Do you love audiobooks?
“You have blind people to thank for that,” said Catherine
Kudlick, director of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San
Francisco State University.
اضافة اعلان
The godfather of the book being read aloud through your
smartphone headphones was Talking Books, the records developed in the 1930s in
the United States for people with impaired vision as an alternative to Braille.
I’ve been discussing the history of audiobooks with Kudlick, who
calls herself “imperfectly blind,” and other experts because, well, I love
listening to books. But it’s more than that. Audiobooks are a prime example of
a technology developed by or for people with disabilities that has helped all
of us. They remind us that people with disabilities are not an afterthought in
invention but key players.
“Disability drives innovation. It’s undeniable,” said Joshua
Miele, a blind adaptive technology designer who was recently named a recipient
of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grant.
“Almost always when you find something that is really cool for
people with disabilities,” Miele told me, “it will find its way into the
mainstream in a way that is wonderful and makes life better.”
Let me go back to a quick history of audiobooks: Robert Irwin,
the former executive director of the American Foundation for the Blind,
spearheaded a program in the 1930s to develop gramophone records of narrators
reading books out loud, according to Mara Mills, a New York University
professor whose expertise includes disability studies.
Back then, only about 10 percent to 20 percent of Americans who
were blind — including veterans who lost their sight in World War I — could
read Braille. The US government helped fund record players for people with
blindness or low vision, and Talking Books were distributed through public
libraries.
Commercial audiobooks started to take off after World War II,
and each generation of audio formats — cassette tapes, CDs and now smartphone
apps — has made listening to books more convenient.
(Side note: Mills said that some people with vision impairments
hacked their record players to speed through Talking Books, and that this aural
speed reading influenced audio time-stretching technology. If you’re fond of
listening to your favorite podcast or audiobook at double speed, you have people
with low vision to thank for that, too.)
This history flips the script on how many of us imagine product
design. We might be more familiar with technologies that are designed for the
general population and then, by adaptation or accident, become useful for some
people with disabilities, too. Smartphones are like that.
But other technologies that are relatively widely used today
exist because of people with disabilities. Ray Kurzweil, the Silicon Valley
inventor and futurist, developed multiple technologies, including the
forerunners for text-to-speech software such as Siri, with the National
Federation of the Blind.
Hearing aids were one of the earliest commercial proving grounds
for the computer chips that are now in everything from fighter jets to your fridge.
And this isn’t strictly technology as we imagine it, but Miele also mentioned
that curb cuts in sidewalks were developed for people who use wheelchairs and
proved useful for many other people.
Talking Books still exist today. But Mills said that screen
readers — descendants of Kurzweil’s design that scan digital text and speak it
aloud or convert it into Braille — have made both Talking Books and audiobooks
a bit less popular with her blind students.
It feels appropriate that one technology initially designed for
blind people has been partially crowded out by another.
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