THE BRAILLE MONITOR
Vol. 47, No. 6 June, 2004
Barbara Pierce, Editor
Published in inkprint, in Braille, and on cassette by
THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND
MARC MAURER, PRESIDENT
National Office
1800 Johnson Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21230
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Monitor subscriptions cost the Federation about twenty-five dollars per year. Members are invited, and nonmembers are requested, to cover the subscription cost. Donations should be made payable to National Federation of the Blind and sent to:
National Federation of the Blind
1800 Johnson Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21230
.
THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF THE BLIND IS NOT AN ORGANIZATION
SPEAKING FOR THE BLIND--IT IS THE BLIND SPEAKING FOR THEMSELVES
ISSN 0006-8829
[PHOTO/CAPTION: The lobby of the Atlanta Sheraton Hotel]
Have you been putting off making your room reservation for this year's convention? The Marriott Marquis is just about full. Those holding room confirmations from the Hilton will have them honored. But the Atlanta Sheraton Hotel, 165 Courtland Street, is now our official overflow hotel. This newly refurbished facility is about two blocks from the Marriott. Room rates are the same at both hotels. To make a room reservation at the Sheraton, call (404) 659-6500.
Vol. 47, No. 6 June, 2004
Contents
The First Jernigan Institute
Technology Training Conference..........................................................................................................
by Betsy Zaborowski
The Heart of the Technology-Training Conference................................................................................
by Anne Taylor
The Topography of Technology, Blindness,
and the Luddite....................................................................................................................................
by Marc Maurer
Striving for Excellence:
The Role of Technology and More.......................................................................................................
by Joanne Wilson
Access Technology and Disabilities
in the Twenty-First Century..................................................................................................................
by Ray Kurzweil
Mermaid A-Calling..............................................................................................................................
by Katie Keim
Eddie and Maria Bell Have Adjusted Gracefully
to Life--and Parenthood--without Sight................................................................................................
by Sarah Rozeboom
Training on Blindness from the Blind Themselves..................................................................................
by Mark A. Riccobono
For Laura............................................................................................................................................
by Barbara Walker Loos
The Latest News at NFB-NEWSLINE®.............................................................................................
by John G. Paré Jr.
Recipes...............................................................................................................................................
Monitor Miniatures..............................................................................................................................
Copyright© 2004 National Federation of the Blind
[LEAD PHOTO: Ray Kurzweil, recognized innovator, inventor, futurist, and longtime friend and colleague of the NFB, delivered a thought-provoking speech on the future of technology at the closing banquet of the Technology for Technology Providers Conference, which took place April 7 and 8 at the NFB Jernigan Institute.
PHOTO DESCRIPTION: Pictured here is Ray Kurzweil gesturing at a complicated graphic visible on the screen behind him.]
[PHOTO/CAPTION:
1. The auditorium of the Jernigan Institute was filled during the general sessions.
2. Trainers and participants alike enjoyed the opportunity for hands‑on assessment of the access technology products demonstrated.
3. Students listen intently to their trainer explain optical character recognition during one of the eight training sessions.
4. Participants had ample time to discuss technology products with vendors in the exhibit hall. Richard Fox of Dewitt and Associates talks with three women in front of his display.
5. Participants had a chance to tour the NFB's International Braille and Technology Center for the Blind. Maurice Peret (seated center left) stands speaks to the group.
The First Jernigan Institute Technology Training Conference
by Betsy Zaborowski
From the Editor: Dr. Zaborowski is the executive director of the new National Federation of the Blind Jernigan Institute:
April 7 to 9, 2004, our new National Federation of the Blind Jernigan Institute hosted a truly unique and highly successful training event, "Technology Training for Technology Trainers," cosponsored with Mississippi State University. Ninety participants, all of them technology, accessibility, or rehabilitation specialists from agencies all over the United States, attended. This was the first program conducted in the Jernigan Institute building, and it took great advantage of our beautiful new auditorium, the technology training lab, the spacious Members' Hall, and our extensive suite of conference rooms.
The training was delivered by our expert access technology team at the NFB's International Braille and Technology Center for the Blind (IBTC), led by Anne Taylor, with the participation of four highly experienced access technology experts from the Iowa Department for the Blind. What made this training event unique and especially effective was the extensive participation of technology vendors in the training sessions themselves, particularly with the hands-on demonstration segments of each session. In addition to the training sessions, the Jernigan Institute's Members' Hall was transformed into a lively exhibit hall, showcasing the products of seventeen vendors of access technology products and related services. Participants were able to spend ample time conversing and networking with the vendor representatives and learning about their products and services.
To quote a highly satisfied participant, "What a superb job on this conference! I felt the tone was different than other conferences. Everyone in attendance is working with blindness and has something to share; the consumer-driven aspect helped shape the direction taken by vendors; and the size of the event was big enough but not too big." Another participant exclaimed, "The topics were very well laid out. Those who planned the program were very insightful to our needs. Again the NFB has outdone themselves!" Additional comments were equally congratulatory: "What I liked best was the attitude of inclusion, the depth of knowledge, and the quality of instructors"; and "the size of the groups allowed for great interaction with the trainers as well as networking with other professionals in my field."
In addition to eight separate technology topic sessions, three general sessions took place during the three-day event. Dr. Marc Maurer, president of the NFB, presented a thought-provoking speech entitled "The Topography of Technology, Blindness, and the Luddite." We were very pleased to have the Honorable Joanne Wilson, commissioner of the Rehabilitation Services Administration, speak to us on "Striving for Excellence: The Role of Technology and More." Finally we were highly privileged to have our longtime friend and colleague, Dr. Ray Kurzweil, nationally recognized inventor, entrepreneur, author, and futurist, deliver a truly mind-bending presentation on "Access Technology and Disabilities in the Twenty-First Century." The texts of these speeches appear elsewhere in this issue.
[PHOTO/CAPTION: Anne Taylor, NFB training leader for this event, took the opportunity to thank participants for their enthusiastic engagement during the training sessions.]
The Heart of the Technology-Training Conference
by Anne Taylor
From the Editor: Anne Taylor is the NFB technology education manager. The primary responsibility for planning this conference was hers. This is the way she describes the hands-on sessions:
The "Technology Training for Technology Trainers" seminar provided participants a unique opportunity to take part in one of the most engaging and dynamic access technology training seminars ever offered anywhere in the country. This event provided an unprecedented venue for participants (all of whom work in the fields of rehabilitation, education, or access technology) to receive training directly from NFB technology experts as well as from experts associated with the leading access technology suppliers. Further, the seminar was conducted in eight small-group, interactive, hands-on sessions covering subjects important to the blindness access technology field. The participants were divided into groups that rotated through all eight sessions, each described briefly below.
"Portable Braille Devices" was presented by Anne Taylor, NFB technology education manager, with co-presenters from three companies in the access technology industry. The portable Braille devices demonstrated in the session were Elba Braille Assistance (demonstrated by Tommy Craig, Sighted Electronics), BrailleNote (demonstrated by Mathew Janusaukas, Pulse Data Humanware), and PAC Mate (demonstrated by Mark Reumann, Freedom Scientific).
In the session participants learned how portable Braille devices benefit blind people. They also learned what factors should be considered when purchasing a portable Braille device. Participants had plenty of time to get a firsthand look at each product represented, guided by the product suppliers.
According to the participants the session was well structured. An enthusiastic trainee commented, "Great format allowing us to see each product up close and personal. Well done group presentation." Another participant exclaimed, "Excellent! I really appreciated the detailed information as well as the opportunity to work hands-on with the devices."
"Citrix Metaframe and Windows Terminal Services: Increased Accessibility and New Job Opportunities" was presented by Brad Hodges, NFB technology accessibility manager, and co-presented by Gareth Collins of Dolphin Computer Access and Doug Geoffray of GW Micro.
The purpose of the session was to address opportunities and challenges for providing access to computer systems which operate over a Citrix Metaframe and a Windows terminal service network. Participants also learned how two screen-access software programs (Window-Eyes from GW Micro and Supernova from Dolphin Computer Access) interface with these programs.
Even though this topic is new and quite advanced, the session was a success because of Brad Hodges and the co-presenters' knowledge and expertise. A trainee commented on the session, "They made a very complex issue understandable. I had never even heard of Citrix before today. This was informative and beneficial. Very good introduction for me, this is a new area to me."
"EBooks," presented by Steven Booth, manager of the NFB's International Braille and Technology Center for the Blind, and Dr. George Kerscher and Annemarie Cooke from Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic (RFB&D). Under the instruction of Steven Booth and Dr. Kerscher the participants gained knowledge of how to use the various forms of electronic books (eBooks). Participants also had an opportunity to see demonstrations of hardware and software eBook players and discuss emerging issues relevant to the electronic books market.
Even though the topic was new to many people, the presenters were able to assist everyone to understand how to take full advantage of under-used eBook resources. A trainee, impressed with the instruction, commented, "Fantastic! This program was worth the price of admission. My understanding of the topic was less than zero. Now I have an excellent understanding of the process. This was presented very well. The trainers know their information and were very enthusiastic about the problems either solved or minimized by new technology."
"Braille Translation: What Technology Trainers Need to Know" was presented by Curtis Chong, program administrator for field operations and access technology with the Iowa Department for the Blind. Curtis is one of the leading access technology experts in the nation and is president of the NFB in Computer Science. Curtis is known for his captivating teaching style and his presentations always packed with tangible tips. This Braille translation session was no different.
The goal of the session was to convey the generalities of Braille translation: the technical process, the tools (hardware and software components of the Braille-production process), and the role of Braille translation in access technology for the blind. Curtis also spent some time discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the most current and widely used commercially available and no-cost Braille translation software.
Curtis's advanced knowledge of Braille and Braille production and his concise presentation style were welcomed by the trainees. One trainee commented, "I learned more about what good Braille is in that brief period than in two years of working on it. Mr. Chong is knowledgeable and very personable. Lots of great information to pass on. Loved the material Mr. Chong provided in our manual, it is an excellent resource."
"Optical Character Recognition (OCR)" was presented by Mark Riccobono, the NFB's coordinator of educational programs, along with representatives of two optical character recognition software suppliers: Stephen Baum from Kurzweil Educational Systems, Inc., and Dusty Vorhees from Freedom Scientific.
This lively and engaging hands-on session was designed to highlight the usefulness of optical character recognition technology for the blind as well as to demonstrate the capabilities of the technology in both the workplace and educational environment. The training room was equipped with scanners as well as twelve computers, which had both the OpenBook software and Kurzweil 1000 software installed on them. The structure of the session allowed the trainees an opportunity to evaluate the two OCR applications in a noncompetitive format so that the participants could draw their own conclusions about the products' capabilities, make comparisons, and determine their own preferences. One attendee commented, "Allowing us to access and use the software was helpful. I liked being able to play with the software firsthand. The vendors presented helpful information on commonalities and differences as well as the strengths and weaknesses of their products."
"Screen-Access Technology: A Discussion about Informed Consumer Choice" was presented by Brian Walker and Michael Barber, technology analysts for Project ASSIST, Iowa Department for the Blind. Michael and Brian are top experts on screen-access technology and are well known by professionals in the industry.
In this hands-on session Michael and Brian instructed the trainees how to identify those for whom a screen-access software application should be recommended over other access technology solutions. The trainees evaluated each of the three most widely used screen-access programs, observed the strengths and weaknesses of the products, and discussed when to choose a screen-access program over other access technology solutions and vice versa.
One impressed trainee commented, "The information was very helpful to remind me of the screen-access choices available today." Another participant was pleased that the "subject matter was interesting and worthwhile."
"Tactile Graphics: A Touching Experience" was presented by Robert Jaquiss, NFB access technology specialist and a top expert in the tactile graphics arena, and by representatives of three companies specializing in tactile graphics technology: David Skrivanek of Repro-Tronics, Steven Landau from Touch Graphics, and Robert Sander from ViewPlus Technologies. Together they made this session a success.
This session was designed to give attendees an overview of the need for tactile graphics and the technology available for producing it. The technologies demonstrated were those currently in use and the emerging tactile graphics production technologies that will be available in the near future. One attendee commented, "very impressive training material, very useful in many different areas, and very up-to-date content." Another attendee added, "The presenters seemed very knowledgeable, and their use of multimedia was good."
"Integrating Technology in the Work Place" was presented by Richard Ring, rehabilitation technology specialist with the Iowa Department for the Blind. Richard taught a very effective session that helped participants gain necessary knowledge and insight into conducting a worksite assessment for their clients. He suggested specific technical solutions to specific situations that rehabilitation counselors may face when assisting their clients to gain meaningful employment. A satisfied trainee commented, "Well done and very informative! Mr. Ring's stories are good. It helped to know that even people like Mr. Ring are challenged for proper access."
In summary, the NFB Jernigan Institute's first access technology training conference, cosponsored with Mississippi State University, was a resounding success. Many attendees asked about plans for conducting these conferences in the future. Based on the very favorable participant evaluation feedback, it is clear that this event met the needs of the access technology community and should be continued.
The NFB Jernigan Institute staff are currently working on a long‑term strategic plan for NFB-sponsored training activities. This plan will span the range of consumer and professional needs. Follow-up on access technology training will certainly form a central element of that plan for the future. However, the challenge which we are eager to meet is to find creative ways to produce these training events in the most affordable, high‑quality, and participant‑responsive manner.
[PHOTO/CAPTION: Marc Maurer]
The Topography of Technology, Blindness, and the Luddite
by Marc Maurer
From the Editor: On the first morning of the technology conference President Maurer addressed conferees, anchoring them in the reality of the blindness experience. This is what he said:
When I think about blindness and technology, the word that comes to mind is "ambivalence." What will the next generation of products do for us, or (which is more likely) what will these products do to us? The next generation of devices may give us greater opportunities than we have today, but they may make ordinary tasks more difficult.
I am reminded of the Luddites of England, who flourished from 1811 to 1816. Named, it is said, after Ned Ludd, who had smashed some frames used in industrial processes, the Luddites objected to the establishment of factories using labor-saving devices because industrial processes took jobs away from factory workers. The protests took tangible form with the Luddites breaking industrial machinery to prevent its use.
As part of my effort in creating the National Federation of the Blind Jernigan Institute, I spent some time recently examining kitchen appliances--stovetops, ovens, microwaves, dishwashers, and refrigerators. At one time or another all of these devices have been easily usable by the blind. However, the control mechanisms now being installed in these appliances are almost universally built with touch-screen technology. Much of the time they are interactive. Pressing the right spot on a touch panel illuminates a menu that offers choices available through touching other spots on the screen. Quite often the menu appears only for a few seconds. The operator of the appliance must be swift and sure in the touching. Without speed and accuracy in touching the right selections, the appliance will not work at all.
Needless to say, the blind, who cannot see the proper spots to touch and who cannot read the menu selections, cannot set the temperature on the oven, cook on the stove, set the temperature in the refrigerator, or set the amount of cooking time for the microwave. I have sometimes been tempted to take my palm and rub it over the entire touch screen just to see what would happen. When the inaccessibility has been monumental, when the day has been long, when the unwillingness of others to comprehend the need for the blind to be a part of society has been overwhelming, blind people sometimes have an appreciation for Ned Ludd. Smashing the stove or the refrigerator won't make it work, but at least there would be a recognizable protest.
Televisions, stereos, cellular telephones, and dozens of other electronic products present similar impediments. Some have buttons that can be felt; others do not. Even with the tactilely identifiable buttons, often the devices have visual displays that must be read to operate them. It is a temptation to say, "A pox on all this new-fangled technology. Give me back my microwave with the buttons and dials."
Just as in the 1800's industrial development could not be stopped, so it is in the twenty-first century--the so-called advances in technology cannot be halted. I remember a serious proposal in the early 1990's from some blind members of the National Federation of the Blind that we undertake to sue the Microsoft Company to prevent it from developing and distributing its graphical user interface--the Windows Operating System. In the 1980's a great deal of development work had been performed to make computers widely accessible to the blind for the first time. When the new technology came out, it was touted by Microsoft as a great advance, but it made computers impossible for the blind to use. Accessibility to computer information had become available through extraordinary effort, but it was being taken from us by a theoretical advance in technology. Because blind people were losing jobs through the dissemination of the graphical user interface, I was tempted by the proposition that we sue Microsoft for an order requiring them to stop distributing Windows. However, I judged that the groundswell had already reached proportions that could not be stemmed. It would be better, I thought, to hunt for ways to get at the information using additional technical development.
Today methods have been identified to make information presented graphically into audible or tactile form, and laws require purveyors of technology to make the systems they sell to government entities accessible to the blind. However, the methods necessarily employed to get at the information within the computer for audible or tactile presentation are inherently unstable because the operating system design does not take into account that audible or tactile presentation is needed, and the programs to offer these forms of presentation are, from the point of view of the designers, an afterthought. Consequently, even with computer access technology for the blind installed, the technology used by blind people is less useful than similar technology used by the sighted. Some programs routinely employed by sighted people will not run on a computer adapted for the blind, and even when the programs being used can be presented audibly with adaptive equipment, computers that blind people use crash more often than the ones used by the sighted.
During the debate about the graphical user interface (a debate that waxed hot and acrimonious), one question which often came to mind was one of fairness. Should the blind be able to prevent the development and dissemination of computer technology simply because it is not accessible in nonvisual ways? If a computer program can illustrate a scientific experiment through pictures that shift and change over time, should the sighted be prevented from having the experience of these pictures because the blind cannot see them? Or is this formulation of the question itself inherently unfair?
The objective in a scientific experiment is to learn information that has not already been discovered or to illustrate information that is known. Presenting the information in a book or on a computer screen is intended to illustrate what is already known. We believe that ways exist to do this that do not require vision, and we have seriously pursued the establishment of policies that require nonvisual access.
We do not object to pictures, and we would not inhibit the development of interesting new ways to present information--visually or otherwise. We do insist that nonvisual methods be employed in presenting information available to everybody else.
Failing to employ nonvisual techniques creates the Rapunzel effect. According to the fairy tale, Rapunzel, one of the most beautiful girls ever born was put into a tower by an evil witch. The tower had no doors and only one window high up in one wall. Rapunzel was trapped in the tower with no way to escape, and everybody else was kept out. Rapunzel eventually found a way to foil the wicked witch by letting her long hair hang out the window so that the handsome prince could climb up, look her over, fall in love with her, and eventually plan to go away with her to his kingdom.
In the case of the blind without adequate nonvisual tools, the computer doesn't even have the window high up in the wall. Getting into the system, the tower, is impossible, and we haven't had the good fortune to find a beautiful woman hanging her hair out of the side of the computer to help us climb up.
A few years ago a representative came to the National Center for the Blind from the Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft was planning to create the Microsoft Reader. The Microsoft vision was that all people everywhere would be able to read books--especially eBooks. The Microsoft Reader was going to make the world of eBooks available to everybody, including the blind.
Later Microsoft said that there had been a little problem. Some of the publishers thought that accessible books--those that could be read using speech--might interfere with the sale of audio books. Consequently the Microsoft Reader would not make eBooks accessible to the blind. This would remain so even if blind people paid good hard cash for the books themselves. Are books for everybody? Should there be universal access to information? Not according to Microsoft. Microsoft has decided it would rather lock its information in a tower with no doors.
In the early 1980's Microsoft created MS-DOS, the disc operating system. It was not accessible by the blind. With considerable effort a number of blind people built applications to speak the information presented in this computer environment. By the early 1990's Microsoft began widely distributing its Windows product with the graphical user interface. It was not accessible to the blind. Through considerable effort a number of blind people created accessibility software to provide the information within the computer system through speech or Braille. In each instance Microsoft periodically changed the operating system, distributing what they said were improved versions. Each time the accessibility programs had to be modified to make these new versions of the Microsoft system accessible.
During the 1990's Microsoft itself had a go at making its software accessible to the blind, but it abandoned the effort within a short time, saying in effect that it wished blind people well but it had no further interest in trying to help. Part of the problem was that Microsoft had built a program it called a screen reader. The screen reader was a dismal failure, and blind people proclaimed this widely because we did not want the uninformed to buy the product in the mistaken belief it would solve the problems of access to information. Microsoft did not say so directly, but many blind people got the idea that they were telling us that, if we didn't appreciate their hard work and good intentions, they would take their marbles and go home.
Today it is rumored that Microsoft is creating still another operating system which will be faster, better, and more robust than all of its previous ones. This new system is intended to take advantage of the advances in computer chip and hardware development. It will come as no surprise that the rumors also tell us Microsoft is not planning to make this software accessible to the blind any more than it made its previous operating systems accessible. Unless a way is found to induce Microsoft to include accessibility for the blind in its planning, we who are blind will be faced with building yet another accessibility program.
Programs to provide accessibility will of necessity be unstable if they have not been incorporated in the design of the operating system itself. These accessibility products are add-ons to the operating system--half measures to try to get at the information that the operating system manipulates. If the computer operating system is not designed to work seamlessly with access technology for the blind, other applications run on computers using these operating systems (or at least some of them) will not be accessible to the blind. Even when they are accessible, they will be slower, more cumbersome, and more subject to computer glitches than would be the case if accessibility for the blind were incorporated into the original design.
With this in mind we should insist that Microsoft and everybody else build products so that accessibility can be a part of them. However, Microsoft does not know about accessibility. It cannot do an adequate job of building its programs to be accessible. Microsoft tried, and it failed. In order for companies to build adequate accessibility tools, the blind must be a part of the process.
Most of the time the blind have been at a disadvantage when trying to get information. But occasionally we have had as much as anybody else, and sometimes we have had more.
In the 1970's the National Federation of the Blind participated in the development of Dr. Raymond Kurzweil's reading machine. We said that we would help him build the device if we could have the opportunity to assist in the design. The partnership worked, and the machine was much more useful than it might have been because of the contributions made by the blind themselves.
This partnership has been reestablished. Today the hand-held reading machine is a goal we are jointly trying to achieve. A proof-of-concept device has been built consisting of a very small computer attached to a digital camera. The user can snap a picture of a page of text, which the machine will read.
The objective is to make a pocket-sized reading machine. In the beginning it will probably be able to read only text, but it will read text in many, many environments. We believe that the machine will be able to read the displays on electronic devices or the words on a computer screen. We believe it can be used to provide the information contained in a cash machine, a voting machine, the devices at checkout counters, the labels on consumer goods, and other printed text. After a time, we expect the Kurzweil National Federation of the Blind Reader to give us the information on street signs, storefronts, and the sides of buses.
When the subject of text has been mastered, we believe the Kurzweil National Federation of the Blind Reader will be able to perform other jobs. The camera built into the machine could be used to record a library of objects. The machine could learn the appearance of an office, a recreation room, a gymnasium, or an auditorium. Those who come late to a lecture might be able to ask the machine to point out where in a lecture hall the empty seats are located, and the machine might be able to give directions.
The library of objects is only the beginning. The machine might also be able to store a library of faces. In a political gathering the Reader could identify senators and point out the direction to travel to meet these people--or to avoid them. These are only a few of the imaginative notions that might be built into the Kurzweil National Federation of the Blind Reader. As you observe from these comments, we are beginning the design of machine-based vision.
In the 1980's the prototype of the first hand-held notetaker for the blind was constructed by Dr. T.V. Cranmer, a member of the National Federation of the Blind. He called it the Pocket Braille. Deane Blazie studied the device and decided that there was a market for it. Working closely with Dr. Cranmer and other members of the National Federation of the Blind, Deane Blazie built the Braille 'n Speak--the first readily available Braille-based notetaker for the blind. From this early beginning came the Braille Lite, the Millennium notetaker, the PAC Mate, and the BrailleNote. I am told that there are other notetakers in development.
Deane Blazie came to the convention of the National Federation of the Blind and told our members what he had done to alter the Braille Lite and the other Blazie notetakers. During the course of his recitation, Deane Blazie was interrupted. A member of the audience asked him why he had spent time and effort creating the improvements that he had listed. Why had he not put his efforts into something else? Deane responded by saying, "These are the changes you asked me to make." In other words he had a continuing commitment to work with the blind to build the products in the way that blind people wanted them built. His wish to listen to the consumers helped him to build a company that was extraordinarily successful even though it was designing a completely new product for an unknown market.
Sometimes we have designed our own access technology. The National Federation of the Blind NEWSLINE® system was created by the blind themselves through the National Federation of the Blind. Through this newspaper delivery system with a hundred newspapers, we have a greater quantity of newspaper information available to the blind than has ever existed before in history. Most sighted people do not have as many newspapers as the blind who use NEWSLINE. One does not wish to be uppish, but it is nice to be ahead just once.
In my house I have a stereo, a VCR, a DVD player, a television, a tape deck, and a radio. They all have remote controls. So far my stove, my refrigerator, my telephone, my furnace, my microwave, my washing machine, my dryer, my freezer, and my computer do not. I have been able to use the remotes to get the machines to do what they were designed to do most of the time. If manufacturers insist on designing electronic products with visual touch-screen displays, I want the manufacturers to build these products so that I can use my universal remote to operate them. This is, of course, not the only way to make such devices accessible, but it is a solution that the manufacturers appear to understand.
What makes me ambivalent about the future of technology is the real possibility that such development may leave us behind. If we are unable to ensure that nonvisual access principles are incorporated in future designs, we will be cut out of commerce. Those who control information are in control of the entire society. One of the essential characteristics of a free society is freedom of speech, which implies freedom of thought. Unless we who are blind have the ability to get at the information which is used to compose the thought, we cannot be full participants in the planning and the discussion and the labor and the governance of the society in which we live. Consequently we will not tolerate a system that builds methods for obtaining information but prevents us from getting at the same sources.
When we are a part of the development of new technologies, everybody benefits. The machines work better for us and also for the sighted because the interfaces designed for their operation are less ambiguous. But there are also other advantages. A reading machine designed for the blind can also be used to provide information to sighted people who have not become literate. The Jobline for the blind program can also give the sighted access to job information. When we have created machine-based vision systems, they can be built into automobiles so that sighted people can drive more safely. The lesson of our experience is clear. We must be a part of the development process.
Many people believe that building devices for the blind is a matter of charity--an afterthought--a part of business that is unimportant. Our task is to change this comprehension. We do this through argument and persuasion when we can. We do it through an appeal to enlightened self-interest when we find somebody prepared to listen. We do it through more confrontational methods when we have no alternative.
Some years ago AOL's online information service was sweeping the nation and fast becoming the standard for the design of online information services. AOL was not accessible to the blind. When we asked that the service be made usable by blind people, we were told that this would be accomplished when AOL had the time. However, that would not be until the online weather service, the online television service, certain streaming video functions, and a number of other products had been perfected. To add insult to injury, one blind person who was solicited by AOL sales personnel was told that although AOL was not accessible to the blind, blind people should buy it anyway because it would become accessible sometime--probably.
When we sued AOL, a number of its officials wondered what all the fuss was about. They seemed to think that we were overly aggressive and unreasonably demanding. However, AOL is now accessible to the blind. But it would have been accessible earlier and AOL might have retained its market share if it had been prepared to work with us in harmony to seek methods for achieving accessibility for the blind.
Which brings me to the Diebold Corporation. We became acquainted with Diebold by observing that this manufacturer of ATM systems had placed a number of inaccessible machines in public places in and around the District of Columbia, and we sued them. Diebold's president, Wally O'Dell, asked us why we had done such an unfriendly thing, and we responded that we wanted his ATMs to be accessible to the blind. From this strange beginning a partnership has developed in which we have joined with Diebold to promote accessibility through ATMs, voting machines, and other devices to be built in the months to come. Diebold understands manufacturing, and we understand accessibility for the blind. Not long after our partnership came together, we approached members of Congress about the urgent need of the blind to be a part of the political process, with the result that the Help America Vote Act incorporates provisions requiring nonvisual access to polling places by 2006. Diebold builds voting machines with state-of-the-art access technology included in them.
What do the blind want, and how do we intend to get it? We want access to the same information that is available to everybody else. We want to be able to use the machines that other people use. We want an interface with digital equipment that will permit us to get at the functions of the machines without the use of sight. In the past we have had buttons to press, and this is acceptable if the interface does not demand vision. We would be willing to have voice control rather than push-button control, but the interface must be nonvisual.
The telephone, the tape recorder, the MP3 player, the computer, the radio, and the digital camera (we are told) are coming together with wireless worldwide communication built in. We want to be able to use the resulting devices for the purposes they were intended to fulfill with the same ease that other people use them. Furthermore we expect to be consulted in the process of designing the nonvisual interfaces.
In the past many people have told us that they know what kinds of specialized products we need. A man came to me once from a benevolent organization to tell me that blind people needed a special cigarette lighter. The cigarette to be lit was placed in a tube attached to the side of the lighter. The flame came from the lighter at the very tip of the cigarette within the tube. The man brought me such a lighter, and I lit a cigarette with it. I wondered as I did so if he had thought blind people were unable to smoke before he created his invention.
We are no longer prepared to have others tell us what we need. We will participate in the development of technology, giving advice about how to make things accessible, and sometimes creating accessible systems ourselves. We will work to ensure that policies are enacted that promote the design and construction of accessible products. We will continue to support legislation to ensure nonvisual access to information, and we will ask that the courts enforce the law.
When the blind are involved in the design of new products, everybody benefits. When we are not involved in the design of new products and when these designs are configured so that we are kept out of the channels of commerce, the systems of education, or the framework of government, there will be conflict. We are not prepared for the blind to be brushed aside or ignored or forgotten. Above everything else we must be a part of the process. In the creation of the National Federation of the Blind Jernigan Institute we have made a powerful commitment to participation and to growth within our culture, and this is a commitment that we intend to keep.
[PHOTO/CAPTION: Joanne Wilson, commissioner of the Rehabilitation Services Administration, delivers the keynote address for the April 8 conference session. President Maurer stands behind her.]
Striving for Excellence:
The Role of Technology and More
by Joanne Wilson
From the Editor: Dr. Joanne Wilson is the commissioner of the Rehabilitation Services Administration. Before joining the Bush administration, she established and directed the Louisiana Center for the Blind. She was president for many years of the NFB of Louisiana and a member of the NFB board of directors. Her commitment to delivering effective services to blind people and other people with disabilities is the hallmark of everything she does. On the second morning of the technology conference she delivered the keynote address. Here is a summary of what she said:
A professor walked to the front of the lecture hall carrying a big jar. He began placing large rocks in it until no more would fit. He then asked the class if the jar was full. The students said that it was. Then he pulled a jar of pebbles out from under the table and poured a number into the jar. Again he asked if the jar was full, and again he was told that it was. Then he produced a jar of sand and poured it into the rocks and pebbles until it reached the top. He asked a third time if the jar was full, and was told that now it really was filled. Finally he produced a pitcher of water and poured it into the jar and said, "Now the jar really is full."
When he asked the students what the point of this demonstration was, they offered platitudes like "you can always fit a bit more into your schedule," or "a busy person can always find time to do something more," and other such lessons. But the professor said that none of these had been his point. He wanted them to remember that, if the big rocks had not been put in first, there would never have been space for them once the pebbles, sand, and water had been added.
So why are we here today? Dr. Jernigan told this story illustrating the importance of priorities years ago, and his point is still true today. We need to decide what the big rocks are in the blindness field today. What do we need to be doing differently to make rehabilitation more effective? We are meeting today in one of the answers to this question. The Jernigan Institute is going to provide new answers--some of the rocks that need to be put in first when we think about rehabilitation and training for the blind. This building, dreamed of and built by blind people, will be a center where knowledgeable people will be thinking and talking about education and training and research and technology for blind people in new ways. For the first time in history blind people will be able to shape their own destiny and determine the most effective ways for programs and research to affect the lives of generations of blind people to come.
As many of you know, in the past much of the programming and technology for blind people has been designed and executed by well-meaning sighted people, usually with little or no participation by blind people. With the Jernigan Institute that will change, and this facility will be a real asset and treasure. You are here because you are interested in technology, and technology is a very important part of the future outlook for blind people.
When I became commissioner of the Rehabilitation Services Administration, I had to decide where to start. I began listening to the people we serve. I asked them what they liked and didn't like about the rehabilitation they receive. How could it be more effective? I had learned from my experience with the National Federation of the Blind that it was important to listen to the people we serve before making policies or developing new programs. By taking part in this conference, you are benefitting from the distilled wisdom of blind people, for that is what this institute offers you.
As I listened to people, I began to develop a set of principles that I believe should guide the rehabilitation world. Let me articulate these principles--the rehabilitation rocks that belong in our jar--as they apply to blind people. My first principle is that blind people can lead independent lives and can hold down high-quality, competitive employment in integrated settings. In other words, they can lead normal lives and share in the American dream.
For the first twenty years or so of the rehabilitation program in this country, no one believed that blind people had any employment possibilities. The rehabilitation program really wasn't meant for them. In fact, if we look at the statistics for the rehabilitation program during those first twenty years, an average of 4.5 blind people per year per state were becoming employed.
Then things began to change because blind consumers themselves began to object. They said that blind people could work, and gradually the law began to change. Concepts such as "most significant disability," "high-quality employment," "comprehensive services," "full potential," "individualized services," "emphasis on wages," and "civil rights" entered our vocabulary. The law began to change, not because a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington decided that it should, but because they began listening to blind people.
In the 1950's no one had ever run a mile in less than four minutes. Then, on May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister broke that barrier; he ran a mile in 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds. Six months later someone else broke that record. Within a year several more people had broken the barrier of the four-minute mile. It took one person to believe that things could be different to raise the bar of expectation for everybody.
Why are you here at this conference? Because you believe that technology is one of those things that can open the future in a new way for blind people. Used right, it can raise the bar and change things for blind people for the rest of history. But bars will be raised and programs will be changed only when we listen to blind people--listen to what consumers are saying.
My second principle is that the major barrier preventing blind people from getting high-quality employment and leading independent lives is not blindness itself but the misconceptions and the stereotyped notions people hold about the disability. These notions exist in blind people themselves, in providers, in family members, in employers, even sometimes within the rehabilitation profession; and the resulting misconceptions and low expectations are often the major barrier to blind people's achieving full integration into society.
The other day a member of my senior management team came to me having just had cornea transplant surgery. He was sighted, but he needed this surgery. He was really having trouble with his recovery. The surgery had not gone well, and he was having problems getting around and reading. Using the computer was giving him real trouble. I suggested that we have adaptive software loaded onto his computer temporarily at least. He had been working for rehabilitation for years. He had seen lots of blind people, including me, working effectively within our system. But he refused point blank to accept the help that was available for him, and he continues to refuse the equipment.
Why does my colleague have such trouble taking this step? The answer is the same thing you face when you begin working with blind customers in the technology field. It was his attitude; he was embarrassed to be thought of as a blind person and to use the equipment that could make him productive. We all have areas in our lives in which we harbor low expectations for ourselves. In these areas we sell ourselves short.
I often tell the following story. In the rehabilitation center I ran that Dr. Maurer referred to earlier, I was working with some of the students, moving some furniture around. We had a big desk to move into another room. I said that we couldn't do it ourselves because we could not get it through the doorway. The students disagreed. They pointed out that, if we just took off the door, we could get it through easily. I immediately called the sighted shop instructor to have him take the door off the hinges for us. But the students said, "No, no, we can do the job ourselves; we don't need J.D." They showed me how to pull out the pins and remove the door. We carried the desk through, put the door back on, and replaced the pins. There was nothing to it. I had sold myself and these blind students short. I had believed that, because we were blind, we couldn't do that task. Lots of us do that kind of thing. Whether it's touching a computer or doing day-to-day tasks, we can sell ourselves short because of misconceptions about our disabilities.
When I first became commissioner, I decided that I just had to figure out why disabled people were having such trouble getting jobs. I called in some folks from Cornell University, where they do lots of research about people with disabilities. I asked them to tell me the secrets revealed by their studies about why some people with disabilities become employed and some do not. They cited one study of blind people preparing for employment. They asked them at the beginning whether they expected that their blindness was going to be a barrier to getting a job. Two-thirds of the participants said that they expected blindness to be a barrier. By the end of the study, 80 percent of that group were unemployed.
When they looked at the results for the third who had said that they did not expect blindness to be a barrier to employment, they found that 80 percent of that group were employed. I asked how the second group had absorbed the healthy attitude about employment. The answer was that some force in their lives--a family member, a teacher, a rehab professional--had convinced them that blindness would not be a barrier. The National Federation of the Blind is such a force, and as you go out to teach technology across this country, you also have the opportunity to be such a force in the lives of your students.
Why do people come to rehabilitation agencies? Maybe they want a college education or a particular piece of technology. Those are the surface reasons, but mostly they come because they see us as the experts on blindness. They believe that we can give them the answers about how they are going to be able to live independently and to go back to work. They are looking for hope from us. It's not just our job or the job of this new institute to provide information or equipment; part of our job is to help consumers deal with the adjustment to their disability, to give them real hope, to teach them a defined philosophy about blindness.
We must help them to sort out their emotions about blindness and to discover which of their notions are true and which are not true. Someone once told me that whoever controls the circumference of your mind controls the circumference of your being. Unless we help people to stretch their minds and build a healthy philosophy about blindness and the possibilities open to them, all the equipment and technology training and tips about daily living will have only a limited effect on their lives. This new Jernigan Institute will offer hope, and if you choose to, you can be the conduit for it.
My third principle is that I really believe that blind people have the right to choose their own employment outcomes: what they want to do with their lives, what kind of jobs they want to have, who they want to have provide the services they need. This is really important in technology. People have a right to understand what is available and decide what will fit their needs.
How do individual people make those choices? When I go to the NFB convention, I spend time in the exhibit hall. If you ever go to the convention, you will see the same thing. People move around, looking at the displays and listening to what the vendors have to say. They begin nudging each other and asking the more experienced users how well particular equipment has worked for them and how well they like using it. Before they commit to a purchase, they ask around the convention, gathering information and advice from other blind people. That is how people come to an informed choice. We need to help blind people come into contact with other blind people. That's how most of us make the big purchase decisions in our lives: we get perspective from others who have already made such choices and will share their experience. The Institute will provide this perspective for blind people and give them the information that will allow them to make informed choices.
My fourth principle is that the real purpose of the general rehabilitation program and the technology training you will be doing is to empower blind people by giving them the training, the services, the equipment, and the education they need; but beyond all of that they need confidence and high expectations for themselves--the conviction that they truly can become fully integrated and contributing members of their communities. All this takes time, and it isn't cheap or easy. But once we have empowered people, we have truly changed their lives.
I remember reading a little piece in the Reader's Digest when I was in high school. One woman in a small town was the envy of all her neighbors because she always had the very best household employees in the community. When she was asked about her ability to hire people who would do a wonderful job, she explained that she used the broom test. Before a job applicant arrived, she would lay a broom on the ground just outside her door. Candidates who simply stepped over the broom on their way in received no consideration. She made her choices from among those who bent down and picked up the broom so that they could prop it in the corner, out of the way. They were the folks with that little something extra.
In my rehabilitation center I conducted a class a couple of times a week in which we discussed all kinds of things. I used to ask the students this question: if you were an employer, and you had two employees who were in every single respect equal except that one was blind, which one would you hire?
The question always resulted in lots of discussion even though no two candidates are ever exactly equal except for one characteristic. Mostly the students decided that they would hire the blind applicant. Then they were shocked when I contradicted them. I pointed out that, if all other characteristics were in fact equal and one person was blind, any good business person would hire the sighted person. The students would be furious. "What do you mean that you wouldn't hire a blind person? How do you ever expect us to get jobs if even you wouldn't hire us?"
My answer was simple: "You are going to get jobs because you are going to work so hard that things will not be equal." Blindness is a problem with many employers and on lots of jobs. The job of effective rehabilitation training is to make sure that graduates have more skills, a better work ethic, a better personality, whatever it takes so that blindness becomes the characteristic tenth or eleventh down the list of factors to be weighed in the hiring decision. Teaching your students technology is one of the factors that will make a difference, but it is only one of many factors. That's why you can't just settle for teaching technology. Our blind graduates have to be superior to their sighted competition, not just equal. This new institute brings the collective voice and experience of blind people into this effort as part of what you can offer your students.
The final principle I want to talk about today is this: I believe that true rehabilitation, the actual changing of blind people's lives, comes not just from technology experts or blindness professionals like me but from our working in partnership with consumer organizations. Consider the general business picture. When you look around at ordinary companies, you will see that some are just getting along and some are thriving. What makes the difference between these two groups? The successful businesses are able to reach beyond the standard resources that we think of: products, personnel, technology, and financial resources. They are tapping into hidden resources that have been under-used. The evidence shows that they are looking to their consumers, the people to whom they provide services. They invite consumers to join their boards and to take part in analysis of their products and services. In short, they are listening to consumers.
I was on a plane the other day and listening to a program. A man from an organization called Redhead Technologies was being interviewed. He explained that the company had not been doing very well. They looked at their corporate structure and discovered that they had a lot of inbreeding. So they began consciously listening to the people who used their products and making decisions based on what they learned. When they began involving consumers, the business took off. This is what the rehabilitation world needs to do. We can tap a valuable resource if we will partner with the organized blind in doing training and rehabilitation and education. We have vastly under-used that resource. We have maintained a wall between rehab professionals and "those wild blind consumers." Sometimes we're practically at war--we certainly don't value the other's opinions or cooperate, much less do things together. We have always viewed doing so as unprofessional, and the result has been that we have lost a valuable group of experts on blindness. This does not make any sense. The business world has discovered that it doesn't make sense, and we in rehabilitation need to discover that it doesn't make sense.
We must tap the resources you have seen here today--the commitment, the expertise, and the role modeling; these can be made available to our customers. As professionals you can do some of what I have talked about here, but you are busy. You are at your desk or trying to sell or teach technology. But you can't do it all, and you can't do it alone. The National Federation of the Blind is a valuable resource. The National Center and the Jernigan Institute are here for you to use, and NFB members can help instill confidence in your consumers and speed their adjustment to blindness.
Those of you who have been in this field for a while or who are blind yourselves, you know what happens when one blind person meets another who has mastered the skills and has the confidence to succeed. A bond is established because someone else understands. People begin going off to conferences and conventions and observing other blind people. They say, "I don't want to be like that blind person, but I sure would like to be like this one." They get perspective and begin to understand just how far they can push themselves. They see blind people doing things they never thought they could do, and they find that others have already articulated the fuzzy thoughts floating around in their own minds. All this helps them define their personal philosophy about blindness.
Not only do they learn about resources and opportunities, but they learn to advocate for themselves. They come to recognize that there is strength in numbers and that they are not alone. They come to understand that together they can change the world, and this discovery is energizing. They discover help and support for themselves when they are facing hard times, but they also find a group to which they can contribute.
I believe passionately that we must break down the barriers and find a way to use the thousands of volunteers who are out there ready to help us do the real rehabilitation, education, and training of blind people if we are truly going to change the system and make a real difference.
I will conclude by telling you a bit about my own life because it is not just my story, it is the story of most blind people. I grew up with RP [retinitis pigmentosa]. I knew I was going to become blind, but I had no one to tell me the truth about blindness. My family and I drifted along, doing the best we could, but I was surrounded by attitudes of pity and protectiveness and low expectation. No one knew what would become of me. As a teenager I remember crying myself to sleep at night, thinking that my friends would leave home and get jobs, marry, and have children; but what future did I have? Like everyone around me, I assumed that I would always be dependent on my family.
Eventually I went off to the public rehabilitation program in my state. It was the Iowa Commission for the Blind, run by Dr. Kenneth Jernigan. For the first time I actually saw professionals and consumers working together, and it changed my life. I met professional staff members who truly believed in me as a blind person. They taught me new attitudes, and they pushed me to learn new skills. Very simply they made me a different person. Why? Because they themselves had positive attitudes about blindness, a new philosophy about blindness, and high expectations for blind people. Their beliefs were different from those of most blindness professionals because they had been around blind people. They had immersed themselves in the writings of blind thinkers and gone to conventions and taken the time to really listen to what blind people and consumer groups of blind people thought and hoped and dreamed. Moreover, they had hung around with blind people and had made friends with them.
The result of all this was that they had a different attitude about blindness. And they conveyed that attitude to a young blind kid from a small town in Iowa. They had me read the material written by the organized blind, they pulled me into discussions that helped me sort out my thoughts about blindness, they encouraged me to attend conferences where I could gain a healthy perspective on my blindness, and they had me hang around with the kind of blind people who could serve as role models and give me hope and encouragement. All this taught me that I could advocate for myself and others, that I should have high expectations for myself, that I had a right to the American dream. They taught me a defined philosophy and gave me a support group that I could give back to. All this made a huge difference in my life. Because of those experiences the big rocks were put into my jar. After that the rest just fell into place.
That is why I am very glad that I was invited to come to talk to all of you today. I believe that all this is your job, and I sincerely ask you to be vehicles for putting the big rocks into the individual lives of the people you work with, but also into the rehabilitation, education, and training professions. Those big rocks are the healthy attitudes, the beliefs, the new truth about blindness, and the recognition that we can partner with the Jernigan Institute, with the National Federation of the Blind, and with other blind people to carry out our jobs and make a difference in the lives of blind people.
[PHOTO/CAPTION: Jim Gashel, Ray Kurzweil, and Marc Maurer enjoy dinner together before Mr. Kurzweil's banquet remarks. ]
Access Technology and Disabilities
in the Twenty-First Century
by Ray Kurzweil
From the EditorM Raymond Kurzweil is an inventor, entrepreneur, author, and futurist. The Wall Street Journal calls him "a restless genius"; Forbes magazine refers to him as the "ultimate thinking machine." He has many firsts to his credit: developer of omni font optical character recognition, inventor of the first text-to-speech reading machine for the blind, developer of the CCD flat bed scanner, inventor of both the first speech synthesizer and a music synthesizer that reproduces the grand piano and orchestral instruments, and developer of the first large-vocabulary speech-recognition system.
Dr. Kurzweil is also the recipient of many awards and honors: the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, inductee to the Inventors' Hall of Fame, and recipient of the National Medal of Technology. But, more important than all these honors to members of the blindness community around the world, Ray Kurzweil has exhibited a close personal and constant commitment to improving the lives of blind people. He awards scholarships to the most deserving blind students each year. He is also working closely with the National Federation of the Blind to develop a pocket-size reading machine that can be used anywhere. On April 8, 2004, Ray Kurzweil addressed the attendees at the first technology conference to be held at the NFB Jernigan Institute. Here are his after-dinner remarks:
This has been the most meaningful working relationship I have had. I started my inventing career with a reading machine for the blind and was gratified to get this very enthusiastic organization not only to back the effort but to work closely with me. We worked with a team of scientists and engineers from the National Federation of the Blind, which I really attribute the success of that project to. It's been a very rewarding effort, so I have kept a close involvement in this field for over thirty years. One gentleman, who is here, Steve Baum, has been a tremendous contributor to that technology and has led the software effort for the last--fifteen years is it?--twenty-two years. Yes, time goes by quickly when you are having a good time.
As Jim mentioned, we are working together again. I'm working with the National Federation of the Blind, and we are going to be using Kurzweil educational software to create a pocket-size reading machine. I'll talk a little bit about the status of the project and what my goals are. But what I'd like to talk to you about is the future of technology. Really my interest in being a futurist stems from my interest in being an inventor, and that goes back to this first major project, the reading machine. I realized that my project had to make sense when I finished the project, not when I began it, and invariably the world was a different place when we got the project done three or four years later. Everything changed--the technology, enabling factors, the market distribution channels, the tools of distribution, and development systems.
Mostly projects fail, not because the R and D department can't get the project to work, but because the timing is wrong--the projects are too late, or they are too early. It's kind of like surfing, catching the wave at the right time, and it's very hard to get that timing just right. Invariably projects are too early, and not all the enabling factors are in place. So I became an ardent student of technology trends. I began to track trends very carefully, and this has taken on a life of its own. I have a team of ten people who gather data about all the different aspects of technology (computation, communications, biological technology, different kinds of electronic technologies), and I work with mathematicians to develop mathematical models, then use that to anticipate technology and have used that really to time the project so we can catch the wave at just the right time.
This has actually enabled me now to invent with the technologies of the future, and not just projects of three or four years from now, but to anticipate what technology will be ten years, twenty years, thirty years hence. While we can't build a circa-2020 product today, we can envision what it would be like and then we can contemplate what its impact will be on society.
So that's what I'd like to talk to you about: where technology is headed, what kind of capabilities we'll have twenty or thirty years from now, and what impact that will have on the world in general and in particular on disabilities and on blindness technology. This will affect everyone; it will have a profound effect on disabilities. I would say that already technology has been a great leveler in that it can really overcome the primary handicaps associated with disabilities, provided that the technology is designed correctly, that people know about the technology, that people have the right training, and that the technology really meets the needs of disabled people.
That's really the purpose of this research and training institute. Technology is accelerating, and I think Dr. Jernigan was very prescient to have the urgency he did despite a fatal illness. He realized there really was no time to wait, that this was the right time for this very daunting project. We do need a national leadership institute such as the Jernigan Institute to guide technology and also to train the world to use the technology effectively. I think the need for that will become more apparent as I go through some of the future trends.
The one trend that has impressed me most deeply from these models that I've developed is that the pace of technology itself is accelerating. It's not a constant. You might say, "Well okay, that's obvious; things are getting faster." It's remarkable that so few otherwise thoughtful observers really take this into consideration. I would say 95 percent of Nobel Prize winners don't factor this in.
I was just at a conference a few months ago, and we were talking about the promise and peril of technology--and I will try to touch on that--and we were talking about the dangers of nanotechnology. One Nobel Prize biologist said, "Oh, we're not going to have self-replicating nanotechnology for at least a hundred years."
I said, "That's actually a very good estimate of the amount of technical progress needed to achieve that milestone (that matches my own models) at today's rate of progress, but we're doubling the paradigm-shift rate, the rate of technical progress, every decade, so we'll make a hundred years of progress at today's rate of progress in twenty-five years." That is consensus in the nanotechnology field.
Generally scientists look at the work they've done recently. They'll have an intuition, "Okay, over the last year we've solved one percent of the problem." It might be hard to define exactly what that means, but their intuition is actually pretty good. Then they'll say, "Okay, we'll take ninety-nine years to do the other 99 percent," not realizing that the pace of progress is going to accelerate greatly because the tools get more and more powerful. That particular insight is very rarely taken into consideration.
I'd like to show you some of these trends. I'm going to talk through the screens for those who are visually impaired. Most of the screens just show a graph that goes up and up. These are what are called logarithmic graphs, which means that going up the chart represents multiplying some key value by a constant, rather than just adding to it. For example, if you have something that doubles every year, a linear chart would show a curve as the slope got more and more extreme as you went to the right. On a logarithmic chart that would be a straight line. So a straight line on a logarithmic chart means exponential growth, and all of these, except for one which I will point out, are logarithmic graphs. This is the growth of the phone industry over the last 110 years. Basically the only point here is that it took half a century for the telephone to be adopted by a quarter of the U.S. population. Here is a more recent technology, U.S. cell phones, and we have the same progression in only ten years. This is one example of the acceleration at all different levels of technology--not only the power of the technology, but the adoption and impact that it has had.
If we put a lot of different communication technologies on a logarithmic graph (the telephone, radio, television), each took quite a few decades to be adopted by a quarter of the U.S. population. The World Wide Web took about five years, reflecting this ongoing acceleration. If we take a broader view of technology, in fact see technology itself as an outgrowth of the biological evolution that led to the technology-creating species in the first place, we actually see that this exponential growth of the rate of progress goes back billions of years to the beginning of life on this planet. The first paradigm shift, cells and DNA, took billions of years.
Evolution works through indirection. It creates a capability; then it uses that capability to create the next stage. That's why an evolutionary process like technology or like biological evolution accelerates. So once we had DNA, which is actually a little computer system that evolution devised to keep track of its experiments, the next stage, the Cambrian explosion when all the body plans of the animals were evolved, went relatively quickly. It only took about ten or twenty million years, which is hundreds of times faster. Biological evolution kept accelerating. Homo sapiens, our species, evolved in only a few hundred thousand years.
Then again, working through indirection, evolution used that creation, homo sapiens, to bring in the next stage, which was human-directed cultural and technological evolution. That again was faster. The first stage in that took only tens of thousands of years. Fire, the wheel, stone tools evolved much more quickly than our species evolved. Each new stage of technology was used to create the next stage. So a thousand years ago a paradigm shift like the printing press took about a century to be adopted, but recent major communication technologies, new paradigms, have been adopted in only a few years' time.
This next chart goes back a certain amount of time and is a double exponential chart that shows the time that particular paradigm took to be adopted. It creates a straight line, really showing that technological evolution was an outgrowth and a continuation of biological evolution. The cutting edge of evolution on our planet is not biological evolution anymore. It's the evolution that we are creating, and we use each generation's tools to create the next.
The first generation of computers were drawn by hand using pencils and straight rules and wired with screwdrivers and individual wires. Now a computer designer will sit at a computer station, design some high-level parameters, and twelve different layers of intermediate design will be automatically computed. A very complex design will be done in a matter of hours, rather than years.
This is some personal experience. When I was a student back at MIT in 1967, a computer that took up a room bigger than this auditorium cost a few million dollars. It was less powerful than the computer in your cell phone; it was a quarter of a MIPS [million instructions per second]. Today a notebook computer, like the one I am using here which costs $2,000--it's actually already less--is four thousand times faster. That's twenty-two doublings of price performance in thirty-six years. So every nineteen months the power per dollar of computers has doubled, and that's actually a pretty conservative statement.
Many of you, I'm sure, have heard of Moore's Law, which reflects the exponential growth of computation. While we're doubling the rate of progress every ten years, the actual power of the technology per unit cost is doubling, generally about once a year. That's actually a deflationary effect of 50 percent. The economists are now worried about deflation when we used to be worried about inflation. They are worried about deflation because we had deflation in the Depression, and they think deflation is a harbinger of depression. That deflation was because of a collapse in consumer demand and the money supply. This deflation is because of an improvement in price performance, and it's actually leading to economic prosperity. It leads to greater productivity; and, as I'll show you later, our actual economic output more than outpaces that 50-percent deflationary factor.
The one factor that has fueled Moore's Law is that on an integrated circuit we shrink the size of transistors, which are microscopic in size, by 50 percent every two years. The transistors also run faster because the electrons have less distance to travel. We basically double the price performance of integrated circuits every twelve months.
Many observers have said, okay, we're going to run out of room in that particular paradigm within--actually they keep pushing the date back--but now it's twenty years. Within fifteen to twenty years the key features of transistors will be a few atoms in width, and we won't be able to shrink them any more. So will that be the end of Moore's Law? Well, the answer is, yes, that paradigm won't work anymore. But the real question is, will that be the end of the exponential growth of computers and all the other things that stem from electronics, like communications and so on? It's really a key question as we consider the twenty-first century because of the profound impact that computation is going to have on many aspects of our lives.
So as one way to examine this question I put forty-nine famous computers on a logarithmic graph, which you see on this slide. This goes back one century, so at the end of the nineteenth century, in the lower left-hand corner, we had a computer that automated the first American census. It used those little punch-card machines. (I think those were subsequently shipped to the Florida Election Commission.) [laughter]
In 1942 we had a different type of computer, based on relays used from the telephone system that Alan Turing and his colleagues put together to crack the Nazi Enigma code, which provided Churchill and Roosevelt a complete transcription of all of the German messages. Actually this was quite a dilemma for the leadership because they didn't want to use the information too freely, or they would tip off the enemy that they had cracked the code. So Churchill knew that Coventry was to be bombed and wasn't able to warn the city. They would try various ruses to try and convince the Nazis that they had gotten the information in some other way. So if they knew a convoy of ships was coming, they would send over a lone flyer, and the Germans would say, "Oh, we've been spotted." In fact the English knew all along where the convoy was coming from, having cracked the code. But then in the Battle of Britain they used the information without reservation. Despite the fact that the RAF was greatly outnumbered, England won that battle, giving us a launching pad for the D-Day invasion.
In the 1950's a different type of circuit came in--vacuum tubes--completely different from relays. CBS used it to predict the election of a president for the first time, President Eisenhower. They were shrinking vacuum tubes, making them smaller and smaller to keep this exponential growth of electronics growing. Finally that paradigm hit a wall. They couldn't shrink it anymore and keep the vacuum. Then a completely different paradigm came out of left field with transistors, which were not small tubes; it's a different technique, and it kept the exponential growth going. Then integrated circuits came.
So every time one paradigm ran out of ability to keep this exponential growth going, another paradigm emerged. Generally, as we could see ahead of time the end of a paradigm's ability to produce exponential growth, that fact would create pressure on research and development to create the next paradigm. That's happening right now, despite the fact that we're fifteen to twenty years away from the end of the current paradigm, which is the fifth, not the first, paradigm to provide exponential growth in computing.
Now that we can see that we will be unable to shrink transistors on an integrated circuit, we've already been doing extensive work on the sixth paradigm, which is three-dimensional molecular computing--building computing devices at the molecular level in three dimensions. When I wrote about this five years ago in the book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, it was considered a controversial notion and was not a mainstream view. There has been a real sea change in attitude among mainstream scientists as to the feasibility of three-dimensional molecular circuits. There has been so much progress, really in the last two years, it's now a mainstream view that, why of course, we'll have three-dimensional molecular circuits, and they are already working on a small scale. My favorite, which I said would most likely work five years ago, are carbon nanotubes, which are hexagonal arrays of carbon atoms that are extremely strong. They're fifty times stronger than steel, and they are extremely fast in terms of computation. A one-inch cube of nanotube circuitry would be a million times more powerful than the computational ability of the brain. I will come back to that, the human brain.
We'll be able to keep this trend going really through the twenty-first century by going into the third dimension. Chips today are very dense, but they are flat. Our brain is organized in three dimensions. Even though our brain actually uses a very cumbersome and inefficient signaling system (it uses an electrochemical computational method that is a million times slower than today's electronic circuits), it's organized in three dimensions, and by using the third dimension, which we might as well do since we live in a three-dimensional world, we'll be able to compete with the human brain. I want to come back and talk more about that.
This curve up here on this chart is not a straight line; it's another curve, meaning there is actually exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. It took us three years to double the price performance for computation at the beginning of the twentieth century. We are now doubling it every year. That's going to continue as well.
These graphs are all different exponential charts. I won't dwell on this because I want to talk more about the implications. But these are different ways of measuring the exponential growth of electronics. These are different Intel processors growing along, doubling time every 1.8 years. Here's the average transistor price in 1968. You could buy one transistor for a dollar. I remember in the 1960's hanging around the surplus electronics shops in New York on Canal Street--they're still there. I could buy the equivalent of a transistor, which at that time was a relay with support circuitry, a large device, about the size of a small toaster. It cost about forty dollars. Today you can buy ten million transistors for a dollar. That has come down in price by half every 1.6 years, so you can buy twice as many transistors for the same price every 1.6 years. Unlike Gertrude Stein's roses, it's not the case that a transistor is a transistor. As we make them smaller, they're actually better. By being smaller, they run faster. Electrons have less distance to travel, so the actual price performance of electronics is doubling every 1.1 years.
The next question is, is there something special about electronics? Some people have said that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, that the electronics industry has noticed this so-called law, so all the companies know where they need to be at different points in time, and it kind of perpetuates itself. So I examined other areas where people have not talked about Moore's Law or exponential growth. These are completely different types of technology--magnetic data storage. This is not packing transistors on an integrated circuit. This is packing magnetic bits on substrate. So this is a different technical problem. But we find exactly the same exponential growth, doubling time every fifteen months.
DNA sequencing, a different technical problem. This is how much biological information you can sequence per dollar. This has doubled every year. The price performance, the speed, the bandwidth of DNA sequencing have doubled, and this has fueled another profound revolution that has enormous implications. We are understanding biology, life, aging processes, and disease in terms of information. We are understanding the software of cancer, of heart disease, diabetes, the fifteen processes that underlie aging. We're actually figuring out how to change those so that we can reverse aging. There are, I would say, hundreds of different developments and methods and drugs in the pipeline that detect very precisely the different steps in the sequence of these diseases.
I believe we will largely eliminate cancer and heart disease over the next ten years. I mean, there are drugs right now in the pipeline for approval (there was just an announcement just this morning) that will wipe out heart disease if you take advantage of these methods over the next three or four years now that we are really understanding these processes in information terms. This technology is also accelerating, doubling in power the amount of genetic information every year. This graph is a logarithmic plot of the amount of DNA information we have sequenced. Basically we are doubling the amount of information we have about these processes every year.
So, if you remember, it took three years to sequence the HIV (AIDS) virus; SARS took two weeks. This is a good example, and it gives me a lot of comfort about our ability to deal with biological viruses. A lot of concern has been expressed about the potential for biological warfare and biological terrorism. Here we had a new virus, much more dangerous than HIV. HIV is hard to spread; you have to really work at it. SARS spreads in the air. It's very communicable. It's much more deadly. HIV is dangerous, but with SARS 20 percent died. The other 80 percent are not doing well. It is a very dangerous virus. We were able to contain that very quickly with a combination of modern technologies, the Internet (where information about it spread very quickly), the ability to sequence it in two weeks and then develop testing methods in a matter of days. Then also we used some ancient methods of physically separating people who have the disease and so on. But it does give me some comfort that we were able to understand this new outbreak about which we had no information and contain it very quickly.
This is a profound revolution, now that we have the intersection of biology and information science. It's subject to the same law of accelerating returns. Communication, another technology, and I won't dwell on these charts, but it's the same thing. It's not Moore's Law. This is a different kind of technology, and there are thirty different ways to measure it: wired, wireless, fiber optics, modems, ISPs--different ways to look at this, all doubling every year.
Here's the Internet. When I wrote my first book in the mid-1980's, The Age of Intelligent Machines, I had only a little piece of this chart. It wasn't called the Internet; it was called the ARPA Net. ARPA is the Advanced Research Project Agency of the Department of Defense. We had gone from twenty thousand nodes serving a few thousand scientists to forty thousand in one year. The next year it was eighty thousand. Very few people had heard of this phenomenon. It was clear to me that that exponential trend would continue, and if you do the math and keep doubling, we would get to ten million, go to twenty million, go to forty million nodes in the mid-1990's. So I predicted that by the mid-1990's this would be on everybody's radar screen and we'd have this universal communication network expanding the globe, and that's exactly what happened. You can see it if you look at the exponential trend.
This next chart is the only one I'm going to show you that's on a linear graph. Of course, when you look at it in a linear graph, it looked like nothing was happening, and then it suddenly exploded in the mid-1990's and came out of nowhere. This is how we experienced the Internet; this is how we experience technology because we live in a linear world. But if you look at these trends exponentially, you can see them coming. Exponential growth is very seductive because it looks like nothing is happening. Exponential growth looks completely flat at first. It's like living on a pond with lily pads. Lily pads grow exponentially. So someone is waiting, doesn't want to leave on vacation because he doesn't want the lily pads to take over his pond, but there seem to be no lily pads, so he waits until the very end of the year, then takes off, and comes back two weeks later to find lily pads have covered the pond completely. It's that last burst of exponential growth that really takes over.
In 1990 the chess champion, Kasparov, looked at the very best chess machines and said, "They're pathetic; they are never going to touch me. They are very crude; they don't have human ways of performing." People told him that they were growing exponentially, but he didn't understand what that meant. He just looked at the best, and it seemed like they would never be able to perform. But in 1997 they soared past him and defeated him. We'll see that in one area after another.
Here is another very important trend. This is a chart showing the same thing in terms of miniaturization, things getting smaller at an exponential rate. We are shrinking the size of technology at a rate of four or five per linear dimension per decade. That exponential rate of shrinking is true of electronic technology. It's also true of mechanical systems. The state of the art is that we can create tiny little machines using the same technology we used to create our chips. There are already four major conferences on building blood-cell-sized devices to go inside the human bloodstream--right now we are testing them on animals--to keep us healthy and do diagnosis and therapy.
One scientist actually cured type 1 diabetes in rats using this type of device. It's a little computerized device that lets out insulin in a controlled fashion and monitors the amount of insulin. It's a very clever device that presides in the bloodstream. It's nanoengineered; the features are measured in billionths of a meter. The same technique will work in humans because it's the same mechanism of diabetes. There are dozens of projects like this already on the drawing boards, so putting intelligent devices in our bloodstream to keep us healthy (there are a number of applications that are more exciting which I will talk about in a few moments) is not so futuristic. This is already working in animals.
This whole field began in the mid-1980's at my alma mater, MIT. This is a little animation of a design by Eric Drexler, who founded this field of nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is building little machines at the nanoscale, which is billionths of a meter. It really means building them out of atoms and molecular fragments. He had these theoretical designs, and they have since been simulated on supercomputers. These are little machines that work at the molecular level, and we already have machines like this working. I would say the golden age of nanotechnology, where we really can build very intelligent machines at this level, will be in the 2020's.
One of the implications is that we will really marry these trends of miniaturization, our understanding of biology in information terms, computation, and communication; they will all come together. We'll have little devices that go inside our bodies and bloodstream and greatly enhance the human potential. They'll have profound implications for disabilities, which I want to talk about in a few moments, but it really will advance our health and longevity.
I believe radical life extension will be coming within a couple of decades. I think it's already feasible for baby boomers like me to essentially postpone aging indefinitely. I have a book coming out on that this fall, How to Live Long Enough to Live Forever. It talks about three things: bridge one is the knowledge we have today that can slow down aging to such a degree that we can remain alive and healthy and viable until the full blossoming of the second bridge, which is biotechnology. That will expand our lifespan to the point which will take us to the third bridge, which is the full blossoming of the nanotechnology revolution, where we can really enhance our biological systems with these nanoengineered