Schoolchildren often learn to count by connecting dots to create a picture.
Easy, you say? Not if you’re blind.
Same goes for that icon-ridden, “user-friendly” computer program known as Windows. So straightforward that even a child can point and click. But take away sight, and Windows is about as mean-spirited as a junkyard dog.
In the Clifton neighborhood of Louisville, 320 people work to help the blind overcome such obstacles.
The American Printing House for the Blind, a not-for-profit company that began as a collaboration among seven states, has been around for 140 years. It is the largest company in the world that makes only products for the visually impaired, and the oldest such company in the U.S.
In 1997, APH sold $14.6 million worth of such products as Bibles, textbooks, annual reports, magazines and fast-food menus in Braille; tape-recorded books distributed free through the Library of Congress; relief maps and globes people can navigate with their fingers; and abacuses, those ancient calculators that display their mathematical results in beads rather than liquid crystal.
Its sales were up almost 26 percent over the previous year.
The burgeoning sales are due in part to APH’s recent commitment to keep pace with technology. Sales of electronic products jumped almost $1 million in a year. Sales of computer software could start climbing in February, when APH plans to issue a CD-ROM to help the visually impaired master computers–and that omnipresent operating system, Windows.
“Some of our products are sophisticated and some are extremely low-tech–but essential,” said vice president Mary Nelle McLennan.
In charge of high-tech is Larry Skutchan, who became completely blind at age 21, when his second retina detached.
He was an English major in college during the 1980s, but found computers to be his passion after graduating.
These days, with guide dog Freddy lounging nearby, Skutchan taps his computer keyboard to get any bugs out of Listening to Windows before it is released in February.
Listening to Windows is one program for the blind that Skutchan has developed, and it seems simple: an interactive tutorial that uses recorded voices to teach keystrokes that maneuver through the program. Press the Control and Escape keys, for example, to start.
It amounts to stripping Windows of everything that makes it popular with those who can see, and reverting to the command-heavy DOS program.
“In a way, we’re taking a lot of simplicity and the intuitiveness out of Windows,” Skutchan said. “But blind people are having a lot of trouble moving over to Windows. You can’t just click on what you want. The tutorial emphasizes commands; there’s not much about the mouse at all.”
To make this all have a point, Skutchan has to have a screen reader, which reads aloud the type on the screen; it would be meaningless to navigate the Internet if no information could be gleaned from it.
But screen readers can handle only text. “You know an illustration is worth 1,000 words,” Skutchan said. “But we can’t see it.” His ideal invention: “Hardware. It would be a way for a tactile surface to come up on a board so we could feel graphics and images. If that ever happens, it would really revolutionize the way blind people communicate.”
Pipe dream? Maybe not. “Anything can be done with enough time and money. But usually, there needs to be a real-word application for it–then someone says, `Hey! Blind people can use it too.’ “
Skutchan’s computer projects are part of a larger trend at APH: Times change, and services for blind people have had to adapt.
The federally mandated mainstreaming of children from residential schools for the blind into regular public schools for the sighted, for instance, has prompted APH to change its way of publishing books in Braille. Since different schools use different textbooks, APH has had to widen its range of offerings to keep up.
With his head near a circuit board, APH manufacturing specialist James Robinson works on another project: an electronic sticky note. If it works, the motion-activated message machine will be used to alert blind people to hazards such as a wet floor or an obstacle, or even just to leave regular voice messages.
Such machines exist already–news racks and store windows that yak at passersby, for instance–but Robinson wants to alter them to be more easily programmed and used by the blind.
“This is a very crude first attempt,” he said as the machine started repeating itself like a scratched record.
No software giants have extended a hand to help in a big way with product development, but they have helped “indirectly,” as Skutchan puts it, by developing voice programs and sound cards that coincidentally happen to help the blind.
