by Susan Thompson
A 50th anniversary edition of Blind Citizens News would not be complete without a reflection on how changes in technology have impacted our lives both as blind and vision impaired individuals and as an organisation. I invite you all to take a trip down memory lane with me. Depending on where your memory starts from, you may be awed by not only how far we’ve come, but how quickly we have got this far.
In 1975, when the National Federation of Blind Citizens (NFBC) was founded, I was still in high school. I grew up on braille which had to be produced by hand with a Perkins Brailler. If copies were needed for multiple students, it was copied using a thermoform machine which melted a sheet of plastic paper and vacuum sucked the melted plastic over the braille dots – one laborious page at a time before binding into the many volumes that a hard copy braille book becomes, even today.
I learned to touch type on a manual typewriter which stamped print letters onto paper via a metal leaver hammering each letter into a ribbon.
If you wanted to write a letter to a sighted friend, you either had to type straight from your head, and mistakes or loosing track would mean winding in a new sheet of paper and starting all over again. Alternatively, brailling by hand first and laboriously typing from the braille copy.
When I was young in the 60s, Using the telephone meant lifting the receiver and winding a lever on the front surface to reach a human operator and asking for a 3-digit number. Later, telephones progressed to putting your finger into a numbered hole in a dial and rotating it in a clockwise direction. If you were not lucky enough to have a phone at home, you had to go to a public phone box (a human-sized cabinet on the street with a phone) to make a call.
I remember as I began to lose vision in my teens, having to learn to fold each note in different ways to manage money, and having to be very disciplined about doing it lest I lose track of things. By the time I had left school I had a bank note measurer to help identify the width of the paper notes, but these measures were made by hand and were very big in some wallets. Although the paper notes did respond well to being folded in different ways identifying notes from change independently could be difficult.
I played braille games and had braille watches and alarms but don’t recall many other gadgets – manual or otherwise – which helped with daily living as a blind person.
I fondly remember that I did recreational reading with a Mark 4 Talking book machine which played back recorded books on an 8-track cartridge about the size of a video cassette.
The most exciting thing I remember in very early high school was the advent of the cassette recorder, which very quickly began to replace reel-to-reel tape for daily individual use, although it was limited in recording time. However, communication by cassette lasted as a very popular way for blind and vision impaired people to keep in touch over many years.
Other than that communication, if you wanted to be involved in things with others, you had to travel for face-to-face contact. When I started to move around the world a little by the mid-70s, a white cane and whatever orientation and mobility skills I had been taught were all I had other than an occasional audio/tactile pedestrian signal.
In the early days of BCA, much of this was reflected in the way we worked as an organisation. Meetings – whether those of branches, conventions, National Council or those held with government or community organisations for advocacy purposes – were held face-to-face, with people often having to make long and expensive trips to get there. In the very early days, nearly all our organisation’s formal or business meetings were recorded for drafting of minutes which were then typed, brailed, thermoform copied, and recorded as necessary – largely by the voluntary efforts of members, their families and friends.
As the late 70s merged into the 80s, the microchip and computer revolution was underway. We began to see word processors and then computers in workplaces, and very soon personal computers in people’s homes. Importantly, we saw this progress influencing innovations which had many benefits for people who were blind or vision impaired both for personal independence, education and employment.
In relation to specific blindness devices, it was the beginnings of speech technology and software, as well as refreshable braille displays. I personally saw and used some of these early devices. Even back then I felt they were beginning to liberate me from the information access constraints of my blindness. In addition, By the later 80s and early 90s, progress in mainstream technologies had begun to have a positive impact. The beginnings of mobile phone technology, scanners and Optical Character Recognition (OCR), to name a few, had a significant role in improving communications and information access.
In the mid-80s I had the talking typewriter in my job, and because I had the money from having started working, I latched onto devices like the keynote and used it to access my newly acquired blue-chip personal computer which I could hardly lift onto the desk.
As I write this article, I can again relive that sense of liberation and excitement of something revolutionary. I developed computer skills and instincts that have served me well to this day, learned to do word processing (earlier than many sighted peers), and felt I had some real tools to improve my job options. Together with the emergence of affirmative action and Equal Employment Opportunity principles, this new technology and the skills to use it helped me do just that.
Taking a huge leap forward in time and technology, I am truly amazed to look at where things are now both for people who are blind or vision impaired and for how BCA can operate today. Mobile phones, the great improvements in internet speed and availability, the portability of computers and the servers that hold the documents and other data for the running of the organisation, and the great improvements in both hard copy braille production and refreshable braille mean we can do so much more to function as a national organisation.
We have our computer server in one part of the country and have had staff working from as many as 4 different states accessing this remotely. Many meetings can be run and attended quickly from anywhere thanks to Zoom and Teams on laptops or mobile phones.
Perhaps the most astonishing transformation that has happened began with the COVID-19 pandemic, and the way BCA has been able to harness Zoom (even for those unable to access computers) to continue and improve business as usual. Most important for all of us, has been the almost overnight growth in the peer support opportunities over Zoom that were initiated in early lockdowns which are still growing today.
Looking back over these 5 decades, for me there is one big standout in the impact of technology on my life. That is mobile phones and the original basic components of calling and texting. Previously, just finding someone at a particular location or in a noisy crowded environment could be incredibly difficult and stressful. Thanks to the simplicity of just carrying a phone I am now able to talk and compare landmarks and find I am as close as the other side of a street to my friend, or we are together in the same noisy, large, crowded room. This has largely removed that stress from my life.
For BCA as an organisation established by and for members, the running of the organisation has benefited from the whole gamut of technological advances, but broadband internet and the connecting benefits of Zoom and Teams take my prize for continually improving the core business of information provision, peer support and advocacy expressed in modern language as “Inform, Connect and Empower”.