Manual control over Optacon threshold has served me well over the
years. Without it, there would have been more failures than
successes as I approached varied reading tasks. But, the flip side
of this great power, lies in the fact that it takes time to tease
out meaning from a series of print characters made up of continuing
font changes. It takes time to twiddle the knob, inspect the
result of dozens of adjustments, settle on the best compromise,
then move to the next letter or word, where the twiddling and
teasing may have to be repeated. This is what happens as I search
for a listing in my local phone book, a word in a dictionary, or
trying to read the label on an audio CD. So, the versatility
afforded by the manual control of the threshold, places a heavy
burden on the user who must develop considerable manual skill to
manipulate controls while simultaneously recognizing characters and
maintaining continuity of comprehension of the material being read.
The limited success of the Optacon Model D was brought about by a
small army of teachers who spent a lot of time teaching skills
unrelated to reading. If we go back to building Model D Optacons,
there is little reason to believe that the rerun would meet with
greater success. On the other hand, if we can design a machine
that effectively optimizes tactile presentation of print character
shapes, we can reduce the need for prolonged training of teachers
of the Optacon, as well as for their pupils. I believe that we can
now design a machine to do the job, which may have been impossible
at the time of the first Optacon design. And, if we can, then the
number of blind people who could quickly learn to use it would be
much larger. Instead of having a very useful machine for a very
few people, we could have a very useful machine for many blind and
visually impaired people.
The human brain is certainly superior to the best computers in the
world, and, in my view, will always be so. Still, there are some
tasks that computers do much better, with greater accuracy, and
very much greater speed, than the best of us humans. So, let's
divide the tasks and let the computer do the signal processing
involved in tactile presentation and let us do the reading, which
they can never do.
While I am at it, let me confess that I have never enjoyed any
success using an Optacon to look at pictures of objects more
complicated than line drawings. It would be a mistake to place
much importance on using this technology to glean information from
a graphical user interface, topographical maps, or photos of loved
ones. Let's focus on reading.
Tim Cranmer
tvc@iglou.com
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