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How to read when you're blind: Ron McCallum at TEDxSydney

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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,
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    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,
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    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!
  • 15:18 - 15:19
    (Applause)
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    (Laughs)
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    (Applause continuing)
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    Oh! Hey!
  • 15:31 - 15:41
    (Applause)
Title:
How to read when you're blind: Ron McCallum at TEDxSydney
Description:

Professor, a prominent lawyer and a human rights advocate Ron McCallum was born blind. Regardless, he managed to fall in love with reading soon after. In this funny and heartfelt talk, he tours the history of reading gear for the blind and shows how each new design has impacted his life.

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Video Language:
English
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TEDxTalks
Duration:
15:48
  • The transcript was very good, congratulations! I fixed reading speed issues in a few subtitles, a few some typos and a few line breaks.

    Note: please do not use "wanna." Instead, use the full form, "want to" (to learn more, see http://translations.ted.org/wiki/English_Style_Guide#Gonna.2C_wanna.2C_kinda.2C_sorta.2C_gotta.2C_.27cause).

    I noticed that you changed all of the speaker's contractions into uncontracted forms (e.g. "it's" would be transcribed as "it is"). There is no need to do that. For a list of contractions that are conventionalized (i.e. have an official spelling), see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_English_contractions

    Even though it's not a serious issue at all, please note that you do NOT need to break lines in subtitles shorter than 42 characters. A short subtitle broken into two lines could be distracting for the viewer.

  • Oh, I think I have read somewhere that all contractions were supposed to be changed into uncontracted forms... Anyway, I will take your instructions into account in the future. Thank you very much for your comment!

English subtitles

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