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The world on a desktop
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The world on a desktop |
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Jaime Fradera Senior Member
since 2000-11-25
Posts 843Where no tyranny is tolerable |
An attempt was made to sell this article to an eznine that offered to buy pieces about technology, but the email address provided came back as invalid. It is written for a general audience. Anybody wannabuy???? (smile) The World On A Desktop By Jaime Fradera The information age began for me one morning in September of 1961. The public school I attended had a resource room for blind children, and that day Ms Alabrock, the teacher, gave me my first Braille lesson. She taught me how to write my name on a mechanical Braille writer, and I remember being amazed by the fact that when we removed the paper from the machine, my name in Braille was still written on the paper! In the beginning I was afraid of the teacher, as only a six year old could be. Every day she made me do what seemed like mindless exercises----writing rows and rows of letters on the Braille writer and putting me through endless reading and spelling drills. Even worse, she sent me home with too many big heavy books, with too many big words in them that were too hard to read. I protested, but it was 1961, and children didn’t have civil rights protection. In what seemed like no time she had me reading things like ‘Green Eggs And Ham’ and other stories out loud to her and to the class. At my tender age I could not, of course, appreciate what Ms Alabrock was doing; but in the end I came to worship her. Over the next four years, Ms Alabrock, my first teacher, would give me the gift of literacy, and with it, her love. In 1965 I was sent to the school for the blind in Texas. I was by then a fluent Braille reader. My idea of a good time was spending afternoons in the school library looking for more books to read. This may have been fine, except that I wasn’t doing assigned homework, and so one day in the fifth grade they called me into the principal’s office, where all bad boys go, where I received a spanking with the board of education at the hands of the principal himself. (I forgot to ask the principal whether the board in question was appointed or elected.) I found school boring and sometimes frightening, but I kept reading unassigned material, taking magazines and books to bed at night, to read under the covers, so our bossy yelling caretakers would think I was asleep. In 1975 I started my first semester in Junior college, away from the shelter and confinement of the school for the blind, and out in what appeared to be the normal world. I began using support services available to blind students. These included human readers to help me study and digest assigned printed course materials, and recorded texts produced by an organization called Recording for the Blind. For those who are not familiar with the “blindness system,” the loose grouping of organizations and programs meant to serve blind people, the following is an overview. One of the biggest disadvantages we have as blind people is severely limited access to the printed word. Historically, only a tiny fraction of books, periodicals and other printed material published for the general public has been produced in Braille or in recorded form for blind readers, due to the considerable expense and labor-intensive techniques of producing books in special formats. In the 1930’s Congress passed legislation creating what would be called the Talking Book program. This program established a network of talking book libraries throughout the country and centralized facilities for the production and distribution of specially-formatted materials to blind library patrons. Although the broad mass of material produced in print could not be made available, in 1975 one could select titles from a monthly catalog of general interest categories such as best sellers, mysteries and fiction. All these services at first worked well enough, but in 1979 I quickly began to go deaf, and suddenly I couldn’t do many things I had come to take for granted. I could no longer read with tapes. Textbooks were unavailable in Braille. I couldn’t hear the jokes at parties, enjoy movies, date girls, or do all the things that seem important when you’re a teenager in College. The illness was terrifying, and the loneliness, isolation and despair I felt were far beyond description. As my life fell apart, I left school to see how I might reorganize. In 1981 I received a book from the Library called “Aids For The Eighties, What They Are And What They Do.” Personal computers had recently come on the market, and all I knew was that blind people couldn’t use them. Still, many of us have at least a little curiosity about new-fangled gadgets that promise to make life easier. I was especially taken by an article describing “paperless” Braille that predicted this technology would revolutionize the production, storage and distribution of Braille. That book sparked my interest in new computer technology. In 1985 I went back to college using new equipment, and with a healthier philosophy. I also had the opportunity to work with one of the early paperless Braille machines, on which text could be written to and read from a cassette tape in much the same way comparable devices could do for the sighted. I began listening to computer shows, ordering computer books and mags from the Library, and fantasized what it might be like to own and use virtually every piece of equipment I heard of, read about, or could imagine. But there was at least one roadblock to acquiring special technology designed for the blind. Most of it cost money, a lot of money, and I didn’t have money. The Texas Commission for the Blind, the public agency charged with purchasing and promoting the use of special equipment, ever mindful of the bottom line and awarding contracts to the lowest bidder, wasn’t about to buy just any blind student a computer. Friends in our local organization helped me write letter after letter and plan meeting after meeting in an effort to convince agency officials that training in computer technology would give me valuable tools and marketable skills, help me earn a living and make unique contributions to society. We tried to convince them these tools were not mere toys or personal conveniences, but necessities. It was after a pivotal event in my life a few years later, having no one left to talk with and nothing else to do, that I began to write. It was in Braille and I didn’t keep any of it. It was just unreadable twaddle. It was the way I felt, full of sadness and longing, roiling with reignited passion and the awareness of unfulfilled desire. While I was undergoing this latest psycho-spiritual transformation, my illness was finally brought under control. The damage to my hearing had stopped, and although I had already lost 90 percent of it, the dizziness and bouts of total deafness began to subside. I was moving from place to place, unable to stay anywhere for long because I didn’t have enough money for basic needs. I was still writing up a storm, though it was mostly to amuse myself. Then one day the co-op house I lived in put on a coffeehouse night, at which anyone wishing to do so could read whatever they chose. Just for fun I decided to perform some of my twaddle, relishing the experience of reading to sighted people. Then two months later I had to move again, and a month later, yet again! I was living in a new co-op house, and when we had another poets’ reading, I was invited to participate! They had heard about me, they said, and asked if I would read. I was so startled and surprised, especially when someone asked if they could have a printed copy of what I had read. But making print copies was no simple matter. It involved getting some teenage kid to stop long enough to take down my dictation with a pencil. This method was slow and tedious, especially if the kid was smoking pot, had to speak directly into my one bad ear, and also couldn’t write, spell or punctuate; and I couldn’t pay anyone to go through all that trouble. Until then, I wrote using the ever-trusty Braille writer. This, however, was about to change. In 1989 the agency for the blind was finally convinced that I needed a computer. It was a little convenience called a VersaBraille. The machine featured an electronically driven (paperless) Braille display and a keyboard. With the addition of a dot-matrix printer, I had a way to compose and print documents for the first time without any sighted help at all. Now, I could crank out letters, homework assignments, fliers, subversive literature, anything I wanted with what to me seemed incredible ease and independence. I also found to my delight that writing on the electric keyboard was much faster than on a mechanical one, and that the more I wrote the more clearly I could think, and vice versa. But there were more startling developments to come. A year later I decided to buy a modem for my VersaBraille and launched into the world of cyberspace, and to me it was a new and truly wondrous world. For the first time I was actually able to read stuff posted on public bulletin boards and do so with privacy and in clear, sharp electronic Braille. As the Persian Gulf War began, I could read the AP press wire in real time and in Braille, without waiting for someone to transcribe it. And all that was BEFORE the coming of the World Wide Web. In 1992 I moved to Denver and began blindness-skills training at the Colorado Center for the Blind, and it seemed that at long last my cyber dreams and fantasies were finally coming true. Here I learned to use Wordperfect, started my first real job, which involved travel and speaking engagements. Before long I was back on the Internet. At first my surfing was basic, as it had been while I was in Austin, Texas. With a Braille Display and the Futura-TTY program, I could log into Denver Freenet and make calls through a relay service for the deaf. By posting on forums and corresponding by email with others on the board, I began to strike up friendships, perhaps for a lifetime, with people I might not otherwise have met. Since my job involved submitting reports in Braille, I had my own personal Braille printer (called a Braille embosser). But even as I learned to use these new tools, the world was changing, and before long I was back in school trying to catch up. As the century drew to a close, Braille displays, translation programs and embossers were becoming cheaper, faster, easier to work with and more numerous. A slew of optical scanning packages were crowding and competing for the commercial office market. As microchips became ubiquitous and part of many common appliances, a bewildering proliferation of talking devices became available to everyone----talking scales, calculators, clocks, thermometers, calendars, personal organizers, measuring devices, video recorders, laboratory tools, personal computers, newspapers for the blind, augmentation devices for the orthopedic ally disabled, children’s toys, and just about anything else an enterprising company may decide to make and bring to market. Perhaps the most stunning development of all has been the development of the World Wide Web which, coupled with speech and Braille screen-reader technology, makes available the digitized collections of the libraries of the world, effectively putting them on a desktop quite literally at one’s fingertips. As more specialized tools become available to all of us, the historically insurmountable barriers that have separated the deaf from the hearing, the blind from the sighted, the physically disabled from the able-bodied, the educated from the ignorant, and even the barriers of time and space, all of them, have begun to blur and disappear. It is especially here, in cyberspace, that all of us can at last share and celebrate our common humanity. Well, something like that. |
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Wanda Member
since 2001-10-23
Posts 461 |
Jaimie, I have just finished reading your short story. May I commend you on an extremely well written account of your life. You may not be able to see with your physical eyes, but you have tremendous insight on life. Thank you for sharing your story, and helping us to better understand what it means to be blind. Wanda |
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Sunshine
Administrator
Member Empyrean
since 1999-06-25
Posts 63354Listening to every heart |
Jaime, from the beginning I have admired your tenacity to see through your fingers. Because with that touch, comes your heart. I have often wondered if I would know your story and background, and now, because of the technology that would otherwise sit and gather dust, I know, by your perseverance, just how remarkable you are! Thank you. |
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Kethry Member Rara Avis
since 2000-07-29
Posts 9082Victoria Australia |
amazing story, that is amazingly well written. Kethry Here in the midst of my lonely abyss, a single joy I find...your presence in my mind. Unknown |
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Midnitesun
since 2001-05-18
Posts 28647Gaia |
Smiling here, at those magical fingertips. |
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