The Role of Technology

The Role of Technology

Future Reflections Convention 1990, Vol. 9 No. 4
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THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY
by Dr. Charles Hallenbeck
Professor of Psychology, University of Kansas
Editor's Note: I first heard this presentation at
an NFB Seminar for Parents in Kansas in the Spring
of 1990. It seemed to fit right in with the theme of
our national parents seminar, so I asked Dr. Hallenbeck
to appear on our June 30 agenda in Dallas,
Texas.
Good afternoon, everybody. At the Kansas
Parents Seminar I gave the group an update of a
paper that I presented to a scientific journal some
ten years before. The paper was entitled "The Impact
of Technology on Lifestyles and Life Satisfactions
of Persons with Disabilities". You can tell it
was a scientific journal because of how many words
there were in the title. What I did in that paper was
two things. One was to discuss some concepts and
ideas that I think are relatively timeless as a preparation
to presenting a review of the current status (at
that time) of technology that applies to the lives of
persons with disabilities (including the blind). The
later part of that paper, which discusses the state of
the art in 1980 is of course obsolete. In fact, it was
virtually obsolete by the time that the paper was
published. Technology advances so rapidly these
days. But, the first part is worth sharing with this
group. I began my discussion in that paper by
discussing some terms. (I think it's always helpful
to define your terms. It helps to bring out some
assumptions that may otherwise be hidden in the
material that will follow.)
The first thing I want to define is the distinction
between a disability and a handicap. The definition I will present is of course not widely accepted by the
whole field. There isn't any definition that is widely
accepted, but this is the one I will use in the discussions
that follow. A disability can be defined in
physical, objective terms. It has to do with the loss
of some important capacity or function. A limitation
in visual acuity, for instance, is obviously a
disability. A limitation in auditory acuity, the absence
of a limb or the absence of the use of a
limb--quadriplegia, paraplegia--the various medical
conditions that we all are familiar with~are
simple examples of disabilities. They are all
definable in objective physical terms. A handicap,
on the other hand, is a disadvantage that arises only
in the presence of the pursuit of some goal so that if
you have some difficulty in reading or in driving an
automobile or in traveling about independently; in
gaining access to public buildings; in finding
employment--those things are handicaps. A disability
is a medical problem, and a handicap is a
social problem. The two are not the same. In many
people's minds, a disability and a handicap go hand
in hand. They are automatically connected with
each other. To have a disability is to have important
handicaps. I guess that I would argue that that is not
necessarily the case. I think we ought to be sensitive
to the difference between these two concepts in
talking about the role of technology in the lives of
people with disabilities.
The next thing I wanted to call your attention to
is the presence of two important and different
philosophies that one can use in the application of
technology to disability-related problems. One
philosophy says that technology is valuable as in
much as it can be addressed directly to the problems
of the disabilty. Technology can be used to reduce
the disability or eliminate it or correct it or prevent
it. Anything that lends itself to technological solutions
is obviously important to do and is worth
people's efforts. The difficulty of that is that it's
often adopted as important to do because of the
automatic connection between a disability and a
handicap. People who advocate the use of technology
to directly combat the disability often do so by
exaggerating the negative consequences the disability
might have. That's unfortunate.
The other philosophy is aimed at the effort to
attack the handicapping aspects of the disability.
...
modification of my hearing aid. He thought that a
little radio transmitter that constantly emitted the
time could be made to be received by my earpiece,
then I would always know what time it was in class.
Well, what I preferred to do in that situation was to
find a social solution to the problem. I went to class
and instead of having to be rigged up with a high
tech solution to my problem, I said to the class,
"Look I don't have my watch today. I won't be able
to know what time it is. (This class met at one
o'clock and was over at two-twenty.) I said to the
class, "If someone will please tell me when it's about two-fifteen it will be very helpful." And to a student,
the class at the proper time said "It's two-fifteen, Dr.
Hallenbeck". (laughter) That's an interesting story,
and I think that it points out that we have to be very
careful not to jump immediately to the high-tech
solutions to simple problems of dependence and
independence.
One of the problems with using technology to
find solutions to disability-related problems (and
this is especially true for blindness-related
problems) has more to do with marketing and
economics than it does with technology itself. The
problem is that there aren't very many blind people.
I think the lives of the blind would be much improved
if there were a lot more of us. The fact is
that blindness is a very low-incidence disability. As
such it presents very little market power. There is
very little incentive, from a economic standpoint,
for developers to develop products which solve
blindness-related problems. People who developed
television sets, washing machines, and computers
did so because of the promise of enormous return-- largely on the strength of the economic market. But
there just isn't a market for products for the blind.
So, one of the things that we also need to be alert to
is trying to find solutions that have been introduced
for the whole population, not especially for the
blind.
Technology is sometimes beneficial to the blind
as an accident or by-product. The prime example of
that kind of advance is of course the tape recorder.
The tape recorder was not invented to make life
easier for the blind, but it certainly does so. Its
popularity, its refinement and improvements, its
inexpensive availability nowadays is a boon to blind
persons. It was not, of course, introduced for that
purpose. The computer is probably a similar
product nowadays. It was not designed or introduced
especially for the blind. It turns out to be a
product which is useful to everyone but especially
useful for blind persons.
Therefore, I think it behooves us to search the
ordinary market for products that have been introduced
for everyone's benefit, but which may have
some special advantage for blind persons.
Ten years ago when I reviewed the current state
of the art, there were three things that I saw as
important at the time, and I would like to comment
briefly on where those things stand now and what I
think about the current situation. The first of those
three was the newly introduced systems for direct
access to the printed page. The product, of course
that I am talking about was the Kurzweil Reading
Machine. Ten years ago it was relatively new. It
was priced at that time between twenty-five and
thirty thousand dollars. It was certainly not appropriate
for individual ownership. The concept
was a very important one. To be able to pick up a
book off the shelf or a piece of mail from the mail
box and to turn it immediately into some readable
form was a very important step forward that technology
produced for us. It was incredibly costly
technology, but the benefit is obviously very attractive.
The
second important breakthrough was an area
which has gone by several names-paperless Braille
or refreshable Braille display. The product that
embodied that ten years ago was the VersaBraille
machine from Telesensory Systems, Inc. The
ability to display Braille in a form that didn't use
paper was a very important technological advance,
as it seemed. It was again a very expensive one, but
the potential seemed to be quite great.
The third development that I saw ten years ago
was the inexpensive implementation of electronic
speech that would make access to computer displays
convenient. There were at the time a couple of
products available. One of them was called a talking
terminal. It sold for about seven thousand dollars
and allowed a user to interact with a large
computer with speech output What was not well
realized at the time was that one could go to one's
corner Radio Shack store and buy a talking Radio
Shack computer for about fifteen hundred dollars
that would do the same thing. (This emphasizes my
point about what I called on that paper "everybody' s
technology"~technology that was introduced for
everybody's benefit.) But talking computers
seemed to have very great potential at that time.
Now where we stand today with those three
products is that the Kurzweil machine has increased
in popularity and become even more important than
it was. Its price has dropped dramatically with the
introduction of the Kurzweil Personal Reader. And
other products have been introduced to give
Kurzweil some competition--namely the
Arkenstone Reader which performs at least as well
as the Kurzweil in most respects and brings the price
availabilty even lower. So there is still some excitement
in that area. The possibility that practical,
usable scanners will be affordable by most people
is something that we can look forward to quite soon.
In terms of the refreshable Braille versus speech
issue, paperless Braille displays are not as cheap
now as one would hope. They are still quite expensive
devices. Speech, however, has swept the field,
and the problem of talking computers is virtually a solved (and boring) problem in many respects. At
least, for technical people it's no longer a problem.
It is a simple solution now to make a computer a
convenient talking device. What has happened is
that technology in Europe has concentrated on
Braille devices, and technology in this country
seems to have concentrated on speech devices. I
think that a part of the reason for that is the variation
and difficulty of the multilingual environment of the
European community as compared to the British
American environment. It's a difficult matter to
devise speech algorithyms that translate different
languages into speech and do a good job, whereas
the display of Braille is a very simple matter when
it comes to overcoming the differences among languages.
Speech products are well-developed in this
country. Braille products are relatively better
developed in European environments.
What I see for the forseeable future is a potential
problem on the horizon which is going to be worth
all of our efforts in solving. There are of course,
many positive things that we can be proud of and
that bode well for us all, but one of the things that
is not so bright is this: Computer displays are rapidly
moving toward visually dramatic and attractive outputs
with pictures and icons and images rather than
simple text displayed on the screen. The impact of
the Macintosh computer on the computer world is
one that will not go away. It is in some ways a sign
of the development that is coming along. IBM and
IBM-type computers are scrambling like the dickens
to catch up with the Macintosh when it comes
to attractive graphics displays. In many ways those
graphics displays defy easy access in speech for the
blind. I state that dramatically. There are solutions
being worked on. There are one or two partial
solutions already available and there are some important
resources that are being invested in that area.
But, it's not going rapidly. There are not going to be
early and big breakthroughs in it. There is going to
be a lot of hard work to be done. [There will be]
technical work for those of us who are computer
advocates and computer enthusiasts to maintain the
access to computer information that we now enjoy
with the standard text output. That's where the effort
needs to be spent in the next three to five years--in
trying to assure everyone that we can have the same
access to those graphics screens as we now enjoy to
the simple text screens.
That's essentially what I had to say in Kansas a
few weeks ago. Again, what I think is important to
emphasize is the distinctions between disability and
handicap.
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