What If?

I walk around just as any pedestrian walks save that owing to my blindness I manage each day to get lost in "soft" ways—to borrow an Irish term. The Irish say that it’s a "soft day" when it’s raining ever so gently.

This morning I was softly lost in a drugstore in Iowa City. I was on my way to the office and I found that I really needed some over the counter sinus medication and I made a little detour into the CVS Pharmacy that’s adjacent to the university’s main campus.

I managed to get lost in a way that most people won’t recognize, which is to say that I found my way correctly to the proper area of the store and I even managed to get the attention of a pharmacist who was able to help me with my purchase. All of this was plain vanilla.

Then a young guy started talking to me. He liked my dog and just wanted to chat. And soon I was talking to him about his Ph.D. in physics and his course of study.

Even this isn’t really about getting lost—conversation is after all a form of cultured distraction and Thank God for that!

This young fellow is working on semi-conductors—chiefly in the area of maximizing their energy efficiency.

And I got lost not because of the technicalities of what he was saying but because I began thinking about how much money the current forms of assistive technology cost and how in turn if we could make a leap to more efficient forms of micro-processing we could by degrees imagine a leap to a new kind of technology that would be customizable and affordable for blind people and others who have disabilities.

I was talking this afternoon to a fine gentleman who sells pocket pcs for the blind and we agreed that the cost of the product we were discussing is very dear.

Current technology that can really help the blind and visually impaired costs a lot to manufacture and to sell.

Why should this be so?

Why can’t we start customizing technologies out of the box so that specialized applications are no more expensive than mass production devices?

So today I got lost not because of my blindness but because the literary writer in me wants to know how to make a leap of engineering and of physics.

I’ve been walking around in the soft sensibilities ever since.

I think we are very close to some significant leaps forward. I may be feeling a bit like Lana Turner, waiting to be discovered in the drug store.

S.K.

Comments

[MFC]

I am a consistent follower of your blog and a fan of your activism and writing. My response is abbreviated due to lack of time, but I wanted to copy and paste some meaningful works in relation to your recent post:

THE RESURRECTION OF THE SPIRIT. A nation usually renews its youth on a political sick-bed, and there finds again the spirit which it had gradually lost in seeking and maintaining power. Culture is indebted most of all to politically weakened periods......Wherever progress is to ensue, deviating natures are of greatest importance. Every progress of the whole must be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures retain the type, the weaker ones help to advance it. Something similar also happens in the individual. There is rarely a degeneration, a truncation, or even a vice or any physical or moral loss without an advantage somewhere else. In a warlike and restless clan, for example, the sicklier man may have occasion to be alone, and may therefore become quieter and wiser; the one-eyed man will have one eye the stronger; the blind man will see deeper inwardly, and certainly hear better. To this extent, the famous theory of the survival of the fittest does not seem to me to be the only viewpoint from which to explain the progress of strengthening of a man or of a race. (Human, All Too Human, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche)

Alison Sheldon, University of Leeds (2003):

Disabled people want systems which they can use physically, they can understand, and are affordable. For many, these systems simply do not exist. Despite organisational rhetoric to the contrary, disabled people are not 'designed in' to products from the outset, making expensive add-ons necessary. Whilst it is true that certain gains have been made by the corporations that develop and market the new systems, it is unlikely that the free market will ever guarantee access for a relatively small social grouping with little disposable income. At present there is no effective regulation to ensure that corporations attend to the accessibility of the equipment they develop. This situation must be remedied as a matter of urgency.

We must not however be distracted into denying the socio-structural origins of the problem. Access to technology is not simply a technical issue with technical solutions. The inaccessibility of technology is just one more symptom of disabled people's continuing oppression. In Britain, the disabled people's movement has organised around the premise that no one aspect of the disablement of people with impairments should be treated in isolation (UPIAS, 1976). This approach suggests that as well as considering access to technology as a purely technological problem, other aspects of disabled people's technological exclusion from must also be considered - access to the wider world of employment, education, housing, transport, the built environment and so on. Equal access to the beneficial use of technology, can only be secured alongside the removal of these more traditional disabling barriers (Roulstone, 1998).

EASI STREET TO SCIENCE, ENGINEERING AND MATHEMATICS:
AWARENESS ISSUES AND LABORATORY ADAPTATIONS PURPOSE

EASI is an affiliate of the American Association for Higher Education
FUTURE POSSIBILITIES
http://www.rit.edu/~easi/easisem/handbk3.html

I hope that this section on accessible computer technology in the laboratory has convinced you that it is short-sighted for teachers to try to deflect young people with disabilities away from careers in science, engineering, or mathematics out of concern about future difficulties they might face. We can perceive only very dimly what the future might be like and what sort of technology these young people might use during their working lives. The careers of scientists and engineers span 35 or 40 years, and even during one scientist's career astonishing technological change is sure to take place. Barriers that we now think to be insurmountable might collapse almost overnight with the advent of new technology.

Consider. A disabled child in middle school today who chooses to follow a career in science, engineering, or mathematics will graduate from college in about the year 2005. If she pursues advanced study in graduate or professional school, she will complete the doctorate in about 2010. And her most productive years will last into the middle of the twenty-first century. Who are we to tell this citizen of the twenty-first century that she should not go into science because of her disability?

Although all prognostications are hazardous, I will venture a few tentative predictions. Because smart instruments will become smarter, laboratory work has the potential to be easier for people with disabilities in the future, but only if instrument-makers can be persuaded not to design insurmountable impediments into their instruments. There are already smart lab instruments that are totally inaccessible to blind users and that are virtually unadaptable because they can't be operated at all without their built-in proprietary graphics-based (GUI) software. That's bad design, but it will be difficult to change the habits of some instrument makers without the big stick of Federal legislation.

There is great promise from personal robots and laboratory robots for scientists and engineers who are unable to perform manual tasks, and the first commercial voice-controlled personal robot recently appeared on the market after more than fifteen years of development. Laboratory robots are still in the early stages of their evolution, and nobody has yet built a lab robot for people with disabilities. However, such a robot is almost within the reach of current technology.

[william Peace]

Technology is indeed expensive. Put the word disabled in the equation and expensive is taken to an extreme. The same applies to adaptive sporting goods. Few can afford an alpine monoski that can cost from $3,000 to $5,000 and more. All adaptive sports equipment is so expensive I sometimes wonder why it exists. I love certain sports, skiing and kayaking in particular, but few disabled people can afford to participate. This bothers to me to no end as sports are so valued in American society.