Posted at 11:38 a.m. PST Monday, December 14, 1998
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Louisville, Ky., Firm Makes Products, Promotes Ideas to Help the Blind


By Louise Taylor, Lexington Herald-Leader, Ky.
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

Dec. 14--Schoolchildren are often called upon to learn to count by
connecting dots to create a picture.

Easy, you say?

Not if you're blind.

Same goes for that icon-ridden, "user-friendly" computer program known as
Windows. So straightforward that even a child can point and click. But take
away sight, and Windows is about as mean-spirited as a junkyard dog.

In the Clifton neighborhood of Louisville, 320 people work to help the
blind overcome such obstacles.

The American Printing House for the Blind, a not-for-profit company that
began as a collaboration among seven states, has been around for 140 years.
It is the largest company in the world that makes only products for the
visually impaired, and the oldest such company in the United States.

In 1997, APH sold $14.6 million worth of such products as Bibles,
textbooks, annual reports, magazines and fast-food menus in Braille;
tape-recorded books distributed free through the Library of Congress;
relief maps and globes people can navigate with their fingers; and
abacuses, those ancient calculators that display their mathematical results
in beads rather than liquid crystal.

Its sales were up almost 26 percent over the previous year.

The burgeoning sales are due in part to APH's recent commitment to keep
apace of technology. Sales of electronic products jumped almost $1 million
in a year. And sales of computer software could start climbing in February,
when APH plans to issue a CD-ROM to help the visually impaired master
computers -- and that omnipresent operating system, Windows.

"Some of our products are sophisticated and some are extremely low-tech --
but essential," said vice president Mary Nelle McLennan.

In charge of high-tech is Larry Skutchan, who became completely blind at
age 21, when his second retina detached.

He was an English major in college during the '80s, but found computers to
be his passion after graduating.

These days, with guide dog Freddy lounging nearby, Skutchan taps over his
computer keyboard to get any bugs out of Listening to Windows before it is
released in February.

Listening to Windows is one program for the blind that Skutchan has
developed, and it seems simple: an interactive tutorial that uses recorded
voices to teach keystrokes that maneuver through the program. Press the
Control and Escape keys, for example, to start.

It amounts to stripping Windows of everything that makes it popular with
those who can see, and reverting back to the command-heavy DOS program.

"In a way, we're taking a lot of simplicity and the intuitiveness out of
Windows," Skutchan said. "But blind people are having a lot of trouble
moving over to Windows. You can't just click on what you want. The tutorial
emphasizes commands; there's not much about the mouse at all."

To make this all have a point, Skutchan also has to have a screen reader,
which reads aloud the type on the screen; there would be no point to
navigating the Internet if none of the information could be gleaned from
it.

Tactile surface for images

But screen readers can handle only text. "You know an illustration is worth
1,000 words," Skutchan said. "But we can't see it." His ideal invention:
"Hardware. It would be a way for a tactile surface to come up on a board so
we could feel graphics and images. If that ever happens, it would really
revolutionize the way blind people communicate."

Pipe dream? Maybe not. "Anything can be done with enough time and money.
But usually, there needs to be a real-word application for it -- then
someone says, 'Hey! Blind people can use it, too.' "

Skutchan's computer projects are part of a larger trend at APH: Times
change, and services for blind people have had to adapt.

The federally mandated mainstreaming of children from residential schools
for the blind into regular public schools for the sighted, for instance,
has prompted APH to change its way of publishing books in Braille. Since
different schools use different textbooks, APH has had to widen its range
of offerings to keep up.

With his head near a circuit board, APH manufacturing specialist James
Robinson works on another project: an electronic sticky note. If it works,
the motion-activated message machine will be used to alert blind people to
hazards such as a wet floor or an obstacle, or even just to leave regular
voice messages.

Such machines exist already -- news racks and store windows that yak at
passersby, for instance -- but Robinson wants to alter them to be more
easily programmed and used by the blind.

Federal funds

"This is a very crude first attempt," he sighed as the machine started
repeating itself like a scratched record.

Robinson came close to perfecting an electronic gizmo that would tell a
blind person what color an item was. He stopped work on the project when an
Austrian company invented the same device, which tells not only hue but
saturation levels and other colorful facts.

With such efforts, APH gears its business toward helping the blind live
independent, working lives.

But its main thrust is toward educating children before they hit college.
The reason: it is the sole purveyor of educational equipment funded by the
120-year-old federal Act to Promote the Education of the Blind. The amount
of money the federal government allocates through the program: about $105 a
year for each of the 57,425 blind primary and secondary students and
preschoolers in this country.

Blindness is becoming more common among Americans as an unintended result
of better medical care.

"Baby saves," as McLennan puts it, have caused an upswing in the number of
children who survive blind and with multiple disabilities, who never would
have made it past their premature births several years ago. People are also
living longer, and as they age, eyes are more likely to succumb to macular
degeneration, cataracts and other afflictions.

In this country, 1.1 million people are legally blind, a status defined as
those who have 20/200 vision or worse with glasses, or who have such
problems as tunnel vision. A whopping 370,000 of those are older than 85,
estimates the American Foundation for the Blind. About 230,000, young and
old, are totally blind or can differentiate only between light and dark.

All in all, it is a small market -- not large enough to attract commercial
companies, because the high cost of producing a book in Braille or a
computer program for the blind is unlikely to be recouped in sales.

"If it's left to commercial ventures, people will simply go without,"
McLennan said.

And the cost is so obviously high. Dozens of employees were working
overtime one recent Friday to get publications out. It's a busy time of
year, not so much because of Christmas but because the school year has
settled in and teachers now know exactly what they need.

In front of presses that open and shut like clamshells, workers fed heavy
paper one sheet at a time. This is how high-quality Braille books are made;
they are even collated and bound by hand.

APH has only one mass-production press, usually reserved for the Braille
editions of Newsweek and Reader's Digest. On this Friday, however, it was
spitting out copies of the Internal Revenue Service's income tax
instructions. Those, too, were collated by hand.

APH does get help from some big companies, and last year itreceived more
than $1.5 million in bequests.

No software giants have extended a hand to help in a big way with product
development, but they have helped "indirectly," as Skutchan puts it, by
developing voice programs and sound cards that coincidentally happen to
help the blind.

On the manufacturing floor, Toyota Motors has been more active. The company
volunteered to help APH streamline its production process, and is still
helping.

Getting what APH and everyone else who works with the blind most want,
though, is a tougher challenge, said Gary Mudd, the company's
public-affairs director.

"Unfortunately, 70 to 80 percent of people of working age who are blind are
unemployed or underemployed," said Mudd, who himself is blind. "We are
trying not only to work on getting the blind better educated, but to change
attitudes toward blind people. We prepare people for life, and generally
life includes employment. But you can have a highly educated blind person
with employable skills -- and it's hard to find people willing to say,
'Yes, I'll hire them."'

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Visit Kentucky Connect, the World Wide Web site of the Lexington (Ky.)
Herald-Leader, at http://www.kentuckyconnect.com/heraldleader


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