October 21, 1994
To: Members of the NFB Forum
From: Emerson Foulke
I am sending this message to the NFB list in the hope (probably
vane) that someone out there will be able to do something to
alleviate my ignorance. Specifically, I need to know more about
the videophone equipment (camera, the card that is installed in the
computer, the software, etc.) that allows two people to communicate
by phone, with speech and visual images.
Here is my reason for wanting to know. As all of you know, Braille
is very poorly taught to blind children in public schools too much
of the time. This happens either because the teachers have a poor
knowledge of Braille, themselves, or because the time an itinerant
teacher can spend with a child learning to read Braille is so short
that all but rudimentary learning is impossible, or both. One way
to change this dismal situation would be to have a much larger
number of better trained Braille teachers, and I hope that happens,
but I doubt it. Poor counties in poor states are barely able to
fund a poor education for sighted children, and I suspect that they
will, as they have in the past, be able to find a way to avoid
hiring the Braille teachers blind children need.
In spite of this generally depressing situation, there are some
Braille teachers who know Braille very well, and know how to teach
Braille reading very well. These teachers could reach many more
children than itinerant teachers do now if they could teach by
videophone, and although the equipment needed to implement this
setup would be expensive, it would surely be cheaper than the
salaries of enough teachers to teach the same number of children
face to face. However, the videophone technology may not yet be up
to this task. The camera and associated equipment would have to be
good enough to send to the teacher a clear moving picture of what
the child was doing with his or her hands, and the transmission
would have to be fast enough to capture continuously moving hands.
The camera would have to capture all of what the teacher needed to
observe from one camera position, because there would not be a
camera technician on the scene (or perhaps the camera could be
controlled remotely by the teacher).
If any of you know about the state of this particular art, please
educate me. Do you know who makes the best equipment for this
purpose? What kind of telephone line would have to be provided by
the phone company? If none of you are experts, do you know someone
who is? From what little I have read, I gather that unless you are
willing to spend something in excess of the national debt for the
required equipment, it can't be done just yet, but I would like to
be wrong. Please let me hear from you if you are less ignorant
than I am.
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