In the recent past, technology has truly closed the gap between ability and disability to a great extent. Up to the end of the last millennium, assistive technology for the visually impaired mostly came in forms that manually or physically aided the blind (such as a blind person using the cane to get tactile and echo feedback or using Braille to read). However, with the dawn of the 21st century, there has been a storm of digital devices and technology that has opened up possibilities for the disabled community in ways never imagined before. As we move into the ‘smart’ century, even our assistive devices are getting smarter. Canes are now ‘Smart canes’, which not only provide tactile feed back but also come equipped to provide vibration feed back about obstructions that can’t be felt with the tip. Phones and computers are getting smarter with each passing day, and the disabled community is benefiting from it as much as anybody else.
For me personally, the assistive technology that has proved most useful and productive is having easy access to accessible books.
My book reading journey’s past
As always, I feel I need to begin telling the tale about my book reading journey before I developed my visual impairment.
I was 10 years old when my eye condition was diagnosed. Although my condition is genetic, the damage was negligible prior to this point. And beyond this point also, the deterioration was progressive, so it wasn’t like I could read one day and the next day I couldn’t.
As a result of this, up to age 10, I could read and was educated like any average child. And like any average child, I had an average liking for books. which basically meant, I loved reading colourful fairytales, somewhat liked reading unillustrated children’s novels, and absolutely hated reading academic or non fiction books.
However, when I think of my book reading habits as a child, one particular incident stands out in my memory. And probably, this incident is enough to convey how my visual impairment snatched away the opportunity for me to develop a hobby for reading.
So this happened in the final week of my 5th grade. We had a good library at our school which allowed students to issue one book every week. If the student couldn’t finish the book in that week, they could reissue the book for the next week. So the book I issued for this particular week was called ‘Shadow the Sheepdog’. It was a sweet story of a shepherd’s son who adopts this brat of a puppy named Shadow, as the dog followed the boy everywhere. Now, I used to carry my library book with me to school to read it if we had a free period or something. On this particular day, some teacher was absent and so the librarian herself came to substitute in her place. She asked us to quietly read anything we want to. No points for guessing what I chose. Now, I must mention, I did have an inkling that if I took out my library book In front of the librarian, she might be reminded to collect our books even though the return date was a couple of days away. however, I decided that if she does so, I’ll simply request a reissue. So I took out my book and the librarian announced that all those students who have brought their library books must return them today itself. When she called my name, I put forward my genius reissue idea and got the reply, “as this is the final week of the session, you cannot reissue the book”.
Sigh…
As this school had two separate libraries for students in the primary section and those in 6th grade and above, I never got a chance to issue that book again. Moreover, I was 10 years old in 5th grade so beyond this point I also developed severe deterioration in my eyesight and thus could never find out how Shadow’s story ended.
Rediscovering my passion for books
As the pressure of academics kept piling on and the added challenge of my disability made things harder, I never even had the time to read a non academic book. But even if I did, I would’ve had to ask someone to read it to me and I sure wasn’t making my mother read to me for leisure purposes, when she was already over burdened with recording my school books for me.
It was when I was in my late teens that a friend of my sister’s (whose brother was into software development) got me a computer software, ‘Read Please’, that read out whatever text you typed in its window. Yes, I know many will say that I should’ve simply gotten myself a screen reding software like JAWS, but I was hardly in touch with any organizations that worked for the visually impaired and thus was unaware that any such technology even existed.
However, once I got Read Please, it didn’t take long for me to rediscover my long lost hobby. I can say I was truly a book lover because of the lengthy process I performed to read a book, which was as follows.
Step 1- Download a book in PDF. As I didn’t have a screen reader, I really had to strain my eyes to surf the internet. However, as I had quite some sight remaining at this point, I could manage it.
Step 2- Copy a chunk of text from the PDF. As Read Please had a limit to the number of characters you could paste in it’s window at a time, I couldn’t read more than four pages in one go.
Step 3- Paste the text in Read Please and hit play.
Step 4- Once that chunk of text has been read, go back to the PDF, copy the next few pages and repeat step 3.
Now I know that it doesn’t seem that long a process, however, if you compare it to the process of a sighted person simply picking up a book, turning pages, bookmarking where they leave, it does sound a bit tedious. Also, the voice quality of Read Please wasn’t as good as present day TTS engines so the experience wasn’t as fulfilling.
My book reading journey’s present
Sometime in 2015, I came in contact with one of the organizations working for the visually impaired and they introduced me to accessibility features in smart phones and computers. This is when I got my Bookshare membership. And I don’t think I have ever spent a day since then, when I haven’t read a book.
Bookshare.org, which is a digital library that caters to people with print disabilities, produces books in the DAISY format. Simply put, organizations like Bookshare and Sugamya Pustakalaya make available talking books, be it in a human narrated voice or a digital text format that can be easily read by a TTS system.
I personally prefer the DAISY text books over audio books as many a times I have felt that the human narrator didn’t read a line with the expression I thought the author wanted to convey. That’s a personal choice and I know of many people who prefer human narrated books as the TTS voice sounds robotic.
I also have a Sugamya Pustakalaya membership, however as most of the fiction books available there are also available on Bookshare, I only use it to access some of the academic books of my subject (such as those by Indian authors or those in Hindi).
Audible and other audiobook libraries are another very good option as one gets a humanized experience of book narration which is of top quality. As these platforms are not designed specially for disabled people and cater to all readers, they come up with some fantastic productions, with background music, multiple narrators reading out parts of different characters and book authors narrating their own books.
The final note
I always say, to be blind in the 21st century is a blessing which our blind ancestors would be oh so jealous of. As I was diagnosed late in my childhood and was never enrolled in a special school, I didn’t learn to read or write Braille. Even if I had, I might have not used Braille to read for pleasure as I have heard from some blind Youtubers that the process of feeling and identifying each symbol, remembering it until you have figured out the entire word and remembering each word until you have reached the end of the sentence, takes away the essence of leisure reading. Of course, people who have mastered braille find reading it as easy and natural as a sighted person finds reading a printed book.
However, technology has introduced so many avenues of consuming books and organizations world over are actively working towards bringing this technology to the disabled community at such low costs, low skill levels, that no blind person can now say that they can’t read.
