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NS love audiobooks? “There are blind people you have to thank for that,” he said. Catherine Kudlick, director of the Paul K. Longmore Disability Institute at San Francisco State University.
The godfather of the book, read aloud through your smartphone headphones, Talking Books, recordings developed in the United States in the 1930s as an alternative to Braille for people with visual impairments.
Calling himself the “perfect blind,” Dr. I was discussing the history of audiobooks with Kudlick and other experts because I love to listen to books. But more than that. Audiobooks are a prime example of a technology developed by or for people with disabilities that helps us all. They remind us that disabled people are key players, not an afterthought invention.
“Disability drives innovation. That’s undeniable,” says Joshua Miele, a blind adaptive technology designer. named A recipient of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grant.
Dr. “Almost always, when you find something really great for people with disabilities, it will find its way into the mainstream in a way that is great and makes life better,” Miele said.
let’s get back quickly history of audiobooks: Robert Irwin, former executive director of the American Foundation for the Blind, spearheaded a program in the 1930s to improve gramophone recordings of aloud narrators. Mara Mills, a New York University professor whose expertise includes disability studies.
At the time, only 10 percent to 20 percent of Americans who were blind, including World War I veterans who lost their eyesight, could read Braille. The US government helped fund record players for the blind or low vision, and Talking Books was distributed through public libraries.
Commercial audiobooks began to take off after WWII, and each generation of audio formats – cassettes, CDs, and now smartphone apps – made it easier to listen to books.
(Side note: Dr. Mills said that some visually impaired people hacked their turntables to speed up Talking Books, and that auditory speed reading affects the audio. time stretching technology. If you like to listen to your favorite podcast or audiobook double speed, there are people with low vision for that too.)
This date changes the scenario that many of us dream of product design. We may become more familiar with technologies designed for the general population and then become useful to some people with disabilities as a result of adaptation or accident. Smartphones are like this.
But other technologies that are relatively widely used today exist because of people with disabilities. Silicon Valley inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has developed multiple technologies, including: pioneers of text-to-speech software like Siri, National Federation of the Blind.
Hearing aids were one of them earliest commercial proof sites for computer chips These are now in everything from fighter jets to your refrigerator. And it’s not exactly the technology we imagined, but Dr. Miele has also proven that curb cuts on curbs are developed for wheelchair users and are beneficial for many other people.
Talking Books there is still today. But Dr. mills said screen readers Descendants of Kurzweil’s design, which scans digital text and speaks it aloud or translates it into Braille, have made both Talking Books and audiobooks slightly less popular with blind students.
It seems fitting that a technology originally designed for blind people should be partially excluded by another.
Further reading:
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