My name is Robert Nagle (aka idiotprogrammer), and I’ll be crossposting items on teleread and elsewhere. I’m a fiction writer who writes under various pseudonyms; I follow developments in open source/copyright/creative commons world very closely. Sometimes I write a lot about one thing; other times I say a little about a lot of things. Perhaps my one claim to fame is that one of my essays is the number one search result when you type Austin Sucks on google. (Let’s just say that I’m quite happily ensconsed in Houston suburbia for the moment).
Here’s a cool audio interview on itconversations with Susan Krieger, a professor of feminist studies at Stanford. Her book, Things No Longer There – A Memoir of Losing Sight and Finding Vision talks about her process of going blind and how it caused her to reflect on visual memories and how they change over time. Fascinating talk. She started writing the book while still able to see, but by the time she finished, she was completely blind and unable to read her own book. (Curious anecdote: she found a person at Stanford to recite the books-on-tape version of this same book, and because of considerable delays, that person ended up becoming severely visually impaired as well. So, as Krieger put it, a blind person wrote a book she herself couldn’t read and would be read aloud by another person who couldn’t read it either).
The interesting (and relevant) part of this talk is Krieger’s description of how blind people adapt to reading text material, how quickly they get used to computer voices (and how often she speeds the computer voice up to find a certain passage). One advantage to computer readers to regular books-on-tape is that she can search for keywords or references, while in traditional books-on-tape you can only proceed through the text in linear fashion. Before her eyesight completely deteriorated, Krieger was still reading blown up versions of text on TV screens and had developed all sorts of reading shortcuts.
She describes her struggle to get an ebook version released which would be accessible to disabled people. Although Adobe has improved their PDFs for accessibility, in fact, the computer voice reader had lots of problems deciphering Adobe fonts in the ebook version of her book. She personally had to intervene to make absolutely sure that the ebook (an Adobe PDF with DRM) was in fact accessible to other blind people like herself. Her publisher ended up having to use a similar-looking font to provide greater accessibility to the visually-impaired. One lesson learned from her tale seems to be that an ebook reader needs enough flexibility with fonts and font size to make conversions to alternate formats easily.
Bonus: see Hellen Kellar’s famous essay Three Days to See about how she would spend the time if she were granted 3 days to see:
Now and then I have tested my seeing friends to discover what they see. Recently I was visited by a very good friend who had just returned from a long walk in the woods, and I asked her what she had observed. ‘Nothing in particular,’ she replied. I might have been incredulous had I not been accustomed to such responses, for long ago I became convinced that the seeing see little.
