How technology allowed me to read

When I was about three or four years old,

I remember my mum 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 mum said, "Darling,

remember that you can't see

and you can't feel the picture

and you can't feel the print on the page."

And I thought to myself,

"But that's 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's now very rare in the developed world.

Little did I know, lying curled up

in my prim baby humidicrib in 1948

that I'd been born at the right place

and the right time,

that I was in a country where I could participate

in the technological revolution.

There are 37 million totally blind people on our planet,b

but those of us who've 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've 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's an interaction between volunteers,

passionate inventors, and technology,

and it's a story that many other blind people could tell.

But let me tell you a little bit about it today.

When I was five, I went to school and I learned braille.

It's an ingenious system of six dots

that are punched into paper,

and I can feel them with my fingers.

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

I don't 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'll find there's braille signage in 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 one dot at a time

so I'd have volumes to read,

and that 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 ain't going anywhere at the moment."

(Laughter)

But think of it. These men,

who hadn't had the educational opportunities I'd had,

helped me gain post-graduate qualifications in law

by their dedicated help.

Well, I went back and became an academic

at Melbourne's Monash University,

and for those 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 Dowery,

whom I later came to call my surrogate mom,

read me many thousands of hours of the 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 hasn't 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's got a glass screen, not much use to me."

How very wrong I was.

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

I got my first blind computer,

and it's actually here.

See it up there?

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

(Laughter)

It's a blind computer.

(Laughter)

It's a Keynote Gold 84k,

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

(Laughter)

Don't laugh, it cost me 4,000 dollars at the time.

(Laughter)

I think there's more memory in my watch.

It was invented by Russell Smith, a passionate inventor

in New Zealand 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 synthesizer.

I'd written my first co-authored [unclear] book

on a typewriter in 1979 purely from memory.

This now allowed me to read back what I'd written

and to enter the computer world,

even with its 84k 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 one font,

but by using charged couple device flatbed scanners

and speech synthesizers,

he developed a machine that could read any font.

And his machine, which was as big as a washing machine,

was launched on the 13th of January, 1976.

I saw my first commercially available Kurzweil

in March, 1989, and it blew me away,

and in September 1989,

the month that my associate professorship

at Monash University was announced,

the law school bought 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 didn't have to be nice to people!

(Laughter)

I no longer would be censored.

For example, I was too shy then,

and I'm actually too shy now, to ask anybody

to read me out loud sexually explicit material.

(Laughter)

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

(Applause)

Now, the Kurzweil Reader is simply

a program on my laptop.

That's what it's shrunk to.

And now I can scan the latest novel

and not wait to get it into talking book libraries.

I can keep up with my friends.

There are many people who have helped me in my life,

and many that I haven't met.

One is another American inventor Ted Hentna.