WEBVTT

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When I was about 3 or 4 years old

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I remember my mom reading a story
to me and my two big brothers.

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And I remember putting up my hands
to feel the page of the book,

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to feel the picture 
they were discussing.

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And my mom said, 
"Darling, remember that you cannot see

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and you cannot feel the picture

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and you cannot
feel the print on the page."

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And I thought to myself,

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"But that is what I want to do.

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I love stories, I want to read!"

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Little did I know

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that I would be part
of a technological revolution

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that would make that dream 
come true.

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I was born premature 
by about 10 weeks

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which resulted in my blindness

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some 64 years ago.

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The condition is known
as retrolental fibroplasia,

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and it is now very rare
in the developed world.

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Little did I know

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lying curled up
in my prim baby humidicrib in 1948

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that I had been born

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at the right place 
and the right time,

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that I was in a country

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where I could participate
in a technological revolution.

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There are 37 million 
totally blind people on our planet,

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but those of us who shared
in the technological changes

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mainly come from North America, 
Europe, Japan


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and other developed parts of the world.

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Computers have changed the lives of us all
in this room and around the world,

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but I think they have changed
the lives of we, blind people,

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more than any other group.

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And so I want to tell you
about the interaction

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between computer-based
adaptive technology

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and the many volunteers
who helped me over the years

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to become the person I am today.

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It is an interaction between volunteers,
passionate inventors and technology

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and it is a story that many other 
blind people could tell,

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but let me tell you a bit about it today.

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When I was 5, I went to school
and I learned Braille.

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It is an ingenious system of 6 dots 
that are punched into paper

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and I can feel them with my fingers.

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In fact, I think they are putting up
my grade 6 report.

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I do not know where 
Julian Morrow got that from

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(Laughter)

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I was pretty good in reading,

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but religion and musical appreciation
needed more work.

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(Laughter)

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When you leave the opera house

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you will find this Braille signage
in the the lifts.

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Look for it.

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Have you noticed it?

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I do, I look for it all the time.

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(Laughter)

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When I was at school,

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the books were transcribed
by transcribers,

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voluntary people who punched 
1 dot at a time,

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so I'd have volumes to read,

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and then it had been going on,
mainly by women,

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since the late 19th century 
in this country,

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but it was the only way 
I could read.

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When I was in high school,

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I got my first Philips 
reel-to-reel tape recorder,

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and tape recorders became


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my sort of pre-computer 
medium of learning.

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I could have family and friends
read me material,

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and I could then read it back
as many times as I needed.

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And it brought me into contact
with volunteers and helpers.

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For example,

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when I studied at graduate school
at Queen's University in Canada,

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the prisoners at the Collins Bay jail
agreed to help me.

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I gave them a tape recorder
and they read into it.

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As one of them said to me,

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"Ron, we are not going anywhere 
at the moment."

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(Laughter)

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But think of it.

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These men who had not had
the educational opportunities I had

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helped me gain
postgraduate qualifications in law

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by their dedicated help.

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When I went back

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and became an academic
at Melbourne Monash University,

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for the first 25 years


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tape recorders were everything to me.

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In fact, in my office in 1990,
I had 18 miles of tape.

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Students, family and friends,
all read me material.

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Mrs Lois Dory,

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whom I later came to call 
my surrogate mom,

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read me many thousands 
of hours onto tape.

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One of the reasons
I agreed to give this talk today

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was that I was hoping 
that Lois would be here

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so I could introduce you to her
and publicly thank her,

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but sadly her health has not
permitted her to come today,

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but I thank you here Lois
from this platform.

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(Applause)

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I saw my first Apple Computer in 1984
and I thought to myself,

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"This thing has got a glass screen,
not of much use to me."

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(Laughter)

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How very wrong I was!

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In 1987, in the month 
our eldest son Gerrard was born,

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I got my first blind computer,

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and it is actually here.

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See it up there?

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And you see it has no–,
what do you call it? No screen.

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(Laughter)

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It is a blind computer.

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(Laughter)

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It is a Keynote Gold 84K,

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and the 84K stands for
it had 84 kilobytes of memory.

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(Laughter)

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Do not laugh, it cost me
4000 dollars at the time!

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(Laughter)

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I think there is more memory 
in my watch.

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(Laughter)

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It was invented by Russell Smith,

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a passionate inventor in New Zeland
who was trying to help blind people.

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Sadly, he died in a light-plane crash
in 2005,

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but his memory lives on in my heart.

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It meant for the first time

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I could read back
what I had typed into it.

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It had a speech synthesiser.

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I had written my first co-authored
labor law book on a typewriter in 1979

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purely from memory.

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This now allowed me
to read back what I had written

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and to enter the computer world,

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even with the 84 KB of memory.

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In 1974,

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the great Ray Kurzweil,
the American inventor,

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worked on building a machine

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that would scan books
and read them out in synthetic speech.

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Optical character recognition units
then only operated usually on 1 font,

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but by using charged-coupled device
flatbed scanners and speech synthesizers

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he developed a machine 
that could read any font.

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And his machine,
which was as big as washing machine

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was launched
on the 13th of January 1976.

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I saw my first 
commercially available Kurzweil

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in March of 1989,

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and it blew me away.

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And in September of 1989,

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the month that my associate professorship
of Monash University was announced,

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the law school got one,
and I could use it.

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For the first time I could read
what I wanted to read

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by putting a book on the scanner.

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I did not have to be nice 
to people.

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(Laughter)

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I no longer would be censored,

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for example,

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I was too shy then,

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and I am actually too shy now,

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to ask anybody to read me outloud
sexually explicit material.

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(Laughter)

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But you know, I could pop a book on
in the middle of the night and–.

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(Laughter)

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(Applause)

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Now, the Kurzweil reader is simply 
a programme on my laptop,

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that is what it shrank to.

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And now I can scan the latest novel

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and not fight to get it 
into talking libraries.

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I can keep up with my friends.

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There are many people 
who helped me in my life

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and many that I have not met.

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One is another American inventor,
Ted Henter.

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Ted was a motorcycle racer,

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but in 1978 he had a car accident
and lost his sight.

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Just devastating if you are trying 
to ride motorbikes.

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(Laughter)

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He then turned to 
being a water skier


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and was a champion 
disabled water skier.

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But in 1989 he teamed up with Bill Joyce
to develop a programme

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that would read out
what was on the computer screen

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from the net or from 
what was on the computer.

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It is called JAWS,
Job Access With Speech,

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and it sounds like this.

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(Fast voice synthesizer speech)

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Isn't that slow?

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(Laughter)

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You see, if I read like that,
I would fall asleep.

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I slowed it down for you.

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I am going to ask that we play it 
at the speed I read it.

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Can you play it that one?

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(Voice synthesizer speech faster)

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(Laughter)

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You know, when you are 
marking student essays,


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you want to get through them 
very quickly.

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(Laughter)

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(Applause)

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This technology
that fascinated me in 1987

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is now on my iPhone
and on yours as well.

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But you know,

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I find reading with machine
a very lonely process.

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I grew up with family, 
friends, reading to me,

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and I love the warmth and the breath
and the closeness of people reading.

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Do you love being read to?

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And one of my most endearing memories


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is in 1999,

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Mary reading to me and the children
down New Manly Beach,

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Harry Potter and the Philosopher's stone.

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Is it not a great book?

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I still love being close to someone
reading to me,

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but I would not give up 
the technology

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because it has allowed me 
to lead a great life.

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Of course talking books for the blind
predated all this technology.

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After all the long playing record
was developed in the early 1930's

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and now we put talking books
on CDs using the digital access system

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know as 'DAISY'.

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But when I am reading 
the synthetic voices,

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I love to come home
and read a racy novel

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with a real voice.

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(Laughter)

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Now, there are still barriers
in front of people with disabilities.

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Many websites we cannot read
using JAWS and the other technologies.

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Websites are often very visual
and there are all these sorts of graphs

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that are not labelled, 
and buttons that are not labelled,

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and that is why 
the world wide web consortium 3,

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known as W3C,

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has developed world wide standards
for the Internet

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and we want all internet users,
or internet site owners,

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to make their sites compatible
so that we persons without vision

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can have a label playing field.

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There are other barriers
brought about by our laws.

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For example, Australia,
like about 1/3 of the world's countries,

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has copyright exceptions
which allow books to be Brailled

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or read for we, blind persons.

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But those books cannot travel
across borders.

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For example,

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in Spain, there are 100,000 
accessible books in Spanish.

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In Argentina, there are 50,000.

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In no other Latin American country
are there more than a couple of thousand,

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but it isn't legal to transport the books 
from Spain to Latin America.

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There are hundreds of thousands
accessible books

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in the US, Britain, 
Canada, Australia and etc.,

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but they cannot be transported 
to the 60 countries in our world

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where English is the first 
or a second language.

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Remember I was telling you 
about Harry Potter?

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Well, because we cannot transport 
books across borders

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there had to be separate versions read
in all the English speaking countries,

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Britain, United States, 
Canada, Australia and New Zeland,

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all had to have
separate readings of Harry Potter.

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And that is why 
next month in Morocco

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a meeting is taking place
between all the countries.

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It is something that a group of countries
and the World Blind Union are advocating:

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a cross-border treaty.

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So that if books are available 
under a copyright exception

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and the other country 
has a copyright exception,

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we can transport those books 
across borders

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and give life to people 
particularly in developing countries,

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blind people who do not have 
the books to read.

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I want that to happen.

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(Applause)

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My life has been extraordinary blessed
with marriage and children

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and certanily interesting work to do.

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Whether it be
at the University of Sidney Law School

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where I served a term as dean,

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or now as I sit on 
the United Nations committee

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on the Rights of Persons 
with Disabilities in Geneva,

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I have indeed been 
a very fortunate human being.

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I wonder what the future will hold.

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The technology will advance even further.

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But I can still remember my mom
saying 60 years ago,

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"Remember darling, you will never be able
to read the print with your fingers."

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I am so glad, that the interaction 
between Brailles for transcribers,

00:14:47.824 --> 00:14:51.154
volunteer readers
and passionate inventors

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has allowed this dream of reading
to come true for me

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and for blind people throughout the world.

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I woud like to thank 
my researcher Hannah Martin,

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who is my slide clicker,

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she clicks the slides,

00:15:04.243 --> 00:15:07.077
and my wife, 
professor Mary Crock,

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who is the love of my life 
and is coming on to collect me,

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I want to thank her too.

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I think I have to say good bye now.

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Bless you!

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Thank you very much.

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(Applause)

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Hey!

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(Applause)

00:15:18.627 --> 00:15:19.537
(Laughs)

00:15:19.537 --> 00:15:26.294
(Applause continuing)

00:15:26.294 --> 00:15:30.865
Oh! Hey!

00:15:30.865 --> 00:15:41.072
(Applause)