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For Visually Impaired People, A New Chapter in Reading Has DawnedBy Penny Reeder Lately, I find myself in a predicament that I could never have imagined when, at 32, I lost all ability to read print. I have access to so many books and magazines and newspapers and articles and letters and manuals and journals and recipes and diaries and blogs that there just isn’t enough time in my life to read them all! My new-found ability to access the fruits of Johannes Gutenberg’s extraordinary invention (the printing press) represents a delicious predicament that I can describe only as akin to that of a kid with unlimited allowance and undecayable teeth who lives in a candy store. There was a time when I had to ask my 6-year-old to sound out the written instructions on the back of a package of “Uncle Ben’s White and Wild Rice Mix.” Today, I wave the package in front of a scanner, and a not-unfriendly robotic voice tells me the name of the product, how much it weighs, its nutritional benefits (or lack thereof), and how to prepare the evening meal’s side dish. There was a time when the closest I could come to reading the newspaper was holding the front page about a half inch from my nose and laboriously decoding the biggest – and only the biggest and blackest – headlines. Then I would hope the nightly newscast would cover the headlines that had captured my most immediate interest. Later on, in the mid-1970s, the Metropolitan Washington Ear delivered an attractive radio receiver to my home. The receiver passed along the programming broadcast over a subcarrier channel provided by my local public radio station, and I could listen to volunteers reading many sections of The Washington Post and the (Washington) Evening Star according to a prearranged schedule. I credit the “Ear” with saving my sanity when I was a stay-at-home mom who could no longer read print, and making me – and all of my preschoolers as well – more news savvy than many of our neighbors.
Today, I pick up my telephone and use its familiar keypad to browse through every single section of the Post. In addition to reading the front section; the Metro section; my favorite, the food section; and every single news item, editorial and even some of the comics, I can breeze through the TV listings to see what’s on and when and if it’s “audio described.” I also can read the shopping ads from local department stores and supermarkets, including the ads from the wine and beer and liquor stores. Now that the voice of the “Ear’s” radio receiver has been replaced by the local jazz station, and the classical music resource, and the talk programming on NPR as the background accompaniment to my days and nights, I may not be informed in as well-rounded a way as I was in the 1980s when I read the Washington, D.C., newspapers at both ends of the political spectrum, and before the dial-in newspaper reading service was available. But what I choose to read, and when I choose to read it, are more under my own control nowadays. It is news to no one that the Internet has opened up an astounding variety of information to all of us, and to those of us who access computers with the assistance of screen-reading software, the ready availability of newspapers, magazines, Web sites, e-mail communications, and search engines like Google and Yahoo seems nothing short of miraculous! The content of the Sunday New York Times, all several pounds of it, is a series of mouse clicks (or in my case, keystrokes) away; “Dictionary.com” allows me to define a word, find its synonyms and antonyms, or even translate it into another language if I follow the right links on the right Web page. Google and Wikipedia have replaced the traditional encyclopedia, and I can access all of the information contained therein, and more. But the best news is about the books. Their number is multiplying exponentially, and things are only going to get better.
On a recent, fairly typical day, using my telephone, I read the headlines on the front page of The Washington Post and forced myself to learn more than I was prepared to first thing in the morning about torture and what the government deems “acceptable” under circumstances of interrogation. I checked my e-mail to find out if there would be room in this issue of Independence Today for this article. Then, still feeling sick at heart about the torture story, I opened up the second chapter of “The Pickwick Papers,” available in audio format on my MP3 player (called the Victor Reader “Stream”), and while I ate my oatmeal, allowed myself to be lulled into a false sense of security as I stepped back into Charles Dickens’ 19th-century serialized saga about an amusing explorer as he and his fictitious colleagues gallivant through the English countryside in a time before modern torture or terrorists or practically anything I had read about earlier on the front page of my morning newspaper. With the oatmeal finished, I turned again to e-mail. There were several new sections from a novel a friend is writing, and there were messages from Internet acquaintances who seemed to agree with my appraisal of today’s headlines; we get together via e-mail on a political discussion list whose members are nearly all blind or visually impaired. There was a recipe from a friend from another listserv, this one called “Cooking in the Dark,” in which members share recipes and information and friendship, often through multiple postings each day. I replied to my friend and asked if she could explain to me just how to open up the clams for the clam and potato pot pie detailed in the recipe she had posted. I knew she would understand that I needed to know about non-visual techniques for extracting clams from their shells, because she is blind like me. Thinking about eating clams reminded me of the bowlful of bread dough that was rising on my kitchen counter, and I consulted the recipe for the “18-hour No Knead Bread” that has taken the Internet by storm and encouraged bakers worldwide to experiment with – imagine this! – an entirely new method for making crusty artisan bread at home. The recipe, originally published a year ago in The New York Times, was posted last December on yet another e-mail list. This one is a one-way list (meaning that readers don’t have an opportunity to write back). I get hundreds of e-mails via this list each week. They are articles electronically “clipped” from the food sections of newspapers from all over the country. The soup I made yesterday came from a newspaper based in a city in the Southwest. Tonight’s “Salad Capresa” came from a newspaper in San Francisco. And the bread dough rising on the kitchen counter was inspired by that same no-knead bread recipe shared with New York Times readers by Mark Bittman last November. Hungry again after poking around in the rising dough and thinking about a clam pot pie with a bacon-studded biscuit crust, I reheated leftover Mexican chicken soup with Spanish rice and tomatillo and cilantro pesto, and sat down for lunch. Among the books I could choose to read while I was eating my lunch was “The Giver” by Lois Lowrey. It was last month’s book club selection (our club’s members are all people who access our books via alternative format). I had downloaded it as a Braille file from BookShare.org, and I had read it, over the course of a couple of days, sometimes with my fingers interpreting Braille, and sometimes by listening to the text read aloud by the speech synthesizer in my accessible PDA, Humanware’s BrailleNote. On the “Stream,” there’s a digital talking book, “Tender at the Bone, Growing Up at the Table,” by Ruth Reichl. My book club read Reichl’s “Garlic and Sapphires” last year, and my means for listening to the book was a held-together-by-packing-tape 4-track, half-speed audiocassette player, which is how books from the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) have arrived since sometime in the 1980s. I am looking forward to accessing “Tender at the Bone,” which is read aloud by one of NLS’ best narrators, via the file I recently downloaded from the NLS Web site. The Stream is a cute little, easily understood MP3 player, about the size of a deck of cards, that fits easily into a pocket or purse and even features a sleep timer so you don’t get completely discombobulated in a book should you fall asleep while listening to a narrator or the synthesized voice that makes text and DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) files accessible. On my Stream’s memory card are “Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany” by Bill Buford, “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser and “A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Khaled Hosseini. The card also holds a book about the history of The Washington Post, which a friend scanned into the Kurzweil program for translation into an accessible format. I promised to edit it so we could share it with the other members of our book club. I’m about halfway through. After lunch, I (virtually) attended an online training seminar on the topic of downloading unabridged digital books using the Overdrive software console. Apparently, if my state’s library system subscribes to this accessible technology project, I will be able to access current audio books, via digital download. These are the same audio books on the racks at Borders and Barnes and Noble, which library patrons have been reserving since our county library procured them from the publishers. I may soon be able to “borrow” them without having to leave home, take a bus to the library, or add my name to the “reserved” list. If my library is a subscriber to the service, I can listen to the books via my computer. Each book disappears after two weeks, which is analogous to the typical time period for checking out a hard-copy library book. Or I can copy the digital files to an MP3 player, or burn them to a CD for future listening. I’m sure you realize by now just exactly how food obsessed I am, and more to the point of this article, how book obsessed I am becoming. My Stream, my BrailleNote, my computer, my scanner, even my phone – and my postal mailbox too, for I still receive Martha Stewart Living in hard-copy Braille – re all delivering books and magazines and newspapers and other printed materials almost faster than I can list them. What a wealth of riches I have to enjoy! My only problem is how to find the time to read everything that is finally available to me – and still go to work, write the occasional article, interact with my family, and indulge in my passions for food and cooking. What a delightful quandary to find myself entangled within! In a future issue, I will list some resources and tell you how to access your own wealth of printed materials. I will try to decode the assistive-technology jargon and include Web sites and contact information so that you too can begin accumulating a collection of accessible books, magazines and other media. Your own digital collection may truly be just a few keystrokes away. |
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