If, many centuries from now, a historian is asked for the most significant ways in which the world changed in the last few decades of the twentieth century, it is difficult to deny that the computerization of society, and the digitization of information which it prompted, would be one of the first items on the list. As with any change which impacts so many people, almost every person involved experienced the change and its consequences quite differently. I will suggest that some of the most remarkable, and remarkably positive, such consequences fell on the fairly small group of people who could not, due to visual or other disabilities, read or write printed or handwritten text on a page. In considering the history of what may be called the alternative access to reading and writing in text, and the digitization of text which so rapidly changed that access, it may be useful to focus, not so much on the technology itself, but on the impacts it brought about in peoples’ lives as readers and writers in general and as students and teachers in particular. The technology used to digitize printed text and read text which was already digitized, was, after all, the intelligent combination of certain tools. These were often generally available, like text to speech and optical character recognition. The extraordinary circumstances came about from the effects on the lives of individuals. Those impacts are, it may be argued, most easily divisible into three parts: those relating to the physical ways of dealing with text, those related to text as used by people in their lives, and those related to the use of text in the specific context of education.
Before considering each of these impacts, it may be useful to examine the situation of those who had difficulty accessing text before digitization became possible. Centuries after the invention of the printing press, it was still either very difficult or impossible for people who were blind to access written words independently. Before the late seventeenth century, as D’Andrea puts it, “there was no standard system for teaching reading and writing to people who were blind.” (D’Andrea, 2009, p. 586). Even when a rudimentary system was developed to produce a small number of books using embossed letters, it “turned out to be slow and cumbersome both for reading and embossing…” (D’Andrea, 2009, p. 586). The braille code, through which many blind people learned to read in the latter half of the nineteenth, and throughout the twentieth, century, evolved and saw increasing use for books only after the 1900s, though it was invented a few decades earlier (D’Andrea, 2009, p. 585). The first significant improvements for those blind people in fairly large cities, or who had access to mail services, began in the late 1890s, when library systems started putting limited numbers of embossed books, using several different systems of dot and shaped writing, on their shelves (NLS, n.d.). Even to access all of this small number of texts, the blind user would have to learn several systems of representing letters on the page. The development which significantly increased the number of books which blind people could access, before what may be called the digital era, was the use of analog audio recordings. This became available to a significant number of blind people in the 1930s, both in Europe and North America, and the number of books available as recordings increased significantly over subsequent years (Philips, 2007, p. 294). Again, however, this was a small increase only to the number of fairly popular books which were published. More obscure texts were not recorded, and ephemeral text, or text which was for specific people, remained unavailable to the blind reader without a great effort, high financial costs, or both.
It is worth noting that the difficulties of accessing text were, of course, not limited to the inability to read books and other printed material. The problems extended into every aspect of life. Just for example, the loss of sight would often mean an almost complete loss of privacy in what was being read. In 1903, a blind author wrote of a friend who, in an attempt to preserve the privacy of the letters he received, had them addressed to a postal outlet, and then took them to a cafe where he would pay a waiter, who did not know him, to read them (Javal, 1903, p. 84). While this solution worked for occasional uses, and other solutions were found to some of the problems caused by the inaccessibility of text, each of these was ad-hoc, solving only specific problems for a specific person with particular resources.
The digitization of text for blind users, outside of specialized settings, began with the Kurzweil reading machine in the middle of the 1970s (Shankweiler & Fowler, 2015, p. 93). For the first time, this allowed blind people, in their homes or workplaces, to scan, digitize, and have text read aloud without the intervention of another person. Over the next few years, the ability to use digital text converged with its increasing production, both specifically for users of assistive technology and for the general public. Devices were produced which allowed totally blind users to enter text using the six dot braille or standard QWERTY keyboard and have that text read aloud, displayed in braille, and embossed on paper (Hoffmann, 2008). As storage capabilities grew, those devices, and the personal computers which were being developed around the same time, gave blind users access to stored digital text, as well as allowing increased magnification of text (Evans & Blenkhorn, 2008). Like most other technologies in public use, the hardware began to shrink and, in recent years, pocket-sized book readers and braille displays have become available (Freedom Scientific, n.d.).
This brings me to the first impact of this assistive technology on the lived experience of its users. Though it is fairly subtle, it is something which often seemed to come up as I watched people begin to use the technology. My own work, which was to support some of the new tools and train people on their use, started when the normal use of digital text, as opposed to embossed braille on paper or analog recordings, was becoming entrenched. The change had started, but was not complete, even for particular students. It was usual for students I worked with to be using the technology I was supporting only for some classes or readings. What struck me was the decrease in physical demands made by the new tools. This is most obvious, and has been mentioned in the literature, when considering the entry of braille text. Doing so on a computerized device is physically easier, and students tend to write for longer and correct more, than when they use the brailler, which is a mechanical device which punches holes directly into paper (Kamei-Hannan & Lawson, 2012). What I found was that the physical demands of using digital text were less throughout. For example, braille books usually come in several volumes, since embossing takes up far more space than printing. Students would have to carry a few of these to have portable access to even a comparatively short novel. Again, if they were using recordings on tape, I would often see that they would take time to rewind and fast-forward to specific sections. These were usually marked with index tones, which could be heard as the tape wound back and forth, but it would often take a good deal of time and effort to find the part which the student wished to hear. Each of these efforts was not, on its own, of any importance, even for younger students, but working with people over a single class period, I noted that where they were unnecessary, as with digital text or digital audio, the student needed to do a great deal less physical work to accomplish the entire task. For younger students, this was obviously a significant benefit, but even older students found it easier to work with the tools when they had to put less time and effort into working with other aspects of their material. Though sometimes overlooked, the way in which easily accessible digital text reshaped the physical circumstances of reading and writing benefited many blind users of the new technology.
The second way in which the advent of digital text impacted the lives of blind readers is far less subtle. It is in the abundance of text which it made available, and the comparatively rapid way in which it could be accessed. Even with the earliest Kurzweil reading machines, blind people no longer had to wait for others to emboss, record, or read text for them. Though the machines often made errors, it was usually possible to extract meaning from the scanned and spoken text and, of course, when text was produced digitally to begin with, errors rarely occurred. Even the obvious abundance of text, however, has its more subtle ramifications. The first related to privacy. Braille continues to be used to increase the privacy of what is being read when that is required, and the digitization of text also allows the accessing of printed material to be private for the blind user who can now, through devices, turn that text into braille (Guerreiro et al., 2013, p. 1). The second may be called a matter of perception. For K-12 students especially, the ability to participate in classes at the same time as their peers, and to interact with the same text their peers are using, is vital socially. A teacher stated this quite pithily after seeing the implementation of the Mountbatten Brailler, a product which allows a blind student to enter braille and have it immediately shown in print, as well as allowing others to enter text using the QWERTY keyboard and having that text transcribed into braille. As that teacher put it “The MB has educated an entire campus that just because you’re blind doesn’t mean an individual can’t learn, be a friend, be a teacher’s helper, get in trouble, and be held accountable. The MB’s presence has raised the expectations of many on the campus.” (Cooper & Nichols, 2007, p. 31). There is a kind of social exclusion when a student cannot write in the same way, or read the same things, that other students in the same class do. That social exclusion exists even if it is only the representation of the text, or the timing of its availability, that is different. The text may be the same, but the differences in how and when it appears may act to separate the student from the rest of the group. Allowing printed and brailled, or spoken, text to be available at the same time and having the easy ability to convert from one representation to another brings the student closer to the class, and makes clear that the differences are more apparent than real.
This brings me to the practical effect on the education of students, which ought not to be overlooked. The digitization of text, and its easy conversion between being represented by speech, braille, or the printed letters most learners use, makes it possible for teachers without training in braille to assist a blind student with any work (Cooper & Nichols, 2007, p. 28). Other students can have access to what the blind student has written, and the student can, taking only a few seconds, convert what others have written into a format which can be read or have that writing spoken aloud. Though this may seem obvious, the benefits to the student and school system are difficult to overestimate. Teachers need not know braille beyond the basics to teach, or at least to assist, the very rare blind students in their class. Students can participate, to a great extent, in the work of groups within their classes. Rather than being put on one side, as it were, the technology permits students who do not read print to work with text, in most cases, in the same way other students do and this, I would suggest, is the overarching way in which digital text, and the technologies which enable it, have changed reading, writing, and communications for the blind. It has permitted them to join the community of readers and writers by opening doors in the barriers of cost and format which, until recently, made it difficult and costly to communicate using the written word.
References
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D’Andrea, F. M. (2009). A history of instructional methods in uncontracted and contracted braille. Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness, 103(10), 585–594. https://doi.org/10.1177/0145482X0910301003
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Freedom Scientific. (n.d.). Focus 14 Blue 5th Gen. Freedom Scientific. https://www.freedomscientific.com/products/blindness/focus14brailledisplay/
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Hoffmann, R. (2008). Speech, text and braille conversion technology. In M. A. Hersh & M. A. Johnson (Eds.), Assistive Technology for Visually Impaired and Blind People (pp. 497–554). Springer London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84628-867-8_14
Javal, E. (1903). The blind man’s world: Advice to people who have recently lost their sight (W. E. Thomson, Trans.). London : G. Pulman. https://archive.org/details/b31364299
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NLS. (n.d.). History [Webpage]. National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled (NLS) | Library of Congress. Retrieved December 11, 2023, from https://www.loc.gov/nls/who-we-are/history/
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Shankweiler, D., & Fowler, C. A. (2015). Seeking a reading machine for the blind and discovering the speech code. History of Psychology, 18(1), 78–99. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038299
