1 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 When I was about three or four years old, 2 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I remember my mum reading a story to me 3 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and my two big brothers, 4 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and I remember putting up my hands 5 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 to feel the page of the book 6 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 to feel the picture they were discussing. 7 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 And my mum said, "Darling, 8 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 remember that you can't see 9 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and you can't feel the picture 10 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and you can't feel the print on the page." 11 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 And I thought to myself, 12 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 "But that's what I want to do. 13 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I love stories. I want to read." 14 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Little did I know 15 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 that I would be part of a technological revolution 16 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 that would make that dream come true. 17 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I was born premature by about 10 weeks, 18 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 which resulted in my blindness some 64 years ago. 19 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 The condition is known as retrolental fibroplasia, 20 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and it's now very rare in the developed world. 21 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Little did I know, lying curled up 22 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 in my prim baby humidicrib in 1948 23 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 that I'd been born at the right place 24 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and the right time, 25 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 that I was in a country where I could participate 26 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 in the technological revolution. 27 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 There are 37 million totally blind people on our planet,b 28 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 but those of us who've shared in the technological changes 29 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 mainly come from North America, Europe, 30 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Japan, and other developed parts of the world. 31 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Computers have changed the lives of us all in this room 32 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and around the world, 33 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 but I think they've changed the lives 34 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 of we blind people more than any other group. 35 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 And so I want to tell you about the interaction 36 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 between computer-based adaptive technology 37 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and the many volunteers who helped me over the years 38 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 to become the person I am today. 39 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 It's an interaction between volunteers, 40 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 passionate inventors, and technology, 41 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and it's a story that many other blind people could tell. 42 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 But let me tell you a little bit about it today. 43 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 When I was five, I went to school and I learned braille. 44 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 It's an ingenious system of six dots 45 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 that are punched into paper, 46 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and I can feel them with my fingers. 47 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 In fact, I think they are putting up my grade six report. 48 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I don't know where Julian Morrow got that from. 49 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 (Laughter) 50 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I was pretty good in reading, 51 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 but religion and musical appreciation needed more work. 52 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 (Laughter) 53 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 When you leave the opera house, 54 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 you'll find there's braille signage in the lifts. 55 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Look for it. Have you noticed it? 56 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I do. I look for it all the time. 57 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 (Laughter) 58 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 When I was at school, 59 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 the books were transcribed by transcribers, 60 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 voluntary people who punched one dot at a time 61 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 so I'd have volumes to read, 62 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and that had been going on, mainly by women, 63 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 since the late 19th century in this country, 64 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 but it was the only way I could read. 65 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 When I was in high school, 66 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I got my first Philips Reel-to-Reel tape recorder, 67 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and tape recorders became my sort of pre-computer 68 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 medium of learning. 69 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I could have family and friends read me material, 70 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and I could then read it back 71 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 as many times as I needed. 72 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 And it brought me into contact 73 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 with volunteers and helpers. 74 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 For example, when I studied at graduate school 75 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 at Queen's University in Canada, 76 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 the prisoners at the Collins Bay jail agreed to help me. 77 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I gave them a tape recorder, and they read into it. 78 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 As one of them said to me, 79 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 "Ron, we ain't going anywhere at the moment." 80 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 (Laughter) 81 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 But think of it. These men, 82 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 who hadn't had the educational opportunities I'd had, 83 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 helped me gain post-graduate qualifications in law 84 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 by their dedicated help. 85 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Well, I went back and became an academic 86 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 at Melbourne's Monash University, 87 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and for those 25 years, 88 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 tape recorders were everything to me. 89 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 In fact, in my office in 1990, 90 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I had 18 miles of tape. 91 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Students, family, and friends all read me material. 92 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Mrs. Lois Dowery, 93 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 whom I later came to call my surrogate mom, 94 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 read me many thousands of hours of the tape. 95 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 One of the reasons I agreed to give this talk today 96 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 was that I was hoping that Lois would be here 97 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 so I could introduce you to her and publicly thank her. 98 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 But sadly, her health hasn't permitted her to come today. 99 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 But I thank you here, Lois, from this platform. 100 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 (Applause) 101 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I saw my first Apple Computer in 1984, 102 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and I thought to myself, 103 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 "This thing's got a glass screen, not much use to me." 104 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 How very wrong I was. 105 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 In 1987, in the month our eldest son Jared was born, 106 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I got my first blind computer, 107 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and it's actually here. 108 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 See it up there? 109 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 And you see it has no, what do you call it, no screen. 110 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 (Laughter) 111 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 It's a blind computer. 112 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 (Laughter) 113 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 It's a Keynote Gold 84k, 114 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and the 84k stands for it had 84 kilobytes of memory. 115 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 (Laughter) 116 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Don't laugh, it cost me 4,000 dollars at the time. 117 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 (Laughter) 118 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I think there's more memory in my watch. 119 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 It was invented by Russell Smith, a passionate inventor 120 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 in New Zealand who was trying to help blind people. 121 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Sadly, he died in a light plane crash in 2005, 122 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 but his memory lives on in my heart. 123 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 It meant, for the first time, 124 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I could read back what I had typed into it. 125 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 It had a speech synthesizer. 126 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I'd written my first co-authored [unclear] book 127 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 on a typewriter in 1979 purely from memory. 128 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 This now allowed me to read back what I'd written 129 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and to enter the computer world, 130 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 even with its 84k of memory. 131 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 In 1974, the great Ray Kurzweil, the American inventor, 132 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 worked on building a machine that would scan books 133 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and read them out in synthetic speech. 134 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Optical character recognition units then 135 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 only operated usually on one font, 136 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 but by using charged couple device flatbed scanners 137 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and speech synthesizers, 138 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 he developed a machine that could read any font. 139 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 And his machine, which was as big as a washing machine, 140 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 was launched on the 13th of January, 1976. 141 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I saw my first commercially available Kurzweil 142 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 in March, 1989, and it blew me away, 143 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and in September 1989, 144 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 the month that my associate professorship 145 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 at Monash University was announced, 146 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 the law school bought one, and I could use it. 147 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 For the first time, I could read what I wanted to read 148 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 by putting a book on the scanner. 149 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I didn't have to be nice to people! 150 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 (Laughter) 151 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I no longer would be censored. 152 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 For example, I was too shy then, 153 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and I'm actually too shy now, to ask anybody 154 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 to read me out loud sexually explicit material. 155 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 (Laughter) 156 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 But, you know, I could pop a book on in the middle of the night, and -- 157 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 (Applause) 158 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 Now, the Kurzweil Reader is simply 159 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 a program on my laptop. 160 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 That's what it's shrunk to. 161 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 And now I can scan the latest novel 162 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and not wait to get it into talking book libraries. 163 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 I can keep up with my friends. 164 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 There are many people who have helped me in my life, 165 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 and many that I haven't met. 166 99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999 One is another American inventor Ted Hentna.