Transcriber: Arthur Manookian Reviewer: Julieta Baccaro
When I was about 3 or 4 years old
I remember my mom reading a story to me and my two big brothers.
And I remember putting up my hands to feel the page of the book,
to feel the picture they were discussing.
And my mom said, "Darling, remember that you cannot see
and you cannot feel the picture
and you cannot feel the print on the page."
And I thought to myself,
"But that is what I want to do.
I love stories, I want to read!"
Little did I know
that I would be part of a technological revolution
that would make that dream come true.
I was born premature by about 10 weeks
which resulted in my blindness
some 64 years ago.
The condition is known as retrolental fibroplasia,
and it is now very rare in the developed world.
Little did I know
lying curled up in my prim baby humidicrib in 1948
that I had been born
at the right place and the right time,
that I was in a country
where I could participate in a technological revolution.
There are 37 million totally blind people on our planet,
but those of us who shared in the technological changes
mainly come from North America, Europe, Japan
and other developed parts of the world.
Computers have changed the lives of us all in this room and around the world,
but I think they have changed the lives of we, blind people,
more than any other group.
And so I want to tell you about the interaction
between computer-based adaptive technology
and the many volunteers who helped me over the years
to become the person I am today.
It is an interaction between volunteers, passionate inventors and technology
and it is a story that many other blind people could tell,
but let me tell you a bit about it today.
When I was 5, I went to school and I learned Braille.
It is an ingenious system of 6 dots that are punched into paper
and I can feel them with my fingers.
In fact, I think they are putting up my grade 6 report.
I do not know where Julian Morrow got that from
(Laughter)
I was pretty good in reading,
but religion and musical appreciation needed more work.
(Laughter)
When you leave the opera house
you will find this Braille signage in the the lifts.
Look for it.
Have you noticed it?
I do, I look for it all the time.
(Laughter)
When I was at school,
the books were transcribed by transcribers,
voluntary people who punched 1 dot at a time,
so I'd have volumes to read,
and then it had been going on, mainly by women,
since the late 19th century in this country,
but it was the only way I could read.
When I was in high school,
I got my first Philips reel-to-reel tape recorder,
and tape recorders became
my sort of pre-computer medium of learning.
I could have family and friends read me material,
and I could then read it back as many times as I needed.
And it brought me into contact with volunteers and helpers.
For example,
when I studied at graduate school at Queen's University in Canada,
the prisoners at the Collins Bay jail agreed to help me.
I gave them a tape recorder and they read into it.
As one of them said to me,
"Ron, we are not going anywhere at the moment."
(Laughter)
But think of it.
These men who had not had the educational opportunities I had
helped me gain postgraduate qualifications in law
by their dedicated help.
When I went back
and became an academic at Melbourne Monash University,
for the first 25 years
tape recorders were everything to me.
In fact, in my office in 1990, I had 18 miles of tape.
Students, family and friends, all read me material.
Mrs Lois Dory,
whom I later came to call my surrogate mom,
read me many thousands of hours onto tape.
One of the reasons I agreed to give this talk today
was that I was hoping that Lois would be here
so I could introduce you to her and publicly thank her,
but sadly her health has not permitted her to come today,
but I thank you here Lois from this platform.
(Applause)
I saw my first Apple Computer in 1984 and I thought to myself,
"This thing has got a glass screen, not of much use to me."
(Laughter)
How very wrong I was!
In 1987, in the month our eldest son Gerrard was born,
I got my first blind computer,
and it is actually here.
See it up there?
And you see it has no–, what do you call it? No screen.
(Laughter)
It is a blind computer.
(Laughter)
It is a Keynote Gold 84K,
and the 84K stands for it had 84 kilobytes of memory.
(Laughter)
Do not laugh, it cost me 4000 dollars at the time!
(Laughter)
I think there is more memory in my watch.
(Laughter)
It was invented by Russell Smith,
a passionate inventor in New Zeland who was trying to help blind people.
Sadly, he died in a light-plane crash in 2005,
but his memory lives on in my heart.
It meant for the first time
I could read back what I had typed into it.
It had a speech synthesiser.
I had written my first co-authored labor law book on a typewriter in 1979
purely from memory.
This now allowed me to read back what I had written
and to enter the computer world,
even with the 84 KB of memory.
In 1974,
the great Ray Kurzweil, the American inventor,
worked on building a machine
that would scan books and read them out in synthetic speech.
Optical character recognition units then only operated usually on 1 font,
but by using charged-coupled device flatbed scanners and speech synthesizers
he developed a machine that could read any font.
And his machine, which was as big as washing machine
was launched on the 13th of January 1976.
I saw my first commercially available Kurzweil
in March of 1989,
and it blew me away.
And in September of 1989,
the month that my associate professorship of Monash University was announced,
the law school got one, and I could use it.
For the first time I could read what I wanted to read
by putting a book on the scanner.
I did not have to be nice to people.
(Laughter)
I no longer would be censored,
for example,
I was too shy then,
and I am actually too shy now,
to ask anybody to read me outloud sexually explicit material.
(Laughter)
But you know, I could pop a book on in the middle of the night and–.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, the Kurzweil reader is simply a programme on my laptop,
that is what it shrank to.
And now I can scan the latest novel
and not fight to get it into talking libraries.
I can keep up with my friends.
There are many people who helped me in my life
and many that I have not met.
One is another American inventor, Ted Henter.
Ted was a motorcycle racer,
but in 1978 he had a car accident and lost his sight.
Just devastating if you are trying to ride motorbikes.
(Laughter)
He then turned to being a water skier
and was a champion disabled water skier.
But in 1989 he teamed up with Bill Joyce to develop a programme
that would read out what was on the computer screen
from the net or from what was on the computer.
It is called JAWS, Job Access With Speech,
and it sounds like this.
(Fast voice synthesizer speech)
Isn't that slow?
(Laughter)
You see, if I read like that, I would fall asleep.
I slowed it down for you.
I am going to ask that we play it at the speed I read it.
Can you play it that one?
(Voice synthesizer speech faster)
(Laughter)
You know, when you are marking student essays,
you want to get through them very quickly.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
This technology that fascinated me in 1987
is now on my iPhone and on yours as well.
But you know,
I find reading with machine a very lonely process.
I grew up with family, friends, reading to me,
and I love the warmth and the breath and the closeness of people reading.
Do you love being read to?
And one of my most endearing memories
is in 1999,
Mary reading to me and the children down New Manly Beach,
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's stone.
Is it not a great book?
I still love being close to someone reading to me,
but I would not give up the technology
because it has allowed me to lead a great life.
Of course talking books for the blind predated all this technology.
After all the long playing record was developed in the early 1930's
and now we put talking books on CDs using the digital access system
know as 'DAISY'.
But when I am reading the synthetic voices,
I love to come home and read a racy novel
with a real voice.
(Laughter)
Now, there are still barriers in front of people with disabilities.
Many websites we cannot read using JAWS and the other technologies.
Websites are often very visual and there are all these sorts of graphs
that are not labelled, and buttons that are not labelled,
and that is why the world wide web consortium 3,
known as W3C,
has developed world wide standards for the Internet
and we want all internet users, or internet site owners,
to make their sites compatible so that we persons without vision
can have a label playing field.
There are other barriers brought about by our laws.
For example, Australia, like about 1/3 of the world's countries,
has copyright exceptions which allow books to be Brailled
or read for we, blind persons.
But those books cannot travel across borders.
For example,
in Spain, there are 100,000 accessible books in Spanish.
In Argentina, there are 50,000.
In no other Latin American country are there more than a couple of thousand,
but it isn't legal to transport the books from Spain to Latin America.
There are hundreds of thousands accessible books
in the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and etc.,
but they cannot be transported to the 60 countries in our world
where English is the first or a second language.
Remember I was telling you about Harry Potter?
Well, because we cannot transport books across borders
there had to be separate versions read in all the English speaking countries,
Britain, United States, Canada, Australia and New Zeland,
all had to have separate readings of Harry Potter.
And that is why next month in Morocco
a meeting is taking place between all the countries.
It is something that a group of countries and the World Blind Union are advocating:
a cross-border treaty.
So that if books are available under a copyright exception
and the other country has a copyright exception,
we can transport those books across borders
and give life to people particularly in developing countries,
blind people who do not have the books to read.
I want that to happen.
(Applause)
My life has been extraordinary blessed with marriage and children
and certanily interesting work to do.
Whether it be at the University of Sidney Law School
where I served a term as dean,
or now as I sit on the United Nations committee
on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Geneva,
I have indeed been a very fortunate human being.
I wonder what the future will hold.
The technology will advance even further.
But I can still remember my mom saying 60 years ago,
"Remember darling, you will never be able to read the print with your fingers."
I am so glad, that the interaction between Brailles for transcribers,
volunteer readers and passionate inventors
has allowed this dream of reading to come true for me
and for blind people throughout the world.
I woud like to thank my researcher Hannah Martin,
who is my slide clicker,
she clicks the slides,
and my wife, professor Mary Crock,
who is the love of my life and is coming on to collect me,
I want to thank her too.
I think I have to say good bye now.
Bless you!
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Hey!
(Applause)
(Laughs)
(Applause continuing)
Oh! Hey!
(Applause)