An Interesting Idea

Greetings. Today, I went to the monthly meeting of the National Federation of the Blind's Dallas Progressive Chapter, that is held the second Saturday of the month. In case anyone's reading this from the Dallas/Fort Worth area, we meet at the Charcoal Broiler, which is at 413 W. Jefferson, in Oak Kliff, which is south Dallas. The only months that we don't meet or don't have a meeting are July and December. The reason we don't meet in July is that is usually when the national convention meets, and we like giving our members a chance to travel to and from the convention, since the meeting time might conflict with the convention scheduled. And, in December we have our Christmas party. The meetings are from 1-3 PM, and people are encouraged to arrive early for lunch, which is very affordable.

Anyway, we had a guest speaker this time from the University of Texas at Arlington. She works with various other people on the Connect Project, which essentially attempts to make technology more accessible for disabled people. Today, she was showing and telling us about a cell phone with AT&T/Cingular in which you could receive accessible text messages on. In that, once signed up with the study, since they are testing this, you could go to a website online, write in any number of messages, and those messages would be delivered to the phone at different times that you specified. For the blind or low vision person, the messages would be spoken, and you clear them with one of two buttons on the phone. I'm not sure what speech engine/program they are using. Anyway, the cell phone is a modern model, with Bluetooth capabilities, and many of the other standard things you find on other cell phones. From what she said, none of the other parts of the phone would be accessible, and the user would be responsible for paying for rate plans and such. One pay off though is that if you signed up, and used the phone through the testing period that the Connect Project specified, then you could keep the phone, so that's something. However, I have a few thoughts on this.

First, as for the people in the Dallas chapter, not many of them are really computer users. Out of the 12-15 that show up fairly regularly, I can think of only about 5, including me, that either have or might have a computer. So, for the rest, they would need to go to another location, either a friend's house, a business, or one of the "free" computer places (library, Net cafe, etc), to use a computer. The speaker seemed to imply that this is not hard to do. However, this implication makes me wonder how much research she and the people she works with did on the blind/low vision community and how we access computers. Because, before we can use a computer, whether its ours or someone else's, it needs to be accessible to us. To her credit, the speaker was familiar, at least by name, with JAWS and other access technology, but my point remains. Though it can be done, its kind of pointless (in my view) to dictate to someone else, what you want to type and where you want to go on a computer, if there's no acccess technology on that computer. In other words, its not as easy for the blind/low vision person that doesn't have a computer, to actually get to a place where they can use a computer, much less the transportation involved in even getting to said location. I'm not saying that these things are a big deal if you can't do it, but if you have to jump through that many hoops to participate in the study, then is it worth the effort? Not to mention that computer skills are learned skills for the blind/low vision person, since they will be not only learning how to use Windows, but also how to use the access software and how that interacts with Windows.

The other point about this study that the chapter president brought up, that looks at the broader outlook, is: what would be better than having messages delivered to a cell phone and spoken, is to actually be able to use the cell phone for other things. In other words, what blind people need are cell phones that are accessible and that they can use. Then we can worry about getting messages from them.

Don't get me wrong, this is a novel idea and I hope the speaker and the Connect Project make some headway with it. I just think that they're going about it the wrong way. I stuck around for a few minutes after the meeting ended in hopes of telling her my Internet concerns, but there were several people talking with her, and I ended up leaving to catch my ride, not wanting another Paratransit incident, :)

I don't usually journal like this in my blog, but I thought that this was an interesting concept and wanted to write my thoughts down on it. When chatting with some people on part of the ride home, they agreed with me that computer access, much less accessible computer access, is hard to come by for the blind person that doesn't even have a computer. What do you think?