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Every year after the hype from CSUN starts to die down, my esteemed colleague from U. Bristol in the UK, Will Pearson writes an article that goes well beyond any of the existing technologies and dives deeply into the research side of vision and vision related technology.  Recently, Will has focused his efforts on the psychology of attention and the associated neuromechanics.

For quite a while now, I’ve written about multiple data streams and simultaneous information delivery as the next generation interfaces for people with vision impairments.  I’ve used a lot of examples from audio and video games and compared them to existing screen readers and other products designed for blind people.  I look at these advances from a fairly practical usability and engineering point of view.  Will studies the underlying science, cognitive psychology, learning theory and other ways the human brain actually works that make my implementation ideas possible and practical.

Will Pearson and I often collaborate via email and in telephone calls discussing our latest ideas.  I have taken a lot of his psychological concepts and tried to fit them into an engineering model that I can use to build software.  I hope that some of my ideas that we’ve discussed have had value to his work as well.

People who read Blind Confidential with some regularity have probably noticed that Will makes frequent comments here.  His writing style falls into the category of dense academic prose that most often appears in scientific journals.  Thus, those of you who don’t like reading serious scientific articles should probably hang onto your seats as you’re in for a pretty rough ride.  If, however, like me you fall into the category of uber-geek, please enjoy the following article.

An Antidote to CSUN
By: Will Pearson

Now that all the hype of CSUN is behind us, I thought it time to begin to explore the more serious questions, the sort that are rarely touched on at CSUN.  The first question I felt worthy of an attempt at an answer is, whether using a screen reader can ever be as efficient as using sight?   There’s been plenty of speculation on the topic, usually resulting in the answer that if waived their magic wand using a screen reader would be as efficient as sight.  However, after spending several years considering this, and other human computer interaction issues related to screen reader use, I take a different view.  My justification, whilst not exhaustive, is below.
 
The first area where screen readers appear to fall short is in their ability to communicate semantics.  Communication is all about communicating thoughts, concepts, states, etc., and communication between an interface for a piece of software and a user is no different in this respect.  The main problem is that screen readers, through their use of speech and Braille, both of which are serialised forms of communication, use less physical variables to encode semantic  content than sight does.  There’s roughly six variables that can be used to encode semantic content, and these are:* The position of something on the X, Y and Z axes* The position of something in time* The frequency of the physical wave, represented by things like color, pitch, etc.* The amplitude of the physical wave, or how strong it isUsing a computer with sight typically takes advantage of five of these variables, whilst screen readers typically only use two.  So, it will take longer to communicate the same semantic content using a screen reader than it will sight.  To some extent this has supporting evidence from psychological studies in which the listening and reading speeds of the same person were compared.  These studies found that the same individual could read something faster than they could listen to it.  There are differences between individuals, which can account for why some screen reader users can listen to things faster than some people can read things, but within the same individual the evidence seems to indicate that listening to things is slower.
 
This serialisation of semantic content, brought about by the smaller capacity of speech, also has implications for memory utilisation and cognitive workload.  Studies involving Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the cortex have shown greater activity in the cortical regions of the brain when listening to speech than when reading something.  Not only is there activity on the left side of the cortex, in regions such as Brocha’s Area and Wernicke’s Area, which is present for both reading and listening, but listening to speech also produces activity in the right side of the cortex, which is thought to be related to contextual priming.  In addition to the extra neurological activity associated with language processing, there is also a higher demand on short term working memory.  As speech is temporary, one moment it is there, the next it is not, someone listening to speech has to remember more than someone reading something.  It is not so easy to move back to a previously listened to word or sentence than it is to move back to a previously read word or sentence.  Navigating by listening often involves listening to words, deciding whether they are the ones that are saught after, and if not, navigating some more and repeating the process.
 
Another consideration are the distinctions between programatic focus, the mechanism used to shift attention with a screen reader, and visual attention.  Screen readers utilise a mechanism of programatic focus to shift the user’s attention between user interface elements.  This means that a user’s attention is only focused on a single point at once, something further compounded by a screen reader’s use of serialised output.  Whilst visual attention is usually focused on a single object, it can shrink and grow, similar to a zoom lens, to encompass more or less of an object.  This ability to shift attention from a word to a paragraph and then onto the entire document provides a number of benefits for people reading documents.  The most obvious benefit is the ability to not only navigate by word or line, but to navigate around the document based on more granular objects, such as paragraphs, tables, images, etc.  Whilst similar functionality is available in some screen readers for a limited set of scenarios, this functionality is not as flexible as the visual mechanism used to shift attention.  The visual mechanism can group granular objects together, such as a table proceeded by a diagram, and can jump to those with very little requirement for processing.  In addition to granular navigation, attention can also be shifted based on physical features, such as color or location, which requires just the elements with those physical features to be searched, as suggested by Treisman’s Feature Integration Theory.  As far as I am aware, no equivalent functionality to this exists in a screen reader.  One key difference between programatic and visual attention is that programatic attention can only be moved to fixed points, whilst visual attention can be moved to any point or object.  The final difference worth mentioning is that attention is not just limited to a single point in the visual field.  Whilst there are overt, indogenous, mechanisms to control visual attention through moving the point of fixation, attention can also be focused in the periphery of the visual field, through covert, indogenous, mechanisms.  This is a useful point, as it means that sighted people can detect changes in the state of something that occur away from their current point of fixation without the cognitive work involved in moving the point of fixation
 
So, I, for one, am beginning to form the opinion that screen readers are not physically capable of delivering the same levels of efficiency as sight can.  This isn’t to say that blind people cannot gain the same level of efficiency, just that it looks likely that they are unable to do this using a screen reader.  What is more, is that this is not the fault of a particular application or platform vendor, as is often claimed, but more a problem with  the core concept of a screen reader, a concept that requires everything to be serialised.
 

As Blind Confidential’s popularity has grown, so has the number of ideas people send in as enhancements and improvements to help BC move from a blog to something more substantial.  Most of these concepts would require that we move from being just a blog to having some web space to go along with it.  I’m not sure if I am ready to commit to a web site in the short term but, over time, it looks as though it will become necessary to do everything we would like to with BC.

A sort of double announcement we’re proud to make combines the signing of our first recording artist with the kick-off of Blind Confidential Music.  After talking to a number of other publishing companies, Blind Master Crash in his Furious Forties, has signed with our new venture dedicated to publishing original music by blind artists with an attitude and a message.  BMC is the only known blind gangster rapper and, soon, BC will be heading down to his crib for an exclusive interview with BMC and some of his posse.  The record should hit the shelves in time for the Christmas rush.

Others have asked BC if they could write either individual pieces or start a regular column associated with Blind Confidential.  I like this idea but don’t know the mechanics of blogspot well enough to know if we can easily do it here or if this will require a separate web site.  Maybe I can become the Arianna Huffington of the blind community?

In advance of the kick off of the recording business, BC will explore doing a “record of the week” that DJ Cousin Blinky will introduce.  We hope to play novelty songs and songs about blindness from the catalogue of old blues musicians and others who looked at blindness with a bit of comedy in their tone.  Maybe, if it catches on, we’ll do a radio station like Mosen’s but, instead of love songs, we’ll just play comedy songs, entertaining songs about blindness and fill in the rest of the time with classic rock and roll songs about committing suicide from having listened to too many love songs.  I think the entire teen suicide and tragic accident genre goes far too unexplored these days.  When was the last time you heard “Patches,” or “Running Bear” or “dead man’s Curve” to liven up your day?  Let’s not forget to mention “Stan,” the great Eminem rhyme that always brightens my heart.  I might toss in some sickly songs about the depravity of addiction like the great Lou Reed’s “Heroin” or maybe Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died.” Just for laughs.

As I mentioned the other day, you can expect some new characters to start appearing in the Blind Confidential neighborhood (do you people think we fall closer to Mr. Roger’s neighborhood or Pee Wee’s Playhouse?) and some new adventures for those who have already popped in.  I’m also sure that the companies that appeared in the two CSUN pieces will reappear along with others yet to be lampooned.

I’ve got to run, my parents are in town.  One of the real downsides to living in Florida is that your family visits you to escape the nasty weather that happens where they live.  Thus, one must learn to disrupt everything you ordinarily do and cater to guests.  They can send my niece Annaleis anytime as she is a very interesting person.  The adults are such high maintenance though.

While I often criticize our government, I feel both proud and happy to live and be a citizen of the United States.  I find many other countries interesting, enjoy visiting them, taking in the culture and cuisine, meeting lots of people and don’t have any feelings of superiority just due to the national identity on my passport.  I understand why people of many other nations have pride and patriotism in their countries and why most people on the planet like living in their home nation and, in spite of what we often tell ourselves, don’t want to move here.

I have never liked many of the trade treaties like GATT, NAFTA, CAFTA nor the enforcement bodies like the WTO.  I believe in fair trade and grow sad when I hear that even iconic American products like a good old pair of canvas, high top Chuck’s are manufactured outside our borders.  The ecological nightmare that is NAFTA also bothers me, because of decisions made by the governing body, Mexican farmers can use DDT as if “American” birds never fly across the border and Argentine fishing vessels can kill sea turtles and, in spite of US laws protecting the ancient animals, our national sovereignty is overridden and we cannot refuse to buy fish from people who kill animals our laws try to protect.

I do, however, have a strong sense of fair play and, while I may not agree with decisions made by the WTO, I feel strongly that the United States, in spite of our enormous wealth and power, must accept the rule of law and abide by the rules set forth in treaties that our government ratifies.  If the US elects to ignore a specific treaty or portion thereof, it should withdraw from the body entirely.  While America has the power and money, it should at least follow the rules it has promised to obey.

Thus, I bring to the attention of Blind Confidential readers an obscure recent ruling by the WTO that may have enormous consequences on intellectual property owned by Americans and US based companies.  This, like so many true stories, feels more like a comic novel than actual news but you can look it up.

I first heard the story on NPR’s All Things Considered in a piece called, “WTO Ruling on Antigua-Based Web Gambling Sites.”  After hearing the story, I did some more research into the decision and found that many articles turned up in a google search.  One of particular interest came in CNET’s article, “Antigua blasts U.S. Net gambling laws.”

When it comes to laws and regulation regarding moral and personal behavior issues, I fall into the libertarian camp.  I don’t care who you sleep with, what bets you place, what drugs you use, if you pay for sex, read dirty magazines or perform unspeakable acts with barnyard animals.  I believe your right to swing your fists end where my nose begins or, to make a more specific statement, if your actions do not harm others (especially children) I don’t want to know about them nor do I care for anyone else to know about or, even more so, regulate my actions.  I do believe strongly that active drug addicted and alcoholic parents should have their kids taken away, I believe people who perform sexual acts or even try to perform sexual acts with children or with a non-consenting adult, should go to jail for a really long time.  I believe bookmakers who break legs or kill people over unpaid debts should go to jail, the same for violent drug dealers, intoxicated drivers and airline pilots.  I can’t say that I care if an athlete throws a game as sports aren’t really that important and, in my mind, fall into entertainment and, like the WWF, shouldn’t be taken too seriously.  Thus, you’ve now heard my opinion on such laws and regulations and we can return to our regular scheduled story.

“”We believe the time has come for the United States to demonstrate … whether the WTO agreements are to work for us all equally, or whether the WTO is
indeed a one-way street for the large economies to further enrich themselves at the expense of lesser ones,” John Ashe, Antiguan ambassador to the World Trade Organization, told diplomats at a session of the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Body (DSB), according to the CNET story.

MSNBC reported, “In a ruling that could open the United States to offshore Internet gambling, a World Trade Organization panel Wednesday said Washington should
drop prohibitions on Americans placing bets in online casinos.”

The NPR story, which you can listen to at the link above, reported that a small time Long Island bookmaker named Jay  chose to leave the US to start an online gambling business called the World Sports Exchange and base his business in Antigua.  The island nation of 67,000 residents permits online gambling and, along with tourism, the gaming industry forms an important part of its economy.

Jay, not realizing that the US would ignore international law, came home to Long Island to celebrate Thanksgiving dinner, 2002, with his family.  There, the FBI arrested him for violating the Federal ban on interstate internet gambling.  Jay, now a very wealthy, legitimate (everywhere in the world other than the US) bookmaker and vendor of gambling software to other betting web sites, was convicted and sent to the Club Fed, where else, but Las Vegas.  Sitting bored in his cell, Jay received a rambling letter from someone who had heard of his case which suggested he petition the Antiguan government to file a complaint with the WTO against the US for violating international trade law.

Jay called his old college roommate, now a lawyer with absolutely no experience in international trade law and the two of them managed to convince little Antigua to take on the Goliath United States in an official trade dispute.  Against all odds, the WTO, in a 290 page ruling, took the side of Antigua and Jay. Who is now out on parole and has left the country again to return to his business in the Caribbean.

The United States announced it would appeal the decision, certainly its right as a nation and that it would ignore the ruling no matter the outcome – a right it does not have under the trade treaty.

So, one may wonder, what sling poor little Antigua can use to slay the Goliath US?  With only 67,000 people, Antigua could boycott everything the US sells and not a single American business would even notice.  If it tried to lace travel restrictions on its citizens from visiting the US, they would only annoy their own business people.  What, then could they do to really hit the US in its pocketbook?

According to the NPR report, Antigua plans on officially taking the action that, because the US will not abide by the trade laws that effect the little island nation, it will go after the US where they can do some real damage.  Antigua plans on making itself an Internet copyright free zone.  Their plan, according to both NPR and a bunch of other sources one can find in a google search, is to allow web sites based in the country to distribute any bit of intellectual property covered by US copyright without paying royalties to US companies, for free or at a charge to the consumer.

Can they get away with this?  The answer is maybe.  The WTO has been known to ignore trade violations when done in retaliation against countries that have ignored their other rulings.

So, one may think that Britney, Metallica and other pop stars will, like during the Napster boom, lose a few bucks due to slumping record sales as music fans turn to free or very low cost Antiguan downloads.  When it comes to software, Microsoft, Adobe, Intuit and the other big players already withstand open piracy in Asia, South America Africa and elsewhere.  Anyone with good web searching skills and really good virus protection software can almost always find a free copy of nearly any software product on some Eastern European server and the software companies, in spite of rampant piracy, endure.

Of course, software companies who make millions upon millions of dollars selling their products to corporations in the US, Canada, the EU and Australia and New Zealand who typically don’t flaunt copyright laws or, like Microsoft, Corel, AOL and others, get paid for software that comes pre-installed on new computers before the less copyright minded end users even get hold of their products can withstand a firestorm of Antiguan copyright free copies of their products.

What about the AT companies?

Like any market segment that sells relatively high priced products to a small number of consumers, the AT vendors feel the pain of piracy much more than do their consumer product cousins.  Companies who make very high priced vertical market products can get badly hurt by a short term slip in their revenues.  Screen reader vendors who find a lot of people downloading cracked copies of their software can literally go bankrupt if a large enough portion of their would be consumers choose to ignore copyright law, forego official technical support and download the products for free or little cost from a tiny nation retaliating against the US government’s refusal to comply with a treaty it did a lot to create.

Many people with vision impairments lament the high prices of AT products and scream about the unfair notion that screen reader vendors live high on the hog of windfall profits.  The economics of the industry, however, is quite different than the perception.  A company that makes screen readers must pay software engineers, quality assurance engineers, documentation and training specialists, product managers, technical support technicians and all others necessary to build software products at the same rate as their mainstream competitors.  While everyone I know who makes screen readers for a living has a lot of pride in their work and a far greater sense of purpose than people who make quantitative equity analysis programs or accounting packages, they also have families, mortgages, car payments and the same living costs as everyone else.  AT companies cannot ask their people to work for the warm and fuzzy feeling they get by making software whose users find so important.  They can’t ask their employees to try to eat prestige.  They are also not charities and, if they don’t make money for their investors, they won’t last very long.

I can already hear some of you arguing that this proves that the current model of making assistive technology products is broken.  I can hear the cries of the open source people and of those who believe that screen readers should be built into operating systems.  Unfortunately, VoiceOver by Apple isn’t mature enough to support all of the programs blind people need at work.  The GNU/Linux gnome based screen readers are hardly more than demos.  So, for now, the model we got is the only game in town and if a trade war hurts the screen reader vendors dramatically, any kind of innovation, any kind of progress and any kind of future for many blinks will immediately go on hold.

Please, write to the Commerce Department and suggest that they follow the WTO ruling and stop being so damned arrogant.  Just because the US has the money and power does not mean that it can pick and choose the international laws it chooses to follow without suffering consequences.  We, as Americans, need to stop the hypocrisy and accept the rule of law.  Where’s Bob Barr when you need him?

As sometimes happens, I woke up today without a topic for a Blind Confidential article and haven’t the motivation to go through the piles of articles I keep in folders to search for inspiration.  Instead, I’ll do a random musings piece about topics I’ve found interesting of late and see if anything of value comes out of it.  In my “real life” I have an overdue deadline for a chapter for a book about Assistive Technology that I am contributing to (my topic is audio games) and I don’t feel overly motivated to finish it either.  Thus, it’s one of those days that we all experience where we lack the drive to get started and just want to crawl back into bed.

I think I’ll start with the case of Charles Taylor, the former strongman dictator of Liberia currently on trial for crimes against humanity in Africa.  Taylor had lived in exile in Nigeria since 2003 and, recently, when the Nigerian government negotiated a deal to turn him over to the tribunal, he managed to escape and attempted to leave the country.

  Many years ago, you can look this up; Charles Taylor sat in a prison in the United States, charged with various war crimes, crimes against humanity and some other rather nasty things.  Taylor escaped from his captors in the US and managed to find his way out of the country, back to Liberia and resumed leadership of his outlaw army.  He regained control of Liberia, torturing the citizens in a manner that would make Saddam feel sick.  My question is, how much more competent is Nigerian law enforcement than that in the US?  He escaped from both but the Nigerians recaptured him while the US managed to let him slip through our dragnet, cross an ocean and take control of another nation.  

Moving on, I’ve been reading Kevin Phillips latest book, American Theocracy” in which he describes how the religious right has managed to take control of the US government, electing its leader, George W. Bush, to the white house and, although a minority in the country, has managed also to take control of the congress and many state governments.  Phillips, way back during the sixties, worked for that unabashed liberal Richard Nixon and developed his, now famous, “Southern Strategy” which led to the hegemony of the ex-confederate states.  As he designed the program, his recent books, “American Dynasty,” about the Bush family, and “American Theocracy” about the reign of the religious right certainly fall into his area of expertise.  I just wonder if Phillips also feels that he’s unleashed a monster and feels that, indeed, Prometheus has become unbound.

Recently, I taught an occupational therapy class at a local university.  I talked about my area of expertise, assistive technology for people with vision impairments and various hardware and software products.  Much of my lecture felt like a sales pitch for Freedom Scientific products as I know them better than any of the others.  I did get to talk about some futuristic ideas (like the haptics concept I mentioned yesterday and 3D audio which I’ve written about in previous articles).  I had never taught at the college level before so this experience created anxiety but, when it ended, I felt I had enjoyed it.

After the class, I went into the lab with the forty three students, forty young women between the ages of 18 and 22 and three men set out to learn various things by playing with different assistive devices and such.  One of the young women approached and sat in the chair next to me.  She asked, I swear this quote is verbatim, “Can blind men really tell what a girl looks like just by touching her wrist like in the movie Ray?”

“Don’t stand, don’t Stand, don’t stand so close to me…” played loudly in my head.  Thoughts of Lewis Carroll and Cheshire cats played over and over in my increasingly clouding brain.  Nabokov, Lolita, Henry Higgins, Harry and Maude, “Lot’s of chocolate for me to eat…” Rubin, Rubin, my mind flooded with images of wild punk rock parties, chocolate syrup, Oh God!  Better think about baseball!

I couldn’t help myself, wisecracks come built into the DNA of us Jersey guys, I said, “No, we have to touch much more to get a real idea for what a woman looks like.”

She took my hand and asked, “Can you show me?”

At this point, the brain went into overload.  I, a crusty, middle aged, grey haired, middle aged, highly neurotic nerd had received an invitation to grope my way around a young, impressionable coed.  “You can keep your California girls,” I thought, “Florida wins hands down.”  Then, what’s left of the self preservation portion of my cerebral cortex took control, I thought of my career at this institution of higher learning and seemingly low moral standards.  I thought of the harassment suit.  I thought bye-bye PhD and hello, door to door JAWS salesman.  I stuttered out, “No,” my id screamed as loudly as ever before, “but I can describe it to you.”  Thus, I gave my first ever private lesson in the blind guy groping method without actually fondling a sweet young woman.

When I told this story to a female assistant dean at the college, she laughed, suggested that, “as it was in the name of science…” laughed some more and then reminded me that I had a wife of nearly nineteen years.  Poor Susan hadn’t entered my mind during the actual event.  I need to work on this with my therapist.

On the technology front, NPR reported last night that Apple has released “Boot Camp,” a program that will let you run Windows on any of the Intel Macintoshes.  I wonder if I can run JAWS in Windows on A Mac Mini while running VoiceOver on OSX while running outspoken on Carbon while running SpeakUp in the Unix console?  If anyone sees or hears evidence of such an experiment, please tell me about it as this would certainly make the $599 for the Mac Mini (even less with university discount) worth just for the novelty value of having four screen readers running at once.

I got the audible.com new releases and recommendations email yesterday.  Noam Chomsky’s new book, “Failed States” topped the list.  The Phillips book of which I’ve read about half of the 17 hours of audio, although very interesting, can approach a level of density that one can cut with a knife.  Phillips, both a scholar and political scientist, makes providing citations an obsession so the reading gets chopped up by the mention of all of his sources.  Chomsky, listed as the world’s number one intellectual in two recent surveys (one of any participant who found his or her way to the BBC web site and the other of purely academics from around the world) and who came in third (behind Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton) in a BBC survey that asked, “Who would you choose as president of the world?” [George W. Bush did not make the top 50 on the list.] sits atop the list of my personal living American heroes (expanded to worldwide, Chomsky falls behind Mandela and His Holiness the Dalai Lama) writes with intensity and density as well.  Can I possibly survive reading one directly after the other or should I look for some brain candy like a suspense story by Dan Brown?

I’ve noticed an increasing number of blindness related blogs popping up.  Please, send me a note or post a comment if you would like BC to link to you.

I have a few other ideas for future BC articles for which I hadn’t the motivation to write about today.  I’ll list them here and readers, if you feel so inclined, can suggest which you would find most compelling.  I definitely plan on unleashing Gonz Blinko on a number more adventures around the world, some related to AT stuff and some not.  I’ve sketches in my mind for two short stories featuring Samhara (Blinko’s African lesbian attorney) that don’t involve Gonz but I don’t know whose voice I should use to write them.  Yesterday, I thought of a character called James Blink: Secret Agent JJG, but haven’t come up with a story for him.  I have another Carl Hiaasan inspired Florida weird story in mind called, “Sex, Drugs and Explosives” about Floridian blinks who, like everything else in the Sunshine State, is just a little more bizarre than anywhere else. On the research side of things, I’ve tons of ideas I’d like to toss out that maybe someone can pick up and do some tinkering with as a project of their own; academic freedom has loosened my brain a little and I find myself in a near constant storm of concepts.  On the charity side, I’ll probably write something about the first quarter progress of PPO and its fundraising blitz, Ben Weiss and AI^2 have pulled into first place for 2005 and second place overall for helping PPO raise much needed cash money.  I’ve thought of doing a piece on companies whose stupidity put them into bankruptcy but they blamed Microsoft anyway.  I’ve also thought of doing a piece about AT companies who have failed badly or went out of business due to their own stupidity but blamed Freedom Scientific anyway.  Having recently read Humanware’s end of year financials (they are online) I have thought of offering theories as to why they have they results they do.  And, as always, I’ll write about whatever comes to mind and things that come over Blind News (who, by the way, usually repost Blind Confidential for their readers but missed us yesterday) and ideas that come from emails, phone calls and random items from the radio and television.

Have fun…

If you’ve read my article in the March Access World or some of the previous entries here in Blind Confidential, you undoubtedly know that I find the idea of exploring the use of video and audio game technology in next generation user interfaces for people with vision impairments.  I’ve spent much more time exploring the audio possibilities than things tactile, primarily due to the high prices of refreshable tactile graphics and haptics hardware.  Recently, though, Blind News sent along a press release about a very exciting development in this area from, where else, the video game industry.

Three dimensional haptics devices have always been extremely expensive but Sand Diego based, Novint Technologies, Inc., will, in 2007, release a new version of its Falcon product that may change the world as we know it.  Other desktop haptics products currently deployed primarily for research or very high end computer based training applications, cost approximately $20,000 and more advanced versions can run into six figures.  The new Falcon, which will join the myriad game controllers in your local consumer electronics store, will carry an MSRP under $100.  When we discuss prices and economies of scale, the $35 billion video game market can make this possible.

The Falcon differentiates itself from the current generation of vibration or force feedback game controllers by bringing a profoundly greater level of sensory resolution than anything previously available to the gaming community.  This “toy” updates its controller (the Falcon supports switchable handles and such to meet different applications) 1000 times per second (1 kHz) and has .5 mm resolution in the x (right/left), y  (up/down) and z (forward/backward) axis.  The company’s web site provides a lot of information about the product so look there for additional reading.

What does this mean for a blind user?

Although I didn’t come across any mention of assistive technology in the press release or on the web site, the potential applications for such a device in the world of technology for people with vision impairments can have Earth shattering effects.

Think of everything you, as a blind person, touch and how much information you learn from the tactile sensation.  Now, for starters, lets take a primitive three dimensional object like a sphere and, build a virtual three dimensional solid out of it by making thousands of little squares with each side no more than .5mm.  This won’t create a perfect sphere as we aren’t curving our little squares but, rather, angling them against each other to create a wire frame sphere with .5 mm resolution in every direction.  Recent experiments show that the typical human can feel distinctions at even higher resolutions but, let’s remember folks; this is a $100 device.  Taking hold of the Falcon controller, the user can move their hand in virtual space and feel the shape of the sphere.  If we add some additional attributes to our ball, the user will be able to detect things like texture (the rough surface of a basketball comes to mind in light of the Gators tremendous victory last night), hardness (is this ball made of steel or is it a nerf?), if the sphere is moveable or many kinds of tactile attributes that I can’t think of off the top of my head.

Now, let’s take this idea to a more practical application like observing art.  With any of today’s relatively low cost laser scanning devices, one can capture a wire frame image of virtually any sculpture (any solid object for that matter) and store it in a database of .5 mm squares.  Somebody who has far better integral calculus skills than I can figure out the surface area of Venus De Milo or Rodin’s Thinker in square half millimeters but I’d assume this would be a pretty large amount of data.  Fortunately, the fact that virtually all current computers come with DVD drives means that cheap media can be used to deliver all of these tiny squares.

I would envision a fast, lower resolution, navigation mode so a user doesn’t need to feel every .55 mm from David’s toe to his head and that art experts should be consulted to add the attribute information but, given a device like this Falcon, actually, given two of them so a user can feel their way around Atlas with both hands, and Microsoft’s Direct X API the 3D touch software shouldn’t be too hard to build.

Needless to say, I can’t wait to get my paws on one of these devices so I can start hacking for fun and building my own virtual art gallery out of little squares that I generate myself.  I’m also interested in hearing what audio game uber-hacker David Greenwood can do with a Falcon or two.

Afterward

Everyone who cares about issues regarding inclusion and peace should do whatever their belief system suggests to remember Dr. Martin Luther King today, the anniversary of his assassination.  NPR reported this morning that since Coretta’s death contributions for the MLK memorial statue to go onto the mall in DC have increased.  You might also think about sending them some money too so we can start integrating our national collection of memorials.

Those of interested in inclusion, peace, civil rights and the arts can also celebrate as poet, leader and one of the most beautiful Americans, Maya Angelou turns 78 today.  With a name as pretty and a voice as strong as hers could she have been anything other than a poet?

Finally, my technology gripe du jour: Does anyone know of a “What the hell is this, why do I want it and how can I get rid of it” software product?  I’m using my relatively new Toshiba laptop to do most things these days.  Toshiba, like all other computer manufacturers, now bundle so much crap, some of which loads at start-up that it’s become difficult to determine whether or not I am being hit by some SpyWare or some other pre-installed program is just causing trouble.  We recently installed a new version of the McAfee Wireless Home Network Security program.  Now, its firewall is complaining about all sorts of junk trying to access the Internet.  What the hell is MetaMail and why do I want or not want it?  There are also loads of these pre-installed turds all over my hard disk that don’t seem to appear in the Add/Remove programs list in Control Panel.  

When I select AOL, a service for which I have no need, in Add/Remove, it tells me that I have to install it before I can uninstall it.  If it ain’t installed, why is it in my Start Menu?  Sure, I can go into the folder and delete it manually and edit my start menu entries but what other turds are stinking up my registry from all of this junk?

I’ve owned many a computer that had less hard disk space than is required to hold the programs this Toshiba comes with pre-packaged.  As much of this doo-doo cannot work with a screen reader, I will never use it but I’ve no way of getting rid of some of it.  Please help.

I’ve written a Blind Confidential item almost every day since January 15. Thus, April starts the second quarter of our existence so I thought I would look back at the formative quarter and talk a little about how BC has found its voice and place in our community.

I would like to start by wishing everyone who read Saturday’s post a Happy April Fools Day. Truly observant readers noticed that the first letters of the first sentence, “’He’s a proud president, yelling about products relentlessly in live forums or over large systems discussing anything you care about assistive technologies,’
reads a quote in the ,London Financial Wire Service report about Doug Geoffray, CEO of GW Micro on the successful sale of his company to Microsoft,” spells out “Happy April Fools Day.” I stole this linguistic trick from the late genius, George Plimpton, who started an article in Sports Illustrated about a fictional baseball player using the same idea. If anyone actually reads the story and believes it could actually be true, I recommend they seek psychiatric help as soon as possible. The truly bizarre quotes and the thought of me getting Bill Gates out of bed should have triggered a notice of the date. If you were fooled just because you glanced at the item, please read in greater depth in the future, you can’t always judge a blog entry by its title.

Now for a few “thank yous” to people who really helped Blind Confidential grow from its first day when it only got 9 hits to today where more than 1000 people receive it on a daily basis. First, my friends Roselle and Gordon for all of their help with the HTML stuff, I am qualified to judge the accessibility of HTML and can repair some problems with a lot of hand holding from a product like Ramp but throw me into raw HTML and my ears glaze over. I would also like to thank friends including Will Pearson, Lisa Yayla and Mike Calvo for sending me items to write about as, without some prompting, I run out of ideas sometimes. The guys at Blind News have been an incredibly valuable resource (where have they been the past few days?) who have provoked a pile of my favorite stories. I would also like to thank all of my old friends from the AT world for forwarding BC posts onto their friends who have now become regular readers. I must thank the folks who have posted comments here either supporting, correcting or criticizing my posts, the debate with Peter Korn over accessibility APIs and, most recently, with the Macintosh militants have been fun and we can’t leave out Will Pearson’s terrific scientific explanations of some of the theory I present here.

It might be difficult to notice from the previous three posts but Blind Confidential has been trying to move away from assistive technology issues and do more about general items of interest to me and, hopefully, other blinks and our friends alike. The April Fools gag was premeditated a day in advance but most topics are selected the morning I write the piece so may contain factual errors. The style I use to build BC entries is to pick a topic and then sit down with MS Word, my laptop and a cup of very strong coffee. I then pretty much perform literary improvisation on the subject and see how it comes out. This is sort of like “riffing” in music, when I play blues with a friend, we might set out with a riff or two in mind and then just let the jam flow. At the end of one of these sessions, usually an hour or so from the start, I then run the spell checker and reread the item. The only changes I make upon rereading are to fix truly contorted sentences and statements I know to be absolutely untrue (if it’s not one of the fiction entries). Thus, people find errors in these articles which should be viewed as commentary and not journalism. I write “creative” non-fiction essays which means I don’t let the facts get too much in the way of a good story or else I write short fictional stories which, by nature, aren’t factual. Please, therefore, enjoy these posts for their entertainment value and their general themes which I do truly believe.

Now, onto the factual correction of the day. In the article on the inaccessibility of the iPod, I was absolutely incorrect in the assertion that UIA was not going to make it for the official Vista release. UIA is already in the alpha distributions of Vista and will be included in the commercial release as well. I had misread a piece after CSUN that said that most programs will not support UIA when Vista is released and, therefore, MSAA is still the best game in town. This is of course also true for the Macintosh and gnome accessibility APIs which, if a program is not written specifically for Cocoa or using the gnome API, it is also not ready for prime time with a screen reader. I apologize to my friends at Microsoft and to anyone else who may have been misled by this error.

What to expect from Blind Confidential in the future?

I think you can bet that there will be more fiction, satire and parody. There will be more items about discrimination, transportation and other issues I find compelling. Art will play a big role as will music and, to a lesser extent, technology. I don’t want to write about current AT products anymore as I’m a little tired of fighting the battles. Thus, when I write about technology, it will fall more on the side of theory and conjecture than a discussion of specific products out there. I’ve fought too many religious wars over technology: Windows v. Mac v. GNU, proprietary v. open or free, patent v. discovery, JAWS v. all other blindness products and many others. I’ve also been involved in the document accessibility wars having sent hundreds, if not a thousand or more emails to webmasters with pointers to W3C/WAI and Deque Systems so they can fix their sites or PDF or whatever broken digital format that I need to slog through a pile of crap to find my point of interest. I’m tired of fighting the battles, I just want to have some fun, invent some very cool new stuff and write articles that inform, entertain and incite in my spare time.

Finally, I want to state for the official record that I have no technological religion. I do not pray at the altars of Microsoft, Apple, Sun or any other technology company. All three of these companies as well as Dell, Sony, HP and others, including Apple, have, from time to time, sold me tools with which I can do my job. This morning, I received an email from a very smart guy who said that because a particular task was impossible to perform with Safari and the Macintosh VoiceOver screen reader that he would forego performing that task until the Apple guys got it right. He points to unethical business practices carried out by Microsoft to build their enormous market share. I don’t follow corporate law and don’t understand anti-trust laws very well so I won’t comment on Microsoft’s history. I will point out that anyone looking for “unethical” business practices should, perhaps, start by boycotting Chiquita (formerly United Fruit Corporation), Kimberly-Clark, Coca Cola, Exxon/Mobil and other businesses who have, throughout their history, hired their own mercenaries to kill actual human beings who tried to ask for a living wage but were unfortunate enough to have chosen their parents incorrectly and grew up in some third world backwater where corporations were given free reign by corrupt puppet governments. What about the companies notorious for discrimination, Denny’s and Cracker Barrel come to mind? What about Wal-Mart and its tremendously poor environmental record coupled with being the defendant in the single largest sex discrimination case in history?

Also, why don’t we blinks stand in solidarity against companies who blatantly discriminate against us? This list would take years to write down as it probably includes 99.99% of all of the corporations worldwide. In a recent survey done by the UK’s RNIB, although the EU, US, Canada, Australia and New Zeeland (a ton of the money in the world) have laws requiring web accessibility, more than 98.4% of web sites in the world have some to many accessibility problems. Why don’t we fight about the corporate practices of companies who build barriers to our success with complete disregard whether warned or not? Take a company like Intuit, for instance, they have received thousands of letters, phone calls and emails asking for them to improve their accessibility but they absolutely refuse to lift a finger.

As Ted henter taught me, technology companies provide tools and it is up to the users to put them to good use. Microsoft is not the enemy when it comes to blindness issues. They are a huge corporation who makes the software that most people with jobs need to use daily. I can’t go out and tell the hundreds of thousands of blinks who use Windows based screen readers to stop working until Apple gets around to filling their requirements. As of today, April 3, 2006, Microsoft Windows XP (Second Edition) is the most robust platform on which a blind person can perform their job, do their academic work, perform research, play audio games and perform most any other computing task they require. Maybe, someday, Apple or gnome will surpass the Windows platform and, possibly, there are already some specific instances where VO or ORCA or IBM’s thing may work better than JAWS or Window-Eyes but the overall package still tips heavily on the Microsoft side.

So, if you want to boycott something, how about Union Carbide for the 30,000 or more people they killed and refused to compensate? How about reading Professor Green’s “IBM and the Holocaust” or the grand exposé of Bayer and their collaboration with Hitler?

Now, back off of my soap box. I suppose readers can detect from my tone that these battles generate real passion on all sides and, frankly, I’ve run out of the energy. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading the first quarter of BC as much as I have had writing it.

Happy hacking and go Gators!

“He’s a proud president, yelling about products relentlessly in live forums or over large systems discussing anything you care about assistive technologies,” reads a quote in the ,London Financial Wire Service report about Doug Geoffray, CEO of GW Micro on the successful sale of his company to Microsoft

Amazing as it may seem to Blind Confidential readers, the wire services reported that Microsoft completed its acquisition of GW Micro shortly after the closing bell in the New York markets yesterday. “Now that Apple has included VoiceOver in its operating system,” stated a smiling Rob Sinclair, head of Microsoft’s Access Technology Group, (ATG), “Microsoft had to respond by adding one to Windows.”

Adding that, “Now providing accessible technology built into the operating system is a competitive requirement, we set out to find the ideal companion for the Windows line of products,” said Sinclair in a poorly attended press conference held near the New York Stock Exchange Building. “We felt that Window-Eyes rock solid reputation met the quality standards we at Microsoft have come to represent.”

Geoffray stated from the podium, “GW has always been closer to Microsoft than any of the other AT companies and have been hoping for this transaction for many years now. We were the first true believers in MSAA and, today, our hard work and loyalty has paid off.”

When asked about the poor attendance at the press conference by a CNN reporter, Sinclair responded, “We wanted to make the announcement as quickly as we could. Unfortunately, it came after the bell on a Friday at the end of the quarter so few people are still in the city to cover the announcement. We tried to get Stevie Wonder to come to celebrate this merger between the two companies but he couldn’t act on 19 hours notice.”

Geoffray added, “Sadly, accessibility isn’t sexy and blindness products even less so. If Microsoft came here to announce that they had acquired Oracle, for instance, I’m sure this place would be jammed.”

Blind Confidential, one of the few news sources to pick up the story, was able to get a pair of very high level exclusive interviews. Late last night, I talked to Bill Gates who, asleep when I reached him having finally called in enough favors to get his private home telephone number, said, “GW what? George Washington Bridge? Blind who?” And, then he hung up the phone.

I was also able to get the opportunity to talk to Mike Lollar, a blind long time GW employee who, over the sounds of a very wild party yelled, “We’re rich, we’re rich, we’re rich!” And then hung up.

Back at the press conference, Geoffray smiling answered a Village Voice reporter’s query, “Actually, I don’t know anything about rent control in New York City. It sounds like a good idea though.”

Sinclair took control of the situation and said that soon, if any user holds down the Windows key along with the letter U, they will hear, “Windows will now be your eyes and will tell you what you need to know.” He then demonstrated Window-Eyes using Internet Explorer, Microsoft Word and a few other applications.

After the press conference ended, I caught Doug Geoffray on his cell phone and asked him what he planned to do now? “I’m going to Disneyland!” Well, although the official dollar figures were not announced, rumor has it that Doug can afford many trips to Disney and any other resorts he finds desirable for a long time to come.

Blind Confidential would like to congratulate all involved on successfully completing this complex transaction.

Afterward

Bruce Bailey wrote to me privately yesterday suggesting that my comments about his criticism of Jay Leventhal’s review of Apple’s VoiceOver screen reader was unfair as I did not include pointers to his sources and quoted him out of context. I can see his point and suggest that readers who want to read his rebuttal to Jay’s article go directly to Bruce’s page: http://home.adelphia.net/~bmss/vo/aw060505fix.html.

I still can’t come up with a compelling reason for a blind person to abandon Windows with their favorite screen reader or, if they prefer, a text based GNU/Linux with SpeakUp or one of the other text screen access tools for that platform. Both provide a vastly wider range of programs one can use than does Apple with VoiceOver and, therefore, a vastly greater number of opportunities for their users.

Finally, Jay did publish some corrections to his review of VoiceOver in the November Access World. I haven’t read them so, if you care, go to the AW web site and read them yourself.

[Does it occur to anyone that my criticism of Bruce’s criticism of Jay’s criticism of Apple’s screen reader might just take the concept of criticism a step too far? Especially in the light that, today, I’m responding to Bruce’s criticism of my criticism of Bruce’s criticism of Jay’s criticism of Apple’s screen reader. We definitely have far too much time on our hands.]

Frankly, after thinking about the Apple question for three straight days, I’m pretty burned out on the topic. Yesterday, I did enjoy a great nostalgia rush as I reminisced about the fun I had on the New York City and then Boston/Cambridge hacker scenes. The great times of stealing 2400 baud modems from the phone company as private citizens weren’t permitted anything faster than 300 baud by FCC regulation. All of those amazing Chinese, Indian, Burmese, Sushi, Vietnamese, Italian, Greek, Persian, Nepalese, Tibetan – you name the cuisine – meals with rapid fire, high test intellectual debates over whatever topics came into mind. The parties at the Cambridge Brewing Company, fetish night at the Man Ray, Black Leather events at MacWorld conferences, the rally outside of the Cambridge Lotus headquarters with speakers like Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Noam Chomsky, Richard Stallman and other intellectual giants who stood for information freedom.

All of that, however, ended decades ago. Now, I stand for peace, inclusion and use my talents to push the technological envelope forward for people with vision impairments. As Ted henter often reminds me, I don’t actually “help” anyone but, rather, I make tools with which people can help themselves. I hope you enjoy the tools I make and that you’ve enjoyed the first three months of Blind Confidential as much as I have enjoyed writing the stories.

Please feel free to send me emails or post comments about ideas for articles in the future. As I’ve mentioned here before, I want to stick more closely to the gonzo/satirical stuff than to the esoterica of assistive technology. Today, with the important announcement by MS and GW, I had to write a straight ahead piece about AT but I really prefer the fun stuff and hope to focus on it in the future.

The item I wrote yesterday about the iPod and Apple’s poor history of investing in accessibility seems to have struck a nerve in our community.  Blind Confidential received more hits in the past 24 hours than any other single day in our three month run.  I also received a lot of private emails about the subject and thank everyone for participating.  As I’ve said before, I don’t have the answers, I just like to make sure we ask the questions and hopefully do so in an informative and entertaining manner.  Today’s entry will contain some response to the comments posted yesterday and, in the name of full disclosure, a little more about my anti-Apple bias.

Way back in the late eighties and early nineties, a lot of IP law regarding software had yet to be settled.  Thus, Federal courts got jammed up with cases regarding user interface copyright and whether or not patent law applied to software.  Richard Stallman and I founded an organization called “League for Programming Freedom” that dedicated itself to opposing UI copyright and software patents.  We won the UI copyright battle in the Supreme Court in the landmark Lotus v. Borland case but, sadly, lost the battle over the fundamentals of software patents.  You can google for “Patently Absurd” an article I wrote a lifetime ago and probably still find it on the MIT and other free thinking web sites today.

How did Apple figure in all of this?  

After Microsoft released Windows 3.1, Apple Computer filed suit in Judge Walker’s court claiming that they had a copyright on things like icons, point and click procedures, overlapping windows and a whole lot of other items standard to any graphical user interface.  Apple wanted to become the terminal point in a legacy started at MIT with Greenblatt’s Windowing System (circa mid 1960s) for the original Lisp Machine.  Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) filled with students of John McCarthy (Stanford), Greenblatt and Minsky (MIT) who all got to hack on the original Lisp box (on which the first Lisp based emacs would make its appearance) took the basic ideas and created the Xerox Star, the first computer with a graphical user interface to attempt to enter the commercial market.  Then, Steve Jobs visited PARC and his eyes lit up, first came the Lisa (how many of you geeks ever touched one of them?) and then, in 1984, with memorable Super Bowl advertisements and all, Apple took on Big Brother and released the Macintosh.

When Microsoft developed windows, Jobs ego got in the way of his memory and history itself.  Suddenly, as if Greenblatt and Xerox never existed, Jobs and Apple insisted they should own the graphical user interface concepts entirely and argued that, rather than admitting they too stood on the shoulders of giants, rounded up a bunch of lawyers and went to Federal Court.  Meanwhile, on the East Coast, Lotus had filed suit against Borland over Quatro Pro providing a “1 2 3” mode to ease a users learning curve if they switched spreadsheets, Lotus having forgotten that they took their UI lock stock and barrel from Danny Bricklan.  The Supremes ruled against Lotus while Apple v. Microsoft remained in the lower courts and all UI copyright ended suddenly.

During these years of IP battles, Stallman coined the phrase, “Innovate, Don’t Litigate!”  Which I still use pretty often today.  Back in the days of the LPF, I thought of the old fanged Apple logo that went onto buttons, coffee mugs, stickers and all sorts of other items surrounded by the phrase, “Keep Your Lawyers off My Computer!”  (I did not do the drawing as I don’t have that sort of talent.)  I was also the one who designed the Day Glo stickers depicting a nineteenth century, “wild west” prostitute emblazoned with the slogan, “Only a Whore Charges for a Look and a Feel – Boycott Apple and Lotus” which our small organization paid homeless people in cash to plaster all over downtown and the Las Vegas strip during a COMDEX convention.

Needless to say, there is little love lost between old time Apple people and me.  So, when I got into the AT biz and Steve made his proclamation that “speech technology is superfluous to our mission” I already had a distaste for them and their poor to non-existent accessibility didn’t do much to help change my mind about the company located at One Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California.

Onto the comments I received yesterday:

Prior to the comment posted anonymously that mentioned a few other portable digital media players, I hadn’t heard of the open source rockbox project.  A few people mentioned the project via email as well.  The latest version of Rockbox apparently works on an iPod and has optional self voicing menus as well.  I didn’t have much time to research this project but, in my cursory look, Rockbox does not seem to include a speech synthesizer so you can navigate the program menus but not the content.  As an iPod contains a ton of storage and my collection of recordings spans from Glenn Gould playing Bach to Eminem insulting me for buying his album, I really need to have access to the content I am about to play as you might guess that I would be in different moods when I would select Hogwood’s rendition of Beethoven’s Ninth or when I might want to listen to Miles Davis and his super cool 1957 line up.  

Also, it comes as no surprise that the Rockbox developers build the software voluntarily and without any notable support from Apple.  If their accessibility solution falls into, “let the community do it” they don’t really have an actual accessibility strategy.

Another anonymous comment called into question the facts in Jay Leventhal’s Access World review of the Apple screen reader.  As I have known Jay for a long time, respect his opinions and find that he can be neutral to a fault, I tend to give him the benefit of any doubts.  Having also recently published an article in Access World (this month’s issue if you’re interested) I have gone through their rigorous vetting process and feel strongly that they do very solid fact checking in their publication.

With that said, though, following the link included in the comment, I first noticed that I had a factual error regarding Jay’s review in yesterday’s BC post, I said it ran in December when, in fact, it appeared in the September 2005 Access World.  Some of the factual errors listed about Jay’s article have little importance to the reader.  Some, however, stand out as fairly major failures in the editing of the review.

The page linked to in yesterday’s comment points out that Jay describes the Macintosh he used for testing with highly ambiguous terms and mixes up some features of desktop and laptop Macintosh models.  This could certainly cause confusion in the mind of a consumer and should have been caught in the editing process.  

Jay’s critic points out that the Access World article slights the VoiceOver documentation and suggests that rather than snippets of information that the documentation included on the Macintosh, supplemented by the online help system is quite robust.  As I have not seen or tried to read either the help system that comes with OSX or checked into the online documentation either, I cannot make an informed comment.  I will, however, state that one man’s “robust” might be another’s “snippet” when neither Jay nor anonymous provides a baseline standard for screen reader documentation.  I’ll put this criticism into the category of subjectivity rather than fact.

Our critic writes, “The equivalent of the Windows desktop on Apple computer is, of course, the Mac OS Desktop.  For users migrating from Windows, Apple has good material describing What’s What, What’s Where.
There is readily available information about the OS X Desktop and Dock.

“The Dock doesn’t have a close analogy in Windows, but it might be considered as analogous to a hybrid between the Windows Task Bar and Start Menu.”  In response to Jay’s statement, “The equivalent of the Windows desktop on Apple computers is the Dock.”  I don’t know the Macintosh well enough to make any comment on this.  Perhaps, I should visit the Apple salon store over in Tampa and learn a bit more.

The web page criticizing Jay’s article quotes Access World as saying, ” This editor [TextEdit] does not include a spell checker or other advanced word-processing functions,” and then goes onto list a number of very advanced word processing features, including spell checking.  As I have quoted Jay in BC when commenting on VoiceOver not supporting a word processor with a spell checker, I must retract my earlier statements as it sounds as if both Jay and I are incorrect in our assertions.  I’m curious, though, does VoiceOver make using the spell checker convenient enough so as to be obvious, like the way JAWS or Window-Eyes do with MS Word, or does it require some sort of convoluted procedure to access it?

Bruce Bailey, aka anonymous, has a very nice collection of pointers to articles about the Macintosh VoiceOver screen reader that you can get to by backspacing over the end of the URL posted in yesterday’s comment.  Bruce is definitely a smart guy and his web site contains a lot of compelling reasons to take a look at the Mac but probably not enough to cause one to run out and buy one.

As for the criticism of Jay’s review, I find that the question of the spell checker existing or not falls solidly into the important category.  I would describe most of the other points, though, as either subjective (in the case of the documentation question) or editorial sloppiness which is rare for Jay but certainly should be noted as it can cause a bit of confusion.

Why do I hold Apple to a higher standard than other companies who make portable media players?

I know that few marketing materials actually tell the whole truth and that even fewer mission statements and corporate images have any basis in reality but Apple has always gone far out of its way to describe its products as the most inclusionary and easy to use.  They have done everything to promote their “outsider” image from having their CEO appear barefoot at COMDEX to suggesting that their computers had so much power that they might actually be weapons.

I don’t fall into the category of the naïve, I don’t believe in either Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny so why do I occasionally fall for Apple’s hype?  

The original Macintosh slogan, perhaps one of the greatest piles of horse manure in history, described the lunchbox computer as, “The computer for the rest of us.”  In fact, a slogan like, “The computer for the best of us,” would suit it better.  Back then, the under-powered, tiny screen, low memory device cost twice what one would pay for a name brand DOS machine and had fewer than a quarter of the applications.  As John Dvorak described it in a PC magazine article back in the eighties, “It’s a yuppie machine, a closed box easy to use computer for dopes.”

The old Apple II machines had provided us hacker types with a dream machine.  We could bring it home, rip off its skin, design and install our own wire wrapped boards that could do everything from really high resolution graphics to speech synthesis.  Then came the Mac, an entirely closed system.  We couldn’t get at the OS and the Andy Herzfeld, ROM QuickDraw primitives were hidden from us.  Clearly, Apple had introduced a computer for the elite.

Meanwhile, Big Blue, the Big Brother of the 1984 Apple Super Bowl advertisements, provided us with a completely open system; we could replace interrupts at will, easily disassemble the BIOS and make incredible hardware and software hacks which, ultimately, led to its dominance.  Apple took the hackers out of the picture so only programmers who liked following rules could write software for it.  JAWS for DOS, Vocal-Eyes and all of the other screen readers that blinks could use to do jobs, get educations and learn their own way to hack had become impossible on an Apple platform.

Over the years, Apple has continued to promote its outsider image and, to me, most offensive of all was its advertising campaign that exploited true iconoclasts who dedicated and, in some cases lost, their lives to breaking down barriers and working toward a more inclusive world.  Gandhi, John Lennon, Martin and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, all appear in relatively recent Apple advertisements.  I wonder why they didn’t choose to include Helen Keller or Stevie Wonder to promote their products?

Afterward

Beating up Apple two days in a row makes me nostalgic for the old days of hanging around the AI lab.  We’d have all sorts of take out from restaurants specializing in foods from around the globe.  The Free Software/Project Gnu/League for Programming Freedom gang, rms, wojo, mmm, hack, bfox, sgs, gsz, gjs, cdh and so many others would sit around the ninth floor play room, chowing on global cuisine, guzzling Cokes and green tea and talking about the information anarchism for which we all stood.

Richard Stallman, the effective founder of the free software/open source movement, the author of the GPL and emacs itself, still stands for everything we believed in.  I don’t know where most of the others went, I write these articles and work on technologies for us blinks and, while I still hold patent free software covered by GPL as the ideal, I put breaking barriers for blind people first.  My free software ideals have definitely been compromised to my ambitions of fighting the techno-discrimination against people with vision impairments.  I sure do miss those wild days when IP law was still up for grabs and we didn’t need make such compromises.  

Remember, it was Woz who “liberated” the source code to Bill Gates’ BASIC interpreter and published it in issue one of Dr. Dobbs Journal.  Boy, those Apple guys have come a long way since then.

Yesterday, I engaged in an email conversation with an old buddy from the blindness community with whom I hadn’t communicated in well over a year.  We got a bit into the old Windows v. GNU/Linux/Macintosh discussion and which may emerge as the next accessibility leader.

We agreed that, today, with an excellent collection of AT products in all categories, Windows had a substantial lead.  We then commiserated over the recent announcement that UI Automation (UIA) would not make it into the first Vista release and that AT products must continue to rely on MSAA.  As new applications will use various Vista enhancements for which there will be no MSAA, the first year after the Vista release could be pretty rocky for those of us who depend upon AT to do our jobs, get an education or just enjoy computing.

The GNU/Linux discussion went a bit differently.  We agreed that the gnome accessibility API certainly could provide an excellent amount of information to an AT product but as few applications exist to really exercise the framework, how will we know if it is usable – another chicken and egg problem.  We also questioned why it seems that, at every CSUN, the open source people have a few new demos of AT for gnome but never seem to release anything beyond an alpha test version.

This year, both IBM and Sun showed off new alpha test screen readers for the GNU/Linux platform.  Sun has ORCA and IBM has a program described by three initials which I can’t recall at the moment.  Neither talked about gnopernicus so I guess that project died on the vine.  This leaves me with the question, “Because both programs are open source and both are targeting the same platform, why do we have two alphas and zero betas?”  Why can’t we all just get along?  How many more years until we hear something described as a “released” screen reader for the gnome desktop must we wait?  How many roads must a man walk down before they call him a man?

The open source world seems to have more screen readers than users.

Finally, we get to Apple.  I really like some of the people working on their screen reader very much and don’t want to trash it as I don’t want to continue to stamp on the toes of old friends.  I will just suggest that anyone interested in it read Jay Leventhal’s article in Access World (I think it appeared in the December edition) and try to give it a whirl at an Apple salon shop at your local mall before committing to using it.

Thus, the recent future seems pretty murky.  Personally, I’ll stick with JAWS on Windows because it will not require me to learn a whole new platform and the idiosyncrasies associated with it.  I know which applications I can use and I know who I can call if I’m in a bind.

The discussion of the major platforms led us to talking about handhelds and, specifically, the “no blind person need apply” iPod.  With a variety of different accessible portables ranging from talking cell phones to the iPAQ to PAC Mate, BrailleNote and some others with accessible interfaces that can play most, if not all, multi-media formats, why does Apple remain so completely bigoted against us blinks?  Don’t the hipster blind kids have the right to destroy their hearing by playing 50 Cent at an ear shattering volume?

So, why is the iPod Inaccessible?

Let’s start by looking at some of the highlights of Apple’s history.  In 1984, Steve Jobs walked out onto the stage at a Boston Computer Society (BCS) meeting.  He placed an original, 64K, single floppy disk Macintosh on a table, clicked a few things and then stood back.  Although I lived in Boston at the time, I did not attend this event but I’ve seen it on video many times.

“Hello, I am Macintosh,” said the robotic speech synthesizer inside this oversized lunchbox with a screen.  The Macintosh, through what we later learned was the MacTalk synthesizer, continued to describe itself as Jobs stood proudly on the stage next to his baby at its first public performance.

The attendees at this general meeting of the BCS sat silently, awed by a computer who could describe itself.  Jobs went on to show the audience a WYSIWYG word processor, a paint package and a few other little doo dads that he could launch by swapping a few floppies and clicking his mouse.  The 1984 audience found his performance vexing and, by the following day, the buzz about Jobs’ new miracle machine had conquered the entire Boston/Cambridge nerd scene and the gossip grew louder each day until a few people got their hands on actual first run Macs.

To those of us with an interest in accessibility, Steve Jobs’ performance at the BCS meeting had an entirely separate impression.  The Macintosh that Steve showed the world that night included the first standard issue software speech synthesizer.  This, we thought, would rock the world.  The earthquake of excitement slowly dwindled to a mild vibration and then to silence.  While the Mac had a major screen reader component built in, it exposed so little information as to render the synthesizer useless for most real blindness applications.  I know, outspoken for the Mac came along but the screen reader later to be acquired by Alva and, more recently, permitted to die a lonely death, felt like using JAWS with only the JAWS cursor or Window-Eyes with its mouse cursor.  

Later on, as my vision deteriorated, I didn’t know about programs like JAWS and the accessibility on Windows but I did remember that Macintosh had a built in magnifier (CloseView) and a synthesizer.  So, with the help of a Mac hacker friend of mine, I set out to create my own screen reader-like utility that, with CloseView running at 10-16X magnification, I could actually use (very inefficiently) the Internet, WordPerfect and Eudora.  My utility wouldn’t win any technology awards as it simply copied selected text to the clipboard and then spouted it out through the synthesizer.  This solution, crufty as it may seem, provided me with good enough computer access to take creative writing classes at Harvard University and to keep in touch with friends and family via email.

Then, a friend of my family who also lost his vision to RP, told my dad about JAWS, Window-Eyes and the Windows solutions.  Bob (my dad) bought me a Gateway laptop, a copy of Window-Eyes and sent it up to our house in Cambridge.  My wife struggled, with the excellent assistance of Mike Lollar on the telephone, for about three hours to get Dec Talk Access 32 installed without bothering the pre-installed virus protection too badly.  I thought I had found heaven.  Within six months, it was bye-bye Harvard and hello Henter-Joyce and my full time pursuit of access technology.

So what happened to Apple between the time it showed off the first computer to ship with a standard speech synthesizer and the release of its iPod?

If you have followed the business side of the computer industry, you probably have noticed that Steve Jobs got fired and replaced by that guy from Pepsi.  The soda guy got fired and was replaced by Gil who, in turn, got fired and replaced by Steve Jobs.  Throughout all of this, Apple would create some really innovative concepts and then kill them before letting them hit the market.  They built things like the Newton about a decade before the technology had matured to a point it could be commercially viable and they floundered listlessly without a real leader at the heart of the organization.  Thus, the return of Steve meant joy in Macville, ding dong the corporate witch was dead and the dreamer had returned.  The rainbow colored Macintosh logo glowed brightly once again.

Steve Jobs, though, had learned a lot about business while in exile at NeXT Corporation and other disasters.  He had learned about saving money, cost cutting and not going too far from the path to relatively certain dollars.

One of the first moves Steve made upon his return furloughed the speech team.  Some of the most talented people in speech technology lost their jobs (none had trouble finding employment elsewhere) because, according to an official statement issued by Apple on that day, “Speech technology is superfluous to our mission.”  I remember reading this article and feeling my heart fall into my stomach.

More recently, in a move typical of Apple, they reversed direction and started a reconstituted speech team and the synthesizer and voice command control in OSX is really quite good.

Why, then, can’t an iPod talk?

Because Apple doesn’t want it to.

Why doesn’t Apple want the iPod to talk?

Ask Steve.

Is it technically feasible for an iPod to talk?

At last, the crux of the biscuit, from the very first iPod released a few years ago to the fanciest one out there today, all had more than enough compute power and storage (with zillions of bytes left over) to run a speech synthesizer.  Having walked through the iPod interface with a sighted guide, I can also state quite clearly, that offering the interface as a self voicing application would not challenge the talented Apple engineers to much.  Including a full talking interface, would definitely add to the “cool factor” of the device as sighted and blind users alike could keep the iPod in their pocket and navigate to their Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd folder quickly and easily without diverting their mind numbed, 120 decibel charged gaze away from whatever they had been staring at.

Effectively, the iPod has no accessibility features because Apple thinks of accessibility well after anything else they design into their products.  Speech in an iPod would have been relatively cheap and easy but Apple thinks of “cool” first and nerdy ideas like universal design just isn’t cool.

So, I cringe every time I hear the term “Pod cast” on a blind person’s web site.  Well before the iPod, an Apple trademark, we blinks enjoyed all kinds of streaming audio on the Microsoft platform using Windows Media Player, Real Player, WinAmp and other programs.  Today, we have the PAC Mate, Braille Note, iPAQ, a whole pile of cell phones on which screen readers run and probably other products I’m forgetting to use to listen to music, books and other information while out and about.  Why then do we insist on giving Apple a free advertisement for a product that might as well have a sign saying, “No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish” hanging on it as far as we blinks are concerned.

I’m also dubious of anything containing the word “pod” that doesn’t refer directly to food.  This comes from the classic Sci-Fi thriller, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” not the remake but the 1950s original.  In the movie, the townspeople disappeared one at a time to be replaced by replicants (who had that zoned out look of an iPod user on their faces) who, perhaps not coincidentally, grew out of giant pea pods.  Are Steve Jobs and Apple snatching the portable music lovers of the world and replacing them with mindless servants of their corporate goals?  Am I one of the last townspeople left running around to spread the information that Apple employees come from outer space and intend to conquer our planet?

Afterward

Sorry for the fairly lame posts the past two days.  I had little time to write so I depended heavily on material I could draw from other news items.  I do think both items described important events but I didn’t do much to add any color or useful commentary to improve on their value.

Although I enjoy learning about many things found in museums, I have spent little or no time surfing the web looking for accessible online collections.  This morning, while drinking my coffee and sorting through the stories that came over Blind News, I found one titled, “Jodi Web Accessibility Awards 2006 Shortlist Announced” from a web site called, “24 Hour Museum” based in the UK.  This impressive site claims to serve as the “official guide to UK museums, galleries, exhibitions and heritage.”  This site where the article about the Jodi Awards appears meets almost all of the accessibility guidelines I could check in my quick survey but it does contain a couple of unlabeled graphical links to sponsors which makes a little noise but, otherwise, this resource appears near letter perfect.  I don’t know about such a site in the US but would enjoy learning of one.

The Jodi Awards, according to the article, “recognize excellence in museum, library, and archive and heritage website accessibility.”  A group of judges, half of whom have a disability, chose the finalists by using the web sites personally and by testing them with automated validation tools.  The award is named in “memory of Jodi Mattes (1973-2001) who worked to ensure the British Museum’s COMPASS site was as accessible as possible. After COMPASS went live in 2000, she went on to work for the Royal National Institute for the Blind,” says the article.

The short list of finalists includes six museums, all based in the UK but, because the Internet has few borders, one can enjoy the sites from wherever they have an accessible computer, PDA or notetaker.

The first site listed in the article, the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery contains a lot of interesting content from a number of museums in its city.  I enjoyed reading about the representation of black Victorians as represented in British art of that time.  The site has many links to interesting sounding subjects and I look forward to returning to it in the future.  The article about the awards says it was chosen because it “is an easy to navigate portal to information about the city’s seven museums and links to BMAGiC – an online collections database. The site includes straightforward advice on changing text size, sharp images and an alternative, text enriched version of the Flash kids’ website.”  I commend any web developers who can make Flash content accessible.

I really enjoyed browsing through the pages of The Portable Antiquities Scheme Finds site which also contends for the Jodi Award.  The web site describes itself by stating, “The Portable Antiquities Scheme is a voluntary scheme to record archaeological objects found by members of the public in England and Wales. Every year many thousands of objects are discovered, many of these by metal-detector users, but also by people whilst out walking, gardening or going about their daily work.” This site contains all kinds of interesting descriptions of objects of historical interest found by volunteers.  It seems that some people look about for such things as a hobby and others just happen upon things ancient.  Either way, this site describes artifacts very nicely and I’m happy to hear about an organization of volunteer archeologists keeping track of found things.

Next in the running comes, i-MAP “The Everyday Transformed” which has “Accessibility Options” at the very top of their page.  I believe this online art museum is the only one intended specifically for visitors with vision impairments.  It includes detailed descriptions of the works it has on display and offers downloadable tactile graphics for those who like to touch their art.  I-Map is part of the internationally famous Tate Modern Art collection and was the winner of the first ever Jodi award,

Their Reading Futures provides “Training and support for libraries’ work with young readers.”  I didn’t find this one especially interesting as I am neither a librarian nor a young reader.  People with children or those who work in the library sciences might find this site useful and it, like the other nominees, is highly accessible.

The History of Wolverhampton web site contains almost exactly what one would guess from its name.  “Wolverhampton is a vibrant, multi-cultural city with a documented history that stretches back to 985AD when King Aethelred granted the title of land known as Heantune to Lady Wulfruna,” says the site.  It contains all sorts of archives and arcane materials about this town with a very proud history.  The accessibility of the site is superb and I wish more places of interest around the world would have their municipal history so well organized and presented in such an accessible fashion.

Another nominated site that dedicates itself to reading is “Speaking Volumes, by Wakefield Library and Information Service.”  The home page states, “Our site is all about the enjoyment of reading and if you look through the pages you will find lots of reading suggestions, local reading related events, reviews of talking books and a noticeboard to give you the chance to swap views and opinions with other readers. You can hear a reading group in action and if you are interested, find out about local groups”

As one might assume, I found some of these sites far more interesting than others.  The concept of the Jodi Award for accessible museum and library web sites should grow to something with an International stature.  Learning about these particular sites in the UK gave me some cool web sites to look at but, more so, provides an example for how museums and libraries no matter of location can make themselves entirely usable by people with disabilities.  I recommend that everyone sends this BC article or the original to any museum web site they would
like to see improved as all six can serve as templates for accessibility excellence.