by Jason Andrew Rhoades
(Editor’s Note: This article, written while Rhoades was a college student, was submitted to us for publication coincidentally on the same day we received an article about a textbook publisher who announced its intention to make books available in a digital format. We hope that Rhoades’ article encourages other textbook publishers to follow the example of Pearson Education, and we look forward to hearing more from other blind students who have ideas worth pursuing.)
America has been called the land of opportunity. Along with millions of my generation I believe that, for those willing to put forth the effort, prosperity is inevitable. Thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, blind people like me are promised inclusion in the hiring pool if we can meet “legitimate skill, experience, education, or other requirements of an employment position.” Like the second in a pair of bookends, the ADA completes the initiative begun by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 1975, which recognizes that “education and employment go hand in hand.” Acting on that promise, nearly two-thirds of visually impaired people enroll in post-secondary education; it is a group including about 300,000 individuals who, like me, are blind in both eyes. Currently in my senior year of college, I have been occupying the space between the bookends for 10 years.
At the age of 16, when I became blind, I had to drop out of school to learn how to go to school. I was introduced to the complex technologies that would help me adapt to an educational setting with my disability. I learned that a talking book could occupy 17 cassettes, that the braille labels could be worn down, making it difficult for me to know what order the cassettes should be in, that tapes may not have been rewound before I got them, and that cuing the tape to a specific sentence or paragraph would be nearly impossible. My most essential adaptive skill was designing my life around the time requirements of study.
The average cost of a four-year degree at my university is around $35,000. Over and above that, I had to invest upwards of $30,000 to equip and learn to use a personal high-tech lab. My computer, notetaker, scanner, voice synthesizer, and three specialized software programs exist for one purpose: to make textbook information accessible. Set up the equipment in my dedicated home office space, add training, bring in a human editor who can read the book to fix the errors made by my scanner, and I am ready to begin studying my textbook — just like my sighted classmates. With our can-do attitude Americans have solved another problem. I am assumed to be able to operate as efficiently as anyone else.
To keep in step with my classmates, I work at my studies 10 hours almost every day, seven days a week, and attend summer school every summer — it takes me that long to reformat textbook content. The thrill of my college career came the one and only time I took a course whose textbook came on CD-ROM! I could cue instantly to the information. I could “read” the text as efficiently as a sighted student. Imagine if all 300 students in Professor Happenstance’s Psych 101 course each had to set up a desktop publishing shop before they could begin to read tonight’s assignment and, after that, spend 5 hours to read 50 pages for the next class. If I am typical, it takes a blind person three times as many hours to complete college, in effect enough time to earn three college degrees.
The extra time it takes a blind student to process textbook information is time taken from other opportunities for professional development. When I finish my degree, can I hope to be the most qualified applicant available for a vacancy in my field of study? If time is money, I figure my delayed entrance into the workforce will cost me about $75,000. Multiplied by all 300,000 of us blind college students, that’s a loss in productivity of $21 billion to the nation.
The lofty goals of IDEA and ADA, along with the financial investment employers have made to provide access, have unleashed an unprecedented response among disabled individuals. According to IDEA ’97, twice as many of today’s 20-year-olds with disabilities are working, and three times that number are enrolled in college, as compared to their predecessors. Federal monies are proposed to provide upwards of $10 million annually to train faculty and administrators to educate disabled students. This massive effort to help me and my peers move toward the goal of employment through education could be even more effective if the time problem could be solved for blind students. I have a proposal for a simple solution.
In 1932, the new technology of the recording industry created the first major breakthrough in access for the blind. The American Foundation for the Blind invented Talking Books to give the visually impaired an alternative to Braille for reading. Congress, in turn, provided by law for free mailing of Talking Books, thus opening the literary world to the blind. As time went by, textbook publishers joined the effort, providing newly published texts to Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic for voice transcription on cassettes. Today, blind students are expected to use recorded textbooks. However, certain fundamental problems exist with textbooks on cassettes: not all texts are recorded; when recorded, the most recent edition may not be available; when available, the text often takes longer than an academic term to arrive; when used for academic study and research, taped textbooks are frightfully inefficient. A better technology is literally at our fingertips: digital.
In the digital age, authors create their manuscripts on computers. The publishing process involves the transmission of digital text directly to computer-run printing presses. Every textbook exists in digital form before it is bound between the covers of a book.
My proposal is this: Congress should pass a law requiring textbook publishers to make textbooks available to blind students on CD-ROM. It is fair to assume that publishers would have legitimate copyright concerns, but I am confident that the law would address such issues in a way similar to the standards that Talking Books and Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic have in place. For example, to qualify for their services, the user must submit documentation of the visual impairment.
If not for the opportunities given to me by America, I might be sitting on the porch listening to the world go by. Instead, I am striving for the promise held out to me that I can succeed through hard work and education, in the belief that “education and lifelong learning are stepping stones for everyone.” My goal is to make myself into that “most qualified applicant.” What I am proposing is a simple, cost-effective way of leveling the playing field.