
||
people to labor, you could control wealth. And while not
|
||
providing the happiest or most productive workers, it worked well
|
||
enough.
|
||
The second industrial revolution, however, the one that is
|
||
now in progress, is based on machines that extend, multiply, and
|
||
leverage, not our physical, but our mental abilities. A
|
||
remarkable aspect of this new technology is that it uses almost
|
||
no natural resources. Silicon chips use infinitesimal amounts of
|
||
sand and other readily available materials. They use
|
||
insignificant amounts of electricity.
|
||
As electronics, computers, and other forms of information
|
||
technology, (bioengineering, for example) grow smaller and
|
||
smaller, the material resources utilized are becoming an
|
||
inconsequential portion of their value. Indeed, software uses
|
||
virtually no resources at all. If you pay three or four hundred
|
||
dollars for a screen reader with synthetic speech, you know that
|
||
you're not paying for the natural resources in this product,
|
||
because you could purchase the same floppy disks without
|
||
information on them for three or four dollars.
|
||
People then say, "Okay, that's true for this strange new
|
||
world of software, but that's still a small part of our gross
|
||
national product. It has little to do with economics." What a lot
|
||
of people don't realize is that the same economic model holds for
|
||
most hardware as well. The quintessential component of hardware
|
||
is the computer chip. A central processing unit or an advanced
|
||
signal processing chip or an advanced image processing chip that
|
||
may sell for three or four hundred dollars costs no more to
|
||
fabricate than a floppy disk. As with a software program, the
|
||
bulk of the cost of a chip is neither raw materials nor
|
||
manufacturing labor, but rather what accountants call
|
||
amortization of development and what philosophers call knowledge.
|
||
It is estimated that for software today the percentage of
|
||
their value represented by natural resources is about 2%. When we
|
||
have full electronic distribution of software, it will go down to
|
||
about 0%. I guess we'll use a little bit of electricity in the
|
||
process.
|
||
The percentage of value represented by natural resources for
|
||
chips is about the same today as for software, about 2%.
|
||
Computers are about 5% natural resources because we still have a
|
||
metal chassis and a power supply, but we won't have those for
|
||
very much longer. In fact, you can draw a reverse exponential
|
||
curve where the y axis is the percentage of value of a product
|
||
represented by natural resources and the x axis is time, and the
|
||
percentage of value represented by natural resources is
|
||
asymptoting to zero as we go forward in time, and every product
|
||
and service is on the curve. Some are closer to zero than others,
|
||
and some categories of products are moving faster than others as
|
||
they move down the curve, but every product is on the curve,
|
||
marching on down to nearly zero contribution from material
|
||
resources and nearly 100% contribution from intellect.
|
||
Indeed, over the past twenty years the value of commodity
|
||
resources, as measured in constant dollars, has fallen
|
||
substantially (about forty percent), and this trend is
|
||
accelerating. So sell short on natural resource stocks. That
|
||
will be my only stock tip for today. Other than to mention that
|
||
my own company just went public two months ago. Okay, let's take
|
||
some examples.
|
||
Musical instruments is a field I've had experience in. The
|
||
percentage of value represented by natural resources and labor
|
||
for instruments using the nineteenth century acoustic technology,
|
||
such as pianos with their hundreds of feet of wire and hundreds
|
||
of pounds of metal and wood, is very high--it's about 60 to 70%.
|
||
For electronic musical instruments, which are basically
|
||
computers, the figure is 5 to 10%. In this industry we are
|
||
gradually replacing acoustics with electronics.
|
||
Consider pianos. And by the term "piano," I am not referring
|
||
to synthesizers, but rather to instruments that look like a piece
|
||
of furniture that you put in your living room for your eight-
|
||
year-old daughter to use while she's taking piano lessons. Six
|
||
years ago the percentage of pianos that used electronic
|
||
technology was 4%. Today, it's 60%, and again I'm not including
|
||
synthesizers or portable keyboards. In two to three years that
|
||
figure is expected to hit 80%. So, if you take the industry as a
|
||
whole, ten years ago the value of musical instruments was 60%
|
||
natural resources; today it's down to 20%, and in five years it
|
||
will be 10%.
|
||
How about the chairs you're sitting in? I recently toured
|
||
newly constructed factories in the Far East, and it was an
|
||
impressive display of the ability to convert intellect into
|
||
products with value. Bags of plastic pellets, jars of silicon,
|
||
and other inexpensive materials get turned into an astonishing
|
||
variety of high-quality products from tables and chairs to radios
|
||
and computers by computerized factories with almost no human
|
||
intervention. One has only to tour these factories with their
|
||
delicately programmed robotic assemblers and material handlers to
|
||
recognize the increasing dominance of knowledge as the
|
||
cornerstone of wealth.
|
||
Speaking of the Far East, despite the recent Asian recession
|
||
the success of Japan is undeniable, and it's certainly not due to
|
||
their natural resources, because they don't have any to speak of.
|
||
The success of Japan, which two years ago was cited by Fortune
|
||
Magazine as the wealthiest nation on the planet, is due entirely
|
||
to their ability to create intellectual property in all of its
|
||
myriad forms.
|
||
And how about Communism? Anyone here remember Communism? It
|
||
was that totalitarian system that disappeared a few years ago.
|
||
Well, I guess it's still around in a few places. So why did it
|
||
collapse when it did? Was it because after seventy years it had
|
||
just run its course? Was it the effectiveness of the Voice of
|
||
America? The fear of Ronald Reagan? The fear of George Bush? I
|
||
mean, why did it collapse just now? We should keep in mind that
|
||
it was the bankruptcy of Communism as an economic strategy that
|
||
caused its downfall. Communism was indeed viable during the late
|
||
stages of the first industrial revolution. It became irrelevant
|
||
only as we entered the second.
|
||
It's a fortunate truth of human nature that, whereas labor
|
||
can be forced, creativity and innovation cannot be. To create
|
||
knowledge, people need the free exchange of information and
|
||
ideas. They need free access to the world's accumulated knowledge
|
||
bases. A society that restricts access to copiers, mimeograph
|
||
machines, and typewriters for fear of the dissemination of
|
||
uncontrolled knowledge will certainly fear the much more powerful
|
||
communication technologies of personal computers, local area
|
||
networks, telecommunication data bases, electronic bulletin
|
||
boards, and all of the multifarious methods of instantaneous
|
||
electronic communication.
|
||
Controlled societies such as the former Soviet Union were
|
||
faced with a fundamental dilemma. If they provided their
|
||
engineers and professionals in all disciplines with advanced
|
||
computer technology, they were opening the floodgates to free
|
||
communication by methods far more powerful than the copiers they
|
||
had traditionally banned. On the other hand, if they failed to do
|
||
so, the professionals became increasingly ineffectual. In the end
|
||
they did a little of both, and both did them in. The lack of true
|
||
intellectual freedom caused economic disaster. And to the extent
|
||
that electronic communication was made available, it made
|
||
totalitarian control impossible. It was said that the 1991 August
|
||
coup in the former Soviet Union was undone by cellular telephones
|
||
and networks of personal computers. And that's true.
|
||
My company has a Russian research institute in Moscow, and
|
||
it would be only a small exaggeration to say that it is as if
|
||
they are working down the hall. We exchange messages, memos,
|
||
data, software on a daily basis through the Internet. And they
|
||
have shared with us that this type of network of personal
|
||
computers and cellular telephones were critical to unraveling
|
||
that coup.
|
||
Innovation, however, requires more than just computer
|
||
workstations and electronic communication technologies. It also
|
||
requires an atmosphere of tolerance for new and unorthodox ideas,
|
||
the encouragement of risk taking, and the ability to share ideas
|
||
and knowledge. A society run entirely by government bureaucracies
|
||
is not in a position to provide the incentives and environment
|
||
needed for entrepreneurship and the rapid development of new
|
||
skills and technologies.
|
||
So, if innovation and invention, which is to say the
|
||
creation of knowledge that has economic value, is increasingly
|
||
the cornerstone of wealth and power, then we need the right
|
||
strategy as we enter the second industrial revolution. On that
|
||
note I'd like to share with you Ray Kurzweil's seven-point
|
||
program for creating intellectual property in the 1990's.
|
||
What's the first thing you should do when you begin the task
|
||
of creating a new invention, and I mean invention in the broadest
|
||
sense as any intellectual creation with value? Well, I'll tell
|
||
you what I always do. The first step in the process of invention
|
||
obviously should be to write the advertising brochure. I have in
|
||
fact done that in each major project that I've undertaken. I'll
|
||
not only write the brochure, but I'll engage a graphic designer
|
||
and have it printed up. Now it doesn't hurt to have a
|
||
nice-looking brochure when you're looking for investors in your
|
||
project, but that's not the reason I start by writing the
|
||
brochure. The reason is that, if you write the advertising first,
|
||
it forces you to articulate clearly who the thing is for and why
|
||
you're doing it. Inventing is different from science. It's even
|
||
different from engineering. The objective is not to create a
|
||
device that demonstrates a new and interesting scientific
|
||
principle, although that might be involved. The objective is not
|
||
to create a device that implements a new and more efficient
|
||
approach to engineering, although that too might be involved. The
|
||
objective is to create a device or a process or an idea that
|
||
brings some benefit to someone, hopefully a lot of someones.
|
||
Writing the brochure as your first step is harder than it
|
||
may seem. It forces you to articulate clearly the features, the
|
||
benefits , and the beneficiaries. Once you've written and printed
|
||
it, show your brochure to potential buyers. If they don't
|
||
immediately get excited and besiege you for a delivery date, then
|
||
you're barking up the wrong tree.
|
||
This brings me to my second point. Now that you've
|
||
identified the beneficiaries of your invention and you've gotten
|
||
them excited about it, let them create the device for you. I
|
||
mean, they want it so much, let them invent it.
|
||
Let me give you some examples. In the 1970's I was working
|
||
on the Kurzweil Reading Machine, which as you know is a device
|
||
that scans printed material, recognizes the printed letters in
|
||
any type font, and then reads the print out loud in a synthetic
|
||
voice. We needed funding, of course, so we approached the
|
||
National Federation of the Blind. They said, okay, we'll help you
|
||
raise the money you need, but you have to put us in charge of the
|
||
human factors design and the user controls, and involve us in
|
||
every facet of the engineering. Well, I wasn't expecting that
|
||
request, but I was in no position to argue, so I said, "sure,
|
||
come on down."
|
||
Well, the blind engineers of the National Federation of the
|
||
Blind moved in and worked intimately with us on every facet of
|
||
the development, and the design came out quite different from
|
||
what we had originally expected, and, as it turned out, it was
|
||
very well accepted by blind consumers. With the intended users
|
||
having been intimately involved in every stage of the design
|
||
process, it anticipated the users' needs in ways that we as
|
||
well-intentioned but sighted engineers could never have
|
||
anticipated. While the Kurzweil Reading Machine has now gone
|
||
through six generations of technology, the basic human-factors
|
||
strategy that was created by the blind scientists and engineers
|
||
who worked with us remains the same today as it was almost
|
||
seventeen years ago in 1976.
|
||
I'll give you one example. We were going to put little
|
||
Braille labels on all of the user controls so that a new user
|
||
would know which control was which. But one of the NFB engineers
|
||
said that it would be very annoying to feel these Braille labels
|
||
hundreds of times a day, every day. So I asked him how a new user
|
||
could identify the controls without Braille labels. He suggested
|
||
putting another prominent button on the panel, which he called
|
||
the "nominator" key, and, if a user wanted to identify a control,
|
||
he would simply push the nominator key, then hit another key, and
|
||
that key would announce its name and describe its function. Then,
|
||
after using the nominator key to explore the keyboard for a few
|
||
days, a user would know where all the keys were and would not
|
||
need to feel these annoying Braille labels hundreds of times
|
||
every day. That made a lot of sense when we heard it, but since
|
||
we were not the intended users of the invention, it is an insight
|
||
that we never would have realized on our own.
|
||
With my music company, we did the same thing. All of the
|
||
engineers are musicians, many of them quite accomplished, because
|
||
there is really no other way to be sensitive to the nuances of
|
||
sound and the subtle interactions of feel and response in a
|
||
musical instrument. In my speech recognition company, Kurzweil
|
||
Applied Intelligence, our voice-activated products for doctors
|
||
have been designed by physicians, and our voice-activated
|
||
products for the hands-impaired have had significant involvement
|
||
by their handicapped users. There is really no way truly to
|
||
understand the needs and desires of your users without deeply
|
||
involving them in every stage of the invention process.
|
||
Now that we're talking about the group that is involved in
|
||
the creation of an invention, my third point is to understand the
|
||
dynamics of this group process. Inventing today is not a matter
|
||
of a single crazy inventor disappearing into his or her basement
|
||
and emerging years later with a breakthrough. Actually it's a
|
||
matter of a group of crazy inventors disappearing into their
|
||
basement. Inventing today is an interdisciplinary process. The
|
||
development of speech recognition, for example, requires
|
||
linguists, speech scientists, signal-processing experts,
|
||
psychoacousticians, circuit designers, programmers, and other
|
||
specialists who can work together and, perhaps most important,
|
||
understand each other's terminology.
|
||
The importance of this last point was first recognized by
|
||
Norbert Wiener, who wrote in 1948, the year I was born, in his
|
||
classic book Cybernetics: "Since Leibniz there has perhaps been
|
||
no man who has had a full command of all the intellectual
|
||
activity of his day.... There are fields of scientific work...
|
||
which have been explored from the different sides of pure
|
||
mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering, and
|
||
neurophysiology; in which every single notion receives a separate
|
||
and different name from each group, and in which important work
|
||
has been triplicated or quadruplicated, while still other
|
||
important work is delayed by the unavailability in one field of
|
||
results that may have already become classical in the next
|
||
field." From my own experience, this meshing of diverse
|
||
disciplines is perhaps the most crucial element in developing
|
||
interdisciplinary technology, which is becoming most of
|
||
technology.
|
||
So after assembling our group of experts and our group of
|
||
users, which hopefully are the same people, we throw out all of
|
||
the words that we all came in with and create our own new
|
||
terminology. By the way, this has advantages in terms of
|
||
proprietary technology protection, because, if anyone overhears
|
||
our conversations, they have no idea what we are talking about.
|
||
Then--and this is now my fourth point--to encourage thinking
|
||
out of the box, I'll assign a linguistics problem, not to the
|
||
linguists, but to the signal processing engineers, and a signal
|
||
processing problem to the linguists. This doesn't always work,
|
||
but it is possible in this way to achieve creative solutions to
|
||
problems that could hardly be attained in any other way.
|
||
They say that a wise man can learn more from a fool than the
|
||
other way around. So my fifth point is that you can learn more
|
||
from failure than from success. Success has a way of covering up
|
||
mistakes. When you're successful, you get the mistaken impression
|
||
that you must have done everything right. As it turns out, you
|
||
just did the right things right. You can, of course, turn your
|
||
failures into successes, not only by considering them growth
|
||
experiences, but by assessing in detail the lessons to be
|
||
learned, which you'll find is much easier to do when you're not
|
||
successful.
|
||
But more important, you should endeavor to turn your
|
||
successes into failures. In other words, look for the failure in
|
||
success. For example, in our apparently successful Gulf war of a
|
||
couple of years ago, many of our weapons didn't work. The much
|
||
vaunted Patriot missile, being a heat-seeking missile, was very
|
||
successful in blowing up the hot launchers of incoming Scuds.
|
||
Unfortunately, it was not the launchers that needed to be blown
|
||
up, but the warhead, which in most cases had already separated
|
||
from the launcher prior to the launcher's being destroyed. Now it
|
||
didn't matter that much a couple of years ago, because the Scuds
|
||
were so inaccurate. But if we fail to look for this failure
|
||
amidst the success, it will matter the next time.
|
||
Point six is to design for marketability. This goes beyond
|
||
identifying who the users will be and why they will want this new
|
||
technology. You need to understand what unique characteristics
|
||
your invention will have and why this is a well-leveraged fit for
|
||
your target application.
|
||
Akio Morita, the well-known Chairman of Sony, who has made
|
||
something of a career out of criticizing American business
|
||
practices, provides an instructive example. The transistor,
|
||
invented in the early 1950's at Bell Laboratories, certainly
|
||
represented a primary technological breakthrough and today fuels
|
||
a revolution that has transformed most industries. A transistor
|
||
has two properties: it amplifies electrical signals, and it's
|
||
small. So obviously its primary market is going to be hearing
|
||
aids. And that was in fact the prevailing view of the Bell
|
||
Laboratories scientists at the time.
|
||
Sony thought otherwise and became the first Japanese company
|
||
to license the patent, in 1953, with the idea of developing a
|
||
transistor-based radio. "Why bother with that?" they were asked.
|
||
After all, you'll still have a very large speaker, not to mention
|
||
all that furniture. But maybe you can replace the big speaker
|
||
with a little speaker. But with a little speaker all the people
|
||
gathered around the radio won't be able to hear it. But maybe it
|
||
is good enough to have one person use it at a time. But a radio
|
||
is too expensive to devote to just one person.
|
||
As the history is written, Sony applied a Gordian solution
|
||
to this knotty and circular thinking and brought the transistor
|
||
radio to market. Their motto became "one person, one radio."
|
||
Junior may not want to listen to the same music as grandpa.
|
||
The transistor radio was a hit, and the transistor was off
|
||
and running. And the Japanese consumer-electronics industry was
|
||
off and running as well. The marketing creativity involved in
|
||
rethinking the purpose of a radio in light of the new
|
||
technological capabilities provided by the transistor was at
|
||
least as important as the technology itself. It involved
|
||
considering several variables at the same time, and not just the
|
||
single issue of the transistor's size.
|
||
And finally here is a foolproof method to create your new
|
||
technology. After you've come up with the breakthrough concept
|
||
that will revolutionize some industry or other; you've written
|
||
the advertising brochure, which as I said, should be your first
|
||
step; you've printed it up; you have some customers clamoring for
|
||
it; you've got your investors; you've assembled your experts, who
|
||
are also, of course, the potential users of your new technology;
|
||
you've thrown out all the common technical terminology and
|
||
devised your own; now here's how you make the whole thing work.
|
||
Sit down or lie down and then imagine, if it existed, what
|
||
would it look like? How would it work? Imagine yourself at a
|
||
conference four years from now, and you're explaining how you and
|
||
your team of experts accomplished your goal, how it works, and
|
||
how you solved problems that at the beginning seemed so
|
||
intractable. Let your thoughts wander. Indulge yourself in this
|
||
fantasy as you're falling asleep. When you wake up the next
|
||
morning, you'll know what to do. Or at least you'll think you do,
|
||
until you run into some roadblock, something your fantasy failed
|
||
to consider. But then just use the same procedure again. From my
|
||
own experience I can tell you this technique usually works. But,
|
||
if it doesn't, you probably won't realize it right away. After
|
||
all, no one said that entrepreneurship was free of risk.
|
||
So on that note I'd like to let our imaginations wander a
|
||
bit and consider the next decade and the next century. Let's
|
||
imagine that the future exists. What does it look like? How does
|
||
it work?
|
||
The first concept we need to consider is Moore's law.
|
||
Moore's law is the driving force behind a revolution so vast that
|
||
the entire computer revolution to date represents only a minor
|
||
ripple of its ultimate implications. Moore's law states that
|
||
computing speeds and densities double every eighteen months. In
|
||
other words, every eighteen months we can buy a computer that is
|
||
twice as fast and has twice as much memory for the same cost.
|
||
Remarkably, this law has held true since the beginning of this
|
||
century, from the mechanical card-based computing technology of
|
||
the 1890 census, to the relay-based computers of the 1940's, to
|
||
the vacuum-tube-based computers of the 1950's, to the
|
||
transistor-based machines of the 1960's, to all of the
|
||
generations of integrated circuits that we've seen over the past
|
||
twenty-five years.
|
||
If you put every calculator and computer for the past 100
|
||
years on a logarithmic chart, it makes an essentially straight
|
||
line (several straight lines, actually). Computer memory, for
|
||
example, is about 16,000 times more powerful today for the same
|
||
unit cost as it was about twenty years ago. Computer memory is
|
||
150 million times more powerful for the same unit cost than it
|
||
was in 1948, the year I was born. If the automobile industry had
|
||
made as much progress in the past forty-five years, a car today
|
||
would cost about a hundredth of a cent and would go faster than
|
||
the speed of light.
|
||
Moore's law will continue unabated for many decades to come.
|
||
We have not even begun to explore the third dimension in chip
|
||
design. Chips today are flat, whereas our brain is organized in
|
||
three dimensions. We live in a three-dimensional world; why not
|
||
use the third dimension? Improvements in semiconductor materials,
|
||
including the development of superconducting circuits that do not
|
||
generate heat, will enable the development of chips, or I should
|
||
say cubes, with thousands of layers of circuitry, which, when
|
||
combined with far smaller component geometries, will improve
|
||
computing power by a factor of many millions. There are more than
|
||
enough new computing technologies being developed to assure a
|
||
continuation of Moore's law for a very long time.
|
||
The implications of this geometric trend can be understood
|
||
by recalling the legend of the inventor of chess and his patron,
|
||
the emperor of China. The emperor had so fallen in love with his
|
||
new game that he offered the inventor a reward of anything he
|
||
wanted in the kingdom. "Just one grain of rice on the first
|
||
square, your Majesty."
|
||
"Just one grain of rice?"
|
||
"Yes, your Majesty, just one grain of rice on the first
|
||
square, and two grains of rice on the second square, four on the
|
||
third square, and so on."
|
||
Well, the emperor immediately granted the inventor's
|
||
seemingly humble request. One version of the story has the
|
||
emperor going bankrupt because the doubling of grains of rice for
|
||
each square ultimately equaled eighteen million trillion grains
|
||
of rice. Another version has the inventor losing his head.
|
||
It's not yet clear which outcome we are headed for, but
|
||
there is one thing that we should take note of. It was fairly
|
||
uneventful as the emperor and the inventor went through the first
|
||
half of the chessboard. After thirty-two squares the emperor had
|
||
given the inventor about eight billion grains of rice. That's a
|
||
reasonable quantity of rice--it's about one field's worth--and
|
||
the emperor did start to take notice. But the emperor could still
|
||
remain an emperor, and the inventor could still retain his head.
|
||
It was as they headed into the second half of the chessboard that
|
||
at least one of them got into trouble. So where do we stand now?
|
||
Well, there have been just about exactly thirty-two doublings of
|
||
performance since the first operating computers were built in the
|
||
1940's. So where we stand right now is that we've just finished
|
||
the first half of the chess board. And indeed people are starting
|
||
to take notice. As we head into the rest of the nineties and the
|
||
next century, we are heading into the second half of the
|
||
chessboard, and that is where things start to get interesting.
|
||
Let's take a moment to examine a few of the things we're
|
||
likely to see as we go through the second half of the chessboard.
|
||
One of my companies, Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, is devoted to
|
||
speech recognition technology. So I'd like to start out by
|
||
sharing with you some scenarios that deal with this technology.
|
||
The state of the art today is that large vocabulary speech
|
||
recognition systems can recognize very large vocabularies of
|
||
50,000 words, which is pretty much anything you might want to
|
||
say. These systems are speaker-independent, which means they can
|
||
recognize anyone without having been trained on that person's
|
||
voice. The primary limitation is that you need to speak in what
|
||
is called discrete speech, that...is...with...brief...pauses...
|
||
between...words...like...this.
|
||
These systems are more popular than many people realize. For
|
||
example, if you have the misfortune of ending up in one of our
|
||
nation's emergency rooms, there is a ten percent chance that your
|
||
patient record will be created by the doctor dictating the report
|
||
directly to a large-vocabulary speech-recognition system that my
|
||
company created, called VoiceEM for Voice Emergency Medicine.
|
||
We already know how to recognize continuous speech, which is
|
||
the type of speech I am creating right now, but it requires
|
||
substantially more powerful personal computers. Well, Moore's law
|
||
will take care of that, and we expect to see accurate large-
|
||
vocabulary continuous-speech recognizers emerge in the next two
|
||
to three years. As we go into the next century, which is only
|
||
about seven years from now, we'll see very accurate continuous-
|
||
speech recognition integrated with a broad variety of other
|
||
artificial-intelligence technologies. Translating telephones, for
|
||
example, which combine large-vocabulary continuous-speech-
|
||
recognition technology, with language-translation software and
|
||
speech synthesis, will be demonstrated later on in this decade,
|
||
Translating telephones will become a routine telephone service
|
||
during the first decade of the next century.
|
||
At Kurzweil Applied Intelligence we are also working on
|
||
developing listening machines for the deaf, which will convert
|
||
human speech into a visual display of text, essentially the
|
||
opposite of reading machines for the blind. So a deaf person
|
||
listening to this lecture could follow along with real-time
|
||
subtitles which could be built into a pair of eyeglasses. We
|
||
expect to see listening machines for the deaf introduced later on
|
||
in this decade. By 2010 we may all wish to use them, since these
|
||
real-time subtitles can include immediate translation into other
|
||
languages and other commentaries.
|
||
We'll also see speech recognition integrated with problem-
|
||
solving software to provide knowledge navigators, essentially
|
||
computerized personal assistants built into your personal
|
||
computer that will talk to you with two-way voice communication
|
||
and that will help you find information and solve problems. For
|
||
example, during the first decade of the next century, you might
|
||
ask your personal knowledge navigator to recommend the optimal
|
||
form of financing for a new marketing program. It would access
|
||
your company's on-line information systems to get details about
|
||
the program, access national financial markets using cellular
|
||
communication to on-line financial information services to obtain
|
||
the latest rate information on different financial instruments,
|
||
call your Vice President of Marketing personally to get her level
|
||
of confidence in the marketing projections, and then assemble the
|
||
information into a presentation. It would do this in seconds if
|
||
it wasn't for the fact that it took a week and a half to get
|
||
through to the one human being involved.
|
||
By 2010 your standard personal computer will come in a
|
||
variety of sizes, from wristwatch size to large wall-sized
|
||
displays. Unrestricted speech recognition will be a primary input
|
||
modality. Your personal computer will perform a broad variety of
|
||
functions. It will be your wristwatch. It will be your telephone,
|
||
which will include high-resolution moving pictures. It will be
|
||
your radio and television, which will be high-definition and
|
||
interactive. It will also provide you with virtual books and
|
||
magazines, which will also be interactive, will include moving
|
||
pictures, and will have display qualities comparable to high-
|
||
quality paper books today.
|
||
On that note, let's talk a little bit about technology for
|
||
the disabled. Reading machines for the blind have certainly
|
||
benefited from Moore's law. I examined this issue recently with
|
||
regard to the Kurzweil Reading Machine. The current model, the
|
||
Reading Edge, has eighty times the speed, contains 128 times the
|
||
memory, and has a comparable improvement in overall performance
|
||
as compared to the original model seventeen years ago. The
|
||
Reading Edge today is now one twenty-sixth the price of the
|
||
original Model 1 as measured in constant dollars. If we thereby
|
||
regard the machine as now providing approximately eighty times
|
||
the performance for one twenty-sixth the price, that's an overall
|
||
improvement in price-performance of about 2,000 to 1. Now 2,000
|
||
is two to the eleventh power, which means we have doubled
|
||
price-performance eleven times. That's exactly what you would
|
||
predict from Moore's law in a seventeen-year period. And, of
|
||
course, Moore's law will continue to improve all aspects of
|
||
reading machine price and performance in the years ahead.
|
||
Just recently, two-dimensional scanning chips have emerged,
|
||
which can scan a full page of text with 300-spot-per-inch
|
||
resolution without any moving parts. These two-dimensional
|
||
scanning arrays, which have over five million pixels, are
|
||
prototypes and are therefore expensive. But within a few years
|
||
these chips will permit the development of pocket-sized scanners,
|
||
the size of a small camera, that can snap a full page instantly.
|
||
Thus, before the decade is out, a full print-to-speech reading
|
||
machine will fit in your pocket. You'll hold it over the page to
|
||
be scanned and snap a picture of the page. All of the electronics
|
||
and computation will be inside this small, camera-sized device.
|
||
You'll then listen to the text being read from a small speaker or
|
||
earphone. You will also be able to snap a picture and read a
|
||
poster on a wall or a street sign or a soup can or someone's ID
|
||
badge or an appliance LCD display and many other examples of
|
||
real-world text. This reading machine will cost less than a
|
||
thousand dollars and will ultimately come down to hundreds of
|
||
dollars.
|
||
Algorithmic improvements will also provide capabilities to
|
||
describe non-textual material such as graphs and diagrams and
|
||
page layouts. These devices will also provide on-line access to
|
||
knowledge bases and libraries through the information
|
||
superhighway, which I will comment on further in a moment. By the
|
||
end of the first decade of the next century, the intelligence of
|
||
these devices will be sufficient to provide reasonable
|
||
descriptions of pictures and real-world scenes. These devices
|
||
will also be capable of translating from one language to another.
|
||
The scanning sensors of the future reading machine will
|
||
ultimately become very small and could be built into a pair of
|
||
eyeglasses. The advantage of doing this is that it would allow
|
||
the user to control the direction of scanning through motion of
|
||
the head in the same way that a sighted person does. Once these
|
||
devices can provide reasonably intelligent descriptions of
|
||
real-world scenes, they will evolve into navigation aids.
|
||
I will point out that access to the world of print has been
|
||
a more important issue than navigation. Braille, of course, is a
|
||
vitally important technology in that it provides access to the
|
||
world of literacy for both reading and writing. It does, however,
|
||
have the limitation that only a small percentage of books and
|
||
topical literature are available in this alternative medium.
|
||
Recorded material has the same limitation. Thus reading machines
|
||
have provided the opportunity to overcome a principal handicap
|
||
associated with the disability of blindness: access to ordinary
|
||
print. But having worked with many blind persons over the past
|
||
twenty years, I have come to realize that navigating within a
|
||
building, or around the world, is not a handicap for a blind
|
||
person who has been trained with advanced navigational skills.
|
||
Until a navigation device can provide a level of intelligence
|
||
sufficient to be truly helpful, the most useful navigational
|
||
technology will continue to be the modern lightweight cane. There
|
||
have already been electronic navigation devices developed, but
|
||
they have not yet proved useful. Unless such a device
|
||
incorporates a level of intelligence at least comparable to a
|
||
seeing-eye dog, it is not of much value.
|
||
General purpose artificial vision is now being developed for
|
||
robots and is in an early stage, although progress is rapidly
|
||
being made. Today, robotic factory inspectors can outperform
|
||
human inspectors in many visually demanding tasks. Vision has
|
||
lagged other developments in artificial intelligence because of
|
||
the enormous flows of data required to process visual information
|
||
intelligently. With the advent of massively parallel computing
|
||
and the continuing progress made through Moore's law, this
|
||
difficulty is gradually being overcome.
|
||
Such a combination reading machine-navigation aid will be an
|
||
assistant that will describe what is going on in the visible
|
||
world. The blind user could ask the device (verbally or using
|
||
appropriate manual commands) to elaborate on a description, or he
|
||
could ask it questions. These artificial visual sensors need look
|
||
not only forward; they may as well look in all directions. And
|
||
they ultimately will have better visual acuity than human eyes.
|
||
Everyone--visually impaired or not--may want to use them.
|
||
Persons with other disabilities will benefit from the
|
||
continuing advance of computer technology as well. I mentioned
|
||
earlier the speech-to-text sensory aid for the deaf, which I
|
||
believe will be introduced within the next several years and will
|
||
become a popular device by the end of this decade. A principal
|
||
physical handicap is paraplegia, the loss of control over the
|
||
legs. The most common prosthetic aid for this disability is the
|
||
wheelchair, which has changed only in subtle ways over the past
|
||
two decades. It continues to suffer from its principal drawback,
|
||
the inability to negotiate doorways and stairs. Although federal
|
||
law now requires most public buildings to accommodate wheelchair
|
||
access, the reality is that access to persons in wheelchairs is
|
||
still severely restricted. By the end of this decade we will see
|
||
the first generation of effective exoskeletal robotic devices,
|
||
called powered orthotic devices, which will restore the ability
|
||
of paraplegic (and in some cases quadriplegic) persons to walk
|
||
and climb stairs.
|
||
Overcoming the handicaps associated with disabilities is an
|
||
ideal application of artificial intelligence technology. In the
|
||
development of intelligent computers, the threshold that we are
|
||
now on is not the creation of cybernetic geniuses. That will come
|
||
later. Instead, we are today providing computers with narrowly
|
||
focused intelligent skills, such as the ability to make decisions
|
||
in such areas as finance and medicine and the ability to
|
||
recognize patterns such as printed letters, human speech, blood
|
||
cells, and land terrain maps. Most computers today are still
|
||
idiot savants, capable of processing enormous amounts of
|
||
information at very high speed and with great accuracy, but with
|
||
relatively little intelligence.
|
||
When one considers the enormous impact that these idiot
|
||
savants have had on society, the addition of even sharply focused
|
||
intelligence will be a formidable combination. It will be
|
||
particularly beneficial for the disabled population. A disabled
|
||
person is typically missing a specific skill or capability but is
|
||
otherwise a normally intelligent and capable human being. There
|
||
is a fortuitous matching of the narrowly focused intelligence of
|
||
today's intelligent machines with the narrowly focused deficit of
|
||
most disabled persons. Our primary strategy in developing
|
||
intelligent computer-based technology for sensory and physical
|
||
aids is for the focused intelligence of the machine to work in
|
||
close concert with the much more flexible intelligence of the
|
||
disabled person himself.
|
||
There are an estimated twenty million disabled Americans.
|
||
Many are not able to learn or work up to their capacity because
|
||
of technology that is not yet available or technology that is
|
||
available but not yet affordable or pervasive and because of
|
||
negative public attitudes toward disabled persons. As the reality
|
||
changes, the perceptions will also change, particularly as
|
||
formerly handicapped persons learn and work successfully
|
||
alongside their non-disabled peers. By the end of the first
|
||
decade of the next century, I believe that we will come to herald
|
||
the effective end of handicaps.
|
||
Another trend worth commenting on is the information
|
||
superhighway. We now realize that the information superhighway
|
||
will be here a lot sooner than we originally anticipated. We
|
||
originally thought that we would have to wire optical fiber into
|
||
every home and office. That massive new physical infrastructure
|
||
would have taken twenty years to put in place. We now realize
|
||
that we need only place optical fiber to within about one mile of
|
||
its final destination. A couple of other technologies that do not
|
||
require a physical infrastructure can then be used to carry the
|
||
information for that critical last mile. For example, existing
|
||
coaxial cable can also provide ten billion bit per second
|
||
point-to-point communication for short distances. There is also a
|
||
new wireless communication using frequencies at the microwave
|
||
range or higher that can also provide very high bandwidth
|
||
communication, again only for short distances, but the last mile
|
||
is all we need.
|
||
It turns out that this last mile of communication represents
|
||
about ninety percent of the infrastructure that we originally had
|
||
contemplated. So eliminating this last mile of wiring means we
|
||
can put the information superhighway in place in about four years
|
||
instead of twenty. This next wave of communication technology
|
||
will be here much sooner than we thought. That will be another
|
||
major step in the ultimate realization of McLuhan's vision of the
|
||
Global Village.
|
||
There are many other emerging trends we could talk about,
|
||
but, in the time I have remaining, I would like to touch on one
|
||
other scenario. This is a scenario that has not been extensively
|
||
discussed in the popular literature but is a development I am
|
||
convinced will occur within the lifetimes of most of the people
|
||
in this room. It is a development that I have spent time
|
||
researching and in fact am writing a book about.
|
||
As you are probably aware, we can simulate the functions of
|
||
human neurons in software. These computerized neural nets, as
|
||
they are called, have become increasingly popular, particularly
|
||
in pattern recognition systems. We use them, for example, in our
|
||
speech recognition systems. Today's simulated neurons are
|
||
somewhat simplified from the real thing. An actual neuron is a
|
||
complex computer, a hybrid analog-digital computer as it turns
|
||
out. But it is feasible to simulate the full complexity of human
|
||
neurons, and some of the more advanced neural nets now being
|
||
developed provide reasonably realistic simulations of true neuron
|
||
function.
|
||
A neural net, and this includes the human brain, uses a
|
||
radically different computational paradigm from the computers
|
||
we're used to. A typical computer does one thing at a time, but
|
||
does it very quickly. A neural net, particularly the human one,
|
||
is very slow, but every part of the net is computing
|
||
simultaneously. We have about 100 billion neurons, and each of
|
||
these neurons has an average of 1,000 connections to other
|
||
neurons. Each of these connections can perform computations
|
||
simultaneously, so that's about 100 trillion computations being
|
||
performed at the same time. There are many subtleties to neural
|
||
nets, but our computer-based neural net simulations have been
|
||
limited primarily by two factors: the number of neural
|
||
connections that can be simulated in real time and the capacity
|
||
of computer memories. Although human neurons are very slow, in
|
||
fact about a million times slower than electronic circuits, their
|
||
massive parallelism more than makes up for it. Although each
|
||
interneuronal connection is capable of performing only about 200
|
||
computations each second, with 100 trillion computations being
|
||
performed at the same time, that comes to about twenty million
|
||
billion calculations per second, give or take a couple of orders
|
||
of magnitude.
|
||
How does that compare to the state-of-the-art in human-
|
||
created technology? Specialized neural computers have been
|
||
developed that can simulate neurons directly in hardware. These
|
||
operate about a thousand times faster than neural networks
|
||
simulated in software on conventional PC's. One recent model
|
||
processes about two billion connections per second. That may seem
|
||
like a lot, but it still about ten million times slower than the
|
||
human brain. Again we look to Moore's law, which projects that
|
||
our personal neural computers will match both the memory and the
|
||
computational ability of the human brain, twenty million billion
|
||
calculations per second, by around the year 2020.
|
||
Now matching the raw computing speed and memory capacity of
|
||
the human brain, even if implemented in massively parallel neural
|
||
nets, will not automatically result in human-level intelligence.
|
||
The architecture and organization of these resources are at least
|
||
as important as the capacity itself. There is, however, a source
|
||
of knowledge that we can tap to accelerate greatly our
|
||
understanding of how to design intelligence in a machine, and
|
||
that is the human brain itself. By probing the brain's circuits,
|
||
we can essentially copy, that is to say, reverse engineer, a
|
||
proven design, one that took its original designer several
|
||
billion years to develop.
|
||
Just as the Human Genome Project, in which the entire human
|
||
genetic code is being scanned, recorded, and analyzed to
|
||
accelerate our understanding of the human biogenetic system, a
|
||
similar effort to scan and record the neural organization of the
|
||
human brain can help provide the templates of intelligence. As it
|
||
becomes clear that we are approaching the computational ability
|
||
to simulate the human brain--we're not there today, but we will
|
||
be there early in the next century--I believe that such an effort
|
||
will be initiated. Indeed, this effort has already begun.
|
||
For example, an artificial retina chip created by a small
|
||
company called Synaptics, is fundamentally a copy of the neural
|
||
organization, implemented in silicon of course, of not only the
|
||
human retina, but its visual processing layer as well.
|
||
High-speed, high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
|
||
scanners are already able to resolve individual somas (neuron
|
||
cell bodies) without disturbing the living tissue being scanned.
|
||
More powerful MRI's are being developed that will be capable of
|
||
scanning individual nerve fibers that are only ten microns in
|
||
diameter. Eventually we will be able automatically to scan the
|
||
presynaptic vesicles that are the site of human learning.
|
||
This suggests two scenarios. The first is to scan portions
|
||
of a brain to ascertain the architecture of interneuronal
|
||
connections in different regions. The exact position of each
|
||
nerve fiber is not as important as the overall pattern. With this
|
||
information we can design simulated neural nets that will operate
|
||
similarly. This process will be rather like peeling an onion as
|
||
each layer of human intelligence is revealed. That is essentially
|
||
what Synaptics has done. They copied the essential analog
|
||
algorithm of center-surround filtering found in the early layers
|
||
of mammalian neural image processing.
|
||
A more difficult but also ultimately feasible scenario will
|
||
be noninvasively to scan someone's brain to map the locations,
|
||
interconnections, and contents of the somas, axons, dendrites,
|
||
presynaptic vesicles, and other neural components. Its entire
|
||
organization could then be re-created on a neural computer of
|
||
sufficient capacity, including the contents of its memory.
|
||
We can peer inside someone's brain today with MRI scanners,
|
||
which are increasing their resolution with each new generation of
|
||
this device. There are a number of technical challenges in
|
||
accomplishing this, including achieving suitable resolution,
|
||
bandwidth, lack of vibration, and safety. For a variety of
|
||
reasons it will be easier to scan the brain of someone recently
|
||
deceased than of someone still living. It is easier to get
|
||
someone deceased to sit still for one thing, but noninvasively
|
||
scanning a living brain will ultimately become feasible as MRI
|
||
and other scanning technologies continue to improve in resolution
|
||
and speed.
|
||
In fact, the driving force behind the rapidly improving
|
||
capability of noninvasive scanning technologies such as MRI is
|
||
again Moore's law, because it requires massive computational
|
||
ability to build high resolution three-dimensional images from
|
||
the raw magnetic resonance patterns that an MRI scanner produces.
|
||
The increasing computational ability provided by Moore's law will
|
||
enable us to continue to improve the resolution and speed of
|
||
these noninvasive scanning technologies.
|
||
You might feel that I am veering off into the realm of
|
||
science fiction, so let me say a word about the nature of this
|
||
projection. If someone a hundred years ago were to have attempted
|
||
a prediction of this past century, he would not have been able to
|
||
predict most of the major technologies that have shaped it, such
|
||
as computers, Moore's law, radio, television, atomic energy,
|
||
lasers, bio-engineering--indeed most of electronics--just to
|
||
mention a few. And indeed all but a handful of futurists at the
|
||
time were unable to foresee any of these developments.
|
||
The century to come will also undoubtedly contain many such
|
||
breakthroughs that we would have difficulty envisioning or even
|
||
comprehending today. But the projection I am making now does not
|
||
contemplate any such breakthrough. It is a modest extrapolation
|
||
of current trends and is based on technologies and capabilities
|
||
that we can touch and feel today. We can't do it yet, but we can
|
||
describe right now how this capability can be achieved.
|
||
The ability to download your mind to your personal computer
|
||
will raise some interesting issues. I'll mention just a few.
|
||
There's the philosophical issue. When people are scanned and then
|
||
re-created in a neural computer, people will wonder just who are
|
||
those people in the machine?
|
||
The answer will depend on who you ask. If you ask the people
|
||
in the machine, they will strenuously claim to be the original
|
||
persons, having lived certain lives, having gone into a scanner
|
||
here, and then having awakened in the machine there. They'll say,
|
||
"Hey, this technology really works. You should give it a try." On
|
||
the other hand, the original people, who were scanned, will claim
|
||
that the people in the machine are impostors, people who just
|
||
appear to share their memories, histories, and personalities but
|
||
who are definitely different people.
|
||
There's the psychological issue. A machine intelligence that
|
||
has been derived from human intelligence will need a body. A
|
||
disembodied mind will quickly become depressed. Ironically, it
|
||
will take us longer to recreate our bodies than it will take us
|
||
to recreate our minds. We are making exponential progress in
|
||
providing the computational resources to simulate intelligence
|
||
with the linear passing of time. But we are only making linear
|
||
progress with the linear passing of time in robotic technology.
|
||
So it will take us longer to recreate the suppleness of our
|
||
bodies than the intricacies and subtleties of our minds.
|
||
There's the ethical issue. Will it be immoral, or even
|
||
illegal, to cause pain and suffering to your computer program?
|
||
Will it be illegal to turn your computer program off? Perhaps it
|
||
will be illegal to turn it off only if you have failed to make a
|
||
recent backup copy. Maybe they'll want to turn us off.
|
||
No one worries much about these issues today, but our most
|
||
advanced programs today are comparable to the minds of insects.
|
||
But when our programs are of the same complexity and subtlety as
|
||
a human mind, which will be the case in a few decades, and when
|
||
our computer programs have, in fact, been derived from human
|
||
minds or even portions of human minds, this will become a
|
||
pressing issue. And, of course, there will be the usual line-up
|
||
of economic and political issues. We are likely to see the
|
||
Luddite issue, the concern over the negative impact of machines
|
||
on human employment, become of intense interest once again.
|
||
Before Copernicus, our speciecentricity--I made up that
|
||
word, by the way, in case you never heard it before--was embodied
|
||
in a view of the universe literally circling around us as a
|
||
testament to our unique and central status. Today our belief in
|
||
our own uniqueness is not a matter of celestial relationships,
|
||
but rather of our intelligence. Evolution is seen as a billion-
|
||
year drama leading inexorably to its grandest creation: human
|
||
intelligence. The specter of machine intelligence's competing
|
||
with that of its creator will once again threaten our view of who
|
||
we are.
|
||
We have now peered about 80% of the way through the chess
|
||
board. We might wonder what happens at the end of the chess
|
||
board. In the year 2040 we will reach the sixty-fourth. square.
|
||
In my view Moore's law will still be going strong. Computer
|
||
circuits will now be grown like crystals with computing taking
|
||
place at the molecular level.
|
||
By the year 2040, in accordance with Moore's law, your
|
||
state-of-the-art personal computer will be able to simulate a
|
||
society of 10,000 human brains, each of which would be operating
|
||
at a speed 10,000 times faster than a human brain. Or,
|
||
alternatively, it could implement a single mind with 10,000 times
|
||
the memory capacity of a human brain and 100 million times the
|
||
speed.
|
||
What will the implications of this development be? Well,
|
||
unfortunately, I've run out of time, so you'll have to invite me
|
||
back. But I'll leave two thoughts with you, written by people who
|
||
did not have the benefit of a voice-activated word processor. Sun
|
||
Tzu, Chou dynasty philosopher and military strategist, wrote in
|
||
the fourth century BC: "Knowledge is power and permits the wise
|
||
to conquer without bloodshed and to accomplish deeds surpassing
|
||
all others." And Shakespeare wrote: "We know what we are, but
|
||
know not what we may be."
|
||
Thank you very much.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
[PHOTO: Portrait. CAPTION: T. V. Cranmer]
|
||
|
||
EMERGING RESEARCH GOALS IN THE BLINDNESS FIELD
|
||
by T. V. Cranmer
|
||
|
||
From the Editor: Dr. Cranmer chairs the Research and
|
||
Development Committee of the National Federation of the Blind. He
|
||
is also an inventor and an expert in technology issues in the
|
||
blindness field. He was the first speaker on the late morning
|
||
panel which addressed the conference on November 4. Here is what
|
||
he had to say:
|
||
|
||
It is a distinct pleasure to be here. I have been attacked
|
||
by my computer, have been humbled by it as late as yesterday. I
|
||
purchased WordPerfect 6.0 a few days ago and installed it. (It
|
||
took sixteen megabytes on my hard disk.) I thought to myself,
|
||
I'll wait until I get back from the conference to look into this
|
||
new program; but yesterday morning, having a couple of hours to
|
||
while away, I couldn't resist, and I tried a new feature, the
|
||
grammar checker. That's where the humility comes in. I ran
|
||
Grammatik, and in the first paragraph it said that my sentence
|
||
constructions were awkward, that I used the incorrect tense (or
|
||
was it tenses?), that I was using the passive voice, and that the
|
||
material was not appropriate to the kind of talk I was making. I
|
||
wondered if I should come at all. So I sought solace in a usually
|
||
reliable place; I explained my humiliation to my wife. And in her
|
||
usual way she rallied to the occasion and said, "Well, you write
|
||
the way you talk." Nevertheless, I am going to plow forward and
|
||
read my comments, in which I have imbedded some humor and whimsy.
|
||
I hope that they are not too well disguised.
|
||
What better thing to do on a Sunday afternoon than discover
|
||
a tide of change in the way humans communicate? This thought gave
|
||
little comfort when, not many Sundays ago, I went with my sister
|
||
to K-Mart to buy some simple necessities. Stopping near a
|
||
counter, I touched a shrink-wrapped package and asked, "What's
|
||
this?"
|
||
"Turn it around so I can see," Irma directed. I rotated the
|
||
package ninety degrees so she could get a good view. "That's a
|
||
bath set," she said, "with a toilet seat cover, tank cover, bath
|
||
mat, and matching towel and wash cloth."
|
||
"Is that what it says?" I asked, with some surprise at the
|
||
completeness of the identification of the package contents.
|
||
"No," she replied, "that is what the picture shows." [And I
|
||
thought: Aren't graphics just for computers?]
|
||
Near by on the same counter there were other packages
|
||
containing just towels, towels and wash cloths, bath mats, and so
|
||
on--all identified by pictures alone.
|
||
These things were not on my shopping list, so we moved on to
|
||
the rack of bagged candies, where I made the only purchase of the
|
||
day--a mixed bag of butterscotch and mint flavored taffy kisses.
|
||
Returning to our car, I opened the candy and invited Irma to try
|
||
a piece and at the same time pick a mint taffy for me. She handed
|
||
me the kiss.
|
||
"Does it say 'mint'?" I asked.
|
||
"No; it just has a leaf on it," she said. "The butterscotch
|
||
has a cow on it."
|
||
That's when it hit me: the moment of truth! While I had been
|
||
chained by love to my disk for the past four decades, the rest of
|
||
the world had been accelerating a swing away from words to
|
||
pictures to convey information, away from text toward icons.
|
||
I learned a lot more during the ride back to the office.
|
||
Traffic lights, at least in my town, don't bear the words "stop,"
|
||
"caution," and "go," depending instead on the colors red, yellow,
|
||
and green. What about drivers who are color blind? The stop light
|
||
is on top; the go light is on the bottom.
|
||
How about traffic signs? The stop sign is a red octagon.
|
||
Mile markers are green vertically oriented rectangles with
|
||
rounded corners, and highway exit signs are green horizontal
|
||
rectangles. If that's not enough, diamond-shape signs signify
|
||
danger, and round ones stand for railway crossings.
|
||
Like any responsible investigator, I contacted our state
|
||
highway department to verify the accuracy of what I had been told
|
||
about traffic lights and signs and to ask why different colors
|
||
and shapes were used. The state official informed me that it was
|
||
so that "people won't have to read them if they aren't
|
||
interested."
|
||
Motorists: can you recall when the image of a horn first
|
||
adorned the horn button on your car? When did the picture of a
|
||
smoking cigarette first identify the cigarette lighter?
|
||
It was at about this point in my new awareness that I
|
||
flashed-back to PC-Magazine for July, where the editor
|
||
proclaimed:
|
||
Coming Soon:
|
||
WordPerfect 6.0 is here. The question is, should you invest in
|
||
what might be one of the last significant DOS programs, or is it
|
||
time to switch to a Windows word processor? Hold on, PC-Magazine!
|
||
Is Windows our only choice? IBM just might offer an alternative
|
||
environment--not that it is guaranteed to provide any advantage
|
||
to the blind.
|
||
In either case I wonder what use word processors will have
|
||
in the world dominated by graphic images. I ponder but won't
|
||
pursue here the question, does our emphasis on pictorial
|
||
information have a direct connection with the reported increase
|
||
in illiteracy in our society?
|
||
For those of you who require more evidence to support the
|
||
notion that we may now be approaching the end point of a swing
|
||
away from words toward symbolic representations, I invite your
|
||
attention to developments in the musical instruments industry.
|
||
Compare the classical organ and its modern equivalent, the
|
||
electronic synthesizer. The pipe organ has stops clearly labeled
|
||
with names like flute, recorder flute, oboe, piccolo, violin, and
|
||
viola. The synthesizer may have similar voices labeled with
|
||
pictures of the instruments they are supposed to imitate but
|
||
without text labels. Furthermore, these electronic instruments
|
||
may have a dynamic visual display that includes pictures of the
|
||
instrument or instruments currently being synthesized.
|
||
It is just a matter of time till photos and illustrations
|
||
will dominate the print publishing industries. It is no longer
|
||
possible to find a book that is not illustrated. Many textbooks
|
||
for primary grades devote as much space to pictures and
|
||
illustrations as to text.
|
||
So the challenge to the blind and to the researchers in the
|
||
blindness field emerges: How are we to decode the visual
|
||
information that surrounds us and back-translate the messages
|
||
into words? How are we to extract the message in the graphic and
|
||
say it in words?
|
||
The interpretation of visual information may be more
|
||
involved than it first appears. To hark back to my earlier
|
||
reference to the picture of a leaf on the peppermint taffy, it
|
||
clearly is not enough to say "leaf" unless the blind observer is
|
||
also given the information that the leaf is on the wrapper of a
|
||
candy kiss. Only then will he make the connection and conclude
|
||
that the leaf is from a sprig of mint. For all the same reasons,
|
||
informing a blind computer user of current information on his
|
||
graphical user interface requires much more than speaking the
|
||
identity of the icons, dialog boxes, radio buttons, et cetera.
|
||
More often than not, it will also be necessary to know the
|
||
juxtaposition of certain depictions, what is currently selected
|
||
(active) and what is required of the blind operator to accept the
|
||
current display or to change conditions.
|
||
Microsoft Corporation has demonstrated initiative in solving
|
||
some of the problems resulting from their emphasis on the Windows
|
||
computer environment. Mr. Greg Lowney has shared information with
|
||
the NFB on his work at Microsoft and will surely discuss the
|
||
progress he has made at some point in this conference. IBM has
|
||
also addressed the issue of access by blind people to their
|
||
Program Manager graphical user interface. Blazie Engineering is
|
||
expected to make an important contribution to mastering the
|
||
Windows program with their product, Windows Master, now in
|
||
development. This ingenious approach allows the blind computer
|
||
user to control and otherwise operate a computer running Windows,
|
||
using only a Braille 'n Speak and the Windows Master software.
|
||
You may coax Mr. Blazie into divulging more information about
|
||
this unannounced product.
|
||
The success of the work of Microsoft, IBM, Blazie
|
||
Engineering, and others must depend on strategies for
|
||
interpreting visual information through speech and Braille. The
|
||
NFB Research and Development Committee and other members of the
|
||
Federation will play an important role in developing these
|
||
strategies.
|
||
One member, T. V. Raman, is a doctoral student at Cornell
|
||
University, a recent NFB scholarship winner, and a member of our
|
||
research discussion group on the Internet. His work can be
|
||
glimpsed through two brief quotes from a paper posted to his file
|
||
area on the computer science archive at Cornell:
|
||
|
||
I have developed AFL, a language for expressing
|
||
audio formatting rules. AFL is used to produce audio
|
||
renderings of electronic documents with heavy
|
||
mathematical content. The system surpasses current-day
|
||
reading machines in both the type of documents handled
|
||
and quality of audio renderings.
|
||
My research on audio formatting, though motivated
|
||
by the need to generate audio documents, is more
|
||
generally applicable to the areas of user interface and
|
||
information access in audio. [or Braille]
|
||
|
||
After taking his Ph.D from Cornell in December, Raman hopes
|
||
to extend his work to include audio formatting of complex
|
||
graphical computer displays. Raman's papers can be retrieved via
|
||
the Internet using file transfer protocol to ftp.cs.cornell.edu
|
||
and changing to the sub directory /pub/raman.
|
||
Once the information in a graphical display has been
|
||
extracted and converted to language elements, some will want to
|
||
forego use of a speech synthesizer in favor of a Braille display.
|
||
The amount and kind of processing required to achieve a
|
||
satisfactory Braille format will depend on the size of the
|
||
Braille display available. We are presently limited to a single
|
||
line of refreshable Braille as the output of a computer, reading
|
||
machine, or consumer product. This is a serious limitation. It is
|
||
difficult, if not impossible, using a single line of Braille to
|
||
convey page layout and other format characteristics that
|
||
contribute to the reading process.
|
||
Inventors and researchers alike are now responding to the
|
||
need for a larger and affordable Braille display. While none have
|
||
as yet found the right combination of materials and technologies
|
||
to produce a full-page, refreshable display, there are numerous
|
||
signs of serious work and some progress worth noting.
|
||
In recent years several materials and mechanical devices
|
||
have competed for the role of the technology of choice to make
|
||
refreshable Braille. The piezoelectric ceramic bimorph has
|
||
emerged as the clear winner. This is the technology used by
|
||
Telesensory in the U.S., Tieman of Holland, Tiflotel in Italy,
|
||
and others to produce one-line displays. Affordable multi-line
|
||
piezoelectric displays have not yet appeared in the market or the
|
||
laboratory.
|
||
One company, Piezo Systems of Winchester, Massachusetts, has
|
||
been funded for the first phase of a project to build
|
||
piezoelectric displays with four and eight lines of forty
|
||
characters each. The number of lines in future displays may be
|
||
any multiple of four. The number of characters per line is
|
||
limited only by the maximum line length that would be acceptable
|
||
to consumers. Piezo Systems has thus far produced a proof-of-
|
||
concept model consisting of 4 columns and 4 rows. The company is
|
||
now awaiting funding for phase II of the project. A date of early
|
||
1996 is projected for producing the first practical prototype
|
||
with four lines of forty cells. While we can expect to see one-
|
||
line piezoelectric refreshable displays for many years to come,
|
||
it is clear that this technology will never be applicable to a
|
||
page-size Braille panel.
|
||
Braille computer screens and reading machines that rival a
|
||
Braille book will come when the tactile equivalent of the pixel
|
||
is designed. The monitor at the airport, the screen on a personal
|
||
computer, and a television set are examples of a remarkable
|
||
application of the phenomenon of phosphorescence. These displays
|
||
are manufactured by coating the inside of the front of a glass
|
||
tube with one or more phosphors which emit light when excited by
|
||
impinging electrons. An electron gun at the rear of the video
|
||
tube sweeps an electron beam back and forth over the phosphor
|
||
coating. By turning the beam on and off as it traverses the
|
||
entire area of the coated surface, some points are made to emit
|
||
light while others remain dark. It is thus possible to produce
|
||
patterns of light and dark points to form pictures. Each point of
|
||
light or dark is called a pixel--for picture element.
|
||
Sophisticated elaborations of this simple technology have led to
|
||
the development of all of the displays mentioned immediately
|
||
above, as well as high definition color television.
|
||
During the first U.S./Canada Conference on Technology, the
|
||
work of Dr. Toyo Tanaka with phase transition gels was cited as a
|
||
possible approach to designing a tactile equivalent of a pixel.
|
||
These gels exhibit the property of dimensional change in the
|
||
presence of visible or invisible light, temperature variation, or
|
||
an electric field. Theoretically it is possible to create a
|
||
smooth, flat panel containing cells filled with a gel material.
|
||
Braille patterns of raised dots could be produced on this panel
|
||
under computer control. Maximum exploitation of this concept
|
||
could result in a transducer capable of displaying high quality
|
||
Braille, raised lines, dots, textures, and other tactual
|
||
graphics. Professor Toyo Tanaka, Assistant Professor Steven Leeb
|
||
at MIT, and Dr. John Gardner at Oregon State University have
|
||
teamed up to explore this application.
|
||
These statements are from the MIT grant application to the
|
||
National Science Foundation:
|
||
|
||
Project Goals
|
||
|
||
The principal goal of this project is to explore
|
||
the practicality of fabricating actuators suitable for
|
||
use in an inexpensive Braille-type display that could
|
||
be used with a personal computer or other information-
|
||
processing tool. This project proposes to explore novel
|
||
actuation technologies based on polymer gels, which
|
||
could, in theory, be used to construct actuators that
|
||
provide direct linear motion quietly, swiftly, and with
|
||
high force. Small actuators based on polymer gels could
|
||
be used in a Braille display and in other miniature
|
||
machines.
|
||
|
||
One or more prototype Braille displays, [will be made] based
|
||
on these actuators, which will operate in concert with a standard
|
||
personal computer to provide a tactile display of Braille text
|
||
and graphics. The NFB R&D Committee welcomed the opportunity to
|
||
comment on the draft of the MIT proposal. We have endorsed the
|
||
application and will maintain communication with Gardner and Leeb
|
||
as this work proceeds.
|
||
For at least a decade there has been a steady murmur of
|
||
discontent among the blind as a number of consumer electronic
|
||
products came to market with displays and control systems that we
|
||
cannot readily use. Listening to this background of discontent,
|
||
one can occasionally pick out clear ideas of what should be done
|
||
to remedy the situation. Some say we need to pass a law to
|
||
mandate all industries to produce only products that can be used
|
||
by blind people. I might say that there is some agreement on this
|
||
point, but it ends at the conceptual level. No one has clearly
|
||
described the details of just how a universal display and control
|
||
system might be designed and implemented across the diverse field
|
||
of consumer electronic products. Some say Braille displays must
|
||
be installed; some insist upon synthetic speech on everything.
|
||
Whether Braille, large print, or speech is the medium, the
|
||
language required may be English, Spanish, or Swahili. Almost
|
||
everyone agrees that there should be no more touch panel
|
||
controls, in which each button is shown as a visible spot that
|
||
cannot be tactilely located. From out of the gray background, I
|
||
begin to hear the boys in the corporate board rooms murmuring
|
||
about the need to have all electronic equipment talk a common
|
||
language so that anything can communicate with anything else. It
|
||
is yet to be made clear why we might want our photocopier to talk
|
||
to our microwave oven.
|
||
Understanding the problem may be the first step in finding a
|
||
solution. The problem can be reduced to two elements: an ever
|
||
increasing diversity of products with visual displays on one side
|
||
of the problem and a finite group of handicapped individuals
|
||
requiring different modes of sensory input on the other side.
|
||
Stated in other terms, consumer products are now designed to
|
||
display information that cannot be decoded by blind and visually
|
||
impaired individuals.
|
||
We may be ready to recognize that there cannot be a global
|
||
solution to the problem of consumer access to electronic
|
||
products. Several solutions must be identified. It is at this
|
||
point that NFB offers a two-dimensional approach to bring
|
||
consumer products within reach of all disability groups.
|
||
Manufacturers of consumer products will be asked to make
|
||
simple and inexpensive provision to accommodate blind and
|
||
visually impaired consumers. The first is to employ only controls
|
||
that can be tactually perceived. Examples include all
|
||
conventional mechanical knobs and buttons as well as touch-pads
|
||
and membrane switches with discernable tactile borders or
|
||
markers.
|
||
The second accommodation requires that all products
|
||
continually send complete information appearing on their visual
|
||
display through an infrared light transmitter. From a hardware
|
||
point of view, this is a very simple design modification. It will
|
||
require the addition of one light-emitting diode (LED) and the
|
||
simple circuitry for modulating the LED with text information
|
||
that corresponds to the information on the visual display. In
|
||
effect, these new products will have two equivalent displays. The
|
||
LCD, gas plasma, or other visual device for the general public
|
||
and the infrared transmitter to display the equivalent
|
||
information to handicapped consumers. Development of a detailed
|
||
description of the protocol for transmitting information through
|
||
the infrared transmitter is one goal of an NFB research project.
|
||
It should be instantly apparent that blind people cannot see
|
||
and interpret information on a beam of infrared light any better
|
||
than they can read an LCD display. Something more is clearly
|
||
needed to make access happen. The blindness industry must respond
|
||
to the standard infrared display by offering a variety of
|
||
products to receive the encoded information on the infrared light
|
||
coming from the CD-player, VCR machine, programmable telephone
|
||
answering machine, et cetera, and then decode the information and
|
||
present it to the blind individual in synthetic speech, Braille,
|
||
large print, or other communication medium of his choosing.
|
||
Demonstration of a consumer receiver system is another goal of
|
||
the NFB project.
|
||
It is safe to assume that manufacturers and vendors will
|
||
respond to this new opportunity to serve blind and visually
|
||
impaired customers. We can expect to see the Braille 'n Speak,
|
||
Braille Lite, Braille Mate, and a host of other products equipped
|
||
with infrared receivers and associated software to translate
|
||
display information to Braille or speech. We can anticipate
|
||
speech synthesizers capable of functioning as the display reader.
|
||
We can also expect to see add-ons to retrofit these and similar
|
||
products so that they can be used to receive the display
|
||
information. For example a simple plug-in module could convert a
|
||
laptop computer to a large print display for an office telephone
|
||
operator. Imaginative vendors will think of additional, novel,
|
||
and useful products based on this technology.
|
||
Emerging research goals in the field of blindness that
|
||
command our resources, energy, and leadership include the areas
|
||
described above. Success in these areas--translating visual
|
||
presentation of information to spoken language and Braille;
|
||
design, building, and deploying a large affordable refreshable
|
||
Braille display; and the provision of a consumer access port to
|
||
electronic products--will together lower some of the barriers to
|
||
full participation by blind men and women in an increasingly
|
||
complex technological society. You can continue to count on the
|
||
NFB to be a supporter, a partner, and a leader in research as we
|
||
move into the future.
|
||
[PHOTO: Portrait. CAPTION: Ruperto Ponz Lazaro]
|
||
|
||
INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION IN THE FIELD OF TECHNOLOGY:
|
||
AN AGENDA FOR ACTION TOWARDS THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
|
||
by Ruperto Ponz
|
||
|
||
From the Editor: Ruperto Ponz chairs the World Blind Union
|
||
Committee on Technology and is also one of the leaders of ONCE,
|
||
the Spanish organization of the blind. Mr. Ponz was invited to
|
||
attend the conference and address the group. He requested that
|
||
the English translation of his remarks be read for him since he
|
||
is not fluent in English. Ronald Meyer, who was recording the
|
||
conference, did so. Here is what Mr. Ponz said:
|
||
|
||
Let me first of all express my satisfaction for the
|
||
opportunity which has been given me to share with you my views
|
||
and goals as Chairman of the WBU Committee on Technology, and let
|
||
me also convey to you warmest greetings from the leadership of
|
||
the Spanish National Organization of the Blind (ONCE), in which I
|
||
have the responsibility of heading the Department of Social
|
||
Services. In the 1980's ONCE as an organization and Spain as a
|
||
country undertook the most dramatic and rapidly improving changes
|
||
in the field of services to the blind that have ever occurred in
|
||
such a short period of time anywhere in the world. Technology has
|
||
not been absent in this forward-looking transformation.
|
||
In the late fifties and early sixties, when I was attending
|
||
a residential school in Spain, the most sophisticated technology
|
||
we were using was the slate and stylus. A Braille writer looked
|
||
to us like an impossible dream. In the late sixties and early
|
||
seventies, when I was employed as a teacher in ONCE's educational
|
||
system, the Perkins Brailler and the cassette recorder were
|
||
already commonplace tools in our schools. In the early eighties,
|
||
when I became headmaster of one of those schools, the Optacon,
|
||
CCTV magnifying systems, and other optical appliances and low-
|
||
vision techniques were introduced in our system. Now in my
|
||
current field of responsibility, which also encompasses all
|
||
aspects of technical research and development, import of
|
||
equipment, and national production and distribution of low- and
|
||
high-technology devices, I am faced with the exciting challenge
|
||
of creating the necessary conditions to place within the reach of
|
||
blind people in my country the considerable advances that
|
||
electronics and computer science have brought about to benefit
|
||
blind and visually impaired people. And I can say now with pride
|
||
that we in Spain have moved from a position of total
|
||
technological dependency to one where we are beginning to be
|
||
technological contributors.
|
||
I have dwelled on the description of my technology-related
|
||
professional itinerary in order to give you an idea of where I
|
||
stand now. Although on a strictly personal level I remain
|
||
faithful to the stylus and slate of the fifties, on a
|
||
professional level I am committed to do everything possible to
|
||
assist in opening all doors of technological progress to my
|
||
fellow blind in Spain and all over the world.
|
||
I accepted the proposal to chair such an important committee
|
||
of the World Blind Union in order to share with others my
|
||
experience as a teacher and school administrator as well as a
|
||
member of the management team of a major organization in the
|
||
blindness field, and to put at the disposal of the international
|
||
community the human and other resources of ONCE. However, the
|
||
success of our endeavors will largely depend on the pooling of
|
||
imagination, critical judgments, and constructive suggestions of
|
||
people with knowledge and expertise from throughout the world. In
|
||
this venture the contribution from North America is essential.
|
||
Aware of the fact that international cooperation is more easily
|
||
said than done, I trust that we will succeed in making steps
|
||
forward in the years ahead in the achievement of some of our
|
||
goals.
|
||
Let me finally outline the main activities we would like our
|
||
Committee to be involved with between now and 1996.
|
||
|
||
1. Information collection and dissemination.
|
||
Further efforts need to be made to improve the mechanisms
|
||
for collecting information about research and development and the
|
||
availability of products and especially to improve the means for
|
||
making existing projects and products known to all their
|
||
potential beneficiaries. The advantages of electronic networks
|
||
must be fully exploited.
|
||
Mechanisms for effective and objective evaluation must be
|
||
further improved. A worthy example in this regard is the
|
||
International Braille and Technology Center of the National
|
||
Federation of the Blind in the USA.
|
||
The basic concept of these North American technology
|
||
conferences deserves to be applied at a world level. We do need
|
||
to create a truly universal forum for researchers, manufacturers,
|
||
service providers, and consumers. We must critically analyze
|
||
current realities, identify areas of cooperation, and establish
|
||
future planning mechanisms. Tentatively such a conference could
|
||
take place in the second half of 1995 or the first half of 1996.
|
||
|
||
2. Influencing general research and development, manufacturing,
|
||
and standard-setting bodies.
|
||
Strategies must be implemented to bring to the attention of
|
||
all those concerned the unique needs and potential of blind and
|
||
visually impaired people. We are potential users of almost any
|
||
product or service, but things are increasingly designed and
|
||
produced as though everyone could see.
|
||
|
||
3. Further defining research and development priorities and
|
||
setting up implementation mechanisms.
|
||
During the previous WBU term of office the Research
|
||
Committee undertook the meaningful task of determining
|
||
priorities. This needs further expansion and revision, and it is
|
||
imperative to make a serious attempt to implement those
|
||
priorities in a concerted manner.
|
||
The World Blind Union lacks resources of its own to promote
|
||
significant projects by itself, but we can do a lot through the
|
||
mobilization of knowledge and expertise and the pooling of funds.
|
||
We could explore the feasibility of establishing a WBU Award for
|
||
the most excellent contributions to the implementation of our
|
||
agreed priorities.
|
||
|
||
4. Involvement of consumers in the design and development
|
||
process.
|
||
We the organized consumers nationally and internationally
|
||
know best what we need and how it should be done. We must put
|
||
pressure on all concerned bodies to see to it that we are
|
||
consulted at the earliest possible stages. In this case the WBU
|
||
should be the representative voice of consumers internationally.
|
||
|
||
5. Technology transfer to the developing world.
|
||
If we do not exert the appropriate solidarity mechanisms,
|
||
advances in technology run the risk of widening the gap between
|
||
developed and developing countries. The majority of blind people
|
||
live in developing countries, and in essence their basic needs
|
||
are similar to ours. If their quantitative importance could be
|
||
brought to bear in the design and production of certain items,
|
||
production would become far more cost-effective for us also.
|
||
It should be one of our priority aims to assist in making
|
||
technology available everywhere. Rapid advances often make useful
|
||
products obsolete in a very short period of time. Such appliances
|
||
could be more helpful in the hands of students and professionals
|
||
in the third world than in our storage rooms. This is only one
|
||
possible example of an opportunity to carry out a positive
|
||
technology transfer.
|
||
In this exciting program I trust that I will be able to
|
||
count on the unreserved cooperation and the immense treasure of
|
||
knowledge and expertise which exists in the field of technology
|
||
in the U.S. and Canada.
|
||
Thank you for your kind attention.
|
||
|
||
|
||
[PHOTO: Portrait. CAPTION: David Andrews]
|
||
|
||
OBSERVATIONS ON THE STATE OF TECHNOLOGY FOR THE BLIND
|
||
by David Andrews
|
||
|
||
From the Editor: David Andrews is the Director of the
|
||
International Braille and Technology Center for the Blind at the
|
||
National Center for the Blind. Today he is one of the most
|
||
knowledgeable people in the world about Braille production and
|
||
speech technology. Here are his remarks:
|
||
|
||
In the next few minutes I hope to give you some observations
|
||
and insights into technology, past and present, that I hope can
|
||
be used to prepare us for the future. As the Director of the
|
||
International Braille and Technology Center for the Blind, I have
|
||
the opportunity to look at and work with all of the computer-
|
||
related technology which is available for blind persons. This
|
||
unique opportunity gives me a broad view of what is happening
|
||
today with technology. I would like to take the next few minutes
|
||
to reflect on what I have observed, both good and bad, including
|
||
some of my pet peeves.
|
||
I got my first taste of technology in 1983 with the old
|
||
Kurzweil Reading Machine. Even though I had one in my office at
|
||
the New Jersey Library for the Blind and Handicapped, I found
|
||
myself using it rarely. This was in part because it was usually
|
||
broken. It was also in part because it was difficult to
|
||
understand and really didn't do that great a job. I sat down with
|
||
the machine and read a whole book about telecommunications. It of
|
||
course repeatedly mentioned AT&T, which the machine insisted upon
|
||
calling a7&7. The machine was a technical achievement, and my hat
|
||
goes off to you, Ray Kurzweil, and certainly it was necessary to
|
||
get us where we are today. Unfortunately, it was more of a
|
||
marketing achievement than a reading solution. Today's generation
|
||
of machines is very reliable and much more able.
|
||
I next moved on to a VersaBraille Classic. We just called it
|
||
the VersaBraille at the time. By 1985 I added an Apple 2e
|
||
computer and Braille-Edit and an old Echo II. These tools were
|
||
necessary to realize much of the power of the VersaBraille. In
|
||
1987 I got my first MS-DOS computer, an old Zenith Z-159 XT, a
|
||
powerful machine at the time. In 1988 I moved up to a NEC 286
|
||
machine, and I added a 286 laptop and laser printer in 1990. In
|
||
1991 I bought a 33 Mhz 486 Zeos Computer, and I later bought a
|
||
smaller 486/sx to use to feed mail and messages to computer
|
||
bulletin boards in the Baltimore area. Along the way I have
|
||
bought, traded, and sold various pieces of access technology--I
|
||
sold my Optacon to buy my first computer, and I sold my
|
||
VersaBraille to buy my second. I have also bought, sold, and used
|
||
various speech synthesizers, owning as many as five at one time.
|
||
All of this is a long way of saying that what is best in
|
||
this field is competition. This is true both in the general
|
||
computer market and the access technology field. In the early
|
||
1980's you could count the number of high-tech devices on your
|
||
two hands and have fingers left over. Now in the International
|
||
Braille and Technology Center for the Blind we have twenty
|
||
Braille embossers, nine Braille translation programs, over
|
||
twenty-five speech synthesizers, twenty screen review programs,
|
||
five stand-alone reading machines, nine computer-based reading
|
||
systems, eight kinds of refreshable Braille displays, two Braille
|
||
laptop computers, seven portable electronic note takers, three
|
||
kinds of printers for creating Braille and print on the same
|
||
page, two devices which allow a deaf-blind person to use a
|
||
telephone, and a wide variety of miscellaneous software and
|
||
hardware, all designed for blind and deaf-blind people. It is
|
||
truly amazing when you consider that most of this development has
|
||
happened in the last five years or less. In less then three years
|
||
the International Braille and Technology Center for the Blind has
|
||
filled a 3,000-plus square foot room with devices and has had to
|
||
move to a space over twice as large. Dr. Jernigan, our Finance
|
||
Chairman, may well hope that the rate of acquisition slows down a
|
||
little so that we can stay in the new premises for a longer time.
|
||
A good example of competition and the way in which it has
|
||
improved things is in the area of stand-alone reading machines.
|
||
The first machines (financed, incidentally, through the National
|
||
Federation of the Blind) cost over 50,000 dollars and came on the
|
||
market some fifteen years ago. I am sure that Dr. Jernigan and
|
||
Ray Kurzweil could tell us some war stories about those days.
|
||
Kurzweil's current model is priced at about ten percent of the
|
||
cost of the original and is smaller and better. I have said to
|
||
people in the past that Kurzweil Computer Products made the
|
||
reading machine market, and Arkenstone made it competitive.
|
||
The other thing that has helped reading products immensely,
|
||
but isn't as available in other access technology areas, is
|
||
piggybacking on commercial developments. Optical character
|
||
recognition products, scanners, and OCR software are now widely
|
||
available and used. This has encouraged a number of companies to
|
||
develop products in these areas. Arkenstone, Kurzweil, and others
|
||
have benefited from this interest and effort. Unfortunately for
|
||
blind people, Braille printers, Braille translation software,
|
||
screen review programs, and speech synthesizers aren't general
|
||
market items. I would expect that this could change in the case
|
||
of speech synthesizers, but not for at least five years. I
|
||
believe that ultimately most computers will operate in part by
|
||
recognizing the operator's voice and responding to his or her
|
||
commands. If you are talking to your computer, you won't
|
||
necessarily be at the keyboard and won't be looking at it. Thus,
|
||
speech synthesis and voice prompting are natural outgrowths of
|
||
speech recognition. At this point cheap and improved speech
|
||
synthesis is possible. Until then our numbers are too small to
|
||
promote much research and development in this area. For all
|
||
intents and purposes, there have not been any major improvements
|
||
in speech for approximately ten years. We have seen incremental
|
||
improvements and a number of new products and, in a couple of
|
||
cases, lower prices; but there has not been a major improvement
|
||
in speech synthesis in some time.
|
||
The price of the DEC-Talk has dropped dramatically, and it
|
||
is increasingly used. However, the danger is that, because it is
|
||
pretty good and more affordable, we will accept it as the norm
|
||
and depend on it. Its widespread availability and acceptance
|
||
don't promote new development. Likewise, reliance on the SSI 263
|
||
chip, used by Artic Technologies, Aicom's Accent, the Braille 'n
|
||
Speak, and others, doesn't promote new products. It offers
|
||
relatively low cost, good performance, and acceptable speech
|
||
quality; and people know how to write for the chip; but it really
|
||
isn't that great. We are just used to it. In my opinion the best
|
||
thing that could happen to the speech synthesis field is that the
|
||
SSI 263 chip would go away. That would force us to develop
|
||
alternatives.
|
||
Another positive development is the increased involvement of
|
||
blind persons in the access technology field. There are quite a
|
||
number of very talented blind programmers out there, and a number
|
||
of important companies are owned and run by blind persons. Caryn
|
||
Navy of Raised Dot Computing and Noel Runyan of Personal Data
|
||
Systems, both of whom are here, are notable examples, and there
|
||
are others. I wasn't trying to leave you out, Ted, Larry, and the
|
||
others. There just isn't time for everyone.
|
||
There still aren't enough of us at the top, though. Look
|
||
around the room and observe how many of you are sighted and how
|
||
many are blind. Further, some of the big companies (TeleSensory,
|
||
HumanWare, and Kurzweil spring to mind) have few if any blind
|
||
sales reps. You might take note of Arkenstone, which has in large
|
||
part made its fortune thanks to the efforts of numbers of
|
||
locally-based entrepreneurs, many of whom are blind.
|
||
In a few years technology has become very important to many
|
||
of us. While it won't and can't replace basic skills like cane
|
||
travel and Braille, some of us couldn't do our jobs without it.
|
||
Now to my pet peeves: In working with all this technology, I
|
||
think I have a unique perspective on what could be better
|
||
overall. With the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act,
|
||
access to information has been placed in a whole new light. It is
|
||
now becoming much more commonplace to get Braille agendas at
|
||
meetings or menus in restaurants. It has become easier to get a
|
||
Braille menu, in some cases, than to get a Braille manual out of
|
||
some of you. Let me give you a couple of examples. We purchased
|
||
the $15,000 David Braille computer from Baum U.S.A. in the summer
|
||
of 1992 and did not get Braille manuals until a year later. We
|
||
did not get Braille manuals for the DMFM/80, the $25,000
|
||
refreshable Braille display we bought from Baum, until late
|
||
October of 1993. We bought the DMFM/80 at the same time we bought
|
||
the David. This is inexcusable for completely Braille-oriented
|
||
products which will be used by blind people only. Baum U.S.A.
|
||
said that it was making changes and didn't want to publish the
|
||
manual too soon. If they had that many changes, perhaps the
|
||
product was released too soon.
|
||
I am not trying to pick on Baum. There are other offenders.
|
||
I finally printed my own Braille manuals for the Braillex IB80
|
||
and Notex 40 from Papenmeier of Germany. I was unable to get
|
||
manuals from two different companies--Adhoc Reading Systems and
|
||
ATR Computer. I am still waiting for Braille for the $16,500
|
||
Braillex 2D refreshable Braille display.
|
||
While I got Braille with the Alva Braille Carrier (a $9,000
|
||
Braille note taker/display sold by HumanWare), it was
|
||
unformatted, unburst, unbound, and all in computer Braille.
|
||
American Thermoform did the same thing with the manual for the
|
||
Braillo Comet, a $3,795 Braille embosser. On the low end, the
|
||
Braille manual that came with the Porta-Thiel (an $1,895 Braille
|
||
embosser, which is sold by Blazie Engineering, among others) was
|
||
atrocious. It also was unformatted and in Computer Braille.
|
||
Further, those of you who send out Braille need to be more
|
||
conscientious at times. For years TeleSensory has distributed
|
||
Braille spec sheets on its VersaPoint embosser. These sheets are
|
||
usually in Computer Braille. All people see is that it isn't in
|
||
Grade 2 Braille. You are only hurting yourselves by not
|
||
translating and proofreading your documents. Speaking of
|
||
TeleSensory and Braille, I just got a Braille document from them.
|
||
It concerns the Everest printer, which they sold in the past, and
|
||
the problems many have had with feeding the paper properly. The
|
||
paper-handling notice was in Braille, but the backs of all the
|
||
pages, which were printed in interpoint Braille, had words
|
||
missing from the right side of each line. It made for difficult
|
||
reading, as you can imagine. While the formatting and translation
|
||
were fine, it is obvious that none of the pages was proofed by a
|
||
Braille reader. and TeleSensory is not the only offender in this
|
||
area. They just come to mind as the last one to cross my desk.
|
||
Most of the screen review vendors do not offer Braille, not
|
||
even a reference card. Omnichron with Flipper and KANSYS, Inc.,
|
||
with PROVOX have traditionally offered Braille manuals upon
|
||
request. IBM had a nice, extra-cost hardcover manual with Screen
|
||
Reader for DOS but took over a year to come up with a Braille
|
||
reference card for Screen Reader/2 for OS/2. Many of you do not
|
||
label your disks or cassette tapes in Braille either.
|
||
So that I won't be perceived as entirely negative, I will
|
||
say that there is some good Braille out there. Telesensory,
|
||
Enabling Technologies, Kurzweil, and Arkenstone, among others,
|
||
have all traditionally offered good Braille manuals. Enabling
|
||
Technologies is noteworthy in that some of their manuals have
|
||
contained servicing instructions. They are also willing to send
|
||
some kinds of parts to individual blind users to install
|
||
themselves. It is nice to be treated like the adults we are. You
|
||
are in the business of providing hardware and software products
|
||
to blind people. Some of us read Braille; some of us like tape;
|
||
some of us prefer disk-based documentation; and some of us would
|
||
rather have large print. Each alternative is what we need,
|
||
though, and this won't change. You need to consider these
|
||
alternate formats as a part of the cost of doing business with
|
||
us. It isn't always enough just to put the manual on disk and
|
||
leave it to us. You owe us more than that, particularly with
|
||
expensive Braille-oriented products.
|
||
Before we leave manuals, I would like to touch upon the
|
||
writing itself. It looks as if some of you don't own a spelling
|
||
checker or don't have access to a good human editor. If this part
|
||
of your products is so sloppy, it makes me wonder about the
|
||
programming or inner workings. I have also come to hate most
|
||
European manuals. They tend to rely on many figures, tables, and
|
||
drawings--and the translation is often terrible. If you are going
|
||
to import a product to the U.S., you need to take the time to
|
||
produce a good manual that Americans can digest. We aren't
|
||
stupid--but the style, usage, and conventions are different here.
|
||
My next cross to bear is difficult installation programs.
|
||
This is particularly a problem with screen review programs and to
|
||
a certain extent may be unsolvable. If the user doesn't have a
|
||
working synthesizer, it can be difficult to get speech up for the
|
||
first time. However, there are things you can do.
|
||
Make initial installation instructions and warnings
|
||
accessible in a variety of formats so everyone can read them. I
|
||
get programs all the time that have the instructions on disk and
|
||
in print. If I don't yet have speech up, I am already stuck until
|
||
I can get a human reader. Don't bury important warnings. SlimWare
|
||
Window Bridge did this with warnings about the memory manager
|
||
QEMM-386. I didn't figure it out until I had lost one of my two
|
||
possible installations from their copy-protected installation
|
||
disk. This copy-protection is another bone of contention with me.
|
||
Virtually everyone in the general software market, as well as the
|
||
access field, has dropped copy protection because of the problems
|
||
it causes users. About the only people using it anymore are game
|
||
makers, who generally sell their products for less than $50 a
|
||
pop. If Synthavoice was offering SlimWare Window Bridge at a
|
||
minimal cost, the copy-protection might make sense, but at $695
|
||
it is one of the more expensive Microsoft-Windows-access
|
||
products.
|
||
The Window Bridge installation does do one good thing. They
|
||
are able automatically to identify and configure themselves for a
|
||
wide variety of synthesizers, simplifying the process. Others are
|
||
starting to identify more synthesizers automatically, but Window
|
||
Bridge initially made big progress in this area.
|
||
The Thiel Bax-10, a high-speed interpoint Braille printer
|
||
that cost over $80,000 at the time we bought it, comes with a
|
||
software-based setup program that is virtually impossible to use
|
||
with speech. It seems that they could do better.
|
||
Some of you could engage in more responsible marketing. I
|
||
realize that the competition at times is fierce, but you will
|
||
ultimately not do yourselves any good by misportraying the
|
||
abilities of your products. As I said earlier, technology, as
|
||
important and useful as it is, isn't a substitute for good basic
|
||
skills. We have seen both the BrailleMate and the Mountbatten
|
||
Brailler portrayed as solutions to our Braille literacy problems.
|
||
While these devices and others may be aids to literacy, they will
|
||
not magically make a blind child know Braille. They should also
|
||
not be substituted for using the slate and stylus.
|
||
A marketing ploy that seems unethical to me is the practice
|
||
of pre-announcing new products. This is telling people that
|
||
something bigger and better is just around the corner. It is a
|
||
problem for two reasons. First, it has the effect of freezing the
|
||
market, and the competition suffers. Second, some people
|
||
perpetually wait for the bigger and better thing. You and they
|
||
are denying them the use of potentially useful technology while
|
||
waiting for that perfect solution that XYZ, Inc., just announced.
|
||
It is understandable that some pre-announcement is
|
||
necessary. It would seem to me that one to three months, maybe
|
||
four months, is reasonable. But we have seen wait times from six
|
||
months to a year or more from companies like Artic Technologies,
|
||
Blazie Engineering, and Index, among others. These periods seem
|
||
unduly long. As a consumer I don't want to buy product X on
|
||
Monday and find that the company started selling Y on Tuesday and
|
||
that Y is much better. On the other hand, if I am waiting around
|
||
for Y for a year or more, then I didn't get the use of X for all
|
||
that time. There comes a time when we all must make the
|
||
technology plunge. If it is good and appropriate technology for
|
||
us, it will still be useful even if it isn't the latest and
|
||
greatest. Companies might offer trade-ins or upgrades, or suspend
|
||
sales of a given device, prior to a new one's coming on the
|
||
market. Ultimately all of you will be better served by attending
|
||
to the needs of your customers, not by bad-mouthing the
|
||
competition or trying to take their business away by pre-
|
||
announcing new products and freezing the market.
|
||
Finally, some of you exaggerate the specifications and
|
||
benefits of your products. Fudged specs are most noticeable in
|
||
the Braille embosser segment. You might rightfully point out that
|
||
you are not fudging. You are just measuring noise or printing
|
||
speed differently from me. While this could be true, I think some
|
||
of you could be more practical and realistic in your
|
||
measurements. One example is the Everest printer. Index and
|
||
TeleSensory have said that it prints at 100 characters per
|
||
second. While I have not measured this scientifically, this
|
||
appears to me and others to be the measure for printing one sheet
|
||
of paper. It doesn't take into account the time it takes to
|
||
change pages on this sheet-feeder type embosser. Most of my
|
||
documents, while not hundreds of pages, are longer than one page.
|
||
A realistic measure would account for a multipage document.
|
||
One of two things needs to happen. The first is that all of
|
||
you agree on how these things should be measured and described.
|
||
The second solution is that someone (those of us at the
|
||
International Braille and Technology Center for the Blind, for
|
||
instance) will measure them in the way we see fit and tell the
|
||
world. We may do this anyway!
|
||
I hope that you accept my remarks in the spirit in which
|
||
they are offered. While there are problems in this field, there
|
||
is also much good to be admired and noted. Your energy,
|
||
dedication, and commitment are outstanding. Most of us, if we
|
||
were in it for the money, should have taken the advice offered to
|
||
Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate and gone into plastics or
|
||
something. Most of you vendors are doing this because you are
|
||
doing what you want to do. I hope that we can all work together
|
||
so that you can make an honest living and offer blind people
|
||
better and cheaper technology at the same time. While not easy,
|
||
it is possible.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
=================================================================
|
||
Mohymen Saddeek, President of Technology for Independence,
|
||
Inc., was the final speaker on the morning panel. "Technology for
|
||
Independence" was his title. A summary of his remarks appears
|
||
elsewhere in this issue.
|
||
=================================================================
|
||
[PHOTO: Portrait. CAPTION: Tony Schenk]
|
||
|
||
PRIDE AND PROFIT:
|
||
OBSERVATIONS OF A FREE MARKETEER
|
||
by Tony Schenk
|
||
|
||
From the Editor: Tony Schenk is the President of Enabling
|
||
Technologies Company. Mr. Schenk was the first speaker on the
|
||
Thursday afternoon panel. Here are his remarks:
|
||
|
||
As I thought about how to contribute to a dialogue which
|
||
brings together such a broad range of consumers from our
|
||
marketplace, I couldn't help recalling hotel magnate Conrad
|
||
Hilton's memorable moment on NBC's "Tonight Show." Asked by
|
||
Johnny Carson if he had a message for his customer base which
|
||
could be summarized in just a few words, Hilton shot back, "Yes!
|
||
Remember when you take a shower in my hotels, the curtain goes
|
||
inside the tub, not outside."
|
||
Now that's what I call getting your point across. Of course,
|
||
Mr. Hilton could afford to be brief because people already knew
|
||
what he stood for, since most of them had probably been in at
|
||
least one of his hotels at one time or another. Fortunately we
|
||
have been given a bit more time for our remarks than guests on
|
||
the "Tonight Show" typically receive, but otherwise my situation
|
||
is not so different from that of Conrad Hilton. You already know
|
||
me and the people who work with me through the products we
|
||
manufacture, deliver and support. Your impression of us has
|
||
already been largely formed by your experience with what we
|
||
offer, and there is nothing I can say here today which would add
|
||
very much to, or take very much away from, that impression. This
|
||
is exactly as it should be.
|
||
Throughout my eleven-year involvement with Enabling
|
||
Technologies, first as a developer of software and hardware and
|
||
later as president of the company, I have been acutely aware that
|
||
what we say matters a good deal less to the people we serve than
|
||
what we do or don't put into the boxes we pack and ship every
|
||
day. Nevertheless, there are a few observations I want to share
|
||
with this select group about some of the ways in which access
|
||
technology is bought and sold. Some strange things occasionally
|
||
happen in this wonderfully topsy-turvy, dynamic field of human
|
||
endeavor. One or two of these could perhaps affect what you pay
|
||
for access technology and what kind of choices you may have.
|
||
My first observation is that only the kind of free market we
|
||
enjoy together could have produced the stunning array of choices
|
||
which currently exist for buyers of access technology. It is
|
||
amazing to me how many companies and how many products have
|
||
managed to survive and even prosper in a marketplace which is
|
||
considered too small for notice by the giants in the technology
|
||
industry. I hope nothing ever happens to restrict this free
|
||
market situation, and I believe that any such development would
|
||
immediately begin to diminish the variety of products and
|
||
services available. But I digress. The wide range of choices
|
||
available to the consumer goes far beyond the matter of which
|
||
device to buy. And some of these decisions impose difficult
|
||
choices on us as a manufacturer.
|
||
There are a lot of ways of describing my job and the job of
|
||
my vice president, B.T. Kimbrough, but most of it comes down to
|
||
highly refined listening in order to make what we are going to do
|
||
next responsive to what the marketplace tells us it wants. I say
|
||
that our listening is a refined skill, because we have to do much
|
||
more than simply hear what people say on the telephone, in
|
||
national conferences, and at regional meetings. In order to truly
|
||
receive the message from the marketplace, we have to hear what
|
||
people don't say but imply in their buying decisions; we must ask
|
||
questions and pay careful attention to the significance of the
|
||
questions people ask us. And beyond that we have to be alert when
|
||
using our own products because this is our best chance to put
|
||
ourselves in the place of the user when we design the next
|
||
generation of product.
|
||
Much of the message about what the marketplace wants in a
|
||
Braille printer, which is our chosen field of focus, is so loudly
|
||
and universally expressed that I could recite it in my sleep, and
|
||
according to my wife I occasionally do. Consumers have come to
|
||
expect subsequent generations of product to contain significant
|
||
advancements over earlier models. Everyone wants to see the next
|
||
product cheaper, faster, lighter, more portable, quieter, more
|
||
flexible, and easier to operate. While at least two of these
|
||
characteristics, simplicity and flexibility, are somewhat
|
||
mutually exclusive, I dare say that any new product which does
|
||
not incorporate at least some of the issues of lower cost,
|
||
greater speed, less noise or greater versatility, will have very
|
||
little chance of success.
|
||
But step below this layer of certainty, and you start
|
||
hearing an ever-widening stream of differing and conflicting
|
||
priorities as you penetrate all the many submarkets which we call
|
||
a customer base. Many of our consumers want a Braille printer to
|
||
make Grade Two Braille without the intervention of a computer;
|
||
some want Braille and print on the same page, while others will
|
||
only consider the product if it can be leased or rented.
|
||
Regardless of its capabilities, some government customers will
|
||
buy it only if it can be obtained from a local dealer. (I will
|
||
have more to say about this trend later.) Still others will only
|
||
buy the product if they are given a sizable discount. (Again,
|
||
more of this later.)
|
||
Some state purchasing authorities disregard all product
|
||
characteristics except speed and price, apparently believing that
|
||
this will at least give the appearance of obtaining the best
|
||
product at the lowest cost. These purchasers are not end users,
|
||
but they control the money. Although the Braille readers who will
|
||
be using the machines are usually quite specific about the
|
||
product or at least the features they want the state to obtain
|
||
for them, the purchasing authorities are usually quite simplistic
|
||
in the specifications they set. As a result, users sometimes do
|
||
not get the device they prefer, and manufacturers are encouraged
|
||
to place undue emphasis on speed because this is the only major
|
||
characteristic specified in too many bids.
|
||
Purchasing agents who represent government and private
|
||
industry are among our most frequent and most challenging
|
||
customers. Anxious to make the transaction as simple and brief as
|
||
possible and insulate themselves from any possible later contact
|
||
with the Braille reading end user, these buyers sometimes insist
|
||
on involving a third party, a tactic which can have wasteful
|
||
consequences. Typically this third party is a local computer
|
||
dealer who has never handled an access technology device and has
|
||
no interest now except the making of a quick buck. Theoretically
|
||
this dealer is supposed to install the device, follow up with the
|
||
user, and deal with any small problems which might arise in
|
||
combining several separate products into a functional system. But
|
||
the dealers chosen for this role are not to be confused with the
|
||
reputable and capable dealers of access technology who can and do
|
||
add value to the transaction by providing installation and
|
||
support when needed. The inexperienced local computer dealers of
|
||
whom I speak add nothing to the transaction except the cost of an
|
||
extra middle man. The manufacturer must give the dealer his piece
|
||
and then absorb the extra cost of whatever support might be
|
||
needed, occasionally coping with dealers who try to look good by
|
||
making a sage-sounding diagnosis of a problem which could be
|
||
dealt with in seconds by someone knowledgeable.
|
||
These are modest but typical examples of what we might call
|
||
restrictions of convenience, which an informed marketplace should
|
||
be able to shrug off with little difficulty. Now let's speak of a
|
||
different, and a much more dangerous type of restriction. I'm not
|
||
sure what to call it; institutional power play describes it
|
||
pretty well. This twisted transaction usually concerns one or
|
||
another of the small technology display and training centers
|
||
which are happily springing up all over the country. These
|
||
technology centers generally have a mission to acquaint potential
|
||
users with expensive devices and give them a chance to select a
|
||
preferred one before making a sizable investment. Many of these
|
||
centers, including our hosts at the International Braille and
|
||
Technology Center for the Blind, carefully plan and fund their
|
||
acquisition of a complete, or at least a representative group of
|
||
competing devices designed for speech, Braille, and large print
|
||
users.
|
||
But a few such centers have taken a different approach. In
|
||
these institutions devices are not bought for the technology
|
||
center, they are donated. And the requests for contributions
|
||
usually go something like this: "We have no money, but we will
|
||
recommend your product if you give us one. If you don't, your
|
||
competitors will, and we will recommend theirs instead." We like
|
||
to have our products tested and reviewed and compared with other
|
||
machines, and we politely decline this opportunity to buy a cheap
|
||
and meaningless recommendation. But I have to wonder how many
|
||
users are getting a distorted view of what's available from a few
|
||
so-called regional or local technology centers who didn't raise
|
||
the money to do it right or didn't spend it on technology in any
|
||
case.
|
||
Again I emphasize that the International Braille and
|
||
Technology Center for the Blind pays for its demonstration units
|
||
in hard cash, as do many other reputable centers across the
|
||
country. Oh, they may ask if a discount is offered, but there is
|
||
no hint that a positive or negative recommendation hangs on the
|
||
answer, or that a purchase will not be made unless a specific
|
||
price is met. Incidentally, like many of our colleagues, we are
|
||
glad to offer substantial discounts to technology centers.
|
||
Sometimes they offer the consumer the best chance to make an
|
||
informed buying decision. But when it comes to a required
|
||
donation in exchange for a bogus recommendation, we can only say,
|
||
as many Americans have said before us: Billions for defense; but
|
||
not a cent for tribute. And my last comment on this subject is
|
||
that I have no intention of naming the institutions or people who
|
||
have approached us in the way I have just described. It is my
|
||
belief that simply exposing this regressive tactic in this
|
||
setting will generate enough negative reaction to see that it is
|
||
not repeated.
|
||
I do not want to leave with you the impression that we find
|
||
our involvement in this industry a negative experience. Quite the
|
||
contrary, the infinitely rich interaction between the people I
|
||
hire to design and build good tools and the people who take them
|
||
and make them mean something is extremely satisfying. And that
|
||
reminds me to comment on something I saw in a recent issue of the
|
||
Braille Monitor. We do not consider ourselves responsible for or
|
||
claim credit for creating a welcome rise in Braille literacy, any
|
||
more than a builder of good hammers deserves credit for a real
|
||
estate boom. We consider ourselves first and last to be builders
|
||
of precision tools, which do not so much empower people as they
|
||
give one more option to combine with many options blind people
|
||
can use to empower themselves. We are gratified by the rise in
|
||
the flow of Braille both in this country, Canada, and many other
|
||
parts of the world. We believe in the future of Braille so
|
||
unreservedly that we are prepared to stake our working lives on
|
||
it. We are proud to say that we have found Braille to increase
|
||
the productivity of each of our customers and with hard work and
|
||
dedication by our engineering, production, marketing, and
|
||
customer support staff, braille has produced a modest profit for
|
||
our investors. If our products are reliable, practical and
|
||
productive, I believe we have nothing to apologize for in terms
|
||
of that profit. If our products fail our customers, no apology
|
||
would be sufficient anyway.
|
||
And that brings me to my closing message, which is about as
|
||
close as I intend to come to the style of the Conrad Hilton
|
||
comment I mentioned at the beginning. When asked if they have a
|
||
message for all their consumers which can be summarized in a
|
||
minute or two, Tony Schenk and B. T. Kimbrough eagerly respond,
|
||
"Read the manual. Please, before you call or decide that it isn't
|
||
working right, at least look at the major headings. We have
|
||
shortened the manual for our newest products, so it won't take
|
||
very long. It's in Braille, it's in print, it's on disk. After
|
||
you've read it, call us if you need to. We thrive on the demands
|
||
of our customers. So go ahead! Push us and challenge us. All you
|
||
will do is bring out our best work, and perhaps we will wind up
|
||
doing the same thing for you."
|
||
|
||
|
||
[PHOTO: Portrait. CAPTION: James Morrell]
|
||
|
||
LISTENING FOR EFFECTIVENESS
|
||
by James Morrell
|
||
|
||
From the Editor: James Morrell has recently become the
|
||
President of Telesensory Corporation. This is what he said:
|
||
|
||
I want to thank Dr. Jernigan and the National Federation of
|
||
the Blind for inviting me to this conference. When the invitation
|
||
was first extended, my reaction was that there would be little I
|
||
could contribute to such a meeting. I am not an engineer, and I
|
||
have spent the greater part of my forty plus years in business in
|
||
non-technical assignments for non-technical companies. My
|
||
experience in this field is limited to several years as a member
|
||
of TeleSensory's Board of Directors and the last ten months as
|
||
its President and CEO. I am quite literally the new kid on a new
|
||
block.
|
||
My career has been spent running business operations ranging
|
||
from small start-up companies to a corporation with annual sales
|
||
of one and a half billion dollars, 55,000 employees, a dozen
|
||
operating divisions, publicly owned, and registered on the New
|
||
York stock exchange, and named several times as one of 100
|
||
companies that were the best places to be employed. From 1986 to
|
||
1991 I operated my own consulting company, lectured, wrote, and
|
||
joined the board of directors of half a dozen organizations and
|
||
spent a lot of time working for my alma mater in institutional
|
||
development activities (read this as raising Money, attempting to
|
||
vitalize alumni activities, and cultivating foundation and
|
||
corporation support for the college and its programs.)
|
||
I tell you this about me only to get to the point that in my
|
||
experience I did become expert in marketing and organizational
|
||
planning and developed a reputation as a manager who could lead
|
||
people and get things done and one who was particularly devoted
|
||
to the theory that business success stems directly from an
|
||
understanding of customer needs and wants. In addition, I found
|
||
that all sizes of organizations were more successful and more
|
||
rewarding in terms of the personal satisfaction of their employee
|
||
constituents when they developed, achieved, stressed, and focused
|
||
on customer satisfaction as the central philosophy and
|
||
orientation of management.
|
||
This has been my message to the employees of TeleSensory.
|
||
So, on reflection, I came to the conclusion that I might be able
|
||
to make a small contribution to this group--not in so far as
|
||
contributing ideas and concepts about specific and particular
|
||
technologies that may be of benefit to individuals with vision
|
||
loss seeking technological assistance and products, but rather on
|
||
the approach that I believe will yield the greatest number of
|
||
successful outcomes and contributions from the companies that
|
||
supply technology to this group of consumers.
|
||
Therefore, while at this conference, I would like to: (1)
|
||
Tell you how I believe supplier companies like TSC should
|
||
approach the decision of what developmental projects they will
|
||
do; (2) tell you some of the things TSC is planning to do and
|
||
get your response about the desirability of these actions; and
|
||
(3) most important, listen to what is discussed at this meeting
|
||
and learn from that discussion how TSC should proceed in the
|
||
future.
|
||
In short, I am seeking answers to the following questions:
|
||
1. What is TSC doing that it should not be doing? 2. What is
|
||
TSC doing that it should continue to do? 3. What is TSC not doing
|
||
that it should be doing?
|
||
For a company to define a rational and effective product
|
||
line, or group of products, it must do two things. The first step
|
||
is to analyze where it stands now, at this time, and do so with a
|
||
great deal of candor and honesty. We must look at them in terms
|
||
of customer acceptance, competitive challenges, profitable return
|
||
to the corporation, technological excellence and reliability,
|
||
probable future viability, and pride--pride of the company and
|
||
its people in the work of producing and marketing the product. Of
|
||
this list, all of which are important, customer acceptance and
|
||
corporate pride are far and away the most important factors.
|
||
*** Determining customer satisfaction and acceptance of current
|
||
products is not an easy thing to do, and it is not a simple thing
|
||
to do. There is no single measurement of customer acceptance that
|
||
gives one a total answer. Rather, customer acceptance is the
|
||
synopsis of a number of inter related measurements, all taken in
|
||
an objective manner--a single conclusion that blends the
|
||
measurements together. We are trying to develop such a system at
|
||
TeleSensory. We are measuring customer complaints and
|
||
compliments, not just in total number, but by specific topic. We
|
||
are doing surveys of existing customers, and general surveys of
|
||
others who participate in our industry, to try to determine why
|
||
people purchase, or do not purchase, our equipment. These take
|
||
the form of interviews, questionnaires, focus groups, and
|
||
listening to general feedback from the industry professionals
|
||
that we are in contact with on a more or less daily basis. We are
|
||
also interested in the comments of people who stop at our booth
|
||
at conventions, in the data we receive in letters from friends,
|
||
and in the feedback we get from our company sales
|
||
representatives, whether they be company employees or independent
|
||
business representatives. And we are trying to learn to listen to
|
||
the sales data we receive on a daily, weely, monthly and
|
||
quarterly basis. Numbers can talk too, if you allow them to do
|
||
so, rather than trying to use them to reach an already finalized
|
||
idea.
|
||
Mostly, determining where you are at the present time is
|
||
based on listening. We all have a number of possible ways to
|
||
listen and an infinite capacity to store the data we listen to.
|
||
The question is, do we do it?
|
||
The second step is describing where you want to go in the
|
||
future. What is the vision of the organization? What should you
|
||
be doing when you arrive at the place you want to be? How did you
|
||
get there?
|
||
Creating a corporate vision also depends mostly on
|
||
listening. You must listen to what the needs and wants are of the
|
||
market you intend to serve. You must listen to determine where a
|
||
new product is needed, when an old product should be maintained,
|
||
what things need to be fixed, what things need to be left alone--
|
||
in short, what will be the easiest things to do to satisfy your
|
||
customers and reach or attain your vision. Really, you must
|
||
listen in order to even have a vision.
|
||
So the first thing that I think technology based companies
|
||
will need to do to be successful in the future is develop the
|
||
capability to be very good listeners and synthesizers of the data
|
||
they receive from listening.
|
||
Then--and only then--the corporation needs to develop
|
||
product ideas based on three important screens. One is the screen
|
||
of core competencies, the second is the idea of strategic assets,
|
||
and the third is the screen of reliability and value.
|
||
The idea of core competencies is that any organization has a
|
||
few things that it can do very well, and rather than trying to be
|
||
all things to all people, the organization should stick to its
|
||
knitting and do what it can do....very well. Core competencies
|
||
tend to be technical competencies and they allow engineers and
|
||
designers to create products that utilize those competencies to
|
||
their fullest. As an example, we at TSC think we have three core
|
||
competencies..three technical competencies that we believe we
|
||
understand. They are tactile information displays, digital and
|
||
analog video processing, system and human interface software.
|
||
If we are right, and we are willing to bet that we are, all
|
||
our products should be based on one, or all, of these
|
||
competencies. So our first screen after determining what our
|
||
customers want is to ask if we can devise an answer to that want
|
||
by utilizing these three central skills.
|
||
The next screen is the concept of strategic assets. Every
|
||
organization excels in the performance of certain tasks. These
|
||
particular skills give the organization an extra edge in solving
|
||
problems that involve those skills. When the organization is able
|
||
to utilize those skills in serving customers there is a greatly
|
||
improved possibility of success.
|
||
At TSC we think our strategic assets include after sales
|
||
support, distribution system, manufacturing facilities and
|
||
capability, and federal program capability.
|
||
Whenever a new product idea needs to incorporate any of
|
||
these assets in order for the product to be made, provided to an
|
||
end-user, and utilized effectively by that end-user, we believe
|
||
we have an increased chance of performing well and therefore of
|
||
successfully adding that product to our offerings.
|
||
The third screen is the screen of reliability and value. Our
|
||
products cannot work intermittently. We must work consistently.
|
||
Therefore, it is not our first priority to design the most recent
|
||
technology into our products. It is not our first priority to
|
||
design the most cost-efficient products. It is our first priority
|
||
to design the most reliable products. Cost-efficiency becomes the
|
||
second most important item, and technology becomes the third item
|
||
of consideration. Of course, we want our products to incorporate
|
||
new, exciting technological capabilities, but only if they are
|
||
reliable and only if they can be provided to our consumers at a
|
||
cost that make owning and using them feasible.
|
||
Reliability is value-related. If the product qualifies for
|
||
consideration based on reliability, then value becomes the
|
||
determinant of selection between alternate product offerings. How
|
||
do we measure value? We think value is the resulting sum of
|
||
features and price. The management task is to know our customers'
|
||
needs and wants well enough that we can provide the features
|
||
needed, and desired, at a price that makes the product desirable.
|
||
To summarize, the products we develop should come from
|
||
listening to a wide variety of sources within the industry, a
|
||
broad sampling of our customers, and the feedback we obtain from
|
||
our own employees and others who come in contact with our
|
||
company. From gathering input from all sources we will determine
|
||
what we will do by screening those ideas against our core
|
||
competencies, our strategic assets, and our ability to create
|
||
solutions that are reliable and combine features and price in a
|
||
way that creates value to our end-users.
|
||
Dr. Jernigan asked me to speak directly to those products we
|
||
are planning for the future. As of this moment, my answer will be
|
||
less than complete, and I will explain what I mean by that
|
||
statement.
|
||
We do know that we are introducing two new refreshable
|
||
Braille products that update our existing Navigator line. One
|
||
product is an 86-cell unit, with a 46-cell unit that will follow
|
||
closely behind. These products are planned to incorporate up-to-
|
||
date technology utilizing on-board speech as well as an expanded
|
||
Braille capability. A second entry to this product line is a less
|
||
sophisticated product that is a slim line portable product made
|
||
to nest with a notebook computer. Both products will be in the
|
||
market place no later than March of 1994, and hopefully the
|
||
portable unit will ship before the end of 1993. In addition we
|
||
have already introduced the speech software for these packages
|
||
which is also marketed as a stand-alone product. Its called
|
||
ScreenPower and will be expanded to be the basic software driver
|
||
of most future TSC access products that you will see.
|
||
Products beyond these three introductions are not known at
|
||
this time. That's because we have launched a strategic study of
|
||
our blindness product line and what that line of products should
|
||
be. We have set up a special team of people to participate in
|
||
this effort, made up of members of our industry, existing
|
||
customers, product users who do not use our existing products,
|
||
members of our distribution team, and corporate staff members
|
||
including engineers and marketing managers who have considerable
|
||
experience in this area. We have given them a very broad
|
||
assignment: Listen, Review, Evaluate and Recommend the current
|
||
status of our products, tell us your vision of where we should be
|
||
in three to five years, and give us your recommended road map of
|
||
how we will get from the Here and Now to the There and Then. We
|
||
should receive their report before February 1, 1994, and we plan
|
||
to take immediate action to begin the process of incorporating
|
||
their recommendations into the future of TSC and its product
|
||
users.
|
||
There are some outcomes of the study that are predictable.
|
||
We will incorporate computers and a lot of software into our
|
||
products. These two parts of electronic technology are firmly a
|
||
part of successful current applications, and it is reasonable to
|
||
expect that they will continue to be central to solving future
|
||
problems. You should also expect to see products based on the use
|
||
of Braille cells and refreshable Braille applications. We know
|
||
that is basic to your view of product needs, and we agree with
|
||
you. You will also find speech as a part of the offering, and
|
||
frequently optical scanning as a related product. We expect we
|
||
will continue to need the capability of a separate, but
|
||
integrated note-taking capability, and certainly, we will want to
|
||
interface well with printers and other computer peripherals.
|
||
We expect our equipment will be used by individuals in the
|
||
workplace, including education as a workplace. A second
|
||
application will be individual use at home, and a third will be
|
||
as part of equipment configurations made by other manufacturers,
|
||
incorporating our skills and equipment in concert with theirs.
|
||
By concentrating on these three markets we will be able to
|
||
adapt individual products and the technology that drives them to
|
||
all three situations. Each situation has its own needs, but the
|
||
core competencies that lead to the specific solutions are very
|
||
similar.
|
||
Finally, our products will be affordable. We have adopted
|
||
this concept as a basic cornerstone for TSC in the future. Others
|
||
in the industry can attain this goal of affordability. What TSC
|
||
can do to further differentiate itself is to provide excellent
|
||
service and training. We have already taken steps to make these
|
||
additive services real. We are strengthening our service network
|
||
here in the East and have provided training resources to the
|
||
division that markets blindness products.
|
||
The future will require that we revise our mission. We are
|
||
no longer in the business of developing products for those with
|
||
visual loss. We are in the business of developing products for
|
||
people who have visual loss who want to utilize the products to
|
||
achieve their goals.
|
||
I hope my presentation has been helpful. I want to thank you
|
||
again for the opportunity to attend this meeting. TSC has been a
|
||
leader in this industry for many years. We intend to continue to
|
||
seek improvement in how we serve the industry, and we will not
|
||
feel that we have succeeded until we are certain that those we
|
||
serve are served well. Thank you.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
=================================================================
|
||
The other two panelists in the afternoon session were Elliot
|
||
Schreier, Director of the National Technology Center at the
|
||
American Foundation for the Blind, and Deane Blazie, President of
|
||
Blazie Engineering. "Future Technology for the Blind: What is
|
||
Coming? What Can We Do About it?" was Mr. Schreier's title, and
|
||
"Research and Development at Blazie Engineering" was Mr.
|
||
Blazie's. Summaries of their remarks appear elsewhere in this
|
||
issue.
|
||
=================================================================
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
SUMMARY OF THURSDAY AFTERNOON DISCUSSION
|
||
|
||
During the discussion after these panel presentations the
|
||
following issues were raised and comments made:
|
||
Dr. Kurzweil urged that this conference establish access to
|
||
the Information Super Highway as one of its first priorities
|
||
because of the vast amount of information that will be available
|
||
to all users, including those who are blind, through it. But
|
||
graphics will be a significant component of the available data,
|
||
so we must solve the graphics-recognition problem.
|
||
Jim Fruchterman said that developers in this field have a hard
|
||
time finding research and development money from sources other
|
||
than their own pockets, and it would be helpful if sources could
|
||
be found to assist in this area. But perhaps an even more
|
||
pressing problem is that facing people who would like to buy this
|
||
expensive equipment but don't have sources beyond themselves or
|
||
their employers to help. The money-lending entities in this
|
||
country do not understand about access equipment, so they are not
|
||
usually willing to make the loans. This is a real problem which
|
||
should be addressed.
|
||
Dr. Jernigan pointed out that the National Federation of the
|
||
Blind has a low-interest (three percent) loan program for
|
||
technology purchases, and he announced that the organization
|
||
would increase that pool of funds from $60,000 to $200,000 in an
|
||
effort to help. Admittedly it won't solve the problem, but it is
|
||
a start. Paul Edwards pointed out that the Technology Act is now
|
||
funding programs in forty-two states, and there has been very
|
||
little effective programming for disabled people. This conference
|
||
might consider making a forceful statement to those who conduct
|
||
the program out of Washington, encouraging them to broadcast
|
||
widely any creative efforts to develop ways of funding technology
|
||
for disabled people.
|
||
Ritchie Geisel said that he has been appointed to an
|
||
advisory panel of CEOs working with the National Information
|
||
Infrastructure (NII), the Information Super Highway. People
|
||
interested in working with him on this project should contact
|
||
him. Paul Edwards immediately volunteered.
|
||
Tony Schenk then clarified his earlier statement to say that
|
||
organizations that base their evaluations of technology on
|
||
whether or not the technology has been donated to them make
|
||
things difficult within the industry. He was not speaking of
|
||
agencies that maintain display settings where the equipment is
|
||
examined by potential users.
|
||
Dr. Herie commented that agencies that find themselves
|
||
holding newly purchased but now outdated equipment are very
|
||
unwilling to pay hard money up front the next time around. He
|
||
urged vendors to admit when their products are outdated or have
|
||
not been successful.
|
||
Louis Tutt, President of the Council of Schools for the
|
||
Blind, offered the facilities represented by his organization as
|
||
locations for any experimental hardware or software that vendors
|
||
would like to have tested. He promised that it would be returned
|
||
at the end of the trial period.
|
||
Noel Runyan said that his company has been working with the
|
||
Recycled Technology Project, a Bay-area organization that
|
||
collects old technology for use by other people. Companies like
|
||
Blazie that have buy-back programs could help, and entities like
|
||
the International Braille and Technology Center for the Blind
|
||
could act as clearinghouses announcing what equipment and
|
||
programs were available. For example, three-quarters of the
|
||
Optacons ever produced are probably sitting out there on shelves,
|
||
not being used. They could be helping people.
|
||
Dr. Jernigan then explained that the NFB's policy with
|
||
respect to the evaluation of technology is clear. The NFB regards
|
||
itself as a watchdog on the field. But under no circumstances
|
||
would the organization's political assessment of a vendor or
|
||
individual color a technology evaluation. The minute that
|
||
happened, the entire system would be compromised. However, if a
|
||
product was good and the producer harmful to blind people in the
|
||
view of the Federation, the organization would have no hesitation
|
||
in adding to its excellent evaluation a statement urging
|
||
consumers and agencies not to buy the product. He went on to say
|
||
that he thought that a growing number of agencies and
|
||
organizations in the blindness field are increasingly concerned
|
||
about the attitudes of vendors toward blind people as well as the
|
||
quality of their products.
|
||
He concluded by saying that the ultimate solution for
|
||
finding the funds to purchase the technology that blind people
|
||
need is to see that they have good jobs with which to finance
|
||
their own purchases. Most sighted people own cars despite the
|
||
fact that they cost close to $20,000. Blind people should be in a
|
||
position to make equivalent purchases for themselves.
|
||
|
||
|
||
[PHOTO: Portrait. CAPTION: James Thatcher]
|
||
|
||
PROBLEMS AND CHALLENGES OF THE GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE
|
||
by James Thatcher
|
||
|
||
From the Editor: Early in the Friday morning, November 5,
|
||
conference session Dr. Jernigan made several general introductory
|
||
comments about language versus graphics. He pointed out that
|
||
humankind's first effort at written communication was pictorial.
|
||
Though this was useful for conveying some kinds of information,
|
||
the pictures had to evolve into an alphabet and mathematical
|
||
symbols before truly complex ideas could be represented. There
|
||
are, however, types of information for which graphical
|
||
representation is faster and more accurate--maps and
|
||
architectural drawings, for example. But it is the nature of
|
||
humanity always to believe that the latest invention is vastly
|
||
superior to everything that has gone before. Radio was the rage
|
||
until television with its action pictures displaced it.
|
||
Dr. Jernigan concluded by raising the question whether the
|
||
Graphical User Interface is merely the latest fad, replacing
|
||
words once more with pictorial representations, or whether
|
||
computer graphics truly do convey information more quickly and
|
||
efficiently than words on a screen can. If the former is the
|
||
case, then we have a right to insist that the most accessible
|
||
operating system be used. If, on the other hand, computer users
|
||
really are more efficient working with the newest, graphics-based
|
||
system, blind people must not attempt to stand in the way of
|
||
progress.
|
||
The first speaker on Friday morning to address the question
|
||
of the Graphical User Interface was Dr. Jim Thatcher. He is the
|
||
Manager of Interaction Technology in the Mathematical Sciences
|
||
Department at IBM Research and a man whose concern for the
|
||
problems faced by blind computer users and intuitive grasp of the
|
||
way in which information is absorbed by those using screen-review
|
||
programs almost certainly are responsible for IBM's ScreenReader
|
||
Program for the OS/2 operating system. Here is what he said:
|
||
|
||
Blind computer users have been worried about access to
|
||
Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) for several years. And, who can
|
||
blame them? They have been shut out of access to graphics
|
||
programs like Flight Simulator for DOS and from certain parts of
|
||
even their favorite text-based programs. The preview facility of
|
||
WordPerfect and the graph facility of Lotus 1-2-3 both enter
|
||
graphics mode and become inaccessible. But blind users may be
|
||
willing to get along without access to that very small fragment
|
||
of the computing environment.
|
||
The graphical user interfaces in MicroSoft's Windows under
|
||
DOS, in IBM's Presentation Manager under OS/2, X Windows under
|
||
UNIX, and the Apple MacIntosh are quite a different story. In
|
||
these environments all programs (including Lotus 1-2-3 and
|
||
WordPerfect, mentioned above) run all the time in graphics mode.
|
||
The environment is radically different, especially for blind
|
||
users and the people who develop access technology for them.
|
||
In this speech I will first explain the difference between
|
||
text-mode and graphics computing. Then, I will discuss the
|
||
advantages of the graphical user interface--advantages shared by
|
||
blind and sighted users alike. Together with these advantages, I
|
||
want to present my view of how a screen reader should respond to
|
||
this new environment. Turning to issues even more specific to
|
||
screen readers, I will then discuss two problem areas that I see
|
||
as critical to the continued evolution of screen readers for
|
||
graphical user interfaces. The first relates to automatic
|
||
announcement of error or status messages; the second is what I
|
||
refer to as the "active point issue."
|
||
|
||
Text-Mode Compared to Graphics-Mode Computing
|
||
|
||
Let's take a look at the two different computing
|
||
environments. Text-mode computing is simple and accurate. It uses
|
||
a model of the display that is a twenty-five by eighty array of
|
||
pairs of numbers. (The size of this array can vary. For example,
|
||
it can be 25 by 132 or 53 by 80.) The first number in the pair is
|
||
the ASCII value of the character that appears in that position on
|
||
the screen, and the second number is the attribute--it gives
|
||
color information for foreground and background colors and tells
|
||
whether or not the character is blinking.
|
||
For example, if the background is blue and there is a white
|
||
"I" in the upper corner of your text-mode display, then the first
|
||
pair of numbers in the array will be "73, 31." Seventy-three is
|
||
the ASCII value of capital I, and 31 is the number that
|
||
represents white on blue.
|
||
In text-mode computing everything is stored in display
|
||
memory, and it is stored there in a useful form. This is what I
|
||
mean by text-mode computing being accurate. It is accurate
|
||
because the display hardware uses only display memory to form the
|
||
image on the screen. Display memory actually contains this array
|
||
of pairs of numbers. This is what gets displayed, nothing more,
|
||
nothing less. The ASCII numbers that represent characters are
|
||
exactly what a screen reader sends to the synthesizer for it to
|
||
translate ASCII text into speech. When 73 is sent to the
|
||
text-to-speech device, it says "I."
|
||
For graphics-based computing there is still display memory,
|
||
but now the numbers in that display memory represent only pixels,
|
||
which are just dots of color. (Pixels are also referred to as
|
||
picture elements or PELs.) For example, a white on blue "I" is
|
||
made up of about 128 pixels--some are the color blue; others,
|
||
comprising the I, are white. The display memory holds only
|
||
pixels. It contains no ASCII values.
|
||
Several methods of reading graphics-mode display screens are
|
||
being discussed. The first method would be to use character
|
||
recognition or, better, document recognition to figure out what
|
||
is on that display. I believe that today character recognition is
|
||
feasible for a static screen, but not for the changing screens we
|
||
find in a computing environment.
|
||
The second solution is to create what Berkeley Systems first
|
||
called an Off-Screen-Model (OSM) when they introduced outSpoken
|
||
for the MacIntosh in November, 1989, the first screen reader for
|
||
a graphical user interface. To the best of my knowledge, all
|
||
screen readers for graphical user interfaces use some form of
|
||
OSM. The idea of the off-screen-model is to intercept everything
|
||
that is going to the display before it becomes pictures and
|
||
record all relevant information in a separate data structure
|
||
(data base) called the off-screen-model. The information recorded
|
||
there will include the text, its position, color, font, and
|
||
window handle. (A window handle is a tag that identifies the
|
||
window.) That is the minimum the OSM will contain. Different
|
||
screen readers will contain more and different information
|
||
depending, in part, on the level at which the drawing calls are
|
||
intercepted.
|
||
Once you have the off-screen-model, a screen reader can be
|
||
built that accesses the OSM instead of the display buffer, to
|
||
determine the text and/or icons that are on the display. The
|
||
screen reader uses the off-screen-model to report text on the
|
||
display, rather than using the display memory as it did for
|
||
text-mode computing.
|
||
|
||
Advantages of GUI's
|
||
|
||
The idea of Common User Access (CUA, IBM calls it) is good
|
||
news for both sighted and blind users. Basically one uses the
|
||
same ways of navigating in many different applications. Text-mode
|
||
programs were heading that way as they added menu bars, pull-down
|
||
menus, dialogs, and the like. Still navigation in text-mode
|
||
Word-Perfect 5.1, Lotus 1-2-3, and Quicken were all different.
|
||
The GUI versions (OS/2 and Windows) of these applications do in
|
||
fact have a common interface. The ways to get to menus, to move
|
||
around menus, to pull down menus, to interact with dialogs are
|
||
all the same.
|
||
That common access is reflected in how the screen reader
|
||
works. In addition to having a model of the display, the GUI
|
||
screen reader is hooked into messages and actions of the GUI and
|
||
so knows when menus are active or dialogs have appeared. Most
|
||
screen readers for GUI's will speak all of these events
|
||
automatically, without configuration of any kind.
|
||
What had become markedly complex and difficult for
|
||
text-based computing (action bars, color bars, pop-ups) is now
|
||
almost automatic. In 1988, before OS/2 1.1 was released, I was
|
||
showing a demonstration program that spoke menus, dialogs, entry
|
||
fields, and window titles as the user moved around the
|
||
Presentation Manager GUI. That is the easy part; that can be done
|
||
by a competent GUI programmer. But not only are these
|
||
standardized controls relatively easy for the screen reader, they
|
||
are the heart of common user access.
|
||
This common access includes help and documentation as well.
|
||
In all applications I have seen for OS/2 and Windows, F1 will
|
||
give context-sensitive help. That unification is truly welcome.
|
||
Online documentation is the rule rather than the exception, and
|
||
most applications use the GUI's information presentation
|
||
facilities, so getting around that documentation will be familiar
|
||
across different applications.
|
||
In summary, the use of standardized controls simplifies
|
||
access for blind users and sighted users alike. In addition, that
|
||
access is what had become so difficult with text-mode screen
|
||
readers. I believe these benefits far outweigh the designers'
|
||
real and perceived difficulties in creating screen readers for
|
||
the GUI environment and the blind users' concern about mastering
|
||
this new environment. It is my contention that, because of common
|
||
user access, the environment is easier to master than was the
|
||
text-based DOS environment.
|
||
|
||
Status Announcements--What Was Easy Is Now Hard
|
||
|
||
It seems to be the nature of things: just when the really
|
||
difficult parts of screen access get easy (menus, popup dialogs,
|
||
and the like), the easy things, like status messages, have become
|
||
difficult. For me to talk about this it is easiest to refer to
|
||
the facilities of IBM ScreenReader. Its 1984 precursor, called PC
|
||
SAID, had a concept of Autospeak: in a profile the user could
|
||
specify any part of the screen (or any expression) to watch; when
|
||
there was a change in that part of the screen or the value of
|
||
that expression, PC SAID would take a specified action, usually
|
||
making an announcement.
|
||
By the time PC SAID came out as the IBM ScreenReader
|
||
product, other screen readers had basically the same function.
|
||
The uses of Autospeaks in all screen readers is more or less the
|
||
same. The blind user needs to be notified of spontaneous status
|
||
messages or error messages that appear somewhere on the display--
|
||
maybe the top, maybe the bottom, but certainly not where the user
|
||
is currently focused. Some examples are the following messages:
|
||
"String not found," "Unknown Command," "The system will go down
|
||
in five minutes," "Drive A not ready," and "WAIT." For most
|
||
text-mode applications, the position where that message appeared
|
||
was fixed for the application, and with relatively simple
|
||
configuration activities the user could both hear the message
|
||
when it appeared and review it. Remember: the text-based model is
|
||
simple and accurate; so the message was to be found in row 23,
|
||
column 16, or row 1 column 76, or maybe two rows above the cursor
|
||
(as examples).
|
||
The situation for the GUI is totally different. Those status
|
||
or error messages are still there. But their location is quite
|
||
another question. To take just one example, the concept of row
|
||
23, column 16 is no longer relevant. The number of rows or
|
||
columns in a graphical screen depends on how much text you have
|
||
put there. Maybe a status message appears at the bottom of the
|
||
window, but when there is no status message, the last line may be
|
||
the text you are currently typing. A status message may
|
||
consistently appear at some pixel position on the display. But
|
||
windows can be moved, and they come up in different positions,
|
||
depending on the order of invocation. Relative positions are not
|
||
good either because windows can be resized.
|
||
I am aware that all of this may seem somewhat mysterious and
|
||
even alarming to blind users. But I want to discuss it here in
|
||
order to explain the IBM ScreenReader/2 solution to this
|
||
difficult problem because I believe it is the only one currently
|
||
available for GUI screen readers.
|
||
Those Autospeaks that were the key innovation of the first
|
||
IBM ScreenReader for DOS have been generalized to be able to
|
||
watch the results of procedures. Those procedures in our Profile
|
||
Access Language (PAL) can be defined to search the window tree of
|
||
the application for the status message and return the text of
|
||
that message (for example) if it is present. In this way the
|
||
status message can be announced. As I said in the beginning of
|
||
this section, it is not easy, but it can be done. I look forward
|
||
to other innovative interactive methods for accomplishing this
|
||
task as screen readers for GUI's evolve.
|
||
|
||
The Active Point Issue
|
||
|
||
This is a subject which is not discussed by application or
|
||
operating system developers or planners. This is, I believe, an
|
||
issue peculiar to screen readers and screen enlargement software.
|
||
Any screen reader must be able to follow and describe the active
|
||
point because the blind user must know what keyboard actions will
|
||
do, what the enter key will do, and where characters will be
|
||
placed when entered from the keyboard.
|
||
It seems to me to be easiest to describe the active point
|
||
issue with reference to text-based DOS computing. The cursor in
|
||
that arena is usually the active point. The information about the
|
||
cursor (position, shape, color) for text-based DOS computing is
|
||
held in registers in the display hardware. A screen reader in
|
||
that environment can know the cursor position by reading those
|
||
registers.
|
||
For contrast, in the mid-80's, IBM had a 3270 emulator that
|
||
ignored the cursor hardware and instead highlighted a single
|
||
character. The active point in that emulator was a single
|
||
highlighted character. The software was inaccessible by screen
|
||
readers of that time because the effort required to find that
|
||
highlighted character was just too great. Note that many screen
|
||
readers of that time, especially IBM ScreenReader/DOS, could find
|
||
that cursor character, but not in a useful or practical way.
|
||
In the late '80's DOS text-based programs more and more had
|
||
a CUA type interface, with action bars, pull-down menus, and
|
||
dialogs. These introduced the active point issue into text-based
|
||
computing. Screen readers adopted methods for watching for
|
||
highlight bar or color bar changes so as to track the active
|
||
point. Some applications (like Lotus 1-2-3) always had the
|
||
hardware cursor follow the highlight or color bar in an invisible
|
||
mode. In these cases tracking the active point was a lot easier.
|
||
Initially these applications were difficult for screen readers;
|
||
but, because the required information was available to the screen
|
||
reading program, those screen reading programs adapted.
|
||
For the graphical user interface the active point issue is
|
||
of special concern. There may be absolutely no way for a screen
|
||
reader to detect the active point. The reason is that the active
|
||
point--the cursor, insertion bar, highlight, or selected item--is
|
||
indicated with some graphical object--a line, a box, or a color
|
||
change. The ways to draw such an object on the display are
|
||
practically unlimited. The graphical screen reader depends on
|
||
knowing the drawing method. This means that it is quite possible,
|
||
as we know, for a screen reader to come out as a product, and the
|
||
next application (one not yet tested) could be completely
|
||
inaccessible because a cursor or highlight is drawn in a way not
|
||
yet imagined by the screen reader developer.
|
||
I can conceive of the following approaches to address the
|
||
active point issue:
|
||
1. Test as many applications as possible prior to product
|
||
release; try to generalize cursor and selector drawing methods
|
||
found in tested applications.
|
||
2. Make absolutely certain that the screen reader handles
|
||
all cursors and selectors that are standard for the GUI.
|
||
"Standard" means "created by a CreateCursor type of call or found
|
||
in standard text editing widgets."
|
||
3. Get on application developers' beta test programs so that
|
||
those applications' problems with active-point tracking can be
|
||
caught before they become products.
|
||
4. Encourage application developers to use standard cursors
|
||
and selectors in standard ways.
|
||
5. Add a hookable call to the GUI, which would inform screen
|
||
readers of the active point. This would be called by the standard
|
||
cursor routines in the GUI, for example, WinShowCursor in PM. But
|
||
also it would be called by applications using unusual,
|
||
non-standard cursors, if those applications wanted to be
|
||
accessible. When a screen reader hooked this call, it would be
|
||
passed the active point information it received.
|
||
In effect, the previous suggestion could be implemented
|
||
independent of the operating system, following the access-aware
|
||
ideas proposed by Berkeley Systems and similar ideas proposed by
|
||
Microsoft. Here a separate library would be provided, and the
|
||
non-standard applications would use it to inform screen readers
|
||
of their active points.
|
||
6. Do research. For example, can artificial intelligence
|
||
techniques be applied in such a way that a screen reader would be
|
||
able to learn that certain graphical objects are to be
|
||
interpreted as an insertion bar, cursor, or the active point?
|
||
I believe that the off-screen-model concept solves the
|
||
problem of the graphics screen for the graphical user interface,
|
||
and I think that technology is well understood by screen reader
|
||
developers. Common user access is a big plus for the computing
|
||
environment, and with access to the GUI this advantage is shared
|
||
by blind users. We need to work more on being able to configure
|
||
screen readers easily to announce automatically all we would
|
||
like; but that will, I think, come with the advancing screen
|
||
reader technology.
|
||
I mentioned the active point issue, because it is important
|
||
and because I do not know what the solution will be. It must be
|
||
remembered that most applications work just fine regarding this
|
||
active point issue. The ill-behaved applications are the
|
||
exception, not the rule.
|
||
|
||
|
||
[PHOTO: Portrait. CAPTION: James Halliday]
|
||
|
||
A QUESTION OF WINDOWS
|
||
by James Halliday
|
||
|
||
From the Editor: Jim Halliday is the President of HumanWare,
|
||
Inc. The following are the remarks he made:
|
||
|
||
It is, once again, an honor to be asked to speak to this
|
||
esteemed group of industry leaders. I want to express my
|
||
gratitude to Dr. Jernigan and the National Federation of the
|
||
Blind for this opportunity.
|
||
I recently attended two major exhibitions: REHA, in
|
||
D<EFBFBD>esseldorf, Germany, and Closing the Gap in Minneapolis. One of
|
||
the hottest topics at both conferences was access to windows.
|
||
Everywhere I turned, someone was announcing a new solution. Some
|
||
products seemed more complete than others. Some had more pizzazz.
|
||
Some seemed easy but limited, and others seemed powerful but
|
||
complicated. Some seemed to work fine in the Windows Program
|
||
Manager and selected applications, but there seemed to be some
|
||
question in everyone's mind about other applications. This
|
||
planted a seed of worry in my mind. Some solutions preferred
|
||
speech output, and others Braille. Several solutions included
|
||
varying degrees of both. As I walked from booth to booth, I felt
|
||
as if I was going into a car dealership for a test drive but kept
|
||
finding myself in the service bay, being shown how to change the
|
||
sparkplugs on the vehicle instead.
|
||
When working in a Windows environment, I use MS-Word for
|
||
word processing and Excel as my spreadsheet. Everyone
|
||
demonstrated their access working with Word, but when I asked
|
||
about Excel, I heard comments like, "We haven't implemented that
|
||
yet," or "That application isn't written to Microsoft's standard
|
||
rules, so we can't work with it, yet." This last comment shocked
|
||
me because I was referring to Excel, a program actually written
|
||
by Microsoft. How is it possible that Microsoft does not keep its
|
||
own rules?
|
||
I wandered from booth to booth and programmer to programmer,
|
||
becoming more confused by the minute. I learned that screen
|
||
readers require an off-screen model of what appears on the
|
||
screen, and this text-based model is actually what the access
|
||
program reads. Some companies are writing their own off-screen
|
||
models; some are using the one under development at Berkeley
|
||
Systems. Some seem more dependent on this model than others.
|
||
I found it hard to know what questions to ask. All of the
|
||
developers sounded brilliant and knowledgeable, and I was
|
||
becoming more confused by the minute. They all professed to
|
||
having the best concept, if not the best solution. I asked myself
|
||
how this was possible, yet I was too ignorant to ask intelligent
|
||
questions that would expose the strengths or weaknesses of a
|
||
particular product. It became increasingly clear that, in order
|
||
to know what questions to ask about Windows, one must have a
|
||
fundamental understanding of the Windows environment itself and
|
||
the unique challenges of access.
|
||
Part of my problem was a perspective rooted in the MS-DOS
|
||
environment. DOS is a fundamentally different paradigm from
|
||
Windows. Over the years the DOS environment has become concrete,
|
||
like a hard-boiled egg. It doesn't always stand up the way we
|
||
want, but at least we can get our hands around it. Windows, on
|
||
the other hand, seems more like a sticky, gooey raw egg that runs
|
||
through your fingers each time you try to pick it up. I guess
|
||
that's why they call Windows a GUI (gooey). (Up till now I always
|
||
thought GUI stood for Graphical User Interface). Of course, gooey
|
||
is okay when mixed with the proper ingredients--raw eggs can be
|
||
extremely versatile, whether you are baking a cake, whipping up a
|
||
Hollandaise sauce, holding together a meatloaf, or making a
|
||
gourmet omelet. The fact that it starts out as a slippery mess
|
||
shouldn't deter us from implementing its use. Success comes from
|
||
having the courage to keep trying things despite the inevitable
|
||
mistakes we make. One does not become a gourmet overnight, and
|
||
Betty Crocker is not going to come to our rescue with a basic
|
||
cookbook for Windows (although such a cookbook might not be a bad
|
||
idea).
|
||
Many of us are already successful computer users.
|
||
Sophisticated access technology has enabled people who are blind
|
||
to function on an equal basis within MS-DOS applications. In
|
||
other words, we know how to cook, and we know the kinds of foods
|
||
that taste good. But cooking in DOS is more like cooking over an
|
||
open fire. Just give me a cast iron pot and the appropriate
|
||
ingredients, and I'll cook up a great stew. Windows, however,
|
||
gives us a full kitchen in which to work. We can have several
|
||
things, including our stew, simultaneously cooking on the stove,
|
||
while at the same time bread is baking in the oven, veggies are
|
||
thawing in the microwave, and pop tarts are crisping in the
|
||
toaster. Accomplishing several tasks at the same time (multi-
|
||
tasking) is one of the real strengths of Windows.
|
||
Another thing that Windows does for us (when the rules are
|
||
properly kept) is that, even though various appliances
|
||
(applications) have different capabilities and functions, the
|
||
basic controls (screens, menu bars, and icons) have a consistency
|
||
that, once learned, makes it easier to understand new
|
||
applications. In other words, instead of the stove's having
|
||
knobs, the oven's having dials, the microwave's having push
|
||
buttons, and the toaster's having levers, all of these
|
||
applications have the same basic interface. Once you learn the
|
||
interface, your knowledge is more easily transferable to other
|
||
appliances (applications). Even if you walk into the laundry
|
||
room, the interface on the washing machine will seem familiar and
|
||
thus easier to learn how to use with minimal reference to the
|
||
owner's manual. Understanding this interface is the initial
|
||
challenge we all face with Windows. For a sighted person the
|
||
learning curve can be quite rapid because of the visual nature of
|
||
the display. For a person who is blind, however, another form of
|
||
access is necessary. Part of our problem is that we need good
|
||
access to learn how to interface with this wondrous new
|
||
environment because without good access it doesn't seem so
|
||
wondrous. In fact, it often seems monstrous.
|
||
So how do we determine what is considered good access
|
||
without understanding Windows in the first place? Are we putting
|
||
blind users in a Catch-22 situation where they can't determine
|
||
good access without understanding Windows, yet they can't learn
|
||
about Windows without good access? If this is the case, we are
|
||
all totally dependent on specialists. Ahh yes, specialists will
|
||
know the answers, and we will just have to trust what they tell
|
||
us. But as I walked around the exhibits in both D<>esseldorf and
|
||
Minneapolis, I kept hearing myself say, "Why is that important?"
|
||
I heard answers like: "Our program is an application; so, even if
|
||
the operating system changes, our solution will still work."
|
||
Another said, "What good is transferability between operating
|
||
systems, if you still can't run most of the major applications
|
||
written for Windows? Our program can access almost all
|
||
applications!" In reply, another said, "That other program will
|
||
be obsolete when the operating system changes, and they'll have
|
||
to rewrite the whole thing!" And another said, "Anyone who tells
|
||
you he can access any application is lying through his teeth!" So
|
||
much for the specialists.
|
||
As I wandered from booth to booth, I realized that everyone
|
||
was talking about Windows 3.1. This is essentially a DOS-based
|
||
system. In other words, it is initially loaded from a DOS prompt.
|
||
In another year or year and a half, Microsoft plans to release
|
||
Windows 4.0, an operating system that some say will be
|
||
independent of DOS and others say is essentially the same
|
||
platform as 3.1. Will all or any of the current access solutions
|
||
work with Windows 4.0? They all cross their fingers and say, "We
|
||
think so," or they say, "It's going to take a lot of
|
||
reprogramming." In addition to Windows 3.1 and 4.0, there is
|
||
Windows NT (another operating system from Microsoft specifically
|
||
aimed at network applications), but Microsoft needs to release
|
||
the appropriate hooks to developers before access will be
|
||
possible, and questions regarding security are lurking in the
|
||
background of access to NT. OS/2 is another graphical user
|
||
interface under which you can run Windows 3.1 applications. This
|
||
appears to be one of the most stable solutions currently
|
||
available. How will that work with Windows 4.0? Then there are
|
||
Unix and X-Windows, for which there has been no direct access at
|
||
all. (I believe IBM has been working on Screen Reader for Unix,
|
||
but I don't know the status). As I pondered the number of
|
||
unknowns, I became even more skeptical that we as an industry
|
||
really know what questions we need to be asking.
|
||
Accessing the Windows GUI environment appears to be one
|
||
problem, and accessing Windows applications such as word
|
||
processors, spreadsheets, data bases, communications programs,
|
||
and so on is yet another. Most access solutions appear to work
|
||
reasonably well within the basic environment, but they all seem
|
||
to have different capabilities as soon as an application is
|
||
loaded. I was told at the conferences, "We have to write special
|
||
drivers for each application, but we haven't finished that yet."
|
||
I asked, "Is the solution simply a matter of writing a driver?"
|
||
The answer to this question varied depending on the specialist
|
||
with whom I was speaking.
|
||
When walking around those exhibits, I began comparing MS-DOS
|
||
and Windows in terms of driving versus flying. DOS screen readers
|
||
allow users to take the wheel and drive around a two-dimensional
|
||
screen that displays a fixed grid of eighty columns by twenty-
|
||
five lines. A Windows screen reader, on the other hand, allows us
|
||
to fly through what seems more like a three-dimensional screen,
|
||
in that there can be multiple layers of files, applications, and
|
||
utilities displayed as a combination of windows, consisting of
|
||
graphical icons, menu bars, toolbars, rulers, text, and graphical
|
||
text. (Yes, there is a difference. Screen readers can interpret
|
||
text, but not graphical characters that look exactly like text.)
|
||
To confuse the issue still further, there is no fixed grid in
|
||
Windows that can be used as a base-line. All screens are
|
||
presented in a variable number of lines and columns. With the
|
||
exception of the consistencies inherent in the GUI environment
|
||
itself (menu bars, drop-down menus, prompts, etc.) every new
|
||
screen can be fundamentally different from the last one, e.g.,
|
||
one line may have ten characters, and the next may have a hundred
|
||
fifty.
|
||
The more I wandered through the exhibit halls discussing
|
||
Windows, the more I drifted back in time, vividly imagining those
|
||
magnificent men and their flying machines, courageous explorers
|
||
searching for solutions to flight, ingenious pioneers on the
|
||
brink of invention. But my metaphor had a chronological glitch
|
||
because DOS screen readers are already as sophisticated as
|
||
today's automobiles, where Windows screen readers seem to be
|
||
still exploring the fundamentals of flight. This has its
|
||
advantages and disadvantages. On one hand, we have a better
|
||
understanding of the power that is possible and needed based on
|
||
our experience in DOS. (Of course, it took us thirteen years to
|
||
get to this point with DOS.) Nevertheless, we require and expect
|
||
equal, if not better, sophistication in a Windows screen reader.
|
||
Jobs are at stake. The pressure is on. Everyone has a flying
|
||
machine, but I keep asking myself, "Does anyone have an airplane
|
||
that can really fly?" Perhaps they all do, but how do we know?
|
||
And how do we find out? If we talk to these magnificent men, we
|
||
find that they can all keep their machines in the air. Some of
|
||
them can even keep them from crashing throughout a complete
|
||
demonstration. But these machines don't come with a pilot, and
|
||
learning to fly a plane is much more complicated than learning to
|
||
drive on grid-like roads in the land of DOS.
|
||
How about some flight training? That's a good idea. But who
|
||
is going to pay for it? Nobody seems willing to pay for training
|
||
in the U.S. Plus, who is going to pay for travel expenses? We all
|
||
know about travel cutbacks. Can we expect users to learn to fly
|
||
without any training? How about a flight simulator? Tutorials
|
||
might be a cheaper way to teach someone to fly. Another good
|
||
idea, but do we teach Windows or access to Windows? Which comes
|
||
first? I can hear our Catch-22 problem re-emerging here.
|
||
We tend to forget pain once it has passed, but I would like
|
||
you to go back and try to remember what it was like learning DOS
|
||
the first time. It was an ugly experience for the average
|
||
computer user, but the fixed grid in DOS made it possible to
|
||
understand and ultimately to grasp. Oh, there were some whiz kids
|
||
who learned to drive without any help, but flying presents a
|
||
whole new set of problems.
|
||
I am concerned about our collective naivete with regard to
|
||
our expectations for Windows access. I am concerned that we do
|
||
not even know what questions to ask. I sent one Windows access
|
||
program to three different people to evaluate. Each came back
|
||
with totally different problems and questions. It was almost as
|
||
if I had sent out three completely different programs. I believe
|
||
that we must put a priority on creating a forum for dialogue at
|
||
all levels of our community, from the specialists to the novice
|
||
users, if we hope eventually to make intelligent decisions about
|
||
real solutions.
|
||
I would like to propose that you, as the major leaders in
|
||
our industry, accept the challenge to create this forum for
|
||
dialogue. Betty Crocker is not available with a Windows cookbook,
|
||
but, if we publish a monthly newsletter specifically dedicated to
|
||
questions and answers regarding Windows, we will soon have a
|
||
cookbook. This publication can be available in print, large
|
||
print, and Braille; or perhaps an audio format would be more
|
||
efficient and cover more information. We have to be careful about
|
||
sending out a fire hose and expecting people to drink, but we
|
||
must also recognize the urgent need for quality information.
|
||
Although developers, manufacturers, and distributors can be
|
||
valuable sources of information and support, I don't think that
|
||
HumanWare or any other company can take the lead on producing
|
||
this publication. Regardless of our objectivity, the unavoidable
|
||
commercial connection would taint our credibility. This cookbook
|
||
must be created month by month by one of your organizations or a
|
||
consortium of the organizations represented here today.
|
||
Part of the cookbook must focus on the GUI environment and
|
||
why flying can be so exciting. Understanding the Windows paradigm
|
||
is essential to this excitement. Otherwise we will remain
|
||
frustrated trying to drive a 747 around a poorly marked tarmac,
|
||
complaining about how much nicer it is to drive our DOSmobile.
|
||
Flying offers some exciting new thrills, but how do we get
|
||
access? Another section must focus on access solutions and what
|
||
questions we need to be asking developers. We need in-depth
|
||
questions regarding access to specific applications and why some
|
||
applications seem more challenging than others. We need to learn
|
||
which questions to ask in order to understand the fundamental
|
||
differences between various screen readers better. How do we
|
||
understand the value of their inherent strengths and limitations?
|
||
Not everyone needs a 747. For some people a Cessna will do just
|
||
fine. We need a section on training. Who's going to do it? How
|
||
will trainers be compensated? What techniques work best in
|
||
teaching the fundamentals of Windows? And the list goes on.
|
||
Perhaps the metaphors I've used in this speech have been
|
||
ill-conceived, but this further drives home the need for better
|
||
information sharing. If there is something I or HumanWare can do
|
||
to help get this cookbook off the ground, please give me a call.
|
||
Ignorance is our worst enemy, and it is time we recognized our
|
||
mutual responsibility, as leaders in this industry, to educate
|
||
each other and the people we serve. I am not talking about
|
||
reviewing specific products, but rather giving our readers a
|
||
basic understanding of the questions that need to be asked and
|
||
answered regarding Windows and Windows access. The more
|
||
intelligent our questions become, the more we will each be able
|
||
to evaluate the difference between a flying machine and a
|
||
reliable solution that will enable us to fly as high as the GUI
|
||
bird allows.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
=================================================================
|
||
"Microsoft's Approach to the Graphical User Interface and
|
||
Accessibility" was the title of remarks by Greg Lowney, Senior
|
||
Program Manager for the Accessibility and Disability Group of
|
||
Microsoft Corporation. A summary of his remarks is reprinted
|
||
elsewhere in this issue.
|
||
=================================================================
|
||
|
||
|
||
[PHOTO: Curtis Chong seated at computer in International Braille
|
||
and Technology Center for the Blind. CAPTION: Curtis Chong.]
|
||
|
||
PROBLEMS AND CHALLENGES OF THE GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE
|
||
by Curtis Chong
|
||
|
||
From the Editor: Curtis Chong serves as President of the
|
||
National Federation of the Blind in Computer Science. He is also
|
||
a Senior Systems Programmer for IDS Financial Services. He is
|
||
extremely knowledgeable about computer access for blind people.
|
||
Here is what he said:
|
||
|
||
It seems that there was never a time when blind people
|
||
weren't concerned about how they would access this or that
|
||
computer system. Back in the 1960's, the problem was being able
|
||
to read punch cards and computer listings. In the seventies and
|
||
early eighties, punch cards and computer listings gave way to
|
||
video display terminals, which in turn gave way to the
|
||
microcomputer. Each step in the evolution of computer technology
|
||
posed a different set of problems for the blind; and, with
|
||
varying degrees of success, each challenge was confronted and
|
||
overcome.
|
||
For the blind the access challenge for the nineties is most
|
||
definitely the graphical user interface, or GUI, as it is more
|
||
often called. It is not that GUI applications are anything new.
|
||
Many GUI programs have been written to run under the Disk
|
||
Operating System (DOS), and for the most part these programs were
|
||
of little concern to the blind. This is because in the DOS world
|
||
GUI programs were in the minority, and the operating system
|
||
itself was compatible with existing screen-reading technology.
|
||
Moreover, most of the commercial software that blind people
|
||
needed and wanted to use was written specifically to run under
|
||
DOS and displayed information in text on a screen with fixed
|
||
dimensions--typically, 25 rows by 80 columns.
|
||
Access to text-based applications running on computers has
|
||
made it easier for blind people to work in a wide variety of
|
||
jobs. These have included customer service, pizza order taking,
|
||
computer programming, and secretarial positions, to name only a
|
||
very few. Blind secretaries will tell you that with a good word
|
||
processor it is far easier today to proofread documents instead
|
||
of relying upon one's ability to type perfectly all of the time.
|
||
Computer programmers will tell you that it is nice to use a
|
||
computer to write and debug programs independently on the big
|
||
mainframe. Some people will even go so far as to say that the
|
||
computer has opened up a whole new world of information and given
|
||
new freedom to the blind. However, I don't know if I would go
|
||
quite that far.
|
||
Anybody who knows anything about the computer industry will
|
||
tell you that the word "computer" is synonymous with "change." It
|
||
would appear that the industry is now undergoing a fundamental
|
||
shift. Text-based operating systems such as DOS and Unix are
|
||
being overlaid by graphically-based shells such as Windows and X
|
||
Windows. In addition, new graphically-based operating systems
|
||
such as OS/2 and Windows/NT are gaining acceptance. One reason
|
||
for this shift, I believe, is the fundamental desire on the part
|
||
of sighted computer users to be free of the physical restraints
|
||
placed upon them by a character-oriented screen. People are not
|
||
content to have simple text presented on a computer display. They
|
||
want pictures, icons, pop-up menus, dialogue boxes, and other
|
||
pictographic representations. Application software developers,
|
||
cognizant of this desire, are developing new versions of their
|
||
products to run under graphical platforms. Combine this with the
|
||
growing use, in today's major corporations, of graphical
|
||
front-end systems to make applications more user-friendly, and
|
||
you have what is shaping up to be a severe problem for the
|
||
blind--particularly, the blind person whose job depends upon
|
||
having independent access to the computer. Even blind people who
|
||
use computers at home cannot escape the problem. More and more
|
||
new releases of off-the-shelf software are being written to
|
||
display information using the graphical user interface, meaning
|
||
that for home use it is becoming more difficult--if not
|
||
impossible--to get the latest and greatest program for the
|
||
familiar DOS environment.
|
||
As consumers we find ourselves in a situation in which more
|
||
and more of the systems we need to do our jobs are less
|
||
accessible to us than they were even two years ago. To an ever
|
||
greater extent companies are embracing Windows, X Windows, OS/2,
|
||
and other graphically-oriented platforms. For the blind this
|
||
means that knowledge of and access to a text-based screen reading
|
||
system simply won't cut it. Although in some cases, with a little
|
||
sophistication and some technical know-how, we can continue using
|
||
a PC that runs only DOS applications, today, as many of us look
|
||
for jobs, we are running squarely into the GUI problem. Moreover,
|
||
as text-based applications give way to the more user-friendly
|
||
graphical user interface, those of us whose jobs already require
|
||
the use of a computer are in real danger of becoming unemployed.
|
||
Some rehabilitation agencies, lacking sufficient creativity,
|
||
have dumped their blind clients into customer service or other
|
||
service jobs requiring immediate access to computerized
|
||
information. I am here to tell you that, unless something is done
|
||
very soon, your clients will be walking the streets looking for
|
||
work. Why? Because the graphical user interface is simply too
|
||
attractive to system designers, who are continually trying to
|
||
make the computer easier and more visually appealing to use. For
|
||
them the graphical user interface is the best way to accomplish
|
||
this goal.
|
||
We are fortunate in that a growing number of screen-access
|
||
technology companies are developing programs to address the GUI
|
||
problem. An early contributor, Berkeley Systems, Inc., developed
|
||
the one and only speech screen-reading system for the Apple
|
||
Macintosh: outSPOKEN. I don't remember exactly when outSPOKEN was
|
||
released, but I think it is important to recognize that outSPOKEN
|
||
represented the very first attempt to provide blind people with
|
||
access to a GUI platform.
|
||
At the 1992 convention of the National Federation of the
|
||
Blind, IBM demonstrated its screen-reading system for the
|
||
graphical OS/2 Presentation Manager. At the 1993 NFB convention,
|
||
Artic Technologies and Berkeley Systems exhibited their Windows
|
||
screen-reading products; and two additional companies,
|
||
Henter-Joyce and Syntha-Voice, discussed their approaches to
|
||
making Windows accessible to the blind at the NFB in Computer
|
||
Science meeting. I am aware that even more companies are working
|
||
on, but not officially announcing their screen access products
|
||
for the Windows platform. No one has announced a commercial
|
||
package for access to the X Windows platform yet, but I believe
|
||
it is only a matter of time before we see something in the
|
||
marketplace. Strangely enough, the largest company in the
|
||
blindness field, TeleSensory, has not given any indication that
|
||
it is working on a GUI-access product.
|
||
Although it is improving at an accelerating pace, GUI screen
|
||
access technology for the blind is still immature. I would say
|
||
that we are at about the same stage in our ability to access GUI
|
||
applications as we were in the early 1980's, when blind people
|
||
first began gaining independent access to microcomputers such as
|
||
the IBM PC and compatible machines. However, there are some
|
||
significant differences. Ten years ago, when blind people began
|
||
taking an interest in using microcomputers independently,
|
||
companies such as IBM and Microsoft couldn't be bothered with
|
||
such an economically insignificant group. The screen access
|
||
programs we needed had to be developed by third-party companies
|
||
with little or no help from these key players. Today, partly
|
||
because of anti-discrimination legislation and partly due to
|
||
increased understanding, major computer companies such as IBM and
|
||
Microsoft are giving serious consideration to the question of how
|
||
to make the GUI accessible to the blind. IBM, which now has a
|
||
major presence at National Federation of the Blind conventions
|
||
and other conferences where technology for the blind is
|
||
discussed, attacked the problem by developing its own screen-
|
||
access program: Screen Reader/2. Microsoft, which is only now
|
||
beginning to devote some resources to the problem, is providing
|
||
technical information to third-party developers on the theory
|
||
that this will give them a jump start in developing screen-access
|
||
programs for Microsoft GUI platforms.
|
||
In discussing the problems and challenges of the GUI, we
|
||
should also take note of the Unix operating system and the X
|
||
Windows graphical user interface. For here, too, the blind have a
|
||
problem. Although we can use a PC to communicate with Unix over a
|
||
network for access to text-based applications, X Windows, being a
|
||
graphical interface, is not as straightforward. Yet Unix and, by
|
||
extension, X Windows are gaining acceptance in the workplace. How
|
||
will blind people use this interface independently?
|
||
In this regard the work of the Disability Action Committee
|
||
for X (DACX) bears watching. This committee is directed by the
|
||
Trace Research and Development Center in Madison, Wisconsin. It
|
||
consists of Unix workstation vendors such as Sun Microsystems,
|
||
Digital Equipment Corporation, and IBM; researchers such as the
|
||
Trace Center and the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability
|
||
Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology; screen access
|
||
vendors such as Berkeley Systems; the X Consortium; and other
|
||
interested parties. The goal of the committee is to design and
|
||
implement standard access solutions to X Windows for people with
|
||
various motor and sensory impairments. I can tell you that a good
|
||
deal of the committee's work focuses on how to make X Windows
|
||
accessible to the blind. However, aside from the prototype
|
||
developed by the Mercator Project at the Georgia Institute of
|
||
Technology, no commercial screen-access programs exist for X
|
||
Windows today.
|
||
Although the GUI may be more intuitive and appealing to
|
||
sighted computer users, it is not intuitive and appealing to the
|
||
blind--at least not yet. Any blind person who has to learn to use
|
||
a graphically-oriented system will find that a significant effort
|
||
is required to master the intricacies of this interface. Even the
|
||
most technically sophisticated among us will need to learn more
|
||
about how GUI applications work before we can begin to formulate
|
||
any recommendations of substance in this area.
|
||
There is one important question that as blind consumers we
|
||
must continue to raise with developers of access technology for
|
||
the GUI. Can graphically-oriented information--including icons,
|
||
dialogue boxes, push buttons, scroll bars, and the like--be
|
||
conveyed to a blind computer user efficiently enough to permit
|
||
him or her to compete with sighted colleagues? Developers of GUI
|
||
access programs are, of necessity, concentrating on trying to
|
||
convey the textual information that is displayed on the graphical
|
||
screen. To the extent to which access programs for the GUI
|
||
attempt to convey information about icons and other pictographic
|
||
objects, efforts seem to be oriented toward presenting the
|
||
information as menus or lists from which the user makes a
|
||
selection. Inasmuch as most of the blind computer users with whom
|
||
I am acquainted have very little experience in this area, it is
|
||
not clear whether this approach will be the best one in the long
|
||
run.
|
||
I would like to say a few words to the trainers and
|
||
technology specialists who work in rehabilitation agencies for
|
||
the blind. You cannot content yourselves with present knowledge
|
||
and expertise, which is largely centered on DOS-based screen
|
||
access systems. Although these systems may have played a key role
|
||
in helping some blind people to get jobs, they will soon become a
|
||
thing of the past. You must keep up with what the bigger
|
||
companies are doing and gain experience with platforms such as
|
||
Windows, OS/2, Unix, X Windows, and GUI applications used by
|
||
today's businesses. Equally important, you must keep pace with
|
||
the developments taking place in the screen access technology
|
||
market--for the developments will come, and at an accelerating
|
||
pace.
|
||
Today the graphical user interface presents many problems
|
||
and challenges for the blind. All of us--consumers,
|
||
rehabilitation professionals, and screen access technology
|
||
developers--need to stop wishing for the GUI to go away and
|
||
confront the problem head on. The major companies developing
|
||
graphical operating systems, most notably IBM and Microsoft, need
|
||
to continue their efforts to help blind computer users access and
|
||
feel comfortable with their graphically-oriented platforms. Also
|
||
these companies need to make it easier for third-party developers
|
||
of screen-reading technology to reach into a GUI application to
|
||
extract the information that a blind person needs in order to use
|
||
it. More important, the computer industry as a whole needs to
|
||
make accessibility a primary consideration instead of an
|
||
afterthought.
|
||
As I said earlier, computers are synonymous with change. We
|
||
shouldn't look back. We should forge ahead and ensure that
|
||
everybody gets a crack at this technology, which promises so
|
||
much.
|
||
|
||
SUMMARIES OF PRESENTER REMARKS
|
||
|
||
From the Editor: As noted earlier, several of the speakers
|
||
did not have prepared remarks. The following are summaries of the
|
||
presentations they made to the conference:
|
||
|
||
[PHOTO: Portrait. CAPTION: Mohymen Saddeek]
|
||
|
||
Mohymen Saddeek
|
||
|
||
Ever since I entered this industry, I have been frustrated
|
||
by the gap between technology for the blind and that intended for
|
||
the general public. Broad market producers have been slow to
|
||
recognize the possibilities for talking technology. Now that they
|
||
realize there is actually demand for such items, the cost is
|
||
finally coming down.
|
||
My company, Technology for Independence, seeks to identify
|
||
the area between general-market technology and technology for the
|
||
blind and then work in that niche, where costs can be
|
||
underwritten by both markets rather than the blindness market
|
||
only. For example, we approached Johnson and Johnson, producers
|
||
of the Lifescan blood glucose analyzer, to see about developing
|
||
technology that could make it speak the information it gathers.
|
||
Company representatives admitted they had never recognized the
|
||
212,000 blind diabetics in the United States and the 47,000 new
|
||
ones each year as a significant potential market for the
|
||
Lifescan.
|
||
I don't mean to criticize producers in our field who develop
|
||
devices designed to do a single, very specific thing. Their
|
||
products are necessarily expensive. In fact, my company has
|
||
modified a commercially available cassette recorder to create our
|
||
Talkman 5, which is very small and records and plays four tracks.
|
||
By the time we designed several necessary parts and made other
|
||
modifications for use with National Library Service cassettes,
|
||
the cost had almost doubled. Many people were still very happy
|
||
with the product, but I was not. In the end Dr. Jernigan, Dr.
|
||
Herie, and Mr. Geisel of Recording for the Blind helped to
|
||
increase the market and therefore lower the price. It shows how
|
||
important cooperation in this field can be.
|
||
I do think that much can be accomplished simply by going to
|
||
the mainline producers and pointing out that blind consumers
|
||
can't use some of their products or that they have to pay much
|
||
more for appropriately modified versions. We worked with one of
|
||
these companies and helped them to produce a product that talked.
|
||
They produced thousands and sold a few hundred to blind people,
|
||
and the rest they successfully sold to sighted customers who
|
||
found the speech option attractive.
|
||
Of course, we are interested in remaining competitive, but
|
||
our mission is to produce high-quality products for blind people
|
||
as inexpensively as possible. In talking with producers of
|
||
medical technology, we have learned that it may actually be
|
||
possible for them to manufacture blood glucose analyzers so that
|
||
they could be made to talk from the beginning or to develop them
|
||
to do so with only a slight further modification. If it can be
|
||
done, the talking unit might well cost only $15 or $20 more than
|
||
the version with a print readout. This is the ideal kind of
|
||
solution, and it is what we are working toward in all our product
|
||
development.
|
||
|
||
[PHOTO: Elliot Schreier standing at podium microphone. CAPTION:
|
||
Elliot Schreier]
|
||
|
||
Elliot Schreier
|
||
|
||
While the problem of the graphical user interface is
|
||
extremely important, I wish to speak about problems of access for
|
||
blind people to what I will call public terminals and what
|
||
service providers, consumers, and vendors can do together to
|
||
solve the difficulties. The VCR is only the most obvious example
|
||
of consumer products with complicated video displays which
|
||
include graphics and which are very difficult or impossible for
|
||
blind people to use efficiently. They are also not very easy for
|
||
many sighted people to use. In the past the solution to making
|
||
such items accessible has been to get inside the box and hard-
|
||
wire in a talking or Braille display. But these were expensive,
|
||
one-of-a-kind solutions.
|
||
For several years at the American Foundation for the Blind
|
||
we worked on developing a camera that could read the LED or LCD
|
||
display. But the technology in all such equipment changes so
|
||
quickly that the AFB engineers kept finding themselves two steps
|
||
behind. Eventually we abandoned that effort to solve the problem,
|
||
but it may still have merit.
|
||
The so-called smart house, whose owner will be able to
|
||
program instructions for appliances from a distance, will provide
|
||
a solution to this problem since the data for each programmable
|
||
device will have to pass through a single point, and a trap could
|
||
be built in, permitting the translation of the information into
|
||
an accessible format.
|
||
Perhaps infrared technology holds the solution. It is
|
||
inexpensive and doable, but line-of-sight constraints are a
|
||
problem. A user must be near the appliance with the transmitter
|
||
or receiver pointing in the correct direction in order for it to
|
||
work.
|
||
There are a number of kinds of public-access terminals that
|
||
are inaccessible to visually impaired people. Transportation
|
||
system monitors are now mounted high on walls and poorly lit.
|
||
Moreover, they may use almost incomprehensible abbreviations to
|
||
identify airports or stations. AT&T has now installed series
|
||
2,000 phones in airports and some other places which include an
|
||
entire CRT screen of information to which there is no access for
|
||
anyone who cannot read it directly. Today there are public-access
|
||
fax and photocopy machines and terminals that provide visual
|
||
displays of information to those who punch in the proper code,
|
||
often using a key pad on a touch screen which itself is unusable
|
||
by blind people. All this replaces the information desk with a
|
||
person to answer questions.
|
||
Automatic teller machines (ATMs) are now beginning to be
|
||
accessible. Some manufacturers have put Braille key-caps on the
|
||
keys, but without a method of reading the print display there is
|
||
still no way to know whether one has made an error during the
|
||
transaction. Moreover, some banks provide screens of customer
|
||
information or the option to conduct transactions in different
|
||
languages. These features are inaccessible to the blind user. The
|
||
technology is, however, already available to mark the ATM card
|
||
with a strip that would automatically cue the machine to provide
|
||
large-print text, for example.
|
||
One possible tool for solving some access problems would be
|
||
to use high-frequency radio-wave transmitters and receivers. We
|
||
might go to the Federal Communications Commission to petition for
|
||
designation of one frequency to be used for disability-related
|
||
technology. Manufacturers would then have to agree upon a method
|
||
of encoding information about what appears on the LCD displays of
|
||
equipment and in what form it appears. Legislation similar to
|
||
that which requires that televisions manufactured after July,
|
||
1993, include a closed-captioning chip for use by deaf people
|
||
could require installation of high-frequency transmitters for the
|
||
use of disabled consumers. The small radio receivers could then
|
||
be adapted to the needs of the individual user: Braille, voice,
|
||
large print, etc. There are many applications that could be
|
||
developed and some problems to work out--how does one sort out
|
||
information coming from or going to different appliances
|
||
simultaneously? These problems are solvable, and the group
|
||
assembled for this conference is the most powerful one around and
|
||
the most likely to lobby successfully for what is needed.
|
||
|
||
[PHOTO: Portrait. CAPTION: Deane Blazie]
|
||
|
||
Deane Blazie
|
||
|
||
These remarks are chiefly about the thought process involved
|
||
in research and development. The first problem is to get over the
|
||
hurdles, the obstacles to finding new solutions. One must look
|
||
hard at what it will take to solve a given problem. In 1986 I
|
||
didn't want to look at what had to be done to make a Braille
|
||
notetaker small enough to be truly portable. Having abandoned a
|
||
wooden case several years before when we were producing the
|
||
Cranmer Modified Brailler in favor of vacuum-forming the box, I
|
||
had trouble picturing the Braille 'n Speak with anything other
|
||
than a plastic case, but I was told that we should be injection-
|
||
molding the cases. I had to learn about this new technology and
|
||
risk a lot on it, but having done so, we found that the Braille
|
||
'n Speak cases are very inexpensive because they are injection-
|
||
molded.
|
||
I didn't want to hear that we should develop a disc drive
|
||
for the Braille 'n Speak. Since 1987 people have been telling me
|
||
that they wanted one. I thought buying a PC for $1,000 was a
|
||
better solution, but we finally listened to people and developed
|
||
what they wanted. It is a good piece of technology--probably the
|
||
biggest bargain we offer, considering what is in it.
|
||
The same thing happened in developing the Type 'n Speak.
|
||
People who didn't know Braille but who wanted a lightweight
|
||
notetaker began talking about having Blazie Engineering develop
|
||
such a device. Since they could use laptops with speech output, I
|
||
didn't take them seriously for a couple of years. But finally we
|
||
did design a notetaker that was small, light, and easy to use,
|
||
like the Braille 'n Speak. The decision required that we examine
|
||
our consciences to determine whether we just didn't want to do it
|
||
because it would be lots of work or whether it was not in the
|
||
best interest of users. Now I am glad that we decided to go
|
||
forward.
|
||
There are certainly still hurdles we haven't yet gotten over
|
||
in some projects: cost and technological barriers, for example.
|
||
But we must always listen to our customers and to the little
|
||
voices inside our own heads. The first tell us what we should be
|
||
doing; the second indicate what we have to overcome.
|
||
All of us in this room are service providers. Those who
|
||
think they are only technology producers had better think again.
|
||
If you don't make a point of listening to customers and giving
|
||
them what they need and want, you will have real problems. At
|
||
Blazie Engineering our problem is that, despite wanting to stay
|
||
small, we keep growing, which means hiring more people and, for
|
||
me, doing more management work. This means in turn that I have
|
||
less time to talk with customers and keep in touch with what they
|
||
want. The person who leads the company and has the ideas must be
|
||
the one to talk to the customers. I don't have a good solution to
|
||
this problem since I don't like letting anyone else run the
|
||
company either.
|
||
|
||
[PHOTO: Portrait. CAPTION: Greg Lowney]
|
||
|
||
Greg Lowney
|
||
|
||
From the Editor: Immediately before Mr. Lowney spoke, Dr.
|
||
Jernigan admitted to the group that, despite all that had been
|
||
said that morning and in previous discussions, he still did not
|
||
understand whether icons are more useful than words on a computer
|
||
screen and what the precise nature of the GUI problem is. Before
|
||
turning to his assigned subject, Mr. Lowney attempted to address
|
||
Dr. Jernigan's questions. This is the substance of what he said:
|
||
|
||
The challenge of an operating system like Windows is to
|
||
allow the screen reader to recognize the symbols on the screen so
|
||
that it can interpret them in words to the listener or Braille
|
||
reader. Mostly these problems have now been solved, thanks to
|
||
many of the people at this conference. Once the symbol-
|
||
interpretation problems have been solved, it is really no more
|
||
difficult to write a screen-reading program for applications
|
||
using a GUI-based operating system than for those using DOS. The
|
||
major difference is that, instead of there being only text to
|
||
interpret, there may now be graphics as well.
|
||
We often overlook the fact that most of the GUI applications
|
||
such as word-processing, spread-sheet, and data-base programs are
|
||
not very graphic. There may be a picture of a printer, but even
|
||
when the user points a mouse at a picture, it is also possible to
|
||
accomplish the same thing by using a keyboard with text menus.
|
||
People are moving toward the graphics-based programs because
|
||
they allow one to mix art work and text simultaneously, rather
|
||
than pasting up the art later. Also people like to see the fonts
|
||
and other graphic alterations they are writing into their
|
||
documents, and it is possible to do so with GUI.
|
||
Virtually all the GUI applications on the market today could
|
||
be produced fairly easily in a pure text mode. The reason they
|
||
are not probably has to do with limited resources. If only one
|
||
version is to be produced, it will use a GUI platform simply
|
||
because it is more popular.
|
||
Finally, one reason people prefer graphics is that lots of
|
||
them recognize pictures faster and remember what they convey
|
||
longer than they do reading words. So, while most generally-
|
||
recognized symbols--stop signs, rest rooms, and lodging signs,
|
||
for example--still incorporate words as well as pictures, there
|
||
are many people for whom the graphic is the effective element of
|
||
the symbol.
|
||
The question, however, which I intend to address today is
|
||
what does it take to make an environment like Windows, or any
|
||
other environment for that matter, accessible?
|
||
(1) The operating system must have a fundamental level of
|
||
accessibility built in. A mouse, for example, must not be the
|
||
only means of moving around the screen; keyboard access must also
|
||
be possible. Moreover, there must be a fundamental level of
|
||
access to the application program--even when specialized programs
|
||
(like screen readers) are not available--on public-access
|
||
terminals or for the use of blind people trouble-shooting
|
||
problems on a sighted colleague's computer, for example. Work is
|
||
currently being done to establish the ground rules for such
|
||
access by a group at the Trace Center in Madison, Wisconsin.
|
||
(2) There must be a range of access aids for users to choose
|
||
among, depending on their personal preferences and computer
|
||
needs--for example, a number of screen readers on the market.
|
||
(3) The creators of the application programs must do what is
|
||
necessary to make it possible for specialized vendors to write
|
||
the accessibility programs. They must, for example, provide
|
||
documentation that will allow screen-reader programmers to build
|
||
on and hook into the operating system. However, without doing
|
||
additional work, Windows programmers cannot provide more
|
||
information to other programmers about the system than it
|
||
actually has available.
|
||
(4) It is therefore necessary for operating-system
|
||
programmers to define new mechanisms designed to deliver more
|
||
information to specialized applications vendors so that they can
|
||
get the data they need to solve their problems. Examples of this
|
||
need would be identifying the active point--what I call the
|
||
visual locus--the point where the computer user's attention is
|
||
focused. Another would be to have the applications programmer
|
||
signal the presence of a graphic image and what it means. We have
|
||
not yet gotten to the point of accomplishing these things, but we
|
||
are moving in the right direction.
|
||
(5) Having defined what we want applications programs to do
|
||
in order to work well with a screen reader, how do we insure that
|
||
applications will be well-behaved? For the first time Microsoft
|
||
is now producing guidelines for general market Window-application
|
||
producers to tell them what their programs need to do to be
|
||
accessible to people with disabilities. The problem is that, no
|
||
matter how many guidelines we establish about what should happen,
|
||
there are always many more areas in which something profound can
|
||
go wrong. In addition, the mainstream-application producers
|
||
depend on distinguishing themselves from everyone else and
|
||
demonstrating why their products are superior to the
|
||
competition's. This natural tendency, which is unquestionably
|
||
strengthened by market forces, works against our efforts to
|
||
persuade these people to design programs that behave consistently
|
||
enough for the access vendors to deal with them all.
|
||
I believe (and a number of other people agree with me) that
|
||
the only way around this problem is to create new Application
|
||
Programming Interfaces (API's) that can be used by access
|
||
programmers. These programmers don't care what a particular
|
||
application does; they just need to know what is happening. How
|
||
can we make these applications producers do what is necessary?
|
||
One way is by legal requirement. In my view the Americans with
|
||
Disabilities Act is currently useless in this respect. Section
|
||
508 of the Rehabilitation Act now has more teeth than it used to,
|
||
and this is making some applications producers sit up and take
|
||
notice, but only those who do enough business with the federal
|
||
government to have the loss of that business make a difference to
|
||
their profits. Lawsuits may be another possibility, but I don't
|
||
think they will work very well, and the time for that strategy is
|
||
in the future. The profit motive would be the best method to use
|
||
if there is a way to make the argument that application producers
|
||
will lose money by refusing to accommodate blind users, but we
|
||
don't have figures to show how much business they would lose. We
|
||
don't even know how many blind people are using GUI, much less
|
||
the dollar amount of their business.
|
||
But even if an application producer were to decide to write
|
||
a well-behaved program, its programmers wouldn't have any idea
|
||
how to do it right. Perhaps the motivation to solve this problem
|
||
could be provided by establishing access certification, reports
|
||
of which could then become a part of mainstream reviews of the
|
||
application. Such certification would have to be done by some
|
||
impartial body. How much would it cost? Who would provide the
|
||
funding and the personnel? These are important questions, and the
|
||
group in this room should have a hand in answering them. My own
|
||
view is that we must find ways of tying the features needed by
|
||
the access community to attributes that will be noticed and
|
||
wanted by the larger computer-buying public. For instance, when
|
||
we are adding a new feature to Windows, I go through it trying to
|
||
think of ways we could tie something to it that would make
|
||
applications better-behaved for disabled people.
|
||
(6) Mainstream applications must be usable. A program in
|
||
which it is possible for one window to hide another is not easy
|
||
for anyone to use. Pressure should be brought to bear on
|
||
applications producers to fix such problems. This is beginning to
|
||
happen, but it is important that access issues be aired whenever
|
||
the question of usability surfaces. We must provide input at all
|
||
phases of product development.
|
||
(7) Once all the problems are solved, the end-user must know
|
||
about the solutions. The standard documentation, available to
|
||
mainstream users, must be available in accessible formats.
|
||
Additional documentation must be developed to outline the
|
||
specific ways in which the application works with access
|
||
programs--hints about how to make it work. Finally, there must be
|
||
good training materials: introductions and tutorials.
|
||
|
||
Raymond Kurzweil
|
||
|
||
From the Editor: Dr. Kurzweil was unable to stay for the
|
||
general discussion of the graphical user interface, but he made
|
||
several comments before his departure. Here they are:
|
||
|
||
One clear answer to the question of why GUI is superior to
|
||
text-based operating systems is WYSIWYG (what you see is what you
|
||
get). This means that the screen display shows the format of the
|
||
document exactly as it will look when printed. This includes type
|
||
font and size, columns, bullets, graphics, and charts and graphs.
|
||
Because information not included in the actual words of the text
|
||
is immediately and accurately communicated by a WYSIWYG
|
||
application, it is more attractive to most users.
|
||
It would be useful if we could develop an agreed-upon method
|
||
of communicating format, chart, and graph information aurally and
|
||
in Braille. That would go a long way toward solving access
|
||
problems.
|
||
But we must not concentrate exclusively on computer output
|
||
problems. The pen-based computing technology will also leave
|
||
blind people at a disadvantage. Speech recognition, which is
|
||
faster than writing with a pen, may provide the ultimate solution
|
||
to input-technology difficulties, but even so, computer input is
|
||
becoming a real problem. Meeting these challenges should be among
|
||
the goals of this group.
|
||
SUMMARY OF FRIDAY CONFERENCE DISCUSSION
|
||
|
||
Following presentations on the graphical user interface, the
|
||
remainder of the Friday program was devoted to a discussion among
|
||
service-providers, consumers, and vendors of the issues raised
|
||
during the conference. The following is a summary of that
|
||
discussion.
|
||
|
||
Jim Fruchterman: I want to try to answer the question of why
|
||
and what are the benefits of switching to the general GUI
|
||
interface. There is an element of fashion, but like the change
|
||
from the long-playing recording to the compact disk, once the
|
||
shift has occurred, there is no going back, because there are
|
||
several real benefits to the GUI operating systems. These arise
|
||
from some problems that people were having with DOS--chiefly its
|
||
relative difficulty for beginners. The success of the Macintosh
|
||
proved that people who knew nothing about computers could sit
|
||
down in front of a computer and do something constructive within
|
||
a short time. This ties into what Elliot Schreier was saying
|
||
about public terminals. They use graphics because without the
|
||
pictures many people could not use them.
|
||
There are some more technical reasons for moving to GUI. One
|
||
is memory; DOS just does not have the capacity to do some things
|
||
we want to do. Optical character recognition (OCR) is an example.
|
||
You cannot get an OCR program to run in DOS. With Windows a lot
|
||
more applications can be used together without their stepping on
|
||
each other's toes, just because there is more memory available.
|
||
Finally I would say that there is now something of a
|
||
backlash against iconography because people don't know what the
|
||
pictures mean. So now we are getting a floating help feature in
|
||
which one can pass the mouse over the icon, and a little box
|
||
appears in the corner of the screen in which words explain what
|
||
the picture means. So it is not only the blind who are having
|
||
problems with the icons.
|
||
Noel Runyan: None of us wants to lose the real benefits of
|
||
GUI, but we must encourage manufacturers to avoid meaningless
|
||
graphics and to provide us with consistent indicators so that we
|
||
can make access programs work.
|
||
Kenneth Jernigan: I urge you to comment on ways in which
|
||
this group might bring about solutions to these problems. We need
|
||
suggestions about what we should be doing together to influence
|
||
the situation.
|
||
David Andrews: Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act
|
||
requires that the federal government purchase only equipment that
|
||
can be made accessible to disabled people. This includes
|
||
computers, operating systems, fax machines, everything. The
|
||
government is not complying with the law and is not enforcing it.
|
||
Perhaps we could agree on ways of bringing pressure to bear on
|
||
the government to live up to its regulations for itself.
|
||
Tim Cranmer: We need ongoing communication between these
|
||
conferences. I invite anyone with an electronic mail address to
|
||
give it to us so that we can put you on our research and
|
||
development discussion distribution list. We have been slowly
|
||
expanding this group for the last year and a half, and as of
|
||
January 1, 1994, we will include anyone who wants to be a part of
|
||
it. Our Internet address is nfb@access.digex.net.
|
||
Marc Sutton: This group can provide a forum through which
|
||
the vendors of screen-access products for graphical user
|
||
interfaces can define the standard by which new software can be
|
||
evaluated. Operating-system developers like Microsoft, Apple, and
|
||
the various Unix systems providers as well as the applications
|
||
developers that write for these operating systems could then have
|
||
a clear standard to determine whether or not they meet the
|
||
requirements. Having such a standard will make it easier for us
|
||
to file lawsuits using the teeth of the ADA and Section 508. I
|
||
also think that, working together, consumer organizations and
|
||
vendors could create tutorials with tactile screens that could be
|
||
very helpful. Some of this is already being done.
|
||
Paul Fontaine: I am from the General Services
|
||
Administration. Access will not be achieved by one strategy
|
||
alone. This group has tremendous political influence, and you
|
||
should use it to identify all the pressure points--economic,
|
||
legal, legislative, etc.--and then apply the necessary pressure.
|
||
The amendments to the Rehabilitation Act mandated that Section
|
||
508 be updated. One of my projects is to get several governmental
|
||
agencies together to update the old Section 508 regulations on
|
||
federal procurement. The political reality is that in the current
|
||
administration there is less emphasis on regulations and
|
||
mandates. They are trying to make government run more like
|
||
business. So, while it is important to rewrite the regulations,
|
||
the political reality is that they will have less influence than
|
||
they might have had in previous administrations. Finally, I would
|
||
point out that the DOS problems were completely solved about the
|
||
time that DOS ceased being generally used. I think that the
|
||
Windows solutions will probably emerge about the time that
|
||
Windows is no longer on the cutting edge. Maybe this group needs
|
||
to focus its efforts on solving the problems with the operating
|
||
systems that have not yet been released. Both Microsoft and IBM
|
||
have radically different systems in development. That is where we
|
||
need to be looking.
|
||
Kenneth Jernigan: You are, of course, right except that
|
||
there are a lot of employed blind people out there who are going
|
||
to become unemployed while Windows and the other operating
|
||
systems are being used if we don't find a way of helping them.
|
||
Jim Thatcher: The resources required to produce these new
|
||
operating systems are rising exponentially, and the funds that
|
||
businesses like IBM are prepared to spend on access programs are
|
||
shrinking rapidly. The architects of new systems are interested
|
||
in helping, but when the financial crunch comes, business demands
|
||
will win out over what is right, unless the impetus to keep the
|
||
systems and programs accessible comes from above. This group must
|
||
get to the CEOs of these companies and persuade them of the
|
||
importance of maintaining a corporate commitment to
|
||
accessibility.
|
||
Tuck Tinsley: Is it possible and would it be helpful for the
|
||
American Printing House to gather a group together to produce a
|
||
tutorial for school-age children on Windows? [Chorus of "No" and
|
||
"We don't know enough to do it."]
|
||
Curtis Chong: Anything you could do to provide Braille and
|
||
tactile graphic materials to teach blind children about GUI-based
|
||
programs would be useful, but you must be careful to choose the
|
||
right GUI. Probably more kids in school are exposed to Apple
|
||
programs than anything else, and we have access programs that
|
||
have solved the screen-review problems for that system, so such a
|
||
tutorial might be helpful.
|
||
David Andrews: Mr. Fontaine says that new federal
|
||
procurement regulations will be written, but we must not forget
|
||
that in the meantime there are regulations on the books which
|
||
should be enforced. We cannot go to the pressure points until we
|
||
are agreed on what we want to ask for, so arriving at that
|
||
agreement is a very important first step.
|
||
Noel Runyan: It is easy to be depressed when looking at the
|
||
complexity of the GUI problem facing this field, but I remind you
|
||
that, when computer terminals were first on the horizon in the
|
||
sixties, there was lots of talk about how blind programmers were
|
||
bound to lose their jobs because their computers would no longer
|
||
be accessible. But we found good solutions to the problems that
|
||
faced us then, and I feel optimistic that we will do it again
|
||
this time. Both the government and business are beginning to
|
||
understand the importance of accessibility, and that will help.
|
||
Deane Blazie: One substantive thing we could do right now is
|
||
to go through the Federal Register and determine where the
|
||
largest automatic data processing (ADP) contracts are going. I'm
|
||
sure Windows would be included. Then the General Services
|
||
Administration (GSA) could demand that an access clause be
|
||
written into the contract in compliance with Section 508.
|
||
Kenneth Jernigan: Rather than GSA, we should get some of our
|
||
friends in the Senate and the House to approach the bureaucrats.
|
||
GSA officials can ask, but when it's the chairman of a key
|
||
committee, the bureaucrats will be much more interested in
|
||
complying.
|
||
Greg Lowney: Of the three largest procurements I am aware of
|
||
right now--the IRS, the Justice Department, and the Coast Guard--
|
||
all three have access language; two quote verbatim the guidelines
|
||
that the GSA put forward. These are outdated, and they do need to
|
||
be revised. The question is whether they will be enforced. There
|
||
are two mechanisms for accomplishing this. Although the people
|
||
letting the bids can choose to ignore the guidelines, they can
|
||
insist they be met at the time the bid is accepted.
|
||
Alternatively, if a contract is awarded without compliance,
|
||
another company can challenge the bid.
|
||
|
||
Friday Afternoon Session
|
||
|
||
Dr. Jernigan had asked Curtis Chong to gather a small group
|
||
together during lunch to discuss actions that conferees might
|
||
jointly take at the conclusion of the meeting or before the next
|
||
one. The group reported that another gathering of technologically
|
||
sophisticated people should soon be called together to discuss
|
||
the GUI at greater length and in greater depth. Details of a
|
||
possible certification system should be worked out, and thought
|
||
should be given to providing better implementation for Section
|
||
508. Dr. Jernigan then asked the group to bring a statement or
|
||
resolution to the service providers and consumers meeting
|
||
Saturday morning for their consideration.
|
||
Lloyd Rasmussen: A different graphics problem is facing
|
||
students and math teachers in high schools and community
|
||
colleges. It is caused by small graphics calculators. They are
|
||
too tiny to make talk, and there are increasing numbers of people
|
||
who don't know how to deal with instructional methods that depend
|
||
on this type of device.
|
||
Gerry Braak: I wish to urge increased attention to the
|
||
problem of access to digital readouts. Blind professionals, like
|
||
physiotherapists, must ask other people to read them the data
|
||
about their patients provided by the LCD displays on their
|
||
equipment.
|
||
Jim Sanders: We at the Canadian National Institute for the
|
||
Blind are very concerned about the problem of marketing. If
|
||
people don't know that the technology they need exists, in their
|
||
ignorance they will live increasingly restricted lives. We must
|
||
find better ways to educate people about what is out there and
|
||
how they can get it. Last March the CNIB launched the Techni-bus,
|
||
which is a forty-foot coach, fitted with display areas and as
|
||
much technology as we could cram into it. It has traveled 75,000
|
||
miles and visited 150 communities. We are still gathering the
|
||
results of this effort, which was complex and expensive, but it
|
||
has certainly educated many more people about the technology
|
||
available to them than we have ever reached before. The CNIB is
|
||
eager to hear from anyone interested in working on this marketing
|
||
problem.
|
||
Judy Dixon: With respect to the National Information
|
||
Infrastructure, two entities are being formed. One is a national
|
||
task force, comprised of people who understand the concepts
|
||
involved in this technology, and the other is a national advisory
|
||
group, made up of policy makers. The blindness field should be
|
||
represented on both of these bodies to insure that we will have
|
||
the access we have come to depend upon. I also hope that those
|
||
involved would be interested in Braille and other forms of access
|
||
beyond speech.
|
||
Frederick Downs: I am the Director of Prosthetics and
|
||
Sensory Aid Service for the Department of Veterans Affairs. I pay
|
||
for the special devices prescribed for the nation's veterans. I
|
||
need immediate information about emerging technology to
|
||
disseminate to 172 medical centers. I buy in volume for national
|
||
and, in future, for state agencies. By Congressional decree I
|
||
have absolute control over a budget which last year was
|
||
$240,000,000. Volume purchasing has made a big difference in
|
||
prosthetic purchases, and we are now making a big push to help
|
||
the blind. I hope to establish a cost-effective system for
|
||
purchasing which could benefit state agencies and others. I
|
||
welcome comment from anyone who can help.
|
||
John Brabyn: This group should take seriously its role in
|
||
and ability to foster targeted research. Dr. Cranmer's R and D
|
||
Committee has been very helpful in identifying the correct
|
||
problem and then encouraging people to focus on solving it. The
|
||
problems that have been identified here are important.
|
||
Mary Frances Laughton: I am pleased to say that the Canadian
|
||
government has just announced its plans for the Canadian
|
||
information superhighway, and the announcement included reference
|
||
to the importance of insuring that all disabled people have
|
||
access to it. We are doing some interesting research and
|
||
development, and I would be happy to put anyone on our mailing
|
||
list.
|
||
Shirley Dupmeier: I am a consumer who knows nothing about
|
||
technology. My plea is that, when you are doing your research and
|
||
marketing, remember those of us on the low end of the technology
|
||
ladder. We are out there, and we need your help too.
|
||
Paul Edwards: When corporations upgrade to new levels of
|
||
computer technology, organizations of and for the blind might
|
||
urge them to consider the tax advantage of making the old
|
||
equipment available to disabled people who would not otherwise
|
||
have access to it. Then consumer groups, Tech Act groups, and
|
||
perhaps state agencies could see about adding the access
|
||
technology to it to make it available to many more blind people
|
||
than would otherwise be able to buy it.
|
||
Caryn Navy: It is important to remember the low-end
|
||
consumer, but it is also important to remember to budget some
|
||
funding for high-end needs as well. So many of the new programs
|
||
require lots of memory and speed. I would like to commend
|
||
Arkenstone for making its speech driver library available to
|
||
vendors. Their generosity is a good model.
|
||
Susan Spungin: On behalf of the American Foundation for the
|
||
Blind and (I suspect) everyone else here, I would like to thank
|
||
the National Federation of the Blind and Dr. Jernigan for
|
||
bringing these three groups together for this important
|
||
discussion.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
******************************
|
||
If you or a friend would like to remember the National Federation of the Blind in your will, you can
|
||
do so by employing the following language:
|
||
"I give, devise, and bequeath unto National Federation of the Blind, 1800 Johnson Street, Baltimore,
|
||
Maryland 21230, a District of Columbia nonprofit corporation, the sum of $_____ (or "_____ percent of my net
|
||
estate" or "The following stocks and bonds: _____") to be used for its worthy purposes on behalf of blind
|
||
persons."
|
||
******************************
|
||
|
||
SUMMARY OF THE SATURDAY CONFERENCE DISCUSSION
|
||
|
||
At the close of the Friday conference session, the vendors
|
||
departed, leaving service-providers and consumers to discuss
|
||
issues together on Saturday morning. Here is the substance of
|
||
that discussion:
|
||
|
||
Dr. Jernigan began by asking the group if there was interest
|
||
in conducting another conference in about two years. He indicated
|
||
that the NFB would be pleased to host such a meeting. He expected
|
||
that by that time there would be a low-vision aids center as part
|
||
of the International Braille and Technology Center for the Blind.
|
||
The group unanimously indicated its interest in doing so.
|
||
Euclid Herie: At the last conference I agreed to chair a
|
||
committee to look into group purchasing, not with an eye to
|
||
hurting vendors, but rather to take advantage of economies of
|
||
scale. There was also a hope that we might be able to encourage
|
||
the development of products or increase their availability
|
||
through volume orders. In the past few months we in Canada have
|
||
organized a large consortium of our own which includes provincial
|
||
entities as well as the CNIB. I have been talking recently about
|
||
this matter with people in the U.K., France, Australia, Spain,
|
||
New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Japan. I think that the time is right
|
||
for developing a world market. Because Gary Magarrell and Jim
|
||
Sanders of my staff will be working together with our program, I
|
||
would suggest that one or both of them chair this committee in
|
||
the next two years.
|
||
Judy Dixon: I recommend that, at the Third U.S./Canada
|
||
Conference, part of the agenda be devoted to non-computer
|
||
technology: creative use of bar-code-scanning technology, talking
|
||
book machines, slates and styluses, and who knows what all. What
|
||
do we need? What is out there that people don't know about?
|
||
Dr. Jernigan asked if she would do the necessary research
|
||
and make the presentation at the conference, and she agreed to.
|
||
Curtis Chong: A group representing vendors, service
|
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providers, and consumers got together yesterday and drew up the
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following resolution:
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2nd U.S./Canada Conference on
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Technology for the Blind
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Resolution
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WHEREAS, throughout North America the graphical user
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interface (GUI) is becoming more widely used on today's computer
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systems; and
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WHEREAS, because GUI applications are incompatible with
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text-based computer access technology for the blind, their
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increased use effectively reduces the ability of the blind to use
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computers independently without resorting to relatively new and
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immature approaches; and
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WHEREAS, if blind people are to continue to enjoy the
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benefits that independent use of the computer has brought, access
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to GUI applications must be ensured; and
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WHEREAS, for the blind full access to GUI applications can
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only be achieved by a cooperative effort between blind consumers,
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those who develop GUI access technology, and developers of GUI
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platforms and applications; and
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WHEREAS, in the United States stronger enforcement of laws
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such as Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans
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with Disabilities Act will help to ensure that accessibility to
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GUI applications for the blind is a primary consideration, as
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opposed to an afterthought; and
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WHEREAS, in Canada the provisions of the Canadian Charter of
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Rights and Freedoms and applicable provincial human rights
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legislation specifically prohibit discrimination on the basis of
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disability: Now, therefore
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BE IT RESOLVED, by the 2nd U.S./Canada Conference on
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Technology for the Blind, in meeting assembled this sixth day of
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November, 1993, in the city of Baltimore, Maryland, that this
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conference call upon all developers of GUI applications to take
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advantage of any standard accessibility application programming
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interfaces (APIs) that may be provided in future operating
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systems; and
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BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that this conference call upon the
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General Services Administration (GSA) in the United States to
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take steps to enforce more strongly Section 508 of the
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Rehabilitation Act, including educating its contract negotiators
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about what it means for the blind to have true access to a GUI
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application; and
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BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that this conference call upon
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federal and provincial governments in Canada and all groups and
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organizations over which the Canadian Charter of Rights and
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Freedoms and applicable provincial human rights legislation have
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effect to take steps to ensure that discrimination on the basis
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of disability is not perpetuated by denying access to computer
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technology; and
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BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that this conference call for the
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convening of a future meeting at which the GUI accessibility
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problem for the blind can be discussed in depth by consumers,
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developers of GUI access technology, and key developers of GUI
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platforms, with a view to making more substantive recommendations
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in this area.
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Tim Cranmer: Let us be careful in stipulating that consumers
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be part of the conference we are proposing to call to discuss GUI
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that we do not try to mandate the establishment of standards for
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evaluating such technology. It will be some time before any of us
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will be knowledgeable enough to do so intelligently.
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President Maurer suggested that some of the applications
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producers might be concerned about the antitrust implications of
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a conference of the type being contemplated. David Andrews
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thought they would be more likely to fear losing their
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competitive advantage by discussing these matters with other
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producers. Dr. Jernigan said that we would look into getting a
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Justice Department letter giving its blessing to any solutions
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coming out of the conference.
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With all these understandings in mind, the group voted
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unanimously to approve the resolution.
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Elliot Schreier: Perhaps this group should think about
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establishing a periodic publication that would collect in one
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place some of the expertise we have. For example, I have copied
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and circulated David Andrews's recent evaluation of reading
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machines, published in the Braille Monitor. It would be helpful
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to have materials like that put together.
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An exchange then took place between Paul Edwards and Kenneth
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Jernigan. Mr. Edwards said that there continues to be a problem
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in providing appropriate and sufficient training for blind people
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who are beginning to use computers. We should see that there is
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some way of determining who is equipped to provide such training.
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Dr. Jernigan asked if he wasn't getting close to suggesting the
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establishment of standards. Edwards said no, but all the groups
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here should work together in a collaborative way to agree upon
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the content of the training.
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Gary Magarrell: Agencies cannot do all the necessary
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training in this area, but they should make sure that the people
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for whom they provide equipment have a tutorial component in the
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rehabilitation package. It is easier to raise the necessary funds
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to have someone associated with the vendor train a client than it
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is to maintain a person on staff to do that training for all
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clients. The vendors must, of course, then be certain that the
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people they have hired as trainers know the equipment well enough
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to train each user appropriately.
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Kenneth Jernigan: Consider for a moment the issues facing
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the NFB with the International Braille and Technology Center for
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the Blind. We have now invested over a million dollars in
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equipment. We have just put six hundred thousand into remodeling
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the new facility. We have the ongoing cost of David Andrews's
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salary and that of the support staff working with him. And really
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we should have at least one more professional down there. We
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provide all kinds of services to the public: evaluations of
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technology, tours, consultation, and training. We will find a way
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to keep this program going because it is important, but it would
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be easier if we could establish some means of generating funds
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through center projects.
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David Andrews: I understand the problem that Paul alludes
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to. The two biggest problems we face in the technology field are
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financing and training, and I don't know how to solve either of
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them. The field is still so new that I don't believe we can
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establish requirements for formal educational credentials; a
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number of us are self-taught and couldn't meet such
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qualifications. Frankly, most of the worst teaching is being done
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by people who are just not good teachers. They know the material,
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but they are not skilled in communicating it.
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Euclid Herie: We at the CNIB intend to establish a formal
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relationship under contract with the NFB to take advantage of the
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facilities here. We can save thousands of dollars each year by
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being able to make informed decisions about equipment purchases
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after coming here and talking with Mr. Andrews.
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Several things that have been said here during this
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conference have been particularly important. It is critical that
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we find a way to get ahead of the technology problems so that we
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are not always winning a battle only to find that the field of
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combat has completely changed. Also, our Techni-bus reached
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17,000 people in eight months, people who had not known that such
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equipment was to be had. I suggest that in a month or so a small
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group of people get together and listen to the tapes of this
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conference in order to pick out the most important ideas. They
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could then be circulated to the participants for individual
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action as seems appropriate.
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Kenneth Jernigan: On the matter of funding this technology
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center--we would like to have some help in funding it if we can
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get it, but, on the other hand, we don't want to put the resource
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out of the reach of people who need it. Striking the right
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balance is a problem.
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Shirley Dupmeier: We must not sell short the intelligence
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and energy of blind people. We must pass on information among
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ourselves and make our own decisions and not think of ourselves
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as helpless victims at the mercy of the vendors. But I would also
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like to request that at the next conference cassette versions of
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the agenda be available for people like me for whom neither print
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nor Braille is a good alternative. Dr. Jernigan thanked her for
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bringing the point to his attention and assured her that it would
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be done.
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Kurt Cylke: I think it will be important for the people who
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agree to do things after the conference to report back about what
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they have accomplished before the next meeting. We have heard
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about two of the five things agreed upon at the last meeting, and
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that points up the importance of follow-through.
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Gerry Braak: I have been a proponent for a long time of
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getting technology demonstrations to outlying areas as has been
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done with the Techni-bus, but many of the people who see the
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equipment comment afterward that there is no way they can afford
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it. The economic component of this situation is very important.
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Moreover, when youngsters leave school, where they have had
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experience with computers, they will lose their skills quickly if
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they do not immediately get jobs that use those skills. This is
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another aspect of the problem.
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Paul Edwards: I have a motion for consideration: moved that
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this conference express its concern over the poor quality of
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training available to many blind people in the field of
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technology and urge all parties involved in work with technology
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to seek ways to improve this unfortunate situation. The motion
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died for lack of a second.
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In closing Dr. Jernigan made the following remarks: We of
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the National Federation of the Blind pledge to you that we will
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continue to maintain the International Braille and Technology
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Center for the Blind, bringing together every piece of Braille-
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producing technology and every screen-reading program that we
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learn about. We will remove the outdated ones and do our best to
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keep this facility state-of-the-art. We will also staff the
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Center appropriately. We contemplate establishing a low-vision
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aids center as well, but we will not do so unless we can
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anticipate having sufficient funds to make it state-of-the-art as
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well. We do not need just one more run-of-the-mill low-vision
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center in this country.
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We have also placed before you the question of how we might
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be assisted to do this work which must be done. Rehabilitation of
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the blind and technology are now inextricably joined. That is why
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we established this Center and why we intend to keep it updated.
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It is in the best interest of every state and private agency and
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every blind consumer that we find the financing to do so. Working
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alone, we cannot possibly make this Center as successful as it
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could be. Since it is already better than anything else of its
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kind in the world, if we do not receive some assistance, we will
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never know how good it might have been.
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The first conference, held two years ago, succeeded in
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meeting its goals: to enable us all to know each other better and
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begin to work together in new ways, and to establish ourselves
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and this field as a force in specialized technology. In addition,
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we went away with a greater knowledge of and appreciation for
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technology and the part it was playing and would continue to play
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in the lives of blind people. Because the decision-makers in the
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field were here, what we received at that conference has helped
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determine the direction of work with the blind in these last two
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years. I also believe that the conference stimulated some joint
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purchasing and some new research and development of technology.
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This conference, too, has met all of those goals again, but
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in addition, it has given us a vision of what the future can be
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and what a nightmare it will be if we do not solve the technology
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problems that face us now. Technology will be a part of our lives
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in the future, whether we will or no, and the people here will
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determine what impact blind people have on that technology. You
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notice that I did not say "what impact technology will have on
|
||
blind people." There is no question that that effect will be
|
||
profound, but the impact blind people will have on the technology
|
||
that shapes our lives will be determined by the people at this
|
||
conference. And we have helped set the tone for that. Personally,
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I am much more concerned about this aspect of the conference than
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I am about any specific technology question we have discussed.
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Each of you has honored the rest of us by your
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participation, and our collective power and potential are greater
|
||
than the sum of the individuals who have been here. It has been
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||
an honor for the National Federation of the Blind to have you
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||
here, and we pledge to do our best to welcome you again in 1995
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||
and to plan an even better conference at that time. In the
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||
interim we will do all that we can to promote usable and useful
|
||
technology and to work cooperatively with you to create better
|
||
technology for blind people.
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