Imagine being at war in the midst of battle without being aware of what was going on around you. Imagine having the desire to serve your country and help your fellow soldiers but you needed an aid to walk. This has been a problem for British soldier Craig  Lundberg for the past three years.  Craig Lundberg lost his vision after he was struck by a rocket propelled grenade in 2007.  

After his incident Corporal Craig Lundberg was the first to get his hands or should I say tongue on a new device called Brainport. You can say that he was a pioneer in using this device. Brainport allows him to see images from his goggles which are then translated with a simulation pattern to his tongue and converted into signals that can be understood by his brain. People who are visually impaired will learn to use this device by recognizing patterns, movement and also high contrast objects. What concerns me is what happens if this particular soldier gets the device damaged while on a mission? Does the device have some sort of backup software and is it durable enough to withstand the different environments and situations a soldier has to deal with in the time of war?

According to Lundberg he says that the device feels like “licking a nine volt battery” or “like popping candy”. This device has a great potential to change the lives of many people if released to the public. This device could help those who are visually impaired see their loved ones which could be an enormous advancement in life of people affected by this disability. Lundberg says “ One of the things it has allowed me to do is pick up objects straight away, I can reach out and pick them up when before I would be fumbling around to feel for them”. The value of this simple action is taken for granted by so many people. You can tell that life is a lot more easier for Lundberg and his family ….even more so than before. There has to be some feeling of relief within him that now he has the ability to do more things for himself as well as others.

Currently this revolutionary device being used is only a prototype according to Disability and Health News. hopefully the British army will find answers to these problems before it is used by other visually impaired soldiers.The neuropsychologist supervising this trial Maurice Pitito says that “ It’s a concept in which you replace a sense that was lost by another one.” Brainport can allow people who are visually impaired walk around without a cane. It gives them the opportunity to navigate obstacles and even the opportunity to read signs. It also allows them to get a feeling of the world from their tongue and that gives them a sense of seeing. Most people do not understand that you do not only see with your eyes but you see with your brain.

It is sad that these companies are fighting to keep books out of the hands of disabled people across the globe. We all know that knowledge is power and that the better educated a person is t he easier time it will be to find a good job or continue in college. By tightly controlling what books are available to the blind, they are deciding what books the blind should read. The individual no longer has control over what materials they have access t, instead large corporations decide that and put whatever price tags for entry on these products so they can control the disabled. The Library of Congress, Google and the Gutenberg Project all pay  the publishers to convert the books into electronic format so that they will be available to many people including those using electronic book readers and the blind. Those works are then placed in public libraries so that they are available to everyone. Evidently the book publishers believe that libraries are really large groups involved in stealing all of their works by making them available to everyone without charging them a fee.

The disabled are usually at the bottom of the economic ladder, trying to live off of Social Security Disability payments and eking out a life for themselves and their families. Most do not have money to purchase books at $15-$50 a pop, especially for technical or college texts. By making these available in formats like Daisy the blind can keep up with the latest trends and make themselves useful to the market for jobs. By locking them out of millions of titles available around the world you lock them out of works that everyone who is not disabled can access. This creates a group of underserved that can only access what companies deem they need to read rather than letting the consumers make that decision. What books and literature should we not allow the blind to read? How about the Jewish population or African Americans? Are we hiding books that show how the have been systematically discriminated against? Is this how we keep the disabled from ever moving up the economic food chain? 

The fight against allowing people to read what they want is a scary idea that needs to be stopped. The free press needs to publish stories on what is happening to the blind so that advocacy groups can step in to protect the rights of the disabled in the United States and Europe. Wile you finish this article, think about what books you should not be allowed to read by corporate america.

Navigating in the operating system has also become more complicated. From Windows 3.1, Microsoft has made a concerted effort to make all commands available from the keyboard. By Windows XP time frame, most applications worked well with text readers and virtually all commands were available directly from the keyboard. However, with the release of Vista, many commands were no longer available from the keyboard and applications don’t have a centralized way of dealing with the keyboard. A ray of light is the search function build into Vista which allows applications to be run without having to know their location. The search function also allows the user to find a document and run the application tied to it. However, many menus have have changed and several functions are mouse only. Trying to find a particular function with voice software can be maddening when you know it is there, but cannot navigate to it. The upgrade to Vista appears to be more of a problem then a solution. Sighted users have a long list of complaints against Vista and many have switched back to XP. Blind users are finding out that using programs in Vista means that functions don’t exist or have moved to strange new locations in the menu system.

While Web 2.0 is causing grief to the blind community, website protection schemes called CAPTCHA is making websites inaccessible. CAPTCHA is a scheme to keep programmatic spamming software from gaining access to websites. Google and Yahoo use this scheme to verify a user is human before they are allowed to create a mail account. To utilize this technology, a jumbled set of text in a fuzzy background is send to the user. Thee user must then type in the characters they see to gain access to the site. Here is where the rub begins, how does a blind person read something that by design is jumbled and blurred. One CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA has the capability of reading the text to be typed in, but that assumes the web reading software can decipher the code surrounding the reCAPTCHA so the user knows where to click. Spammers and hackers are forcing virtually all sites to employ some kind of verification before allowing users access. This is going to make it ever more difficult for the blind to access websites, blogs, and online applications.