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THE BRAILLE MONITOR
Barbara Pierce, Editor
Published in inkprint, Braille, on talking-book disc,
and cassette by
THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND
MARC MAURER, PRESIDENT
National Office
1800 Johnson Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21230
* * * *
Letters to the President, address changes,
subscription requests, orders for NFB literature,
articles for the Monitor, and letters to the Editor
should be sent to the National Office.
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Monitor subscriptions cost the Federation about twenty-five
dollars per year. Members are invited, and non-members are
requested, to cover the subscription cost. Donations should be
made payable to National Federation of the Blind and sent to:
National Federation of the Blind
1800 Johnson Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21230
* * * *
THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND IS NOT AN ORGANIZATION
SPEAKING FOR THE BLIND--IT IS THE BLIND SPEAKING FOR THEMSELVES
ISSN 0006-8829 THE BRAILLE MONITOR
A PUBLICATION OF THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND
CONTENTS
JANUARY, 1994
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2ND U.S./CANADA CONFERENCE
ON TECHNOLOGY FOR THE BLIND
NOTE FROM THE CHAIRMAN
by Kenneth Jernigan
LIST OF CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS
THE 64 SQUARES OF THE CHESS BOARD
by Raymond Kurzweil
EMERGING RESEARCH GOALS IN THE BLINDNESS FIELD
by T. V. Cranmer
INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION IN THE FIELD OF TECHNOLOGY: AN AGENDA
FOR ACTION TOWARDS THE 21ST CENTURY
by Ruperto Ponz
OBSERVATIONS ON THE STATE OF TECHNOLOGY FOR THE BLIND
by David Andrews
PRIDE AND PROFIT: OBSERVATIONS OF A FREE MARKETEER
by Tony Schenk
LISTENING FOR EFFECTIVENESS
by James Morrell
SUMMARY OF THURSDAY AFTERNOON DISCUSSION
PROBLEMS AND CHALLENGES OF THE GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE
by James Thatcher
A QUESTION OF WINDOWS
by James C. Halliday
PROBLEMS AND CHALLENGES OF THE GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE
by Curtis Chong
SUMMARIES OF PRESENTER REMARKS
SUMMARY OF FRIDAY CONFERENCE DISCUSSION
SUMMARY OF SATURDAY CONFERENCE DISCUSSION
Copyright National Federation of the Blind, Inc., 1994[LEAD
PHOTO: North-South view of the International Braille and
Technology Center for the Blind. CAPTION: On November 16, 1990,
the doors of the National Braille and Technology Center for the
Blind opened for the first time. The facility was located in the
central courtyard building at the National Center for the Blind,
and was so spacious that it was hard to believe that Braille
production and speech technology would ever fill it. During the
first U.S./Canada Conference on Technology for the Blind, held at
the National Center for the Blind in September of 1991, the
National Braille and Technology Center for the Blind became the
International Braille and Technology Center for the Blind
(IBTCB), reflecting the growing worldwide significance of the
operation. But time and technology march on, and by early 1993 it
was clear that the array of embossers, synthesizers, computers,
and related hardware and software was about to outgrow the space
available in the central courtyard building. The decision was
made to devote the street level, Johnson Street wing of the main
building at the National Center for the Blind to an enlarged and
expanded facility, complete with specially designed display
tables, spacious offices, a museum, a large conference room, and
a kitchen. Pictured here, the IBTCB covers 20,000 square feet of
prime display space. It opened just in time to be the symbol and
centerpiece of the 2nd U.S./Canada Conference on Technology for
the Blind, which occurred November 4-6, 1993.]
[PHOTO/CAPTION: Euclid Herie (left), Mary Ellen Jernigan, and
Kenneth Jernigan stand talking in the International Braille and
Technology Center for the Blind.]
[PHOTO: Conference attendees seated in 4th floor conference room
at the National Center for the Blind. CAPTION: Approximately 65
people filled the large fourth-floor conference room at the
National Center for the Blind for the opening session of the 2nd
U.S./Canada Conference on Technology for the Blind.]
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2ND U.S./CANADA CONFERENCE
ON TECHNOLOGY FOR THE BLIND
November 4 to 6, 1993
Planned and Hosted by the National Federation of the Blind
Conference Chairman, Kenneth Jernigan
Note from the Chairman: In September of 1991 representatives
of four organizations, all members of the Committee on Joint
Organizational Effort, planned the First U.S./Canada Conference
on Technology for the Blind, which was hosted by the National
Federation of the Blind and held at the National Center for the
Blind in Baltimore. (See the January, 1992, issue of the Braille
Monitor for a full account of that important meeting.) The
gathering was significant in part because those present, senior
officials of service-providing and consumer organizations and
technology producers in the blindness field, all had the
authority to make policy decisions and set their own
organizational goals based on what they learned and on what the
group decided. One of several decisions made at the close of that
meeting was to reconvene in two years. That gathering took place
November 4 to 6, 1993, and again the National Federation of the
Blind hosted the event.
It began Thursday morning with greetings from Marc Maurer,
President of the National Federation of the Blind, and Dr. Euclid
Herie, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Canadian
National Institute for the Blind, followed by the conference
keynote address. After coffee the remainder of the morning was
devoted to presentations by four speakers, and following lunch
there was another panel discussion. The second half of the
afternoon was devoted to tours of the newly completed facility
occupied by the International Braille and Technology Center for
the Blind. A reception and dinner completed first-day conference
activities.
Friday morning began with a panel of speakers discussing the
Graphical User Interface. Following coffee and again after lunch
there were lively general discussions. The remainder of Friday
was devoted to informal, small-group or private discussions, and
on Saturday morning consumers and service providers discussed
issues of mutual interest to them.
In my view and that of a number of other participants, this
conference was, if possible, even more productive than the first
one two years ago. Much will now depend, however, on what occurs
as a result of the discussions begun in early November. It is
extremely important that the technology experts among us settle
down to work on the software and consumer-product access problems
identified during our meetings and that the consumers and service
providers then use our joint strength and creativity to influence
mass-market computer program producers and consumer-technology
manufacturers to insure that blind people have continued and
increasing access to their products.
Gathering to become better acquainted and to exchange ideas
was an important step. But the crisis facing the blindness field
today is as serious as any we have ever faced. Blind computer
users increasingly find that their inability to access the GUI-
based programs being used more and more in the workplace is
costing jobs. Unless something is done to counteract the trend,
the situation will only get worse. As if this were not bad
enough, household appliances and publicly accessible information
terminals are increasingly unuseable to anyone who cannot read
the LCD or CRT screen displays. Therefore, the future jobs of
thousands of blind people and their ability to use household
appliances and deal electronically with the rest of the world in
years to come may well depend upon our capacity today to work
together for the common good. The challenge is great. Let us all
hope that we are now in a better position than ever before to
meet it successfully. Here is the list of participants in the 2nd
U.S./Canada Conference on Technology for the Blind:
Kenneth Jernigan, President, North America/Caribbean Region,
World Blind Union, Baltimore, Maryland
Euclid Herie, Treasurer, World Blind Union; President and
Chief Executive Officer, Canadian National Institute for the
Blind, Toronto, Ontario
Marie Amerson, President, Association of State Educational
Consultants for the Visually Impaired, Macon, Georgia
David Andrews, Director, International Braille and
Technology Center for the Blind, National Federation of the
Blind, Baltimore, Maryland
Laurie Bellefontaine, National Director of Technology,
Canadian Council of the Blind
Deane Blazie, President, Blazie Engineering, Forest Hill,
Maryland
Geraldine Braak, President, Canadian Council of the Blind,
Powell River, British Columbia
John Brabyn, Program Director, Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research
Foundation, San Francisco, California
Curtis Chong, Senior Systems Programmer, IDS Financial
Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Charles Cook, President, Roudley Associates, Owings Mills,
Maryland
Neil Cooper, Software Engineer, Syntha-Voice Computers,
Inc., Hamilton, Ontario
Tim Cranmer, Chairman, Research and Development Committee,
National Federation of the Blind, Louisville, Kentucky
Frank Kurt Cylke, Director, National Library Service for the
Blind and Physically Handicapped, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.
Suzanne A. Dalton, President, Association of Instructional
Resource Centers for the Visually Impaired, Tampa, Florida
Judy Dixon, Consumer Relations Officer, National Library
Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Washington,
D.C.
Frederick Downs, Jr., Director, Prosthetic and Sensory Aids
Service, Veterans Health Administration, Washington, D.C.
Shirley Dupmeier, Member of National Council, Consumer,
Canadian National Institute for the Blind, Toronto, Ontario
Paul Edwards, American Council of the Blind, North Miami,
Florida
Carl E. Foley, President, Blinded Veterans Association,
Washington, D.C.
Paul Fontaine, Specialist, Clearinghouse on Computer
Accommodations, General Services Administration, Washington, D.C.
Jim Fruchterman, President, Arkenstone, Sunnyvale,
California
Ritchie Geisel, President, Recording for the Blind,
Princeton, New Jersey
Greg Guidice, Vice President of Marketing for Adaptive
Products, Xerox Imaging Systems, Inc., Peabody, Massachusetts
James C. Halliday, President, Humanware, Inc., Loomis,
California
Ted Henter, President, Henter-Joyce, Inc., St. Petersburg,
Florida
Raymond Kurzweil, President, Kurzweil Applied Intelligence,
Waltham, Massachusetts
Mary Frances Laughton, Chief, Social and Informatics
Applications, Industry and Science Canada, Ottawa, Ontario
Jose Luis Lorente Barajas, Technical Advisor, Spanish
National Organization of the Blind (O.N.C.E.), Madrid, Spain
Greg Lowney, Senior Program Manager, Accessibility and
Disability Group, Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Washington
Gary Magarrell, Executive Director, Ontario Division,
Canadian National Institute for the Blind, Toronto, Ontario
Vicki Mains, National Manager, Technical Aids, Canadian
National Institute for the Blind, Toronto, Ontario
David Mansoir, Chairman, Information and Technology
Division, Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the
Blind and Visually Impaired, Mountain View, California
Marc Maurer, President, National Federation of the Blind,
Baltimore, Maryland
Barbara McCarthy, President-Elect, Association for Education
and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired, Richmond,
Virginia
Dale McDaniel, Vice President for Marketing, Artic
Technologies, Troy, Michigan
Peter Merrill, President, The Betacom Group, Mississauga,
Ontario
James Morrell, President, TeleSensory Corporation, Mountain
View, California
Caryn Navy, Vice President, Raised Dot Computing, Madison,
Wisconsin
Gilles Pepin, Director, Visuaide 2000, Inc., Longueil,
Quebec
Ruperto Ponz Lazaro, Chairman, World Blind Union/Committee
on Technology, Madrid, Spain
Lloyd Rasmussen, Senior Staff Engineer, National Library
Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C.
Rachel Rosenbaum, President, National Council of Private
Agencies for the Blind, Newton, Massachusetts
Noel Runyan, President, Personal Data Systems, Campbell,
California
Mohymen Saddeek, President, Technology for Independence,
Inc., Boston, Massachusetts
James Sanders, National Director, Government Relations and
International Services, Canadian National Institute for the
Blind, Toronto, Ontario
Leroy Saunders, President, American Council of the Blind,
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Tony Schenk, President, Enabling Technologies Company,
Stuart, Florida
Elliot Schreier, Director, National Technology Center,
American Foundation for the Blind, New York, New York
Larry Skutchan, President, Microtalk, Texarkana, Texas
Yakov Soloveychik, President, BAUM U.S.A., Encino,
California
Susan Spungin, Associate Executive Director for Program
Services, American Foundation for the Blind, New York, New York
Joe Sullivan, President, Duxbury Systems, Inc., Littleton,
Massachusetts
Marc Sutton, Access Products Manager, Berkeley Systems,
Inc., Berkeley, California
Stephen Tappin, Technical Aids Coordinator, Ontario
Division, Canadian National Institute for the Blind, Toronto,
Ontario
James Thatcher, Researcher, IBM Corporation, Yorktown
Heights, New York
Tuck Tinsley, President, American Printing House for the
Blind, Louisville, Kentucky
Jocelyne Tremblay, Director, Direction des Services
hors-Quebec et programme d'aides technique, Sillery, Quebec
Louis Tutt, President, Council of Schools for the Blind,
Baltimore, Maryland
David Vogel, President, National Council of State Agencies
for the Blind, Jefferson City, Missouri
Dennis Wyant, Director, Vocational Rehabilitation and
Counseling Services, Veterans Administration, Washington, D.C.
____________________
Following are the texts of the presentations made at the
conference. Summaries of those remarks not submitted in writing
for publication as well as highlights of the discussions held
during conference sessions are also included.
[PHOTO: Portrait. CAPTION: Raymond Kurzweil.]
THE SIXTY-FOUR SQUARES OF THE CHESSBOARD
by Raymond Kurzweil
From the Editor: Dr. Kurzweil was the founder of Kurzweil
Computer Products and the creative genius behind the Kurzweil
Reading Machine, which in the mid-seventies was the first
successful attempt to scan printed text and read it aloud using
computer technology and artificial speech. Dr. Kurzweil has gone
on to pursue other interests and now heads another company,
Kurzweil Applied Intelligence. He continues to be interested in
computer access for blind people, and he accepted the invitation
to keynote the 2nd U.S./Canada Conference on Technology for the
Blind. This is what he said:
Having been in this field for many years, I was impressed
with Dr. Jernigan's ability to gather together all the leaders of
this field in the first of these conferences. That was certainly
a stirring and unprecedented event. This meeting actually marks a
personal milestone for me. This week marks exactly twenty years
that I have been in this field. I started Kurzweil Computer
Products to develop a reading machine for the blind exactly
twenty years ago with a $33,000 grant from Johnson and Johnson.
The discussion at that meeting and the recommendations that came
forth were quite substantial; and, given the expanded prominence
of this group here, this is a very propitious meeting as well.
Dr. Jernigan asked me to talk to you today about the nature
of information technology and the impact it is having on our
world. We live in a world today in which all of our knowledge,
all of our creations, all of our insights, all of our ideas, our
cultural expressions--pictures, movies, art, sound, music, books,
and the secret of life itself--are all being digitized, captured,
and understood in sequences of ones and zeroes.
I speak to many different groups: computer scientists and
engineers, librarians, musicians, magazine publishers, doctors,
graphic artists, architects, researchers of different kinds. All
of them, in diverse ways, are experiencing the same thing: the
digitization of their knowledge bases, their methods, and the
expressions of their work. Those of you who are working with
information technology to help overcome communication barriers
understand the significance of these developments all too well,
and that's one reason I've been looking forward to speaking with
you this morning.
As we'll discuss a little later, we will have the technology
in the next ten to fifteen years largely to overcome the
handicaps that are associated with visual, auditory, and other
disabilities. What I like to call the age of knowledge is also
transforming the nature of wealth itself and affecting deeply all
of our political and economic institutions. So I'd like to talk
to you today about the changing nature of wealth. I'd also like
to share from my own experience a strategy for fostering
innovation in this emerging information age. And then we'll talk
a little bit about the impact of all this technology on the next
decade and the next century.
Now you may have noticed that there seems to be an intense
preoccupation of late with the economy; and, if you've paid
attention to the news in recent months, you know that economic
issues have been dominating the national consciousness. But for
all of the attention, I think most people still find the subject
confusing. I'm reminded of the economics professor who year after
year has the questions to his final exam stolen by his students
and explains why he's really not upset about this. "The questions
are always the same anyway," he points out; "it's the correct
answers that keep changing." A lot of people feel that's why
economics differs from science. But if you pay close attention to
computer science, you know that the correct answers keep changing
here too.
Today the correct answer to the question of how to advance
economic competitiveness is to foster the creation of
intellectual property, which is information--that is sequences of
1's and 0's that have economic value. That has not always been
the case in human history, and I would like to share with you my
view of why the world has changed in this way.
Now I'm not an economist, but that won't inhibit me from
sharing with you economic opinions. Very few people are inhibited
from expressing economic opinions. That is, I am sure, very
frustrating to economists. My own background is in signal
processing and pattern recognition, and very few people express
opinions about signal processing and pattern recognition, which
is another reason I have been looking forward to talking to you
today, for you are a group that understands the importance of
accessing patterns of information.
In this field we recreate worlds inside the computer. And
the ramifications of doing this go far beyond mere pictures and
sounds but are part of a transformation of society the
implications of which we are only beginning to understand. They
say that war is too important to leave to the generals; I've
always felt that signal processing and pattern recognition are
too important to leave to us engineers. Ours is the first
generation to live through the early stages of what I've called
the Age of Intelligent Machines.
Translating information from one medium to another,
transforming visual information to auditory information, for
example, has always inherently been on the cutting edge of
computer architectures, so we have perhaps a clearer vision than
most of the importance of this era, but do we truly understand
the significance of the invention of the computer?
When the telephone, another communication technology, was
first invented, the chief engineer of the British post office
dismissed the news with the statement, "This is no big deal; we
have plenty of messenger boys." The mayor of Philadelphia had
considerably more insight into the importance of this new
development. "This is of great significance," he said. "Someday
every city will have one." The first programmable computer ever
built was the Zuse-3, built by a German tinkerer named Konrad
Zuse. He presented his invention to his original sponsor, the
German Aircraft Research Institute of the Third Reich. The chief
engineer in charge explained to Zuse, "The German aircraft is the
best in the world. I cannot see what we could possibly calculate
to improve on," and they withdrew their funding.
The first commercially produced electronic computer, the
Univac, was built by Remington Rand. They commissioned a market
study which concluded that eventually, someday, a worldwide
market would develop for fifty computers. If I look back on my
own career, I think I have bought those fifty computers myself.
Today we may have more vision than the chief engineer of the
British post office or the chief engineer of the German Aircraft
Research Institute, but the common wisdom is, I believe, perhaps
more akin to the view of the mayor of Philadelphia. Society today
sees the computer as a mere facilitator of information, as a tool
that provides some added efficiency. But I see it as something
quite different. To me, the emergence of machine intelligence can
be seen from two perspectives: as a turning point in human
history and as a major milestone in the evolution of life on this
planet, more significant than when animals first left their
watery habitats and took their first steps on land.
Let me first share with you the former perspective--the
significance of machine intelligence in the history of mankind.
This will lead us to the latter perspective, the view from the
flow of evolution.
The industrial revolution of the last two centuries, the
first Industrial Revolution, was characterized by machines that
extended, multiplied, and leveraged our physical capabilities.
With these new machines humans could manipulate objects for which
our muscles alone were inadequate and carry out physical tasks at
previously unachievable speeds. As a result the world during this
period was hungry for natural resources and labor.
Mao said that "power comes from the barrel of a gun." And
that statement was true when he said it. But he said it in the
last possible decade in which one could make that statement,
because through physical coercion you could control natural
resources. If you could control natural resources and compel
people to labor, you could control wealth. And while not
providing the happiest or most productive workers, it worked well
enough.
The second industrial revolution, however, the one that is
now in progress, is based on machines that extend, multiply, and
leverage, not our physical, but our mental abilities. A
remarkable aspect of this new technology is that it uses almost
no natural resources. Silicon chips use infinitesimal amounts of
sand and other readily available materials. They use
insignificant amounts of electricity.
As electronics, computers, and other forms of information
technology, (bioengineering, for example) grow smaller and
smaller, the material resources utilized are becoming an
inconsequential portion of their value. Indeed, software uses
virtually no resources at all. If you pay three or four hundred
dollars for a screen reader with synthetic speech, you know that
you're not paying for the natural resources in this product,
because you could purchase the same floppy disks without
information on them for three or four dollars.
People then say, "Okay, that's true for this strange new
world of software, but that's still a small part of our gross
national product. It has little to do with economics." What a lot
of people don't realize is that the same economic model holds for
most hardware as well. The quintessential component of hardware
is the computer chip. A central processing unit or an advanced
signal processing chip or an advanced image processing chip that
may sell for three or four hundred dollars costs no more to
fabricate than a floppy disk. As with a software program, the
bulk of the cost of a chip is neither raw materials nor
manufacturing labor, but rather what accountants call
amortization of development and what philosophers call knowledge.
It is estimated that for software today the percentage of
their value represented by natural resources is about 2%. When we
have full electronic distribution of software, it will go down to
about 0%. I guess we'll use a little bit of electricity in the
process.
The percentage of value represented by natural resources for
chips is about the same today as for software, about 2%.
Computers are about 5% natural resources because we still have a
metal chassis and a power supply, but we won't have those for
very much longer. In fact, you can draw a reverse exponential
curve where the y axis is the percentage of value of a product
represented by natural resources and the x axis is time, and the
percentage of value represented by natural resources is
asymptoting to zero as we go forward in time, and every product
and service is on the curve. Some are closer to zero than others,
and some categories of products are moving faster than others as
they move down the curve, but every product is on the curve,
marching on down to nearly zero contribution from material
resources and nearly 100% contribution from intellect.
Indeed, over the past twenty years the value of commodity
resources, as measured in constant dollars, has fallen
substantially (about forty percent), and this trend is
accelerating. So sell short on natural resource stocks. That
will be my only stock tip for today. Other than to mention that
my own company just went public two months ago. Okay, let's take
some examples.
Musical instruments is a field I've had experience in. The
percentage of value represented by natural resources and labor
for instruments using the nineteenth century acoustic technology,
such as pianos with their hundreds of feet of wire and hundreds
of pounds of metal and wood, is very high--it's about 60 to 70%.
For electronic musical instruments, which are basically
computers, the figure is 5 to 10%. In this industry we are
gradually replacing acoustics with electronics.
Consider pianos. And by the term "piano," I am not referring
to synthesizers, but rather to instruments that look like a piece
of furniture that you put in your living room for your eight-
year-old daughter to use while she's taking piano lessons. Six
years ago the percentage of pianos that used electronic
technology was 4%. Today, it's 60%, and again I'm not including
synthesizers or portable keyboards. In two to three years that
figure is expected to hit 80%. So, if you take the industry as a
whole, ten years ago the value of musical instruments was 60%
natural resources; today it's down to 20%, and in five years it
will be 10%.
How about the chairs you're sitting in? I recently toured
newly constructed factories in the Far East, and it was an
impressive display of the ability to convert intellect into
products with value. Bags of plastic pellets, jars of silicon,
and other inexpensive materials get turned into an astonishing
variety of high-quality products from tables and chairs to radios
and computers by computerized factories with almost no human
intervention. One has only to tour these factories with their
delicately programmed robotic assemblers and material handlers to
recognize the increasing dominance of knowledge as the
cornerstone of wealth.
Speaking of the Far East, despite the recent Asian recession
the success of Japan is undeniable, and it's certainly not due to
their natural resources, because they don't have any to speak of.
The success of Japan, which two years ago was cited by Fortune
Magazine as the wealthiest nation on the planet, is due entirely
to their ability to create intellectual property in all of its
myriad forms.
And how about Communism? Anyone here remember Communism? It
was that totalitarian system that disappeared a few years ago.
Well, I guess it's still around in a few places. So why did it
collapse when it did? Was it because after seventy years it had
just run its course? Was it the effectiveness of the Voice of
America? The fear of Ronald Reagan? The fear of George Bush? I
mean, why did it collapse just now? We should keep in mind that
it was the bankruptcy of Communism as an economic strategy that
caused its downfall. Communism was indeed viable during the late
stages of the first industrial revolution. It became irrelevant
only as we entered the second.
It's a fortunate truth of human nature that, whereas labor
can be forced, creativity and innovation cannot be. To create
knowledge, people need the free exchange of information and
ideas. They need free access to the world's accumulated knowledge
bases. A society that restricts access to copiers, mimeograph
machines, and typewriters for fear of the dissemination of
uncontrolled knowledge will certainly fear the much more powerful
communication technologies of personal computers, local area
networks, telecommunication data bases, electronic bulletin
boards, and all of the multifarious methods of instantaneous
electronic communication.
Controlled societies such as the former Soviet Union were
faced with a fundamental dilemma. If they provided their
engineers and professionals in all disciplines with advanced
computer technology, they were opening the floodgates to free
communication by methods far more powerful than the copiers they
had traditionally banned. On the other hand, if they failed to do
so, the professionals became increasingly ineffectual. In the end
they did a little of both, and both did them in. The lack of true
intellectual freedom caused economic disaster. And to the extent
that electronic communication was made available, it made
totalitarian control impossible. It was said that the 1991 August
coup in the former Soviet Union was undone by cellular telephones
and networks of personal computers. And that's true.
My company has a Russian research institute in Moscow, and
it would be only a small exaggeration to say that it is as if
they are working down the hall. We exchange messages, memos,
data, software on a daily basis through the Internet. And they
have shared with us that this type of network of personal
computers and cellular telephones were critical to unraveling
that coup.
Innovation, however, requires more than just computer
workstations and electronic communication technologies. It also
requires an atmosphere of tolerance for new and unorthodox ideas,
the encouragement of risk taking, and the ability to share ideas
and knowledge. A society run entirely by government bureaucracies
is not in a position to provide the incentives and environment
needed for entrepreneurship and the rapid development of new
skills and technologies.
So, if innovation and invention, which is to say the
creation of knowledge that has economic value, is increasingly
the cornerstone of wealth and power, then we need the right
strategy as we enter the second industrial revolution. On that
note I'd like to share with you Ray Kurzweil's seven-point
program for creating intellectual property in the 1990's.
What's the first thing you should do when you begin the task
of creating a new invention, and I mean invention in the broadest
sense as any intellectual creation with value? Well, I'll tell
you what I always do. The first step in the process of invention
obviously should be to write the advertising brochure. I have in
fact done that in each major project that I've undertaken. I'll
not only write the brochure, but I'll engage a graphic designer
and have it printed up. Now it doesn't hurt to have a
nice-looking brochure when you're looking for investors in your
project, but that's not the reason I start by writing the
brochure. The reason is that, if you write the advertising first,
it forces you to articulate clearly who the thing is for and why
you're doing it. Inventing is different from science. It's even
different from engineering. The objective is not to create a
device that demonstrates a new and interesting scientific
principle, although that might be involved. The objective is not
to create a device that implements a new and more efficient
approach to engineering, although that too might be involved. The
objective is to create a device or a process or an idea that
brings some benefit to someone, hopefully a lot of someones.
Writing the brochure as your first step is harder than it
may seem. It forces you to articulate clearly the features, the
benefits , and the beneficiaries. Once you've written and printed
it, show your brochure to potential buyers. If they don't
immediately get excited and besiege you for a delivery date, then
you're barking up the wrong tree.
This brings me to my second point. Now that you've
identified the beneficiaries of your invention and you've gotten
them excited about it, let them create the device for you. I
mean, they want it so much, let them invent it.
Let me give you some examples. In the 1970's I was working
on the Kurzweil Reading Machine, which as you know is a device
that scans printed material, recognizes the printed letters in
any type font, and then reads the print out loud in a synthetic
voice. We needed funding, of course, so we approached the
National Federation of the Blind. They said, okay, we'll help you
raise the money you need, but you have to put us in charge of the
human factors design and the user controls, and involve us in
every facet of the engineering. Well, I wasn't expecting that
request, but I was in no position to argue, so I said, "sure,
come on down."
Well, the blind engineers of the National Federation of the
Blind moved in and worked intimately with us on every facet of
the development, and the design came out quite different from
what we had originally expected, and, as it turned out, it was
very well accepted by blind consumers. With the intended users
having been intimately involved in every stage of the design
process, it anticipated the users' needs in ways that we as
well-intentioned but sighted engineers could never have
anticipated. While the Kurzweil Reading Machine has now gone
through six generations of technology, the basic human-factors
strategy that was created by the blind scientists and engineers
who worked with us remains the same today as it was almost
seventeen years ago in 1976.
I'll give you one example. We were going to put little
Braille labels on all of the user controls so that a new user
would know which control was which. But one of the NFB engineers
said that it would be very annoying to feel these Braille labels
hundreds of times a day, every day. So I asked him how a new user
could identify the controls without Braille labels. He suggested
putting another prominent button on the panel, which he called
the "nominator" key, and, if a user wanted to identify a control,
he would simply push the nominator key, then hit another key, and
that key would announce its name and describe its function. Then,
after using the nominator key to explore the keyboard for a few
days, a user would know where all the keys were and would not
need to feel these annoying Braille labels hundreds of times
every day. That made a lot of sense when we heard it, but since
we were not the intended users of the invention, it is an insight
that we never would have realized on our own.
With my music company, we did the same thing. All of the
engineers are musicians, many of them quite accomplished, because
there is really no other way to be sensitive to the nuances of
sound and the subtle interactions of feel and response in a
musical instrument. In my speech recognition company, Kurzweil
Applied Intelligence, our voice-activated products for doctors
have been designed by physicians, and our voice-activated
products for the hands-impaired have had significant involvement
by their handicapped users. There is really no way truly to
understand the needs and desires of your users without deeply
involving them in every stage of the invention process.
Now that we're talking about the group that is involved in
the creation of an invention, my third point is to understand the
dynamics of this group process. Inventing today is not a matter
of a single crazy inventor disappearing into his or her basement
and emerging years later with a breakthrough. Actually it's a
matter of a group of crazy inventors disappearing into their
basement. Inventing today is an interdisciplinary process. The
development of speech recognition, for example, requires
linguists, speech scientists, signal-processing experts,
psychoacousticians, circuit designers, programmers, and other
specialists who can work together and, perhaps most important,
understand each other's terminology.
The importance of this last point was first recognized by
Norbert Wiener, who wrote in 1948, the year I was born, in his
classic book Cybernetics: "Since Leibniz there has perhaps been
no man who has had a full command of all the intellectual
activity of his day.... There are fields of scientific work...
which have been explored from the different sides of pure
mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering, and
neurophysiology; in which every single notion receives a separate
and different name from each group, and in which important work
has been triplicated or quadruplicated, while still other
important work is delayed by the unavailability in one field of
results that may have already become classical in the next
field." From my own experience, this meshing of diverse
disciplines is perhaps the most crucial element in developing
interdisciplinary technology, which is becoming most of
technology.
So after assembling our group of experts and our group of
users, which hopefully are the same people, we throw out all of
the words that we all came in with and create our own new
terminology. By the way, this has advantages in terms of
proprietary technology protection, because, if anyone overhears
our conversations, they have no idea what we are talking about.
Then--and this is now my fourth point--to encourage thinking
out of the box, I'll assign a linguistics problem, not to the
linguists, but to the signal processing engineers, and a signal
processing problem to the linguists. This doesn't always work,
but it is possible in this way to achieve creative solutions to
problems that could hardly be attained in any other way.
They say that a wise man can learn more from a fool than the
other way around. So my fifth point is that you can learn more
from failure than from success. Success has a way of covering up
mistakes. When you're successful, you get the mistaken impression
that you must have done everything right. As it turns out, you
just did the right things right. You can, of course, turn your
failures into successes, not only by considering them growth
experiences, but by assessing in detail the lessons to be
learned, which you'll find is much easier to do when you're not
successful.
But more important, you should endeavor to turn your
successes into failures. In other words, look for the failure in
success. For example, in our apparently successful Gulf war of a
couple of years ago, many of our weapons didn't work. The much
vaunted Patriot missile, being a heat-seeking missile, was very
successful in blowing up the hot launchers of incoming Scuds.
Unfortunately, it was not the launchers that needed to be blown
up, but the warhead, which in most cases had already separated
from the launcher prior to the launcher's being destroyed. Now it
didn't matter that much a couple of years ago, because the Scuds
were so inaccurate. But if we fail to look for this failure
amidst the success, it will matter the next time.
Point six is to design for marketability. This goes beyond
identifying who the users will be and why they will want this new
technology. You need to understand what unique characteristics
your invention will have and why this is a well-leveraged fit for
your target application.
Akio Morita, the well-known Chairman of Sony, who has made
something of a career out of criticizing American business
practices, provides an instructive example. The transistor,
invented in the early 1950's at Bell Laboratories, certainly
represented a primary technological breakthrough and today fuels
a revolution that has transformed most industries. A transistor
has two properties: it amplifies electrical signals, and it's
small. So obviously its primary market is going to be hearing
aids. And that was in fact the prevailing view of the Bell
Laboratories scientists at the time.
Sony thought otherwise and became the first Japanese company
to license the patent, in 1953, with the idea of developing a
transistor-based radio. "Why bother with that?" they were asked.
After all, you'll still have a very large speaker, not to mention
all that furniture. But maybe you can replace the big speaker
with a little speaker. But with a little speaker all the people
gathered around the radio won't be able to hear it. But maybe it
is good enough to have one person use it at a time. But a radio
is too expensive to devote to just one person.
As the history is written, Sony applied a Gordian solution
to this knotty and circular thinking and brought the transistor
radio to market. Their motto became "one person, one radio."
Junior may not want to listen to the same music as grandpa.
The transistor radio was a hit, and the transistor was off
and running. And the Japanese consumer-electronics industry was
off and running as well. The marketing creativity involved in
rethinking the purpose of a radio in light of the new
technological capabilities provided by the transistor was at
least as important as the technology itself. It involved
considering several variables at the same time, and not just the
single issue of the transistor's size.
And finally here is a foolproof method to create your new
technology. After you've come up with the breakthrough concept
that will revolutionize some industry or other; you've written
the advertising brochure, which as I said, should be your first
step; you've printed it up; you have some customers clamoring for
it; you've got your investors; you've assembled your experts, who
are also, of course, the potential users of your new technology;
you've thrown out all the common technical terminology and
devised your own; now here's how you make the whole thing work.
Sit down or lie down and then imagine, if it existed, what
would it look like? How would it work? Imagine yourself at a
conference four years from now, and you're explaining how you and
your team of experts accomplished your goal, how it works, and
how you solved problems that at the beginning seemed so
intractable. Let your thoughts wander. Indulge yourself in this
fantasy as you're falling asleep. When you wake up the next
morning, you'll know what to do. Or at least you'll think you do,
until you run into some roadblock, something your fantasy failed
to consider. But then just use the same procedure again. From my
own experience I can tell you this technique usually works. But,
if it doesn't, you probably won't realize it right away. After
all, no one said that entrepreneurship was free of risk.
So on that note I'd like to let our imaginations wander a
bit and consider the next decade and the next century. Let's
imagine that the future exists. What does it look like? How does
it work?
The first concept we need to consider is Moore's law.
Moore's law is the driving force behind a revolution so vast that
the entire computer revolution to date represents only a minor
ripple of its ultimate implications. Moore's law states that
computing speeds and densities double every eighteen months. In
other words, every eighteen months we can buy a computer that is
twice as fast and has twice as much memory for the same cost.
Remarkably, this law has held true since the beginning of this
century, from the mechanical card-based computing technology of
the 1890 census, to the relay-based computers of the 1940's, to
the vacuum-tube-based computers of the 1950's, to the
transistor-based machines of the 1960's, to all of the
generations of integrated circuits that we've seen over the past
twenty-five years.
If you put every calculator and computer for the past 100
years on a logarithmic chart, it makes an essentially straight
line (several straight lines, actually). Computer memory, for
example, is about 16,000 times more powerful today for the same
unit cost as it was about twenty years ago. Computer memory is
150 million times more powerful for the same unit cost than it
was in 1948, the year I was born. If the automobile industry had
made as much progress in the past forty-five years, a car today
would cost about a hundredth of a cent and would go faster than
the speed of light.
Moore's law will continue unabated for many decades to come.
We have not even begun to explore the third dimension in chip
design. Chips today are flat, whereas our brain is organized in
three dimensions. We live in a three-dimensional world; why not
use the third dimension? Improvements in semiconductor materials,
including the development of superconducting circuits that do not
generate heat, will enable the development of chips, or I should
say cubes, with thousands of layers of circuitry, which, when
combined with far smaller component geometries, will improve
computing power by a factor of many millions. There are more than
enough new computing technologies being developed to assure a
continuation of Moore's law for a very long time.
The implications of this geometric trend can be understood
by recalling the legend of the inventor of chess and his patron,
the emperor of China. The emperor had so fallen in love with his
new game that he offered the inventor a reward of anything he
wanted in the kingdom. "Just one grain of rice on the first
square, your Majesty."
"Just one grain of rice?"
"Yes, your Majesty, just one grain of rice on the first
square, and two grains of rice on the second square, four on the
third square, and so on."
Well, the emperor immediately granted the inventor's
seemingly humble request. One version of the story has the
emperor going bankrupt because the doubling of grains of rice for
each square ultimately equaled eighteen million trillion grains
of rice. Another version has the inventor losing his head.
It's not yet clear which outcome we are headed for, but
there is one thing that we should take note of. It was fairly
uneventful as the emperor and the inventor went through the first
half of the chessboard. After thirty-two squares the emperor had
given the inventor about eight billion grains of rice. That's a
reasonable quantity of rice--it's about one field's worth--and
the emperor did start to take notice. But the emperor could still
remain an emperor, and the inventor could still retain his head.
It was as they headed into the second half of the chessboard that
at least one of them got into trouble. So where do we stand now?
Well, there have been just about exactly thirty-two doublings of
performance since the first operating computers were built in the
1940's. So where we stand right now is that we've just finished
the first half of the chess board. And indeed people are starting
to take notice. As we head into the rest of the nineties and the
next century, we are heading into the second half of the
chessboard, and that is where things start to get interesting.
Let's take a moment to examine a few of the things we're
likely to see as we go through the second half of the chessboard.
One of my companies, Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, is devoted to
speech recognition technology. So I'd like to start out by
sharing with you some scenarios that deal with this technology.
The state of the art today is that large vocabulary speech
recognition systems can recognize very large vocabularies of
50,000 words, which is pretty much anything you might want to
say. These systems are speaker-independent, which means they can
recognize anyone without having been trained on that person's
voice. The primary limitation is that you need to speak in what
is called discrete speech, that...is...with...brief...pauses...
between...words...like...this.
These systems are more popular than many people realize. For
example, if you have the misfortune of ending up in one of our
nation's emergency rooms, there is a ten percent chance that your
patient record will be created by the doctor dictating the report
directly to a large-vocabulary speech-recognition system that my
company created, called VoiceEM for Voice Emergency Medicine.
We already know how to recognize continuous speech, which is
the type of speech I am creating right now, but it requires
substantially more powerful personal computers. Well, Moore's law
will take care of that, and we expect to see accurate large-
vocabulary continuous-speech recognizers emerge in the next two
to three years. As we go into the next century, which is only
about seven years from now, we'll see very accurate continuous-
speech recognition integrated with a broad variety of other
artificial-intelligence technologies. Translating telephones, for
example, which combine large-vocabulary continuous-speech-
recognition technology, with language-translation software and
speech synthesis, will be demonstrated later on in this decade,
Translating telephones will become a routine telephone service
during the first decade of the next century.
At Kurzweil Applied Intelligence we are also working on
developing listening machines for the deaf, which will convert
human speech into a visual display of text, essentially the
opposite of reading machines for the blind. So a deaf person
listening to this lecture could follow along with real-time
subtitles which could be built into a pair of eyeglasses. We
expect to see listening machines for the deaf introduced later on
in this decade. By 2010 we may all wish to use them, since these
real-time subtitles can include immediate translation into other
languages and other commentaries.
We'll also see speech recognition integrated with problem-
solving software to provide knowledge navigators, essentially
computerized personal assistants built into your personal
computer that will talk to you with two-way voice communication
and that will help you find information and solve problems. For
example, during the first decade of the next century, you might
ask your personal knowledge navigator to recommend the optimal
form of financing for a new marketing program. It would access
your company's on-line information systems to get details about
the program, access national financial markets using cellular
communication to on-line financial information services to obtain
the latest rate information on different financial instruments,
call your Vice President of Marketing personally to get her level
of confidence in the marketing projections, and then assemble the
information into a presentation. It would do this in seconds if
it wasn't for the fact that it took a week and a half to get
through to the one human being involved.
By 2010 your standard personal computer will come in a
variety of sizes, from wristwatch size to large wall-sized
displays. Unrestricted speech recognition will be a primary input
modality. Your personal computer will perform a broad variety of
functions. It will be your wristwatch. It will be your telephone,
which will include high-resolution moving pictures. It will be
your radio and television, which will be high-definition and
interactive. It will also provide you with virtual books and
magazines, which will also be interactive, will include moving
pictures, and will have display qualities comparable to high-
quality paper books today.
On that note, let's talk a little bit about technology for
the disabled. Reading machines for the blind have certainly
benefited from Moore's law. I examined this issue recently with
regard to the Kurzweil Reading Machine. The current model, the
Reading Edge, has eighty times the speed, contains 128 times the
memory, and has a comparable improvement in overall performance
as compared to the original model seventeen years ago. The
Reading Edge today is now one twenty-sixth the price of the
original Model 1 as measured in constant dollars. If we thereby
regard the machine as now providing approximately eighty times
the performance for one twenty-sixth the price, that's an overall
improvement in price-performance of about 2,000 to 1. Now 2,000
is two to the eleventh power, which means we have doubled
price-performance eleven times. That's exactly what you would
predict from Moore's law in a seventeen-year period. And, of
course, Moore's law will continue to improve all aspects of
reading machine price and performance in the years ahead.
Just recently, two-dimensional scanning chips have emerged,
which can scan a full page of text with 300-spot-per-inch
resolution without any moving parts. These two-dimensional
scanning arrays, which have over five million pixels, are
prototypes and are therefore expensive. But within a few years
these chips will permit the development of pocket-sized scanners,
the size of a small camera, that can snap a full page instantly.
Thus, before the decade is out, a full print-to-speech reading
machine will fit in your pocket. You'll hold it over the page to
be scanned and snap a picture of the page. All of the electronics
and computation will be inside this small, camera-sized device.
You'll then listen to the text being read from a small speaker or
earphone. You will also be able to snap a picture and read a
poster on a wall or a street sign or a soup can or someone's ID
badge or an appliance LCD display and many other examples of
real-world text. This reading machine will cost less than a
thousand dollars and will ultimately come down to hundreds of
dollars.
Algorithmic improvements will also provide capabilities to
describe non-textual material such as graphs and diagrams and
page layouts. These devices will also provide on-line access to
knowledge bases and libraries through the information
superhighway, which I will comment on further in a moment. By the
end of the first decade of the next century, the intelligence of
these devices will be sufficient to provide reasonable
descriptions of pictures and real-world scenes. These devices
will also be capable of translating from one language to another.
The scanning sensors of the future reading machine will
ultimately become very small and could be built into a pair of
eyeglasses. The advantage of doing this is that it would allow
the user to control the direction of scanning through motion of
the head in the same way that a sighted person does. Once these
devices can provide reasonably intelligent descriptions of
real-world scenes, they will evolve into navigation aids.
I will point out that access to the world of print has been
a more important issue than navigation. Braille, of course, is a
vitally important technology in that it provides access to the
world of literacy for both reading and writing. It does, however,
have the limitation that only a small percentage of books and
topical literature are available in this alternative medium.
Recorded material has the same limitation. Thus reading machines
have provided the opportunity to overcome a principal handicap
associated with the disability of blindness: access to ordinary
print. But having worked with many blind persons over the past
twenty years, I have come to realize that navigating within a
building, or around the world, is not a handicap for a blind
person who has been trained with advanced navigational skills.
Until a navigation device can provide a level of intelligence
sufficient to be truly helpful, the most useful navigational
technology will continue to be the modern lightweight cane. There
have already been electronic navigation devices developed, but
they have not yet proved useful. Unless such a device
incorporates a level of intelligence at least comparable to a
seeing-eye dog, it is not of much value.
General purpose artificial vision is now being developed for
robots and is in an early stage, although progress is rapidly
being made. Today, robotic factory inspectors can outperform
human inspectors in many visually demanding tasks. Vision has
lagged other developments in artificial intelligence because of
the enormous flows of data required to process visual information
intelligently. With the advent of massively parallel computing
and the continuing progress made through Moore's law, this
difficulty is gradually being overcome.
Such a combination reading machine-navigation aid will be an
assistant that will describe what is going on in the visible
world. The blind user could ask the device (verbally or using
appropriate manual commands) to elaborate on a description, or he
could ask it questions. These artificial visual sensors need look
not only forward; they may as well look in all directions. And
they ultimately will have better visual acuity than human eyes.
Everyone--visually impaired or not--may want to use them.
Persons with other disabilities will benefit from the
continuing advance of computer technology as well. I mentioned
earlier the speech-to-text sensory aid for the deaf, which I
believe will be introduced within the next several years and will
become a popular device by the end of this decade. A principal
physical handicap is paraplegia, the loss of control over the
legs. The most common prosthetic aid for this disability is the
wheelchair, which has changed only in subtle ways over the past
two decades. It continues to suffer from its principal drawback,
the inability to negotiate doorways and stairs. Although federal
law now requires most public buildings to accommodate wheelchair
access, the reality is that access to persons in wheelchairs is
still severely restricted. By the end of this decade we will see
the first generation of effective exoskeletal robotic devices,
called powered orthotic devices, which will restore the ability
of paraplegic (and in some cases quadriplegic) persons to walk
and climb stairs.
Overcoming the handicaps associated with disabilities is an
ideal application of artificial intelligence technology. In the
development of intelligent computers, the threshold that we are
now on is not the creation of cybernetic geniuses. That will come
later. Instead, we are today providing computers with narrowly
focused intelligent skills, such as the ability to make decisions
in such areas as finance and medicine and the ability to
recognize patterns such as printed letters, human speech, blood
cells, and land terrain maps. Most computers today are still
idiot savants, capable of processing enormous amounts of
information at very high speed and with great accuracy, but with
relatively little intelligence.
When one considers the enormous impact that these idiot
savants have had on society, the addition of even sharply focused
intelligence will be a formidable combination. It will be
particularly beneficial for the disabled population. A disabled
person is typically missing a specific skill or capability but is
otherwise a normally intelligent and capable human being. There
is a fortuitous matching of the narrowly focused intelligence of
today's intelligent machines with the narrowly focused deficit of
most disabled persons. Our primary strategy in developing
intelligent computer-based technology for sensory and physical
aids is for the focused intelligence of the machine to work in
close concert with the much more flexible intelligence of the
disabled person himself.
There are an estimated twenty million disabled Americans.
Many are not able to learn or work up to their capacity because
of technology that is not yet available or technology that is
available but not yet affordable or pervasive and because of
negative public attitudes toward disabled persons. As the reality
changes, the perceptions will also change, particularly as
formerly handicapped persons learn and work successfully
alongside their non-disabled peers. By the end of the first
decade of the next century, I believe that we will come to herald
the effective end of handicaps.
Another trend worth commenting on is the information
superhighway. We now realize that the information superhighway
will be here a lot sooner than we originally anticipated. We
originally thought that we would have to wire optical fiber into
every home and office. That massive new physical infrastructure
would have taken twenty years to put in place. We now realize
that we need only place optical fiber to within about one mile of
its final destination. A couple of other technologies that do not
require a physical infrastructure can then be used to carry the
information for that critical last mile. For example, existing
coaxial cable can also provide ten billion bit per second
point-to-point communication for short distances. There is also a
new wireless communication using frequencies at the microwave
range or higher that can also provide very high bandwidth
communication, again only for short distances, but the last mile
is all we need.
It turns out that this last mile of communication represents
about ninety percent of the infrastructure that we originally had
contemplated. So eliminating this last mile of wiring means we
can put the information superhighway in place in about four years
instead of twenty. This next wave of communication technology
will be here much sooner than we thought. That will be another
major step in the ultimate realization of McLuhan's vision of the
Global Village.
There are many other emerging trends we could talk about,
but, in the time I have remaining, I would like to touch on one
other scenario. This is a scenario that has not been extensively
discussed in the popular literature but is a development I am
convinced will occur within the lifetimes of most of the people
in this room. It is a development that I have spent time
researching and in fact am writing a book about.
As you are probably aware, we can simulate the functions of
human neurons in software. These computerized neural nets, as
they are called, have become increasingly popular, particularly
in pattern recognition systems. We use them, for example, in our
speech recognition systems. Today's simulated neurons are
somewhat simplified from the real thing. An actual neuron is a
complex computer, a hybrid analog-digital computer as it turns
out. But it is feasible to simulate the full complexity of human
neurons, and some of the more advanced neural nets now being
developed provide reasonably realistic simulations of true neuron
function.
A neural net, and this includes the human brain, uses a
radically different computational paradigm from the computers
we're used to. A typical computer does one thing at a time, but
does it very quickly. A neural net, particularly the human one,
is very slow, but every part of the net is computing
simultaneously. We have about 100 billion neurons, and each of
these neurons has an average of 1,000 connections to other
neurons. Each of these connections can perform computations
simultaneously, so that's about 100 trillion computations being
performed at the same time. There are many subtleties to neural
nets, but our computer-based neural net simulations have been
limited primarily by two factors: the number of neural
connections that can be simulated in real time and the capacity
of computer memories. Although human neurons are very slow, in
fact about a million times slower than electronic circuits, their
massive parallelism more than makes up for it. Although each
interneuronal connection is capable of performing only about 200
computations each second, with 100 trillion computations being
performed at the same time, that comes to about twenty million
billion calculations per second, give or take a couple of orders
of magnitude.
How does that compare to the state-of-the-art in human-
created technology? Specialized neural computers have been
developed that can simulate neurons directly in hardware. These
operate about a thousand times faster than neural networks
simulated in software on conventional PC's. One recent model
processes about two billion connections per second. That may seem
like a lot, but it still about ten million times slower than the
human brain. Again we look to Moore's law, which projects that
our personal neural computers will match both the memory and the
computational ability of the human brain, twenty million billion
calculations per second, by around the year 2020.
Now matching the raw computing speed and memory capacity of
the human brain, even if implemented in massively parallel neural
nets, will not automatically result in human-level intelligence.
The architecture and organization of these resources are at least
as important as the capacity itself. There is, however, a source
of knowledge that we can tap to accelerate greatly our
understanding of how to design intelligence in a machine, and
that is the human brain itself. By probing the brain's circuits,
we can essentially copy, that is to say, reverse engineer, a
proven design, one that took its original designer several
billion years to develop.
Just as the Human Genome Project, in which the entire human
genetic code is being scanned, recorded, and analyzed to
accelerate our understanding of the human biogenetic system, a
similar effort to scan and record the neural organization of the
human brain can help provide the templates of intelligence. As it
becomes clear that we are approaching the computational ability
to simulate the human brain--we're not there today, but we will
be there early in the next century--I believe that such an effort
will be initiated. Indeed, this effort has already begun.
For example, an artificial retina chip created by a small
company called Synaptics, is fundamentally a copy of the neural
organization, implemented in silicon of course, of not only the
human retina, but its visual processing layer as well.
High-speed, high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
scanners are already able to resolve individual somas (neuron
cell bodies) without disturbing the living tissue being scanned.
More powerful MRI's are being developed that will be capable of
scanning individual nerve fibers that are only ten microns in
diameter. Eventually we will be able automatically to scan the
presynaptic vesicles that are the site of human learning.
This suggests two scenarios. The first is to scan portions
of a brain to ascertain the architecture of interneuronal
connections in different regions. The exact position of each
nerve fiber is not as important as the overall pattern. With this
information we can design simulated neural nets that will operate
similarly. This process will be rather like peeling an onion as
each layer of human intelligence is revealed. That is essentially
what Synaptics has done. They copied the essential analog
algorithm of center-surround filtering found in the early layers
of mammalian neural image processing.
A more difficult but also ultimately feasible scenario will
be noninvasively to scan someone's brain to map the locations,
interconnections, and contents of the somas, axons, dendrites,
presynaptic vesicles, and other neural components. Its entire
organization could then be re-created on a neural computer of
sufficient capacity, including the contents of its memory.
We can peer inside someone's brain today with MRI scanners,
which are increasing their resolution with each new generation of
this device. There are a number of technical challenges in
accomplishing this, including achieving suitable resolution,
bandwidth, lack of vibration, and safety. For a variety of
reasons it will be easier to scan the brain of someone recently
deceased than of someone still living. It is easier to get
someone deceased to sit still for one thing, but noninvasively
scanning a living brain will ultimately become feasible as MRI
and other scanning technologies continue to improve in resolution
and speed.
In fact, the driving force behind the rapidly improving
capability of noninvasive scanning technologies such as MRI is
again Moore's law, because it requires massive computational
ability to build high resolution three-dimensional images from
the raw magnetic resonance patterns that an MRI scanner produces.
The increasing computational ability provided by Moore's law will
enable us to continue to improve the resolution and speed of
these noninvasive scanning technologies.
You might feel that I am veering off into the realm of
science fiction, so let me say a word about the nature of this
projection. If someone a hundred years ago were to have attempted
a prediction of this past century, he would not have been able to
predict most of the major technologies that have shaped it, such
as computers, Moore's law, radio, television, atomic energy,
lasers, bio-engineering--indeed most of electronics--just to
mention a few. And indeed all but a handful of futurists at the
time were unable to foresee any of these developments.
The century to come will also undoubtedly contain many such
breakthroughs that we would have difficulty envisioning or even
comprehending today. But the projection I am making now does not
contemplate any such breakthrough. It is a modest extrapolation
of current trends and is based on technologies and capabilities
that we can touch and feel today. We can't do it yet, but we can
describe right now how this capability can be achieved.
The ability to download your mind to your personal computer
will raise some interesting issues. I'll mention just a few.
There's the philosophical issue. When people are scanned and then
re-created in a neural computer, people will wonder just who are
those people in the machine?
The answer will depend on who you ask. If you ask the people
in the machine, they will strenuously claim to be the original
persons, having lived certain lives, having gone into a scanner
here, and then having awakened in the machine there. They'll say,
"Hey, this technology really works. You should give it a try." On
the other hand, the original people, who were scanned, will claim
that the people in the machine are impostors, people who just
appear to share their memories, histories, and personalities but
who are definitely different people.
There's the psychological issue. A machine intelligence that
has been derived from human intelligence will need a body. A
disembodied mind will quickly become depressed. Ironically, it
will take us longer to recreate our bodies than it will take us
to recreate our minds. We are making exponential progress in
providing the computational resources to simulate intelligence
with the linear passing of time. But we are only making linear
progress with the linear passing of time in robotic technology.
So it will take us longer to recreate the suppleness of our
bodies than the intricacies and subtleties of our minds.
There's the ethical issue. Will it be immoral, or even
illegal, to cause pain and suffering to your computer program?
Will it be illegal to turn your computer program off? Perhaps it
will be illegal to turn it off only if you have failed to make a
recent backup copy. Maybe they'll want to turn us off.
No one worries much about these issues today, but our most
advanced programs today are comparable to the minds of insects.
But when our programs are of the same complexity and subtlety as
a human mind, which will be the case in a few decades, and when
our computer programs have, in fact, been derived from human
minds or even portions of human minds, this will become a
pressing issue. And, of course, there will be the usual line-up
of economic and political issues. We are likely to see the
Luddite issue, the concern over the negative impact of machines
on human employment, become of intense interest once again.
Before Copernicus, our speciecentricity--I made up that
word, by the way, in case you never heard it before--was embodied
in a view of the universe literally circling around us as a
testament to our unique and central status. Today our belief in
our own uniqueness is not a matter of celestial relationships,
but rather of our intelligence. Evolution is seen as a billion-
year drama leading inexorably to its grandest creation: human
intelligence. The specter of machine intelligence's competing
with that of its creator will once again threaten our view of who
we are.
We have now peered about 80% of the way through the chess
board. We might wonder what happens at the end of the chess
board. In the year 2040 we will reach the sixty-fourth. square.
In my view Moore's law will still be going strong. Computer
circuits will now be grown like crystals with computing taking
place at the molecular level.
By the year 2040, in accordance with Moore's law, your
state-of-the-art personal computer will be able to simulate a
society of 10,000 human brains, each of which would be operating
at a speed 10,000 times faster than a human brain. Or,
alternatively, it could implement a single mind with 10,000 times
the memory capacity of a human brain and 100 million times the
speed.
What will the implications of this development be? Well,
unfortunately, I've run out of time, so you'll have to invite me
back. But I'll leave two thoughts with you, written by people who
did not have the benefit of a voice-activated word processor. Sun
Tzu, Chou dynasty philosopher and military strategist, wrote in
the fourth century BC: "Knowledge is power and permits the wise
to conquer without bloodshed and to accomplish deeds surpassing
all others." And Shakespeare wrote: "We know what we are, but
know not what we may be."
Thank you very much.
[PHOTO: Portrait. CAPTION: T. V. Cranmer]
EMERGING RESEARCH GOALS IN THE BLINDNESS FIELD
by T. V. Cranmer
From the Editor: Dr. Cranmer chairs the Research and
Development Committee of the National Federation of the Blind. He
is also an inventor and an expert in technology issues in the
blindness field. He was the first speaker on the late morning
panel which addressed the conference on November 4. Here is what
he had to say:
It is a distinct pleasure to be here. I have been attacked
by my computer, have been humbled by it as late as yesterday. I
purchased WordPerfect 6.0 a few days ago and installed it. (It
took sixteen megabytes on my hard disk.) I thought to myself,
I'll wait until I get back from the conference to look into this
new program; but yesterday morning, having a couple of hours to
while away, I couldn't resist, and I tried a new feature, the
grammar checker. That's where the humility comes in. I ran
Grammatik, and in the first paragraph it said that my sentence
constructions were awkward, that I used the incorrect tense (or
was it tenses?), that I was using the passive voice, and that the
material was not appropriate to the kind of talk I was making. I
wondered if I should come at all. So I sought solace in a usually
reliable place; I explained my humiliation to my wife. And in her
usual way she rallied to the occasion and said, "Well, you write
the way you talk." Nevertheless, I am going to plow forward and
read my comments, in which I have imbedded some humor and whimsy.
I hope that they are not too well disguised.
What better thing to do on a Sunday afternoon than discover
a tide of change in the way humans communicate? This thought gave
little comfort when, not many Sundays ago, I went with my sister
to K-Mart to buy some simple necessities. Stopping near a
counter, I touched a shrink-wrapped package and asked, "What's
this?"
"Turn it around so I can see," Irma directed. I rotated the
package ninety degrees so she could get a good view. "That's a
bath set," she said, "with a toilet seat cover, tank cover, bath
mat, and matching towel and wash cloth."
"Is that what it says?" I asked, with some surprise at the
completeness of the identification of the package contents.
"No," she replied, "that is what the picture shows." [And I
thought: Aren't graphics just for computers?]
Near by on the same counter there were other packages
containing just towels, towels and wash cloths, bath mats, and so
on--all identified by pictures alone.
These things were not on my shopping list, so we moved on to
the rack of bagged candies, where I made the only purchase of the
day--a mixed bag of butterscotch and mint flavored taffy kisses.
Returning to our car, I opened the candy and invited Irma to try
a piece and at the same time pick a mint taffy for me. She handed
me the kiss.
"Does it say 'mint'?" I asked.
"No; it just has a leaf on it," she said. "The butterscotch
has a cow on it."
That's when it hit me: the moment of truth! While I had been
chained by love to my disk for the past four decades, the rest of
the world had been accelerating a swing away from words to
pictures to convey information, away from text toward icons.
I learned a lot more during the ride back to the office.
Traffic lights, at least in my town, don't bear the words "stop,"
"caution," and "go," depending instead on the colors red, yellow,
and green. What about drivers who are color blind? The stop light
is on top; the go light is on the bottom.
How about traffic signs? The stop sign is a red octagon.
Mile markers are green vertically oriented rectangles with
rounded corners, and highway exit signs are green horizontal
rectangles. If that's not enough, diamond-shape signs signify
danger, and round ones stand for railway crossings.
Like any responsible investigator, I contacted our state
highway department to verify the accuracy of what I had been told
about traffic lights and signs and to ask why different colors
and shapes were used. The state official informed me that it was
so that "people won't have to read them if they aren't
interested."
Motorists: can you recall when the image of a horn first
adorned the horn button on your car? When did the picture of a
smoking cigarette first identify the cigarette lighter?
It was at about this point in my new awareness that I
flashed-back to PC-Magazine for July, where the editor
proclaimed:
Coming Soon:
WordPerfect 6.0 is here. The question is, should you invest in
what might be one of the last significant DOS programs, or is it
time to switch to a Windows word processor? Hold on, PC-Magazine!
Is Windows our only choice? IBM just might offer an alternative
environment--not that it is guaranteed to provide any advantage
to the blind.
In either case I wonder what use word processors will have
in the world dominated by graphic images. I ponder but won't
pursue here the question, does our emphasis on pictorial
information have a direct connection with the reported increase
in illiteracy in our society?
For those of you who require more evidence to support the
notion that we may now be approaching the end point of a swing
away from words toward symbolic representations, I invite your
attention to developments in the musical instruments industry.
Compare the classical organ and its modern equivalent, the
electronic synthesizer. The pipe organ has stops clearly labeled
with names like flute, recorder flute, oboe, piccolo, violin, and
viola. The synthesizer may have similar voices labeled with
pictures of the instruments they are supposed to imitate but
without text labels. Furthermore, these electronic instruments
may have a dynamic visual display that includes pictures of the
instrument or instruments currently being synthesized.
It is just a matter of time till photos and illustrations
will dominate the print publishing industries. It is no longer
possible to find a book that is not illustrated. Many textbooks
for primary grades devote as much space to pictures and
illustrations as to text.
So the challenge to the blind and to the researchers in the
blindness field emerges: How are we to decode the visual
information that surrounds us and back-translate the messages
into words? How are we to extract the message in the graphic and
say it in words?
The interpretation of visual information may be more
involved than it first appears. To hark back to my earlier
reference to the picture of a leaf on the peppermint taffy, it
clearly is not enough to say "leaf" unless the blind observer is
also given the information that the leaf is on the wrapper of a
candy kiss. Only then will he make the connection and conclude
that the leaf is from a sprig of mint. For all the same reasons,
informing a blind computer user of current information on his
graphical user interface requires much more than speaking the
identity of the icons, dialog boxes, radio buttons, et cetera.
More often than not, it will also be necessary to know the
juxtaposition of certain depictions, what is currently selected
(active) and what is required of the blind operator to accept the
current display or to change conditions.
Microsoft Corporation has demonstrated initiative in solving
some of the problems resulting from their emphasis on the Windows
computer environment. Mr. Greg Lowney has shared information with
the NFB on his work at Microsoft and will surely discuss the
progress he has made at some point in this conference. IBM has
also addressed the issue of access by blind people to their
Program Manager graphical user interface. Blazie Engineering is
expected to make an important contribution to mastering the
Windows program with their product, Windows Master, now in
development. This ingenious approach allows the blind computer
user to control and otherwise operate a computer running Windows,
using only a Braille 'n Speak and the Windows Master software.
You may coax Mr. Blazie into divulging more information about
this unannounced product.
The success of the work of Microsoft, IBM, Blazie
Engineering, and others must depend on strategies for
interpreting visual information through speech and Braille. The
NFB Research and Development Committee and other members of the
Federation will play an important role in developing these
strategies.
One member, T. V. Raman, is a doctoral student at Cornell
University, a recent NFB scholarship winner, and a member of our
research discussion group on the Internet. His work can be
glimpsed through two brief quotes from a paper posted to his file
area on the computer science archive at Cornell:
I have developed AFL, a language for expressing
audio formatting rules. AFL is used to produce audio
renderings of electronic documents with heavy
mathematical content. The system surpasses current-day
reading machines in both the type of documents handled
and quality of audio renderings.
My research on audio formatting, though motivated
by the need to generate audio documents, is more
generally applicable to the areas of user interface and
information access in audio. [or Braille]
After taking his Ph.D from Cornell in December, Raman hopes
to extend his work to include audio formatting of complex
graphical computer displays. Raman's papers can be retrieved via
the Internet using file transfer protocol to ftp.cs.cornell.edu
and changing to the sub directory /pub/raman.
Once the information in a graphical display has been
extracted and converted to language elements, some will want to
forego use of a speech synthesizer in favor of a Braille display.
The amount and kind of processing required to achieve a
satisfactory Braille format will depend on the size of the
Braille display available. We are presently limited to a single
line of refreshable Braille as the output of a computer, reading
machine, or consumer product. This is a serious limitation. It is
difficult, if not impossible, using a single line of Braille to
convey page layout and other format characteristics that
contribute to the reading process.
Inventors and researchers alike are now responding to the
need for a larger and affordable Braille display. While none have
as yet found the right combination of materials and technologies
to produce a full-page, refreshable display, there are numerous
signs of serious work and some progress worth noting.
In recent years several materials and mechanical devices
have competed for the role of the technology of choice to make
refreshable Braille. The piezoelectric ceramic bimorph has
emerged as the clear winner. This is the technology used by
Telesensory in the U.S., Tieman of Holland, Tiflotel in Italy,
and others to produce one-line displays. Affordable multi-line
piezoelectric displays have not yet appeared in the market or the
laboratory.
One company, Piezo Systems of Winchester, Massachusetts, has
been funded for the first phase of a project to build
piezoelectric displays with four and eight lines of forty
characters each. The number of lines in future displays may be
any multiple of four. The number of characters per line is
limited only by the maximum line length that would be acceptable
to consumers. Piezo Systems has thus far produced a proof-of-
concept model consisting of 4 columns and 4 rows. The company is
now awaiting funding for phase II of the project. A date of early
1996 is projected for producing the first practical prototype
with four lines of forty cells. While we can expect to see one-
line piezoelectric refreshable displays for many years to come,
it is clear that this technology will never be applicable to a
page-size Braille panel.
Braille computer screens and reading machines that rival a
Braille book will come when the tactile equivalent of the pixel
is designed. The monitor at the airport, the screen on a personal
computer, and a television set are examples of a remarkable
application of the phenomenon of phosphorescence. These displays
are manufactured by coating the inside of the front of a glass
tube with one or more phosphors which emit light when excited by
impinging electrons. An electron gun at the rear of the video
tube sweeps an electron beam back and forth over the phosphor
coating. By turning the beam on and off as it traverses the
entire area of the coated surface, some points are made to emit
light while others remain dark. It is thus possible to produce
patterns of light and dark points to form pictures. Each point of
light or dark is called a pixel--for picture element.
Sophisticated elaborations of this simple technology have led to
the development of all of the displays mentioned immediately
above, as well as high definition color television.
During the first U.S./Canada Conference on Technology, the
work of Dr. Toyo Tanaka with phase transition gels was cited as a
possible approach to designing a tactile equivalent of a pixel.
These gels exhibit the property of dimensional change in the
presence of visible or invisible light, temperature variation, or
an electric field. Theoretically it is possible to create a
smooth, flat panel containing cells filled with a gel material.
Braille patterns of raised dots could be produced on this panel
under computer control. Maximum exploitation of this concept
could result in a transducer capable of displaying high quality
Braille, raised lines, dots, textures, and other tactual
graphics. Professor Toyo Tanaka, Assistant Professor Steven Leeb
at MIT, and Dr. John Gardner at Oregon State University have
teamed up to explore this application.
These statements are from the MIT grant application to the
National Science Foundation:
Project Goals
The principal goal of this project is to explore
the practicality of fabricating actuators suitable for
use in an inexpensive Braille-type display that could
be used with a personal computer or other information-
processing tool. This project proposes to explore novel
actuation technologies based on polymer gels, which
could, in theory, be used to construct actuators that
provide direct linear motion quietly, swiftly, and with
high force. Small actuators based on polymer gels could
be used in a Braille display and in other miniature
machines.
One or more prototype Braille displays, [will be made] based
on these actuators, which will operate in concert with a standard
personal computer to provide a tactile display of Braille text
and graphics. The NFB R&D Committee welcomed the opportunity to
comment on the draft of the MIT proposal. We have endorsed the
application and will maintain communication with Gardner and Leeb
as this work proceeds.
For at least a decade there has been a steady murmur of
discontent among the blind as a number of consumer electronic
products came to market with displays and control systems that we
cannot readily use. Listening to this background of discontent,
one can occasionally pick out clear ideas of what should be done
to remedy the situation. Some say we need to pass a law to
mandate all industries to produce only products that can be used
by blind people. I might say that there is some agreement on this
point, but it ends at the conceptual level. No one has clearly
described the details of just how a universal display and control
system might be designed and implemented across the diverse field
of consumer electronic products. Some say Braille displays must
be installed; some insist upon synthetic speech on everything.
Whether Braille, large print, or speech is the medium, the
language required may be English, Spanish, or Swahili. Almost
everyone agrees that there should be no more touch panel
controls, in which each button is shown as a visible spot that
cannot be tactilely located. From out of the gray background, I
begin to hear the boys in the corporate board rooms murmuring
about the need to have all electronic equipment talk a common
language so that anything can communicate with anything else. It
is yet to be made clear why we might want our photocopier to talk
to our microwave oven.
Understanding the problem may be the first step in finding a
solution. The problem can be reduced to two elements: an ever
increasing diversity of products with visual displays on one side
of the problem and a finite group of handicapped individuals
requiring different modes of sensory input on the other side.
Stated in other terms, consumer products are now designed to
display information that cannot be decoded by blind and visually
impaired individuals.
We may be ready to recognize that there cannot be a global
solution to the problem of consumer access to electronic
products. Several solutions must be identified. It is at this
point that NFB offers a two-dimensional approach to bring
consumer products within reach of all disability groups.
Manufacturers of consumer products will be asked to make
simple and inexpensive provision to accommodate blind and
visually impaired consumers. The first is to employ only controls
that can be tactually perceived. Examples include all
conventional mechanical knobs and buttons as well as touch-pads
and membrane switches with discernable tactile borders or
markers.
The second accommodation requires that all products
continually send complete information appearing on their visual
display through an infrared light transmitter. From a hardware
point of view, this is a very simple design modification. It will
require the addition of one light-emitting diode (LED) and the
simple circuitry for modulating the LED with text information
that corresponds to the information on the visual display. In
effect, these new products will have two equivalent displays. The
LCD, gas plasma, or other visual device for the general public
and the infrared transmitter to display the equivalent
information to handicapped consumers. Development of a detailed
description of the protocol for transmitting information through
the infrared transmitter is one goal of an NFB research project.
It should be instantly apparent that blind people cannot see
and interpret information on a beam of infrared light any better
than they can read an LCD display. Something more is clearly
needed to make access happen. The blindness industry must respond
to the standard infrared display by offering a variety of
products to receive the encoded information on the infrared light
coming from the CD-player, VCR machine, programmable telephone
answering machine, et cetera, and then decode the information and
present it to the blind individual in synthetic speech, Braille,
large print, or other communication medium of his choosing.
Demonstration of a consumer receiver system is another goal of
the NFB project.
It is safe to assume that manufacturers and vendors will
respond to this new opportunity to serve blind and visually
impaired customers. We can expect to see the Braille 'n Speak,
Braille Lite, Braille Mate, and a host of other products equipped
with infrared receivers and associated software to translate
display information to Braille or speech. We can anticipate
speech synthesizers capable of functioning as the display reader.
We can also expect to see add-ons to retrofit these and similar
products so that they can be used to receive the display
information. For example a simple plug-in module could convert a
laptop computer to a large print display for an office telephone
operator. Imaginative vendors will think of additional, novel,
and useful products based on this technology.
Emerging research goals in the field of blindness that
command our resources, energy, and leadership include the areas
described above. Success in these areas--translating visual
presentation of information to spoken language and Braille;
design, building, and deploying a large affordable refreshable
Braille display; and the provision of a consumer access port to
electronic products--will together lower some of the barriers to
full participation by blind men and women in an increasingly
complex technological society. You can continue to count on the
NFB to be a supporter, a partner, and a leader in research as we
move into the future.
[PHOTO: Portrait. CAPTION: Ruperto Ponz Lazaro]
INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION IN THE FIELD OF TECHNOLOGY:
AN AGENDA FOR ACTION TOWARDS THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
by Ruperto Ponz
From the Editor: Ruperto Ponz chairs the World Blind Union
Committee on Technology and is also one of the leaders of ONCE,
the Spanish organization of the blind. Mr. Ponz was invited to
attend the conference and address the group. He requested that
the English translation of his remarks be read for him since he
is not fluent in English. Ronald Meyer, who was recording the
conference, did so. Here is what Mr. Ponz said:
Let me first of all express my satisfaction for the
opportunity which has been given me to share with you my views
and goals as Chairman of the WBU Committee on Technology, and let
me also convey to you warmest greetings from the leadership of
the Spanish National Organization of the Blind (ONCE), in which I
have the responsibility of heading the Department of Social
Services. In the 1980's ONCE as an organization and Spain as a
country undertook the most dramatic and rapidly improving changes
in the field of services to the blind that have ever occurred in
such a short period of time anywhere in the world. Technology has
not been absent in this forward-looking transformation.
In the late fifties and early sixties, when I was attending
a residential school in Spain, the most sophisticated technology
we were using was the slate and stylus. A Braille writer looked
to us like an impossible dream. In the late sixties and early
seventies, when I was employed as a teacher in ONCE's educational
system, the Perkins Brailler and the cassette recorder were
already commonplace tools in our schools. In the early eighties,
when I became headmaster of one of those schools, the Optacon,
CCTV magnifying systems, and other optical appliances and low-
vision techniques were introduced in our system. Now in my
current field of responsibility, which also encompasses all
aspects of technical research and development, import of
equipment, and national production and distribution of low- and
high-technology devices, I am faced with the exciting challenge
of creating the necessary conditions to place within the reach of
blind people in my country the considerable advances that
electronics and computer science have brought about to benefit
blind and visually impaired people. And I can say now with pride
that we in Spain have moved from a position of total
technological dependency to one where we are beginning to be
technological contributors.
I have dwelled on the description of my technology-related
professional itinerary in order to give you an idea of where I
stand now. Although on a strictly personal level I remain
faithful to the stylus and slate of the fifties, on a
professional level I am committed to do everything possible to
assist in opening all doors of technological progress to my
fellow blind in Spain and all over the world.
I accepted the proposal to chair such an important committee
of the World Blind Union in order to share with others my
experience as a teacher and school administrator as well as a
member of the management team of a major organization in the
blindness field, and to put at the disposal of the international
community the human and other resources of ONCE. However, the
success of our endeavors will largely depend on the pooling of
imagination, critical judgments, and constructive suggestions of
people with knowledge and expertise from throughout the world. In
this venture the contribution from North America is essential.
Aware of the fact that international cooperation is more easily
said than done, I trust that we will succeed in making steps
forward in the years ahead in the achievement of some of our
goals.
Let me finally outline the main activities we would like our
Committee to be involved with between now and 1996.
1. Information collection and dissemination.
Further efforts need to be made to improve the mechanisms
for collecting information about research and development and the
availability of products and especially to improve the means for
making existing projects and products known to all their
potential beneficiaries. The advantages of electronic networks
must be fully exploited.
Mechanisms for effective and objective evaluation must be
further improved. A worthy example in this regard is the
International Braille and Technology Center of the National
Federation of the Blind in the USA.
The basic concept of these North American technology
conferences deserves to be applied at a world level. We do need
to create a truly universal forum for researchers, manufacturers,
service providers, and consumers. We must critically analyze
current realities, identify areas of cooperation, and establish
future planning mechanisms. Tentatively such a conference could
take place in the second half of 1995 or the first half of 1996.
2. Influencing general research and development, manufacturing,
and standard-setting bodies.
Strategies must be implemented to bring to the attention of
all those concerned the unique needs and potential of blind and
visually impaired people. We are potential users of almost any
product or service, but things are increasingly designed and
produced as though everyone could see.
3. Further defining research and development priorities and
setting up implementation mechanisms.
During the previous WBU term of office the Research
Committee undertook the meaningful task of determining
priorities. This needs further expansion and revision, and it is
imperative to make a serious attempt to implement those
priorities in a concerted manner.
The World Blind Union lacks resources of its own to promote
significant projects by itself, but we can do a lot through the
mobilization of knowledge and expertise and the pooling of funds.
We could explore the feasibility of establishing a WBU Award for
the most excellent contributions to the implementation of our
agreed priorities.
4. Involvement of consumers in the design and development
process.
We the organized consumers nationally and internationally
know best what we need and how it should be done. We must put
pressure on all concerned bodies to see to it that we are
consulted at the earliest possible stages. In this case the WBU
should be the representative voice of consumers internationally.
5. Technology transfer to the developing world.
If we do not exert the appropriate solidarity mechanisms,
advances in technology run the risk of widening the gap between
developed and developing countries. The majority of blind people
live in developing countries, and in essence their basic needs
are similar to ours. If their quantitative importance could be
brought to bear in the design and production of certain items,
production would become far more cost-effective for us also.
It should be one of our priority aims to assist in making
technology available everywhere. Rapid advances often make useful
products obsolete in a very short period of time. Such appliances
could be more helpful in the hands of students and professionals
in the third world than in our storage rooms. This is only one
possible example of an opportunity to carry out a positive
technology transfer.
In this exciting program I trust that I will be able to
count on the unreserved cooperation and the immense treasure of
knowledge and expertise which exists in the field of technology
in the U.S. and Canada.
Thank you for your kind attention.
[PHOTO: Portrait. CAPTION: David Andrews]
OBSERVATIONS ON THE STATE OF TECHNOLOGY FOR THE BLIND
by David Andrews
From the Editor: David Andrews is the Director of the
International Braille and Technology Center for the Blind at the
National Center for the Blind. Today he is one of the most
knowledgeable people in the world about Braille production and
speech technology. Here are his remarks:
In the next few minutes I hope to give you some observations
and insights into technology, past and present, that I hope can
be used to prepare us for the future. As the Director of the
International Braille and Technology Center for the Blind, I have
the opportunity to look at and work with all of the computer-
related technology which is available for blind persons. This
unique opportunity gives me a broad view of what is happening
today with technology. I would like to take the next few minutes
to reflect on what I have observed, both good and bad, including
some of my pet peeves.
I got my first taste of technology in 1983 with the old
Kurzweil Reading Machine. Even though I had one in my office at
the New Jersey Library for the Blind and Handicapped, I found
myself using it rarely. This was in part because it was usually
broken. It was also in part because it was difficult to
understand and really didn't do that great a job. I sat down with
the machine and read a whole book about telecommunications. It of
course repeatedly mentioned AT&T, which the machine insisted upon
calling a7&7. The machine was a technical achievement, and my hat
goes off to you, Ray Kurzweil, and certainly it was necessary to
get us where we are today. Unfortunately, it was more of a
marketing achievement than a reading solution. Today's generation
of machines is very reliable and much more able.
I next moved on to a VersaBraille Classic. We just called it
the VersaBraille at the time. By 1985 I added an Apple 2e
computer and Braille-Edit and an old Echo II. These tools were
necessary to realize much of the power of the VersaBraille. In
1987 I got my first MS-DOS computer, an old Zenith Z-159 XT, a
powerful machine at the time. In 1988 I moved up to a NEC 286
machine, and I added a 286 laptop and laser printer in 1990. In
1991 I bought a 33 Mhz 486 Zeos Computer, and I later bought a
smaller 486/sx to use to feed mail and messages to computer
bulletin boards in the Baltimore area. Along the way I have
bought, traded, and sold various pieces of access technology--I
sold my Optacon to buy my first computer, and I sold my
VersaBraille to buy my second. I have also bought, sold, and used
various speech synthesizers, owning as many as five at one time.
All of this is a long way of saying that what is best in
this field is competition. This is true both in the general
computer market and the access technology field. In the early
1980's you could count the number of high-tech devices on your
two hands and have fingers left over. Now in the International
Braille and Technology Center for the Blind we have twenty
Braille embossers, nine Braille translation programs, over
twenty-five speech synthesizers, twenty screen review programs,
five stand-alone reading machines, nine computer-based reading
systems, eight kinds of refreshable Braille displays, two Braille
laptop computers, seven portable electronic note takers, three
kinds of printers for creating Braille and print on the same
page, two devices which allow a deaf-blind person to use a
telephone, and a wide variety of miscellaneous software and
hardware, all designed for blind and deaf-blind people. It is
truly amazing when you consider that most of this development has
happened in the last five years or less. In less then three years
the International Braille and Technology Center for the Blind has
filled a 3,000-plus square foot room with devices and has had to
move to a space over twice as large. Dr. Jernigan, our Finance
Chairman, may well hope that the rate of acquisition slows down a
little so that we can stay in the new premises for a longer time.
A good example of competition and the way in which it has
improved things is in the area of stand-alone reading machines.
The first machines (financed, incidentally, through the National
Federation of the Blind) cost over 50,000 dollars and came on the
market some fifteen years ago. I am sure that Dr. Jernigan and
Ray Kurzweil could tell us some war stories about those days.
Kurzweil's current model is priced at about ten percent of the
cost of the original and is smaller and better. I have said to
people in the past that Kurzweil Computer Products made the
reading machine market, and Arkenstone made it competitive.
The other thing that has helped reading products immensely,
but isn't as available in other access technology areas, is
piggybacking on commercial developments. Optical character
recognition products, scanners, and OCR software are now widely
available and used. This has encouraged a number of companies to
develop products in these areas. Arkenstone, Kurzweil, and others
have benefited from this interest and effort. Unfortunately for
blind people, Braille printers, Braille translation software,
screen review programs, and speech synthesizers aren't general
market items. I would expect that this could change in the case
of speech synthesizers, but not for at least five years. I
believe that ultimately most computers will operate in part by
recognizing the operator's voice and responding to his or her
commands. If you are talking to your computer, you won't
necessarily be at the keyboard and won't be looking at it. Thus,
speech synthesis and voice prompting are natural outgrowths of
speech recognition. At this point cheap and improved speech
synthesis is possible. Until then our numbers are too small to
promote much research and development in this area. For all
intents and purposes, there have not been any major improvements
in speech for approximately ten years. We have seen incremental
improvements and a number of new products and, in a couple of
cases, lower prices; but there has not been a major improvement
in speech synthesis in some time.
The price of the DEC-Talk has dropped dramatically, and it
is increasingly used. However, the danger is that, because it is
pretty good and more affordable, we will accept it as the norm
and depend on it. Its widespread availability and acceptance
don't promote new development. Likewise, reliance on the SSI 263
chip, used by Artic Technologies, Aicom's Accent, the Braille 'n
Speak, and others, doesn't promote new products. It offers
relatively low cost, good performance, and acceptable speech
quality; and people know how to write for the chip; but it really
isn't that great. We are just used to it. In my opinion the best
thing that could happen to the speech synthesis field is that the
SSI 263 chip would go away. That would force us to develop
alternatives.
Another positive development is the increased involvement of
blind persons in the access technology field. There are quite a
number of very talented blind programmers out there, and a number
of important companies are owned and run by blind persons. Caryn
Navy of Raised Dot Computing and Noel Runyan of Personal Data
Systems, both of whom are here, are notable examples, and there
are others. I wasn't trying to leave you out, Ted, Larry, and the
others. There just isn't time for everyone.
There still aren't enough of us at the top, though. Look
around the room and observe how many of you are sighted and how
many are blind. Further, some of the big companies (TeleSensory,
HumanWare, and Kurzweil spring to mind) have few if any blind
sales reps. You might take note of Arkenstone, which has in large
part made its fortune thanks to the efforts of numbers of
locally-based entrepreneurs, many of whom are blind.
In a few years technology has become very important to many
of us. While it won't and can't replace basic skills like cane
travel and Braille, some of us couldn't do our jobs without it.
Now to my pet peeves: In working with all this technology, I
think I have a unique perspective on what could be better
overall. With the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act,
access to information has been placed in a whole new light. It is
now becoming much more commonplace to get Braille agendas at
meetings or menus in restaurants. It has become easier to get a
Braille menu, in some cases, than to get a Braille manual out of
some of you. Let me give you a couple of examples. We purchased
the $15,000 David Braille computer from Baum U.S.A. in the summer
of 1992 and did not get Braille manuals until a year later. We
did not get Braille manuals for the DMFM/80, the $25,000
refreshable Braille display we bought from Baum, until late
October of 1993. We bought the DMFM/80 at the same time we bought
the David. This is inexcusable for completely Braille-oriented
products which will be used by blind people only. Baum U.S.A.
said that it was making changes and didn't want to publish the
manual too soon. If they had that many changes, perhaps the
product was released too soon.
I am not trying to pick on Baum. There are other offenders.
I finally printed my own Braille manuals for the Braillex IB80
and Notex 40 from Papenmeier of Germany. I was unable to get
manuals from two different companies--Adhoc Reading Systems and
ATR Computer. I am still waiting for Braille for the $16,500
Braillex 2D refreshable Braille display.
While I got Braille with the Alva Braille Carrier (a $9,000
Braille note taker/display sold by HumanWare), it was
unformatted, unburst, unbound, and all in computer Braille.
American Thermoform did the same thing with the manual for the
Braillo Comet, a $3,795 Braille embosser. On the low end, the
Braille manual that came with the Porta-Thiel (an $1,895 Braille
embosser, which is sold by Blazie Engineering, among others) was
atrocious. It also was unformatted and in Computer Braille.
Further, those of you who send out Braille need to be more
conscientious at times. For years TeleSensory has distributed
Braille spec sheets on its VersaPoint embosser. These sheets are
usually in Computer Braille. All people see is that it isn't in
Grade 2 Braille. You are only hurting yourselves by not
translating and proofreading your documents. Speaking of
TeleSensory and Braille, I just got a Braille document from them.
It concerns the Everest printer, which they sold in the past, and
the problems many have had with feeding the paper properly. The
paper-handling notice was in Braille, but the backs of all the
pages, which were printed in interpoint Braille, had words
missing from the right side of each line. It made for difficult
reading, as you can imagine. While the formatting and translation
were fine, it is obvious that none of the pages was proofed by a
Braille reader. and TeleSensory is not the only offender in this
area. They just come to mind as the last one to cross my desk.
Most of the screen review vendors do not offer Braille, not
even a reference card. Omnichron with Flipper and KANSYS, Inc.,
with PROVOX have traditionally offered Braille manuals upon
request. IBM had a nice, extra-cost hardcover manual with Screen
Reader for DOS but took over a year to come up with a Braille
reference card for Screen Reader/2 for OS/2. Many of you do not
label your disks or cassette tapes in Braille either.
So that I won't be perceived as entirely negative, I will
say that there is some good Braille out there. Telesensory,
Enabling Technologies, Kurzweil, and Arkenstone, among others,
have all traditionally offered good Braille manuals. Enabling
Technologies is noteworthy in that some of their manuals have
contained servicing instructions. They are also willing to send
some kinds of parts to individual blind users to install
themselves. It is nice to be treated like the adults we are. You
are in the business of providing hardware and software products
to blind people. Some of us read Braille; some of us like tape;
some of us prefer disk-based documentation; and some of us would
rather have large print. Each alternative is what we need,
though, and this won't change. You need to consider these
alternate formats as a part of the cost of doing business with
us. It isn't always enough just to put the manual on disk and
leave it to us. You owe us more than that, particularly with
expensive Braille-oriented products.
Before we leave manuals, I would like to touch upon the
writing itself. It looks as if some of you don't own a spelling
checker or don't have access to a good human editor. If this part
of your products is so sloppy, it makes me wonder about the
programming or inner workings. I have also come to hate most
European manuals. They tend to rely on many figures, tables, and
drawings--and the translation is often terrible. If you are going
to import a product to the U.S., you need to take the time to
produce a good manual that Americans can digest. We aren't
stupid--but the style, usage, and conventions are different here.
My next cross to bear is difficult installation programs.
This is particularly a problem with screen review programs and to
a certain extent may be unsolvable. If the user doesn't have a
working synthesizer, it can be difficult to get speech up for the
first time. However, there are things you can do.
Make initial installation instructions and warnings
accessible in a variety of formats so everyone can read them. I
get programs all the time that have the instructions on disk and
in print. If I don't yet have speech up, I am already stuck until
I can get a human reader. Don't bury important warnings. SlimWare
Window Bridge did this with warnings about the memory manager
QEMM-386. I didn't figure it out until I had lost one of my two
possible installations from their copy-protected installation
disk. This copy-protection is another bone of contention with me.
Virtually everyone in the general software market, as well as the
access field, has dropped copy protection because of the problems
it causes users. About the only people using it anymore are game
makers, who generally sell their products for less than $50 a
pop. If Synthavoice was offering SlimWare Window Bridge at a
minimal cost, the copy-protection might make sense, but at $695
it is one of the more expensive Microsoft-Windows-access
products.
The Window Bridge installation does do one good thing. They
are able automatically to identify and configure themselves for a
wide variety of synthesizers, simplifying the process. Others are
starting to identify more synthesizers automatically, but Window
Bridge initially made big progress in this area.
The Thiel Bax-10, a high-speed interpoint Braille printer
that cost over $80,000 at the time we bought it, comes with a
software-based setup program that is virtually impossible to use
with speech. It seems that they could do better.
Some of you could engage in more responsible marketing. I
realize that the competition at times is fierce, but you will
ultimately not do yourselves any good by misportraying the
abilities of your products. As I said earlier, technology, as
important and useful as it is, isn't a substitute for good basic
skills. We have seen both the BrailleMate and the Mountbatten
Brailler portrayed as solutions to our Braille literacy problems.
While these devices and others may be aids to literacy, they will
not magically make a blind child know Braille. They should also
not be substituted for using the slate and stylus.
A marketing ploy that seems unethical to me is the practice
of pre-announcing new products. This is telling people that
something bigger and better is just around the corner. It is a
problem for two reasons. First, it has the effect of freezing the
market, and the competition suffers. Second, some people
perpetually wait for the bigger and better thing. You and they
are denying them the use of potentially useful technology while
waiting for that perfect solution that XYZ, Inc., just announced.
It is understandable that some pre-announcement is
necessary. It would seem to me that one to three months, maybe
four months, is reasonable. But we have seen wait times from six
months to a year or more from companies like Artic Technologies,
Blazie Engineering, and Index, among others. These periods seem
unduly long. As a consumer I don't want to buy product X on
Monday and find that the company started selling Y on Tuesday and
that Y is much better. On the other hand, if I am waiting around
for Y for a year or more, then I didn't get the use of X for all
that time. There comes a time when we all must make the
technology plunge. If it is good and appropriate technology for
us, it will still be useful even if it isn't the latest and
greatest. Companies might offer trade-ins or upgrades, or suspend
sales of a given device, prior to a new one's coming on the
market. Ultimately all of you will be better served by attending
to the needs of your customers, not by bad-mouthing the
competition or trying to take their business away by pre-
announcing new products and freezing the market.
Finally, some of you exaggerate the specifications and
benefits of your products. Fudged specs are most noticeable in
the Braille embosser segment. You might rightfully point out that
you are not fudging. You are just measuring noise or printing
speed differently from me. While this could be true, I think some
of you could be more practical and realistic in your
measurements. One example is the Everest printer. Index and
TeleSensory have said that it prints at 100 characters per
second. While I have not measured this scientifically, this
appears to me and others to be the measure for printing one sheet
of paper. It doesn't take into account the time it takes to
change pages on this sheet-feeder type embosser. Most of my
documents, while not hundreds of pages, are longer than one page.
A realistic measure would account for a multipage document.
One of two things needs to happen. The first is that all of
you agree on how these things should be measured and described.
The second solution is that someone (those of us at the
International Braille and Technology Center for the Blind, for
instance) will measure them in the way we see fit and tell the
world. We may do this anyway!
I hope that you accept my remarks in the spirit in which
they are offered. While there are problems in this field, there
is also much good to be admired and noted. Your energy,
dedication, and commitment are outstanding. Most of us, if we
were in it for the money, should have taken the advice offered to
Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate and gone into plastics or
something. Most of you vendors are doing this because you are
doing what you want to do. I hope that we can all work together
so that you can make an honest living and offer blind people
better and cheaper technology at the same time. While not easy,
it is possible.
=================================================================
Mohymen Saddeek, President of Technology for Independence,
Inc., was the final speaker on the morning panel. "Technology for
Independence" was his title. A summary of his remarks appears
elsewhere in this issue.
=================================================================
[PHOTO: Portrait. CAPTION: Tony Schenk]
PRIDE AND PROFIT:
OBSERVATIONS OF A FREE MARKETEER
by Tony Schenk
From the Editor: Tony Schenk is the President of Enabling
Technologies Company. Mr. Schenk was the first speaker on the
Thursday afternoon panel. Here are his remarks:
As I thought about how to contribute to a dialogue which
brings together such a broad range of consumers from our
marketplace, I couldn't help recalling hotel magnate Conrad
Hilton's memorable moment on NBC's "Tonight Show." Asked by
Johnny Carson if he had a message for his customer base which
could be summarized in just a few words, Hilton shot back, "Yes!
Remember when you take a shower in my hotels, the curtain goes
inside the tub, not outside."
Now that's what I call getting your point across. Of course,
Mr. Hilton could afford to be brief because people already knew
what he stood for, since most of them had probably been in at
least one of his hotels at one time or another. Fortunately we
have been given a bit more time for our remarks than guests on
the "Tonight Show" typically receive, but otherwise my situation
is not so different from that of Conrad Hilton. You already know
me and the people who work with me through the products we
manufacture, deliver and support. Your impression of us has
already been largely formed by your experience with what we
offer, and there is nothing I can say here today which would add
very much to, or take very much away from, that impression. This
is exactly as it should be.
Throughout my eleven-year involvement with Enabling
Technologies, first as a developer of software and hardware and
later as president of the company, I have been acutely aware that
what we say matters a good deal less to the people we serve than
what we do or don't put into the boxes we pack and ship every
day. Nevertheless, there are a few observations I want to share
with this select group about some of the ways in which access
technology is bought and sold. Some strange things occasionally
happen in this wonderfully topsy-turvy, dynamic field of human
endeavor. One or two of these could perhaps affect what you pay
for access technology and what kind of choices you may have.
My first observation is that only the kind of free market we
enjoy together could have produced the stunning array of choices
which currently exist for buyers of access technology. It is
amazing to me how many companies and how many products have
managed to survive and even prosper in a marketplace which is
considered too small for notice by the giants in the technology
industry. I hope nothing ever happens to restrict this free
market situation, and I believe that any such development would
immediately begin to diminish the variety of products and
services available. But I digress. The wide range of choices
available to the consumer goes far beyond the matter of which
device to buy. And some of these decisions impose difficult
choices on us as a manufacturer.
There are a lot of ways of describing my job and the job of
my vice president, B.T. Kimbrough, but most of it comes down to
highly refined listening in order to make what we are going to do
next responsive to what the marketplace tells us it wants. I say
that our listening is a refined skill, because we have to do much
more than simply hear what people say on the telephone, in
national conferences, and at regional meetings. In order to truly
receive the message from the marketplace, we have to hear what
people don't say but imply in their buying decisions; we must ask
questions and pay careful attention to the significance of the
questions people ask us. And beyond that we have to be alert when
using our own products because this is our best chance to put
ourselves in the place of the user when we design the next
generation of product.
Much of the message about what the marketplace wants in a
Braille printer, which is our chosen field of focus, is so loudly
and universally expressed that I could recite it in my sleep, and
according to my wife I occasionally do. Consumers have come to
expect subsequent generations of product to contain significant
advancements over earlier models. Everyone wants to see the next
product cheaper, faster, lighter, more portable, quieter, more
flexible, and easier to operate. While at least two of these
characteristics, simplicity and flexibility, are somewhat
mutually exclusive, I dare say that any new product which does
not incorporate at least some of the issues of lower cost,
greater speed, less noise or greater versatility, will have very
little chance of success.
But step below this layer of certainty, and you start
hearing an ever-widening stream of differing and conflicting
priorities as you penetrate all the many submarkets which we call
a customer base. Many of our consumers want a Braille printer to
make Grade Two Braille without the intervention of a computer;
some want Braille and print on the same page, while others will
only consider the product if it can be leased or rented.
Regardless of its capabilities, some government customers will
buy it only if it can be obtained from a local dealer. (I will
have more to say about this trend later.) Still others will only
buy the product if they are given a sizable discount. (Again,
more of this later.)
Some state purchasing authorities disregard all product
characteristics except speed and price, apparently believing that
this will at least give the appearance of obtaining the best
product at the lowest cost. These purchasers are not end users,
but they control the money. Although the Braille readers who will
be using the machines are usually quite specific about the
product or at least the features they want the state to obtain
for them, the purchasing authorities are usually quite simplistic
in the specifications they set. As a result, users sometimes do
not get the device they prefer, and manufacturers are encouraged
to place undue emphasis on speed because this is the only major
characteristic specified in too many bids.
Purchasing agents who represent government and private
industry are among our most frequent and most challenging
customers. Anxious to make the transaction as simple and brief as
possible and insulate themselves from any possible later contact
with the Braille reading end user, these buyers sometimes insist
on involving a third party, a tactic which can have wasteful
consequences. Typically this third party is a local computer
dealer who has never handled an access technology device and has
no interest now except the making of a quick buck. Theoretically
this dealer is supposed to install the device, follow up with the
user, and deal with any small problems which might arise in
combining several separate products into a functional system. But
the dealers chosen for this role are not to be confused with the
reputable and capable dealers of access technology who can and do
add value to the transaction by providing installation and
support when needed. The inexperienced local computer dealers of
whom I speak add nothing to the transaction except the cost of an
extra middle man. The manufacturer must give the dealer his piece
and then absorb the extra cost of whatever support might be
needed, occasionally coping with dealers who try to look good by
making a sage-sounding diagnosis of a problem which could be
dealt with in seconds by someone knowledgeable.
These are modest but typical examples of what we might call
restrictions of convenience, which an informed marketplace should
be able to shrug off with little difficulty. Now let's speak of a
different, and a much more dangerous type of restriction. I'm not
sure what to call it; institutional power play describes it
pretty well. This twisted transaction usually concerns one or
another of the small technology display and training centers
which are happily springing up all over the country. These
technology centers generally have a mission to acquaint potential
users with expensive devices and give them a chance to select a
preferred one before making a sizable investment. Many of these
centers, including our hosts at the International Braille and
Technology Center for the Blind, carefully plan and fund their
acquisition of a complete, or at least a representative group of
competing devices designed for speech, Braille, and large print
users.
But a few such centers have taken a different approach. In
these institutions devices are not bought for the technology
center, they are donated. And the requests for contributions
usually go something like this: "We have no money, but we will
recommend your product if you give us one. If you don't, your
competitors will, and we will recommend theirs instead." We like
to have our products tested and reviewed and compared with other
machines, and we politely decline this opportunity to buy a cheap
and meaningless recommendation. But I have to wonder how many
users are getting a distorted view of what's available from a few
so-called regional or local technology centers who didn't raise
the money to do it right or didn't spend it on technology in any
case.
Again I emphasize that the International Braille and
Technology Center for the Blind pays for its demonstration units
in hard cash, as do many other reputable centers across the
country. Oh, they may ask if a discount is offered, but there is
no hint that a positive or negative recommendation hangs on the
answer, or that a purchase will not be made unless a specific
price is met. Incidentally, like many of our colleagues, we are
glad to offer substantial discounts to technology centers.
Sometimes they offer the consumer the best chance to make an
informed buying decision. But when it comes to a required
donation in exchange for a bogus recommendation, we can only say,
as many Americans have said before us: Billions for defense; but
not a cent for tribute. And my last comment on this subject is
that I have no intention of naming the institutions or people who
have approached us in the way I have just described. It is my
belief that simply exposing this regressive tactic in this
setting will generate enough negative reaction to see that it is
not repeated.
I do not want to leave with you the impression that we find
our involvement in this industry a negative experience. Quite the
contrary, the infinitely rich interaction between the people I
hire to design and build good tools and the people who take them
and make them mean something is extremely satisfying. And that
reminds me to comment on something I saw in a recent issue of the
Braille Monitor. We do not consider ourselves responsible for or
claim credit for creating a welcome rise in Braille literacy, any
more than a builder of good hammers deserves credit for a real
estate boom. We consider ourselves first and last to be builders
of precision tools, which do not so much empower people as they
give one more option to combine with many options blind people
can use to empower themselves. We are gratified by the rise in
the flow of Braille both in this country, Canada, and many other
parts of the world. We believe in the future of Braille so
unreservedly that we are prepared to stake our working lives on
it. We are proud to say that we have found Braille to increase
the productivity of each of our customers and with hard work and
dedication by our engineering, production, marketing, and
customer support staff, braille has produced a modest profit for
our investors. If our products are reliable, practical and
productive, I believe we have nothing to apologize for in terms
of that profit. If our products fail our customers, no apology
would be sufficient anyway.
And that brings me to my closing message, which is about as
close as I intend to come to the style of the Conrad Hilton
comment I mentioned at the beginning. When asked if they have a
message for all their consumers which can be summarized in a
minute or two, Tony Schenk and B. T. Kimbrough eagerly respond,
"Read the manual. Please, before you call or decide that it isn't
working right, at least look at the major headings. We have
shortened the manual for our newest products, so it won't take
very long. It's in Braille, it's in print, it's on disk. After
you've read it, call us if you need to. We thrive on the demands
of our customers. So go ahead! Push us and challenge us. All you
will do is bring out our best work, and perhaps we will wind up
doing the same thing for you."
[PHOTO: Portrait. CAPTION: James Morrell]
LISTENING FOR EFFECTIVENESS
by James Morrell
From the Editor: James Morrell has recently become the
President of Telesensory Corporation. This is what he said:
I want to thank Dr. Jernigan and the National Federation of
the Blind for inviting me to this conference. When the invitation
was first extended, my reaction was that there would be little I
could contribute to such a meeting. I am not an engineer, and I
have spent the greater part of my forty plus years in business in
non-technical assignments for non-technical companies. My
experience in this field is limited to several years as a member
of TeleSensory's Board of Directors and the last ten months as
its President and CEO. I am quite literally the new kid on a new
block.
My career has been spent running business operations ranging
from small start-up companies to a corporation with annual sales
of one and a half billion dollars, 55,000 employees, a dozen
operating divisions, publicly owned, and registered on the New
York stock exchange, and named several times as one of 100
companies that were the best places to be employed. From 1986 to
1991 I operated my own consulting company, lectured, wrote, and
joined the board of directors of half a dozen organizations and
spent a lot of time working for my alma mater in institutional
development activities (read this as raising Money, attempting to
vitalize alumni activities, and cultivating foundation and
corporation support for the college and its programs.)
I tell you this about me only to get to the point that in my
experience I did become expert in marketing and organizational
planning and developed a reputation as a manager who could lead
people and get things done and one who was particularly devoted
to the theory that business success stems directly from an
understanding of customer needs and wants. In addition, I found
that all sizes of organizations were more successful and more
rewarding in terms of the personal satisfaction of their employee
constituents when they developed, achieved, stressed, and focused
on customer satisfaction as the central philosophy and
orientation of management.
This has been my message to the employees of TeleSensory.
So, on reflection, I came to the conclusion that I might be able
to make a small contribution to this group--not in so far as
contributing ideas and concepts about specific and particular
technologies that may be of benefit to individuals with vision
loss seeking technological assistance and products, but rather on
the approach that I believe will yield the greatest number of
successful outcomes and contributions from the companies that
supply technology to this group of consumers.
Therefore, while at this conference, I would like to: (1)
Tell you how I believe supplier companies like TSC should
approach the decision of what developmental projects they will
do; (2) tell you some of the things TSC is planning to do and
get your response about the desirability of these actions; and
(3) most important, listen to what is discussed at this meeting
and learn from that discussion how TSC should proceed in the
future.
In short, I am seeking answers to the following questions:
1. What is TSC doing that it should not be doing? 2. What is
TSC doing that it should continue to do? 3. What is TSC not doing
that it should be doing?
For a company to define a rational and effective product
line, or group of products, it must do two things. The first step
is to analyze where it stands now, at this time, and do so with a
great deal of candor and honesty. We must look at them in terms
of customer acceptance, competitive challenges, profitable return
to the corporation, technological excellence and reliability,
probable future viability, and pride--pride of the company and
its people in the work of producing and marketing the product. Of
this list, all of which are important, customer acceptance and
corporate pride are far and away the most important factors.