Confronting the challenges of being a blind physicist in 1988

By: John Gardner

It was early September, 1988 when I woke up one morning blind.  The next month or more were spent commuting to Portland for eye operations. I was experiencing severe pain and nausea caused by fluctuating pressure in my eye, but my professional responsibilities didn't slow down a lot. Even from my hospital bed, I spent hours a day on the phone directing my Oregon State University physics research group. In retrospect the illness and pressing responsibilities were a blessing in disguise, because they were distractions from the usual human depression over going blind. By the time my work schedule returned to normal in January, 1989 the worst of it was past.

My computer at the time was an IBM PC running DOS.  I learned about screen readers and eventually settled on Vocal-Eyes, the forerunner of Window-Eyes.  The internet and e-mail were in a primitive state.  I did not begin using e-mail extensively until my sabbatical year in Germany in 1993-94.  There were many challenges, but at least computers allowed me to read and write text and math (in the Latex language). I was thankful that my vision loss had not occurred before the advent of personal computers.  My two biggest challenges were time and graphics. 

Time was a huge problem because everything now took so much more of it.  Text could be read and written pretty efficiently on the computer, but math was a horror.  It takes forever and intense concentration to read any but the simplest math equation in Latex, and “doing” math (ie solving complicated algebraic and integro/differential equations) was all but impossible.  I did learn Braille but never conquered it sufficiently that it was faster than reading in audio with my screen reader.  Perhaps Braille math would have been more efficient than listening to Latex, but it was just not practical.  There were no computer math to/from Braille translators, and it would have taken an army of human translators to meet my needs for math to/from Braille conversion.

Graphics was the real killer problem though.  At this time I needed to read perhaps a dozen articles  and skim contents of several dozen journals a week.  Math was difficult, but there was just not any way to access the vast amount of scientific information conveyed by graphics.  A good fraction of the earth’s population would have been needed to convert graphics to tactile form to meet all my needs.  And even then, a substantial fraction of those graphics were simply too complex to be understandable without a note book full of Braille notes.  Even worse, the data being gathered in my own physics research lab was analyzed graphically, and it was just not possible to reproduce these data in a form accurate enough for me to analyze them or to know whether my students had done it correctly.  This problem had no solution and eventually led to my giving up materials physics research, but it stimulated me to start a new Oregon State University accessibility research program funded by the National Science Foundation.

This new research effort was remarkably fruitful.  It produced the DotsPlus Braille method of writing math, the Tiger technology for embossing Braille and graphics, the predecessor of the Audio Graphing Calculator, and software forerunners to the IVEO audio/tactile graphics access technology.  And of course it led directly to the founding of ViewPlus.  These developments will be described in later posts.