WEBVTT 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 When I was about three or four years old, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I remember my mum reading a story to me 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and my two big brothers, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and I remember putting up my hands 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 to feel the page of the book 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 to feel the picture they were discussing. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And my mum said, "Darling, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 remember that you can't see 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and you can't feel the picture 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and you can't feel the print on the page." 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And I thought to myself, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 "But that's what I want to do. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I love stories. I want to read." 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Little did I know 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that I would be part of a technological revolution 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that would make that dream come true. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I was born premature by about 10 weeks, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 which resulted in my blindness some 64 years ago. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The condition is known as retrolental fibroplasia, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and it's now very rare in the developed world. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Little did I know, lying curled up 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 in my prim baby humidicrib in 1948 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that I'd been born at the right place 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and the right time, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that I was in a country where I could participate 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 in the technological revolution. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 There are 37 million totally blind people on our planet,b 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 but those of us who've shared in the technological changes 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 mainly come from North America, Europe, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Japan, and other developed parts of the world. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Computers have changed the lives of us all in this room 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and around the world, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 but I think they've changed the lives 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 of we blind people more than any other group. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And so I want to tell you about the interaction 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 between computer-based adaptive technology 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and the many volunteers who helped me over the years 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 to become the person I am today. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It's an interaction between volunteers, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 passionate inventors, and technology, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and it's a story that many other blind people could tell. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But let me tell you a little bit about it today. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 When I was five, I went to school and I learned braille. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It's an ingenious system of six dots 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that are punched into paper, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and I can feel them with my fingers. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In fact, I think they are putting up my grade six report. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I don't know where Julian Morrow got that from. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 (Laughter) 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I was pretty good in reading, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 but religion and musical appreciation needed more work. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 (Laughter) 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 When you leave the opera house, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 you'll find there's braille signage in the lifts. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Look for it. Have you noticed it? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I do. I look for it all the time. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 (Laughter) 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 When I was at school, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the books were transcribed by transcribers, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 voluntary people who punched one dot at a time 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 so I'd have volumes to read, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and that had been going on, mainly by women, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 since the late 19th century in this country, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 but it was the only way I could read. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 When I was in high school, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I got my first Philips Reel-to-Reel tape recorder, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and tape recorders became my sort of pre-computer 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 medium of learning. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I could have family and friends read me material, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and I could then read it back 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 as many times as I needed. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And it brought me into contact 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 with volunteers and helpers. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 For example, when I studied at graduate school 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 at Queen's University in Canada, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the prisoners at the Collins Bay jail agreed to help me. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I gave them a tape recorder, and they read into it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 As one of them said to me, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 "Ron, we ain't going anywhere at the moment." 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 (Laughter) 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But think of it. These men, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 who hadn't had the educational opportunities I'd had, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 helped me gain post-graduate qualifications in law 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 by their dedicated help. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Well, I went back and became an academic 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 at Melbourne's Monash University, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and for those 25 years, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 tape recorders were everything to me. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In fact, in my office in 1990, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I had 18 miles of tape. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Students, family, and friends all read me material. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Mrs. Lois Dowery, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 whom I later came to call my surrogate mom, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 read me many thousands of hours of the tape. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 One of the reasons I agreed to give this talk today 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 was that I was hoping that Lois would be here 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 so I could introduce you to her and publicly thank her. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But sadly, her health hasn't permitted her to come today. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But I thank you here, Lois, from this platform. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 (Applause) 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I saw my first Apple Computer in 1984, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and I thought to myself, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 "This thing's got a glass screen, not much use to me." 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 How very wrong I was. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In 1987, in the month our eldest son Jared was born, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I got my first blind computer, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and it's actually here. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 See it up there? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And you see it has no, what do you call it, no screen. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 (Laughter) 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It's a blind computer. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 (Laughter) 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It's a Keynote Gold 84k, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and the 84k stands for it had 84 kilobytes of memory. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 (Laughter) 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Don't laugh, it cost me 4,000 dollars at the time. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 (Laughter) 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I think there's more memory in my watch. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It was invented by Russell Smith, a passionate inventor 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 in New Zealand who was trying to help blind people. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Sadly, he died in a light plane crash in 2005, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 but his memory lives on in my heart. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It meant, for the first time, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I could read back what I had typed into it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It had a speech synthesizer. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I'd written my first co-authored [unclear] book 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 on a typewriter in 1979 purely from memory. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 This now allowed me to read back what I'd written 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and to enter the computer world, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 even with its 84k of memory. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In 1974, the great Ray Kurzweil, the American inventor, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 worked on building a machine that would scan books 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and read them out in synthetic speech. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Optical character recognition units then 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 only operated usually on one font, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 but by using charged couple device flatbed scanners 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and speech synthesizers, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 he developed a machine that could read any font. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And his machine, which was as big as a washing machine, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 was launched on the 13th of January, 1976. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I saw my first commercially available Kurzweil 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 in March, 1989, and it blew me away, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and in September 1989, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the month that my associate professorship 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 at Monash University was announced, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the law school bought one, and I could use it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 For the first time, I could read what I wanted to read 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 by putting a book on the scanner. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I didn't have to be nice to people! 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 (Laughter) 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I no longer would be censored. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 For example, I was too shy then, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and I'm actually too shy now, to ask anybody 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 to read me out loud sexually explicit material. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 (Laughter) 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But, you know, I could pop a book on in the middle of the night, and -- 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 (Applause) 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now, the Kurzweil Reader is simply 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 a program on my laptop. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 That's what it's shrunk to. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And now I can scan the latest novel 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and not wait to get it into talking book libraries. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I can keep up with my friends. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 There are many people who have helped me in my life, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and many that I haven't met. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 One is another American inventor Ted Hentna.