October 11 Disabilities Awareness Item

Hi Friends

Today’s Disability Awareness Item starts with an obligatory rant:
http://rantwoman.blogspot.com/2011/10/groupware-accessibility-bakeoff.html


Next is a couple interesting obituaries / tributes. The tributes are part of the text because they came in email, not with nice clean links. They are marked TRIBUTE 1 about Steve Jobs and TRIBUTE 2 about a guy named Dr. Jim Bliss, to help you skim. Finally there is another obituary which I hope Friends will find spiritually interesting even if the exact technical esoterica is not necessarily interesting.. Everything today has something to do with technology but I hope you can see it is not all just technology but also a certain crusading spirit playing out a few different ways.

I got this item unattributed. I assume it comes from some publication and has some byline and looking up the attribution is more than I can do in the time I have.

TRIBUTE 1
Subject: [VICUG-L] Stevie Wonder offered a perspective on Steve jobs' impact on the world that didn't get a lot of attention.doc
Stevie Wonder offered a perspective on Steve jobs’ impact on the world that didn’t get a lot of attention in the first round of reports about his death at age 56 on Wednesday from cancer.“The one thing people aren’t talking about is how he has made his technology accessible to the blind and the deaf and people who are quadriplegics and paraplegics,” Wonder said when he called me Thursday afternoon. “He has affected not just my world, but the world of millions of people who without that technology would not be able to discover the world.”Wonder first put his recording engineer, Femi Jiya, on the phone to talk specifically about how the various Apple products Jobs introduced over the last few decades had revolutionized the recording process.“Because of what Apple has done with their technology, everything we’re using in the high-end recording situation is now accessible to everybody,” Jiya said. "A lot of that is through Steve Jobs and his love of music, and him wanting to get that technology to everybody at a reasonable cost.“He developed Garage Band [recording and music editing software], so now a 15-year-old kid can be in his bedroom with his iPad playing around with Garage Band and come up with unbelievable ideas, which can then be taken to the next level… He has leveled the playing field; nobody else had done that.”Jobs also expanded that field to include groups of people who previously had little or no access to many technological innovations. That’s what left the biggest impression on the 25-time Grammy Award winning singer, songwriter, instrumentalist and producer.“His company was the first to come up with technology that made it accessible without screaming out loud, ‘This is for the blind, this is for the deaf,’ ” Wonder said. “He made it part of the actual unit itself; there were applications inside the technology that allowed you to use it or not use it. The iPhone, iPad touch, iPod touch, all these things, even now the computer, are accessible to those who are with a physical disability.“In another sense, he has given the blind eyes to see the world, the deaf ears to hear the world," Wonder said. "I had wanted to meet him for a long time, and I’m just happy that before he passed away, I was able to meet him and say to him, ‘Look, you’ve changed the lives of millions and millions of people you may never ever meet. Truly you’ve been a blessing for those of us who’ve needed that kind of technology to do more things, to be part of this world, to be in this millennium.'“I’m just hoping that his life and what he did in his life will encourage those who are living still and those who will be born, that it will encourage them and challenge them to do what he has done,” Wonder added, “and not making the whole concept so complicated that people can’t use it -- you just make it one of your applications, it’s in your technology. That will then create a world that will be accessible to anyone with any physical disability, and anyone can buy it, even if that person doesn’t have lots of money.”REL Steve Jobs More than a turnaround Artist

TRIBUTE 2, partly free associating from Steve Jobs’ interest in typesetting, partly because a lot of quotes also speak to things to do with language and some points from my own experience about visual, pattern recognition aspects of learning foreign languages:


I know there are other Optacon users on this list. There may be some who don't know that Dr. Jim Bliss, one of the Optacon inventors, is terminally ill. I'm sending along this article about the Optacon and Dr. Bliss that appeared yesterday on an NPR website.

The Optacon allows blind people to "read" complex visual material through their fingertips.

Dr. Bliss:
As so many on this list have already said, the Optacon changed my life...I thank you for your tremendous contribution and may God be with you.
- G.

This week, James "Jim" Bliss announced he is dying.

In an email message Bliss, an MIT Ph.D. electrical engineer who developed technology for the visually impaired, wrote that he has "terminated all treatment" for his multiple myeloma and "joined Hospice" after battling cancer for eight years.

Bliss developed a life-changing device for blind people that few outside that community have ever heard of. The Optacon, which Bliss created with Stanford Professor John Linvill (who first dreamed up the idea to help his blind daughter, Candy, read) looks like a clunky, 70s-era tape recorder with a cable attached not to a microphone, but to an optical sensor. By enabling users to gather visual information through touch, the machine has been a game-changer.

Many report the Optacon is the single best device that allows for a life of independence, to learn foreign languages, become an engineer, read music or simply peruse one's own mail.

Indeed, Bliss's posting about his terminal cancer on a listserve devoted to the device, Optacon-L, generated scores of responses from blind people all over the world describing how the device transformed their lives by allowing them to "read" complex visual information through their fingertips, rather than with their eyes.

In contrast to Braille (which expresses letters as simple raised dot patterns) or speaking machines (which perform optical character recognition and read text aloud), the Optacon, (or OPtical to TActile CONverter) senses dark-and-light areas of ink and paper, converting them into a vibration pattern that can be felt with the fingertip and, with experience, interpreted by the brain. The device can also be used to "read" information directly from a computer display.

What's startling about the notes to Bliss is that so many blind people have relied on their Optacon devices for more than 30 years. Some recount having two machines on hand to make sure at least one is available when the other undergoes repairs. Many report it's the single best device that allows for a life of independence, to learn foreign languages, become an engineer, hold a job, read music, finally understand capital letters or simply peruse one's own mail.

Here's a sampling:


Dear Dr. Bliss,
I'd like to add my voice to all of those many who have praised the Optacon and its incredible life changing impact on all of us who use it...In my opinion, not even the enormous impact that today's most proliferate and productive technologists like the late Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and others can in any way measure up to or compare with the positive good and many blessings that your tireless efforts and the work of pioneer John Linvill have brought about via the Optacon. This remarkable instrument...is an example of humanity at its very best.

Or this from a woman in Wales:
Yes, thank you for all you've done in promoting the Optacon. I taught myself cursive writing in Russian and English using it; began transcribing books into Braille; as well as studying New Testament Greek and Biblical Hebrew inmgraduate school. Countless other things, too, but those stand out for me. God give you strength, Dr. Bliss.

"As a software engineer," one man writes, "I have found it to be the mos useful tool I have to do my job."

Bliss apparently took his role as a creator of the Optacon quite seriously, according to Don Bishop, who writes:

I received my OPTACON in 1972 and your wife was one of my original Optacon training teachers at the motel on El Camino where the classes were held. At the time I lived just across the bay in Fremont and I distinctly remember that you personally carried the big box containing the OPTACON out to our car. How many CEO's do that?

I appreciate all you have done in the creation and marketing of the OPTACON as well as your participation in our list here where you've provided valuable input over the past few years.

One gentleman writes that the Optacon "still ranks as the best Enabling Technology invention that has helped so many people around the world have the freedom to read the printed word," and another woman says the device "gave me my job at IBM." A New Yorker writes of seemingly small but astonishing breakthroughs:

Before I got my Optacon, I knew nothing about print. Now, I know, for example, that often in books, the first word is written in capital letters, or the first letter of the word can be very big. I now know what italics looks like. Amazing.

And here, a user remarks on the dignity such a device offers:
Dr. Bliss, I have only one thing to add to all that has been said about the Optacon and that is that it is the one piece of technology which I would never give up. I could live without all the other gadgets, but giving up my Optacon would take away one of the very few links we as blind people have to the sighted world of print information. The Optacon is still the best device in terms of its versatility and its reliance on the user's own intelligence. Thank you for giving us a device that boosts our dignity by its very design.

Earlier this week I emailed Bliss to get his response. He wrote back saying that what surprised him most were the amazing things that long-time Optacon users said they were able to do with the device. "I suspect this is the result of rewiring of the brain to use parts normally used for vision," Bliss wrote. "That is why I've proposed a new Optacon be developed that has higher resolution, greater field of view, and displays more attributes such as color, intensity, etc."

When I asked for more details about Optacon 2.0 a day later, Bliss said he was too ill to write back. He expressed hope, though, that a new team of researchers working on a modern Optacon would soon find success.


(Comment: I think there is a development team working on ways to do tactile representations of images at a bigger scale than the one-finger Optacon output.)


Finally, A Quakerly Obituary about a non-Quaker
http://rantwomanrsof.blogspot.com/2010/04/quakerly-condolences.html


In the Light

(RantWoman)