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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.