The Pier Shareware 6

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ The Pier Shareware 6 / The_Pier_Shareware_Number_6_(The_Pier_Exchange)_(1995).iso / 026 / omygui.zip / OMYGUI.TXT

Wrap

Text File | 1994-10-07 | 54KB | 1,063 lines

This article was sent to me recently, and I found it quite interesting. I got the original author's permission to post it here. I thought it would be a good starting point for some discussion of the topic of Window's access. I realize it is a bit extreme, but then, "What would happen?". I would hope that something like this article, which will no doubt stir up some deep emotions of varying origin, could begin a real dialog between those who are going to lose if a solution isn't found, and those who have the knowledge to help us find a real solution. Please send any comments you have to me at 74664,2404 and I will try to pass them on to various entities who can make something happen. 2010 "ACCESS DENIED!" Nightmares Realized If Communications Work Exclusively by the Graphical-User-Interface or How Technology Can Bypass the Blind September 15, 1994 by Galina Nosenko Introduction: What I am writing offers a nightmare vision of exclusion. It is a nightmare which may not be far from lurching into reality if and ONLY if the present world-wide drive toward making visual interaction with the "Graphical-User-Interface" the undisputed standard for communicating with computers and other electronic devices continues. Like all nightmares, it represents the enhanced and condensed fears of the day rampaging as the hobgoblins of the night. The intent of bad dreams is to prepare one to confront whatever is fearful or perplexing when wide awake, NOT to prophecy doom, encourage people to write their wills or head for their favorite mental bomb shelters. This paper appears in two sections after about two pages of opening comments which explain my intent. If you want to jump straight into the nightmare, proceed to the section titled, "The Contours of a Dubious Future." The last section is called "Get Out of Bed!". What's it all about? This article is about only one group affected -- and afflicted -- by a pandemic of vidiocy. It is intended for people who know something about computers but who are not techies and who are also aware of the lot of people who cannot see. It is not intended for gurus of any persuasion or for people who agree with me. It is intended as a call to arms or, lacking that distinction, at least as a call to consciousness of present peril. If you can't imagine that there is a threat facing blind people today from the GUI, stop reading and tune your television set to find "Jeopardy" instead. Who is considered? I have neglected the deaf, the deaf-blind, the dyslexic, the motor-impaired, the learning disabled, and people with other disabilities, not because I do not care about their own difficult encounters with shuffling computer mice around a desktop, trying to do something equivalent, or the whole point-and-shoot, arcade-games mentality behind the Graphical-User-Interface, but because I am not well acquainted with them. Since the very early '80's, I have modified hundreds of jobs for visually-impaired and blind people or made academic work accessible to them primarily by using adapted computers. Like everyone else, I know most about my own disabilities and about those of the people whose lives have most clearly touched and continue to touch my own. Who may be offended? If anyone feels personally or professionally offended by this article, (and I see no reason they should not), I freely admit to blazing my own hostile attitudes abroad. They are not aimed at individuals or at particular organizations but at the savage culture traps by which they have been caught. Remember this is a nightmare vision; things are taken to their logical extremes, and the weaknesses, blind spots, and, yes, vices of many professions are allowed to bloom grotesquely in the dark. Again, if anyone wants to read a sweetly-reasoned, nicely balanced and academically-framed article, this isn't it, nor is it intended to be such an essay. Maybe that's for next time. Why not now? Most of the articles, conference reports and "Letters to the Editor" I have read on the subject of access to the GUI by the blind display emotional and intellectual perplexity, whether the authors admit it or not. The GUI is often heralded in the same piece as of enormous benefit to the sighted and the blind. Then something odd happens to the tone of the writing. We begin to hear that there are elements of the GUI which are difficult to deal with -- maybe really, really difficult -- but if we work hard enough, smart enough, long enough, if we have had the right kind of training, we can handle it. No need to back away, retreat to the vanishing DOS cave! Such language and mixed attitudes seem to appear most often in writings by men. There is an expectation of impending personal trial and of personal validation or failure. For those of us who read such articles the effect is to make us feel guilty -- not rationally critical of any ideas at all -- just stupidly guilty. Why aren't we as positive, as willing to take on the world on its terms? Have we really given the new access technologies which are supposed to work on the GUI-based systems a fair shake? --- every single one of them -- before we jump to any conclusion whatsoever? It makes one nervous. I find myself starting to sing quietly in Russian while reading these ambivalent pieces. I want to get out my CD player and put on The Red Army Band and Chorus doing "The Volga Boatman" at top volume. The sweaty, stress-filled life must be so blasted noble! Now, we all wish to be reasonable, unbiased, wise, and -- by golly! -- upbeat. These are the virtues of our craft and of responsible, educated people. We are usually rewarded when we embody such virtues in our work, and taken to task or, at least, embarrassed when we do not. Unfortunately, we are now inundated by questions -- or should be -- about how blind people can deal with the consequences of this culture's infatuation with and addiction to the visual presentation of information, and we are finding too few ready answers despite the number of adaptive technology firms currently selling or proposing to sell some kind of answers. Naturally, many companies are trying hard to provide solutions to the GUI problem as it manifests itself, particularly in "Windows". I have not written this paper in ignorance of or in disregard for their often brilliant efforts. A list of such firms must include at least the following: ALVA, Artic Technologies, BAUM, Berkeley Systems, Bio-Link, Blazie Engineering, G.W. Micro, Henter- Joyce, IBM, Micro Talk, Pappenmeier, Syntha-Voice, and TeleSensory. However good these solutions may be or will turn out to be, (some of them are in beta or alpha stages of development), they encounter two problems: They cannot make data which is inherently visual presentable in tactile or verbal format. They also cannot present a viable means of getting around visual ways of working in graphical applications when there are no keyboard alternatives. And, as you will see presently, there are other problems associated with the GUI which are much more daunting. So to promote a discussion which may offer more heat than light on a subject that is not just going to be crucial but IS crucial to the blind, I offer a picture of what nobody wants to see. It is also probably what nobody expects to see because we always seem to get some kind of compromised or compromising solution to our access problems for a short space before the technology jumps out of the tracks that we may have managed to travel at least some distance in. This paper sets up the worst scenario, summons up the worst demons, (well, at least some very nasty ones) so we can consider what we may well get if we can't develop adequate access to information via the G.U.I., the interface for the "Rest of Us". Who are they? Those who have eyes to see, ears to hear and hands able to use computer mice. The Contours of a Dubious Future: The following is a paper written by a student named Steven A. Miller for Human Issues in Computer Technology 416 at Oregon State University. He and his paper provide me with a convenient social fiction. References to 1994 are, however, fact. Miller is writing in 2010. Things have changed a lot since 1994. It must be a poor university to let Miller get away with skipping footnotes and bibliography, but then I am responsible for his academic climate. When Technology Excluded the Blind, Years of Increasing Deprivation: 1995-2010 May 24, 2010 by Steven A. Miller In 2010, there is scarcely a blind person to be found in higher education and extremely few in employment. The contrast with the period between the 1980's or the early 1990's and now is painfully obvious to anyone who remembers the times or who has seen the statistics. What happened to change the status of blind people? What part did the development of technology play in driving them further to the fringes of society? What other forces brought them to the precarious state in which they find themselves now? It would require another paper to begin to define what can be done to mitigate the effects of this problem. When most jobs for the blind vanished in the late 1990's, it signalled the end of a comfortable illusion that advances in technology would lift everyone's boat a little higher, like some kind of tide. Unfortunately, technology did not raise all the boats, and the people who did not see were some of the first to notice the cruel effects of the delusion of universal progress. The direction taken by a culture increasingly dominated by the visual display of information resulted in removing those who could not see from the information stream or leaving them so far up in its backwaters that they lost touch with most of the activity, educational resources, and real work of society. They struggled to get at the data behind the visual constructs on computer displays, but the technology available to them failed far too often to render what was merely visual into something they could comprehend, that is, something audible, tactile, produced in Braille or combining the elements of all three. Down the Slippery Slope: When everything began to go wrong, there was wide-scale job loss among the blind through use of various species of "Windows" (NT, Chicago, Cairo); "OS/2", "X-Windows", etc.. It was not so much the visual front-ends of these operating systems but the host of intensely visual applications running under them which ultimately excluded blind people. For a while they were able to use graphical front-ends to access what were then known as DOS-based programs such as Word Perfect for DOS. They were even able to work productively on the minicomputers and mainframes used by many companies back then, which still presented information in a text- based format. This gave the blind the illusion that they had really cracked the graphical environment and there really was no reason to worry. The speed of unemployment varied depending on the degree of enlightenment in various parts of the country. Some state and municipal agencies, for instance, used their copies of word processing software known as Microsoft's "Word" or of IBM's "DisplayWrite" when others had long since scrapped their old 80386-SX-class computers and made obeisance to the icon-littered programs of their choice. Low vision twilight: Only about thirty percent of people who are legally blind are without useful vision or any sight at all. The remaining have some kind of sight. These fell broadly into three categories with respect to how they were impacted by technology. Sometimes they appeared to blend into to one another. For those at the low end of partial sight, the new technologies were as devastating as for the totally blind. The mass of moving shapes and colors were meaningless whatever degree of magnification they used. For those in the middle who had better sight, prospects were somewhat better but not improved over what they could accomplish under older operating systems. They needed to rely heavily on dual-access technologies, that is image-enlarging and speech output to get their work done. The image-enlarging systems only allowed them to view a small portion of the screen at any given time. However, the GUI expected its users to be immediately and intuitively aware of multiple events on the screen. The result was that they had to spend too much time checking what they were doing and were thus seriously compromised in getting work done as quickly and well as their fully-sighted peers. For the third group, those with sight in the territory between 20/100 and 20/300, life was still not simple or convenient. They often used huge 27-inch monitors in an attempt to keep track of the whole computer screen and to stand some chance of identifying the tiny icons present in so many applications. However, they inevitably distrusted their own work because they could not feel confident about their vision. They too used image-enlarging systems, to some extent speech output, and were more likely than most computer users to be found straining to see what was at the top or extreme edges of their monitors. Household Inconveniences: Actually two heavy blows fell in quick succession on people who could not see. The second blow was in some ways more demoralizing than the first and ultimately more exclusionary. Just after computers started turning hopelessly graphical, manufacturers of appliances such as General Electric, Magnavox, Motorola, Tappan, Maytag, Sony, etc., discovered the incredible economy as well as the great appeal of using visual interfaces on their products. A host of products "went visual", starting with telephones and proceeding to television sets, VCR's, radios, CD players, tape recorders, stoves, food processors, microwaves, air-conditioners, dishwashers, washing machines and dryers. Being tossed out of a job by inaccessible technology was one thing; being increasingly forced to search for old appliances or, say, the most primitive gas stoves to use around the house was another. Even if they were not generally poor, the blind were forced into flea markets to do their appliance shopping. With the old technologies, the blind never had it easy in dealing with a host of household appliances. For example, microwaves had to be brailled and VCR's had to be programmed by sighted children. However, the new graphical technologies frayed what were already tenuous links with the rest of society. Replacement Projects: Training programs for connecting the blind to the real world evaporated as sheltered workshops rose to prominence again for lack of better alternatives. Those running such training programs leading to employment in the private sector were slow to recognize the danger. They had been saved before by technology, and the argument ran among them, that they would be saved again. That is what technology was for. After all, didn't everything sort itself out after the 1970's when blind programmers had to shift from using punch cards to dumb and inaccessible terminals? when typists had to confront first magnetic card-reading machines, then dedicated word processors also using dumb terminals? Unfortunately, the rehabilitation professionals did not notice that the basic model of displaying information had changed. It was displayed not as text, not as tables, but as graphs and pictures, diagrams, moving images, two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional objects, and ultimately, as we see now, in the incredible success of the Venture 7 Computer from IkonoKlan Technologies, Inc., in holographic images of customer demographics dancing in corporate offices. Human beings as corporate trainers seemed to vanish in a puff of smoke, displaced by interactive computer-based tutorials in which everything looked really good and trained people really well, was economical and totally inaccessible if you couldn't see it. No one had mandated that the makers of training packages or training materials of any sort make their products available to people with disabilities. There was nothing short of disaster in the works as the service providers for the blind met their daily crises a dozen at a time. But, as usual, they were not willing enough to admit there was a real problem in the beginning to let them smell the smoke from the job market about to burn to the ground for their clients. Changing Job Descriptions: Let's take as an example what happened to one of the favored, that is, possible, jobs for blind people in the 1980's and early 1990's. Documents have always been critical parts of the office, in fact, the largest part of office records, and, indeed, they have done anything but disappear. But by the date these words by Andy Reinhardt appeared on what was then paper page 91 of "Managing the New Document" in Byte magazine of August 1994, a word processing job in many companies had ceased to be simply a matter of punching in or merely editing text. "Now, the role of documents is poised to become even more central. Documents are no longer merely the electronic analog to paper, but rather dynamic, modular, multi-media entities." And it is exactly with this development that blind persons using word processing software started getting locked out of what they were supposed to create or edit. One could have only the most elementary sense of what the final product would be. In the work place, the skills and abilities required to manipulate moving images, insert voice clips, pictures, graphs and other forms of visual representation, were seen as increasingly important. Medical transcriptionists and those in other positions involving taking straight dictation were virtually eliminated as voice input technology allowed doctors, attorneys and other fully sighted professionals to dictate text to the computer and edit it simultaneously. Again, consider the job of computer programming. For a time, it was one of the safe havens for bright, educated people without sight. Blind programmers employed during the 1980s and early to mid 1990s could be extremely productive in this field, since the work involved entering and editing lines of code, building sets of instructions using argument lists and symbols, and correcting mistakes by reading through the text and isolating errors. But around 1994, things began to change with the proliferation of the visual programming languages that we see today. Consider the intense appeal of a visual work environment evident in even the figure caption from a Byte issue of July 1994. "Snap-Master's displays are clear and easy to read. Data flows from step to step through pipes; arrows indicate the data-flow direction. Of the products included, Snap-Master's graphics are second to none." The example happens to be taken from a very specialized area called "data acquisition programming" but the model for programming it uses is what the industry latched on to, making the programmer link objects on the screen much in the way that she or he would put together an electrical or plumbing diagram. Instead of having to enter lines of code, sets of instructions were represented as visual objects on the screen which could be manipulated and connected to one another using a mouse. Instead of having a complex statement to control the way in which a set of instructions was executed, visual cues such as arrows, shading, color coding, and lines of varying texture and thickness, made this immediately obvious. Here, it seemed, was an opportunity to make the task of programming computers so simple and visually intuitive that even a child could do it, provided, of course, that the child had the privilege of sight. Companies found that having their programmers construct software in this manner was also much less time-consuming than entering lines of code. Although a considerable amount of code-pounding was and still is required, the manipulation of visual objects became such a significant element of programming as to render this occupation impossible for a blind person. This trend was extremely evident as early as 1994. Look back at the training course schedules for computer professionals published in major city newspapers such as "The New York Times", "Chicago Tribune" or "The Los Angeles Times". Courses in traditional programming languages and operating systems such as C and UNIX were disappearing, being replaced by the emerging visual programming languages such as Visual C, Visual Basic, Power- Builder, etc., and the underlying operating systems that required these visual interfaces. Creating the illusion of work: After the pink slips started piling up about 1997, society began to involve blind people in make-work projects. In the process, they infantalized and trivialized the blind by giving them little tasks that anyone with even the most drug-fried intelligence recognized as demeaning. No matter what their degrees or experience, the unemployed blind faced enormous pressure to pitch themselves -- for their own alleged good -- headlong into what often appeared to them to be the living death of sheltered workshop life where the pleasures were few and the Lithium had to be handy. In the face of such bleak prospects for their clients, professional rehabilitation workers -- what was left of them by 2000, for they were discouraged out of the field by the hundreds -- searched desperately for limited areas in which blind people could still do something constructive and rewarding and for which they themselves would not need to feel such excruciating guilt about the little they could offer. Changing Definitions: Rehabilitation professionals, beginning by 1999 to call themselves "blind care providers/specialists", "visual deficit counselors," and informally "blink-watchers", demanded and found wider roles for sheltered workshops and developed different but oddly familiar definitions for rehabilitation agencies: They studied the past to find out how the blind handled weaving, pottery-making, chair-caning, piano tuning, and checked up on the current state of pen and pencil-making. They made pilgrimages to workshops that produced brooms, brushes, mats, scrapers, webbing for the military or that handled small-scale shrink-wrapping and packaging. They were grateful for every client they could place in a vending stand. They resurrected old "DOS-based computers" to do telemarketing by contract for real telemarketing companies living happily with fully-sighted workers using graphical systems. Agencies that formerly trained the blind to do useful work started to look like Third World resource centers -- dispensing guitar strings, reeds for instruments at cost and giving State-sponsored music lessons on anything that could be played on the street. They never managed to give the disabled a chance to sell national lottery tickets as they do still in Spain. In the United States in particular, they also tried earnestly to find places in volunteer organizations for the newly unemployed or unemployable blind -- assuming that volunteer organizations would have them, at least for therapeutic reasons. In Europe, which has never had a culture of volunteerism, this option was not available. What Blind Clients Paid For: The price for receiving services from agencies serving the blind was essentially adjustment to uselessness training disguised officially as "Adjustment to Enforced Leisure." Anesthetic phrases began to perfume professional conversations and articles as early as 1998 in an attempt to disguise the stench of inactivity forced on a whole class of citizens. Social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists demanded that the blind participate in such Adjustment to Uselessness counseling conducted by what were functionally thanatologists parading as "reality advisors." New Counselors: The wisest counselors on the New Realities found their models in the early writings of the 1960's on "enforced leisure", (something almost incomprehensible to the ordinary, that is, able-bodied and stressed-out American living with the ever present threat of corporate "right-sizing" current in the 1990's). Rehabilitation professionals also found their models in the vast body of "grief" literature. (See everything written by Dr. Elizabeth Kubla Ross and all of the "dolorology" and "thanatology" titles of the period.) Social workers, by and large, have never had an idea of how history or economic planning work but they understood then as they do now the immediate context of agonizing, individual predicaments, and so they enforced the belief that "diminished expectations" were inescapable and would continue to be necessary. There were few protestors among them, though they themselves suffered from grief aplenty and needed their own counselors. "Burn-out" seminars, popular in the early 1980's, returned like a craze for old fashions, there were and still are a host of seminars on "What To Do After Your Counseling Career." The Irrational Rationale: The enforcers of the status-quo, whoever they were in the late '90's, but chiefly pathologists, optometrists, ophthalmologists, social workers, nurses and what were a new, narrowly and badly trained class of blindness care- takers, spiritually closer to geriatric nurses than rehabilitation workers, effectively re-wrote history to define progress in terms of technical advancement. They needed to do this for their own hard- pressed sanity. They also needed to do it to convince their clients that somebody had to pay for progress. The New and Unimproved Medical Model: In the face of real disaster regarding anything resembling ancient "rehabilitation", those in charge of the profession seized on models of service provided by physicians and pathologists. Teenagers were effectively served by people functioning as gerontologists with all the gusto and good cheer of hospice workers. The emphasis on preventing blindness and/or restoring sight as evident in the rehabilitation and social work journals of the late '90s is astounding. They did not stress restoring sight among the young who had lost their sight or were going blind but on saving the sight of the adult population. There were many good reasons for this emphasis. Medical science had its functional limits, its gambles -- and its astronomical costs. Those who were most interested in, even hysterically intent on, being sighted were what were called "yuppies", young-upwardly- mobile-professionals of a particular post World War II generation who could not imagine life without intense competition and plenty of money. They drove much of the research into eye diseases during the past thirteen years. The New Culture: The new blindness workers, of course, did little publishing as we know it, not being particularly literate. They attended conferences with titles such as "Client Control 2001" and "What to Do When There Is Nothing to Do", produced an airless culture of their own for the blind to wilt in, wrote case notes, summaries and plans, and broadcast the "Bad Word of Disability" more effectively than if they had appeared on the then-popular "Donahue Show" or got themselves in print in learned journals. Of course, they did not consider the subject of changing the direction of technology itself. Naturally, they were aided in these accomplishments by corporate and government economists in worshipping the Gross National Product, and sadly rooting for the greater good of the many at the expense of the few, and in raising the specter of falling behind the computer geniuses of other countries, chiefly the Japanese. They ignored the plight of the few as well as their past accomplishments. And here is the real loss: they ignored what history could have been had other definitions of society and of those served by technology been considered seriously. Social Perspectives on Blindness How the Media Saw It The popular press pointed hopelessly, obsequiously and unimaginatively to the plight of the newly blind and unemployed or unemployable. There were tear- jerking stories of the day at least for a while until society lost its sympathy for and patience with people who needed dogs or long white sticks to get around and far too much to be employed. Meanwhile, pop television personalities continued their intellectually challenging and socially crucial researches into the impact on mothers of finding their children taking carnal knowledge of gerbils and what it really, really felt like to be the bi-sexual great- grandfather (or was it great-grandmother?) of asthmatic, marijuana- addicted Siamese twins. And when they were not busying themselves with sorties into such questions that shake civilizations, they turned their attention to the pressing problem of AIDS. That disease alone has put enough strain on the economy and health care system in the last fifteen years to make questions of rehabilitation look minor compared to matters of life and all-too- abundant death. How the Churches Saw It: Religious institutions, with few but vocal and significant exceptions, sided with the pathologists and social workers who were unable to offer hope, at least in this life. They counseled their blind parishioners in the ways of long-suffering and holiness rather than in rebellion against the popular and dysfunctional definitions of God or of the arbitrary actions of man. "The Windows of Heaven will pour you out a blessing" was seen as having little to do with any operating system produced by the fabled Microsoft Corporation, then of Redmond, Washington, and far more to do with standing with a large tub at the Pearly Gates waiting for a major downpour of Just Rewards. No one delivered a sermon after the manner of Emerson who could say in the 19th Century, "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind." In the late 1990's, representations of things were raking blind people with their bloody spurs. There was increased division among the blind about the usefulness of religion to them, with those involved in desperate piety even more desperate and pious and those who hadn't figured out where any Divine Intelligence operated in their affairs even more hopeless, outraged, inconsolable, and as far as their counselors were concerned, more anti-social, and in need of counseling and drug therapy. (Drug therapy usually won out, as it does now, in any contests with counseling; it takes less staff-time to guarantee quiet.) The anti-religious found it more difficult than most of the religious to accept conventional forms of wisdom, the Iron Realities preached at them incessantly, directly or indirectly, and did not wait as patiently as the pietists, Social Security Disability checks in hand, for deliverance from a very present evil. Isolation in a Democracy The Information Lock-Out: Unemployment and lack of information effectively cut the blind off from society. The blind socialized with and were led by the blind -- so far as the communications, economic, and political structures of the sighted community allowed it. There were no evil intentions here, no physically-enforced ghetto life as such, no English-speaking Third Reich. They lost track of public affairs and dropped out of intelligent participation in what was supposed to be representative democracy. This trend began in the mid 1990s when computer information services, (as they were known then), such as the Internet and America On-line, began to adopt the Graphical-User- Interface as their standard for communication. In addition, the nature of the information on these systems also became increasingly visual so that even if blind people could get through the graphical front-end, the graphs maps and moving images which were rapidly replacing text-based articles and papers, were totally incomprehensible to them. This isolation was made more complete by the integration of news coverage and public debate into the data links in our homes via phone and TV which are so much a part of our lives today. It was also about the mid 1990s that we began to see the introduction of the graphical phone, that is, a phone which was operated in the same visual manner as computers. Pilot projects using graphical phones were introduced as early as 1994 by companies such as Pacific Bell. The phone had always been a link to the rest of the community which blind people could rely on, and it seemed inconceivable that such a verbal form of communication could be lost or limited by technology. But when phones "went visual", that is, when one had to point at a picture or at least know what a particular image was in order to use the phone, all this changed. Even though people could still use their old, push button phones, these older models lacked many of the basic functions needed to participate effectively in the community and be on equal terms with the rest of society. As a result of these developments, the information stream which the fully sighted found increasingly alluring and indispensable to their lives never reached the blind. Detiorating Economic Status: When changes happened slowly enough, few fully-sighted people noticed the change. When changes happened quickly, sighted neighbors of the blind were left without a clue of how to help. The blind middle class and lower class were driven onto the dole, if they were lucky, and found themselves in poverty, in any case if they were breadwinners. The rich blind, few as they were and are, found themselves economically distressed but left at least intact. When they were rich enough, they were more or less in the position of the rich in many Third World countries, able to have others do everything for them for a price. What Rights? Blind people found themselves with much-diminished rights: There was increased pressure from doctors, social workers, government agencies, family planning clinics, family members, insurers, neighbors, and even some clergy for abortions of children who might be born blind. The blind were pressured to give up the children they already had because, after all, the reasoning went, they were blind, useless, poor, and unlikely to keep their children safe. There was massively increased pressure for blind people with hereditary blindness to avoid having children in the first place or from marrying at all. Naturally, there were scores of pilot voluntary sterilization projects which became increasingly less voluntary. The Human Genome Project succeeded in finding the genes that created havoc in many individual lives, but the fruits of such research were as handy as post-mortems for people who were already blind. The big killers of the 20th Century and the first part of this century, such as AIDS, Cancer, diabetes and heart disease, have inevitably got the most attention in the scientific community, as well as the most money. No one has been able to put any real research time into curing a whole list of eye diseases: Retinopathy of Prematurity, Stargaards, optic atrophy, congenital cataracts, and albinism as well as a whole host of congenital eye diseases. More funds have gone into dealing with macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, and Retinitis Pigmentosa. Public Tolerance: A nation-wide Harris Poll conducted in 2009, found that over 85 percent of the population of the United States considered blind people to be parasites who sap the nation's resources. How did this come to be? In the late 1990's there was already diminished tolerance for the blind by the body politic, insurance agencies, and taxpayers who, after all, wanted relief from welfare burdens brought on them already by the diminished numbers of workers compared to those who were retired. There was increased violence against the blind generally by an unsympathetic and fearful public. There was a communal forgetting about people who were blind and once useful. The only image the public had then and still has now of the blind is that of the legendary Helen Keller, and she was deaf-blind. The Price of Visibility: The blind became more visible, much to the distress of the ordinary man as they appeared increasingly as street musicians, beggars, prostitutes, and pitiful spectacles -- if they managed to stay out of the workshops. The blind moved into poorer and more dangerous parts of the community and became subject to more crime. Families with blind members were increasingly disrupted and destroyed. Blind children faced increased despair because they could not have as substantial educations as their forerunners or job opportunities outside the mere scut work of sheltered workshops. Parents and relatives of the blind faced huge amounts of despair and guilt. Not surprisingly, the whole class of blind people was increasingly stigmatized and shunned. Forced Out of Education: Blind people faced increased pressure to stay away from education. It was assumed to be an unrealistic objective. Blind children faced a world in which the window of opportunity was being slammed shut. Employers expected computers in the schools to work the same way they did in business, represent the world in the same intensely visual way that it was represented in the work place. An aging population, eager to get the school costs off their backs, wanted more from teachers. They got it: more computerization, more tutorials, more self-teaching materials, almost all hopelessly visual and inaccessible. When blind children managed to get materials on the same subject as fully-sighted children, they almost invariably progressed more slowly. Visual displays simply made things more obvious to the sighted, offered better examples and illustrations, working models of operations, and interactive learning sessions than anything that could be produced for the blind. History, for example, until the late '80's had been largely a textbook subject. There were maps, slides, some videos. Once everything went interactive, however, it was easier to grasp a lot of history in a hurry. The Battle of Gettysburg, for example, could now be seen from a variety of angles, the eagle's eye view of the old textbooks, the commander's observation post views. The maps could be flipped to see things from the point of view of this army or that. One could see troop movements, angles of fire, ask to see particular times in the battle, summon up ordinance lists, display uniform types, armaments, vehicles, commanders' biographies and military logs, compare notes written at the same time by opposing field commanders, examine the aftermath of battle, display casualty records, retreat routes, see the grim photographs of medical services. For those interested in the bottom line there were even graphs of what it really took for three days of fighting in men and money. Health Problems: Not surprisingly, the disease, insanity and mortality rates for the blind increased to the alarming rates we see today. The general population has become even more terrified of going blind than they were fifteen years ago. Insurance companies report phenomenal increases in the past ten years in disability insurance related to blindness. And unfortunately, even our language has taken account of the social change. The phrase "Dutch treat" has recently been widened in the 16th college edition of Merriam Webster's dictionary published in 2009. Its latest meaning is "doctor-assisted voluntary death by lethal injection to avoid the mental anguish of disability." Another phrase appearing in the new Webster's with the same grim import is "taking the Kavorkian cure." 20/20 Hindsight: To the extent that a graphical-user-interface inevitably locked the blind out of some communications functions in the society, one can comprehend what happened to this minority. But why should the lock-out have become so all-encompassing, so ghastly in its human consequences? Could it have been slowed down or avoided, at least in part? The uncontrolled slide into the present situation undoubtedly had many causes. Among them are the following: 1. The blind themselves did not know what to think, how to consider the GUI problem or whom to believe: They had been promised too many good things by too many vendors to be trustful. They had not organized themselves on a grassroots level outside of their contentious national and state organizations. They were also convinced that individuals who could not see would not make a difference in the development of technology or of much else. Ultimately, they were far too intent on conforming to the visual ways of working thrust on them by the rest of society to demand modes of access to information that really met their needs. 2. Rehabilitation agencies serving the blind responded to the danger posed by the GUI slowly, waiting too long to devote staff and resources to try on their own or in league with others to figure out just how they could keep their training programs viable and job placements, outside of pot-scrubbing and dish-washing, possible. For the most part, such agencies suffered more than most parts of the society from lacking managers capable of dealing with information regarding technology or its implications. They were "people-people" by their own estimates and responded best to individual personal crises. They did not respond well to tales, however credible, of impending technology-driven doom. There were good reasons for this. The models they worked by were basically those of social work, crisis intervention, optometry, and, by-in-large, old-fashioned top-down management. The few people who ran their assistive technology projects or programs might as well have spoken in Aramaic when talking to non-technical managers and executives -- no matter how much they avoided computer- speak -- until it was too late for them to begin a decent analysis of the danger. Technology workers were not widely trusted anyway, except by clients; knowledge was and is power for good or ill, and for all too many inherently suspicious managements the existence of uncommon knowledge implied unspoken threats to authority and staff controls. Alarm bells went off in administration offices only when job placements dwindled and funding vanished like rain in the desert. Administrators were incensed that the underpowered computers they had purchased years ago -- and which had done so well -- could not begin to even load the operating systems and application software required in modern offices. They prayed desperately for more grants and for somebody to make it all work -- just like in the good old days. Because they had traditionally kept the salaries of technology workers low and because they were convinced people could just "catch on" to piling pieces of technology on top of one another without proper training, they felt betrayed when exhausted staff members fled for better paying jobs in the private sector or education. Ultimately, employees recognized that they were not the charity. 3. When changes in the workplace began to exclude blind people, this should have been a clear signal to blind consumers and rehabilitation professionals that some serious thinking was needed in order to find a niche in which blind people could continue to be productive. There was a systemic failure here. Too many organizations and agencies simply did their own thing in isolation. They did not consider matters seriously together. They did not start consulting with people in private industry, government and academia to find out what jobs would be viable or could be made viable in the future. They did not attempt to determine how much of computer programming could be saved, just how word processing might be kept open as an option, how one could continue to work as an attorney in the evolving office, or what would be necessary to manage a reception desk. Given the limited number of occupations available to blind people in the 1980's and 1990's, it was not as if they needed to account for the whole range of jobs in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles, but that they did not look long and hard at what technologies would or could come into the workplace and how they would impact the way in which people worked. They scarcely took into account cultural changes driven by technology or peculiar assumptions rampant in American business such as the notion that everyone should be his or her own secretary. Inevitably, they would have been shooting at moving targets, but at least they would have had their guns up and their eyes on something. 4. Organizations of the blind spent so much time and energy arguing among themselves that they presented a disunited front to the public government agencies which could not determine the needs of the blind if they could not begin to define them for themselves. 5. State agencies serving the blind often lacked money for service but, more often, lacked personnel who could understand or do anything about the possible consequences of the GUI. State agencies also were often dependent on understaffed, non-profit agencies for technical advice which they could not really offer. The states, like most other organizations, had no long-term plans for dealing with technological change, in this case, genuine revolution. 6. Adaptive technology firms did not band together to make a concerted assault on the vendors of GUI systems to demand coherence along product lines as well as accessibility. They created and sold products providing limited access to individual products and operating systems, and often did this brilliantly. But they had few models in the American economy for cooperation among competitors, had no encouragement from the government, and, because they were often very small enterprises, had too few staff to take on wide scale projects involving legal teams, liaisons with other firms, lobbyists in Washington, and representations to the Congress, etc. Technology firms were also hindered by the fact that GUI firms, particularly Microsoft, did not make proprietary code available to render access more than limited and unreliable. 7. No one properly exploited dual modes of access to the GUI for the totally blind. In the United States in particular, notorious for its mindless and allegedly cost-conscious love affair with speech output, rehabilitation professionals usually pushed sole access to the GUI through speech output. It was as if nobody had researched, much less understood, how tactile forms of access such as Braille could be the best shot that blind people had of making sense of the spatial concepts behind the GUI. The number and quality of integrated speech and braille output systems remained pathetically low and ineffective. Often, when vendors did provide Braille/tactile access to their products, it was only as an afterthought to speech, and they seemed to have no idea of how to exploit the additional capabilities that Braille could provide for the blind. The number of blind students and their teachers who assumed that they could live without good Braille skills remained, on the other hand, self-destructively high. 8. Nobody launched law suits against firms such as Microsoft to guarantee access to, much less consistency across their product lines. In 1994, Microsoft continued its token investment in the future of those with disabilities by devoting one entire full-time position related to access for all disabilities to their entire product line. 9. No organization of the blind or serving the blind engaged in civil disobedience to bring attention to a developing crisis. There were no sit-ins, boycotts, demonstrations, computer- bashings, protest marches, cross-country treks to Washington, D.C.. It was as if the blind did not think of themselves as an ordinary political minority capable of doing these things for their own self-interest. There was not even a single massed modem assault of the kind we are used to now from other protest groups to tie up business or government phone lines, not even a FAX attack. 10. Nobody in the federal government seemed to notice that the information super-highway lacked adequate access ramps for the blind. They also did not put any real teeth in the Americans With Disability Act of the early 1990's. The government failed to implement its demands that the technology it purchased be accessible to people with disabilities. And, lastly, they did not set up any research labs to throw the weight of the whole society into providing solutions to the problems posed by the GUI. 11. The last point is the most distressing of all. It appears that everyone thought there was someone or something out there that would make the GUI access problems go away. They were wrong. "Get Out of Bed!" Will we be wrong too? Will we wait for the future to arrive like an avalanche taking us anywhere it is headed? I didn't write this essay because I believe we live helplessly in the path of cascading technology but because I know we can help direct our future. You read a lot in the "20/20 Hindsight" section about what people did and did not do before the fictional year of 2010. The questions is: what are we going to do? I am not politically astute enough to know how to start a grassroots movement taking on the grim implications of the GUI. I may not even know how to start a small debate. I have given up on the genteel ways of rehabilitation publishing with some risk, at least long enough to ask you to consider where we are headed and what we can do. If you find this article mere raving, say so. If you agree with anything, say that too. The real point is that somebody does some thinking about this now, takes some reasoned action on this now. You can surely start a discussion with me and with each other, form local groups concerned with the GUI, consult with people actively involved in developing technologies, get an education as you educate them. Ultimately, we must broaden our discussions. We must let a wider public know about the kind of world we need to live in and for which we, individually and together, are prepared to do some very hard and careful work. If in three years time, we are groping in the dark with technologies which fumble with the GUI, we are in very serious trouble. Why? Three years is long enough for training programs to lose credibility and for GUI technologies to gain enormous momentum. We need continued and increasingly serious dialog with the computing industry and frankly to force the GUI makers to give us alternate access routes into their products. We also need to organize more conference and other initiatives to educate one another. In addition, we must forge significant links with politicians involved with access issues. If we can do all this, we will have gone a long way toward insuring that the 2010 scenario remains fiction.