by Paul Edwards
In my January message for the first month of the last year of the last millennium, I talked about what life was like for people who were blind in 1900. The real 21st century actually begins this month, and I thought it might be interesting to do a little crystal ball gazing. It is absolutely clear that a blind person from 1900 would have found himself or herself very much out of place if he or she were suddenly transported to our time. I suspect that we would feel just as dysfunctional were we to find ourselves suddenly transported a century ahead. Perhaps I should talk about why this is even a subject that ACB should be concerned about. Obviously, one reason is that I enjoy extrapolation and, as president, I get to choose what I write about! More than that, though, I think there is a real advantage for an organization that serves blind people to strive to understand the environment in which it operates. I wouldn’t dare play the role of a futurist, predicting with authority what life will be like a century ahead, because I have no confidence that we can see very much of what is likely. No one in his right mind could have predicted the changes that have occurred in the 20th century and, though my sanity is not at all certain, I don’t believe I can predict all of the changes that are likely to happen over the next three generations. I do believe, however, that we can extrapolate — based on current trends and on predicted technological change. In its purest sense, extrapolation is usually pretty accurate because honest prediction is based on situations that are already developing.
More and more young blind people are becoming computer users. A larger and larger percentage of blind children are attending regular public school for their whole education. Braille training continues to be poor. I think that most people would agree with all three of these statements. If we put them together, can we draw any conclusions? I think we can. I believe that many young people do not now perceive themselves as needing to connect with other blind people. They are gathering information from the Internet; they are not using braille; and they are striving to make friends in mainstream classrooms. Their parents may also be discouraging contact with blindness organizations and, without the cultural base that attendance at schools for the blind imposed on many young blind people who grew up in the first half of the 20th century, there simply is not the same blindness orientation that operated before.
This concurrence of circumstances has already meant that ACB has found it difficult to reach out to many young people. It also means that many young people are now tending to avoid other blind people and I see this trend getting worse, not better, because there is little perceived incentive for young blind people to get involved with one another, or with blindness organizations.
In addition, technology is lessening the differences between people who are blind and those who are not. One basic motivation for getting involved with organizations like ACB was a shared recognition by people who were blind that their blindness made things difficult.
Ten years ago, though scanning was certainly possible, the results were less than wonderful and even blind people with a real interest in technology chose not to acquire much of their information through scanning. Now more and more blind people are reading whole books that they scan and are relying less and less on more traditional sources for books such as RFB&D and NLS. At this point I can and do scan 400-page paperbacks in an hour and prefer to choose what I will read rather than relying on NLS’s book selection. A single CD can now contain thousands of pages and, for the first time, blind people can acquire their own library of classic literature. The Internet, too, is a source for downloadable books and so information is no longer the scarce resource it once was for people who are blind. This trend is bound to continue, and more and more information will become accessible over the next decades. With the emergence of e-books, small Internet devices and audio on the Internet, the ways that we will access information are proliferating.
In other countries, too, the use of CDs to produce multiple formats of the same book on a single CD is already under way. As a side light, we might note that in those countries, Daisy technology is replacing cassettes just as scanning has, for many, rendered the Optacon obsolete.
In many speeches over the past several years, Ray Kurzweil, developer of the first reading machine, has spoken about the future. He thinks that by 2020, we will have pocket scanners that can read menus, grocery store labels and street signs. It will probably be possible for those same devices to utilize satellites to tell a blind person exactly where he or she is. All the possibilities that this technology unlocks will almost certainly work with the existing trends toward “disconnectedness,” to make it less likely that blind people will feel they need other blind people in their lives, or organizations like ACB.
I don’t believe that these trends render ACB obsolete. I do think that we have to rethink what justifies our existence — as integration into mainstream society becomes more of a reality for so many blind people. I have always thought of integration as low among the prioritized reasons that justify our organizational existence, although I continue to believe that the organized blind movement must work to assure that the societal changes that occur are inclusive. We also have a need to be certain that society knows it is doing a lousy job of employing blind people and accommodating our needs in the built environment.
Our real task as the new millennium starts is to recognize that we have a new job to do. We must go out and actively convince blind people that they need one another, and that they need ACB. Our value to blind people continues to be huge. We in ACB continue to work to help society understand blind people and to help blind people understand our connectedness one to another. That is our mission and we must accept it, but we will need to know that our task will get harder, not easier. As more and more blind people perceive themselves as not needing us, we will have to find ways to reach out to them to articulate our relevance in a society that is more and more open to people who are blind. We are a community within a community and must find meaningful ways to connect with those who may not know just how much they need us!