The developer of speech synthesis for the blind in the mid-1970s discusses
being a text-based guy living in a graphic world.
kelly
Blind Jacksonville, Fla., Innovator Makes Technology Accessible to Disabled
(Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News)
By Simon Barker-Benfield, The Florida Times-Union, Jacksonville
Feb. 15--Jim Kutsch and his German Shepherd, Yulland, walk quickly
past the desks in the executive area, into a maze of corridors and
toward the elevator at Convergys Corp.'s main building on Baymeadows
Way.
The computers that are at the center of Kutsch's life and work
are massed in cubicles and offices scattered across the 10-building
complex.
Computers have allowed him to create tools to help both him and
other blind people deal with some of the obstacles they face at work.
Ironically, those same computers now threaten to isolate him.
But the evolving marriage of the computer to the wireless phone
offers hope, said Kutsch, a top technologist and executive of Convergys
Corp. in Jacksonville, who is blind.
The problem revolves around the trend toward using Graphical User
Interfaces -- GUIs for short -- that substitute small pictures or
icons for complex written commands on computer screens. Anybody who
uses Windows- or Macintosh-based software relies on GUIs (pronounced
gooeys) to help navigate their computer.
"Text data is very easy for access through speech synthesis, but
once you start in graphical data, it becomes more difficult," Kutsch
said.
GUIs have had an impact on people with a wide variety of impairments,
said Kutsch, vice president of information technology services in
Convergys' Communications Alliances Group.
They're a challenge "for the visually impaired," Kutsch said,
"because you have to look at the graphics and be able to click to
certain spots in there; or people with motor impairments because it
involves fine motor controls to move the mouse to get exactly to the
place where you need to be."
And GUIs are a challenge "for people with hearing impairments,
because we are seeing so much more in multimedia and you have to
be able to hear what's being generated out of the system," Kutsch
said.
New technology can be a mixed blessing, said Edward Tenner, historian
and visiting scholar at Princeton University who is the author of
Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences.
"A new technology can have unfortunate indirect consequences because
it undermines the base of an older and still valuable technology that
it doesn't completely replace," Tenner said.
Kutsch, 49, was a pioneer in using computers to turn written text
into spoken words: It was the subject of his Ph.D. thesis at the University
of Illinois more than 20 years ago.
And in the past 10 years, he helped create the technology used
at two former AT&T units in Jacksonville -- AT&T Universal Card Services,
now owned by Citibank, and AT&T American Transtech, now owned by
Convergys, which uses phones and computers to handle customer service
and telemarketing calls for Fortune 500 clients.
It was a chemistry experiment gone wrong that sent Kutsch into
a career in technology.
"I was experimenting with the couple of friends with homemade
explosives," Kutsch said. Not to put too fine point on it, he was
messing around with the makings for a pipe bomb.
A jar full of chemicals exploded.
"The force of the explosion injured my hands and the flying glass
fragments caused the blindness," Kutsch said.
He was 16 years old. His friends, further away from the blast,
were spared.
"As a 16-year-old when this happened, I was faced with a lot of
life ahead of me," Kutsch said. "And because of my interest in engineering,
science and so on, I tended to view the challenges as sort of technology
or engineering challenges."
His first steps were the kind of thing a bright teenager would
think. They were also simple, effective and indicative of the approach
he would take to solving problems during his career.
"I took the glass face off my alarm clock, so I could touch the
hands and find out what time it was," Kutsch said.
College led him to computers and computers led him, via a college
professorship, to AT&T and its Bell Labs unit -- now Lucent Technologies
Inc. -- one of the great wellsprings of U.S. high technology in the
20th century.
At college in the late 1960s, he wanted to work directly with
computers, not rely on intermediaries.
"I was interested in getting the computer output in an accessible
form, and I was primarily using fellow classmates or hired readers
to read the computer output," Kutsch said.
So in the grand tradition of American inventors, he tinkered.
"You know the challenge for any person with a visual impairment
is to use a different sense to accomplish the same thing," Kutsch
said. "The sense of sight is so overwhelming in terms of bandwidth
-- everybody favors sight, and I need to look to move that to hearing,
touch, taste or smell."
First came a project that turned computer output into sounds similar
to Morse code. Then was a project to turn the output into braille,
the system of raised dots that can be read using the fingers.
Then came a project, later his Ph.D. project, to turn text into
speech.
"These days there are many, many talking computers that are around,
but this was in the mid-'70s," Kutsch said. "It was around the time
where PCs were not really available, the first microprocessors were
becoming introduced."
His postgraduate work in computer technology led him first into
academia and later to Bell Labs, where he spent 12 years on the technical
staff, and then to AT&T's units in Jacksonville.
Daunting as the prospect of living a text-based computer life
in an icon-based computer world is, Kutsch is upbeat.
To begin with, some quality software developers are including
parallel text-based versions of their products for the Internet, Kutsch
said.
And he is optimistic that the marriage of wireless phones and
the Internet will encourage the use of delivering information and
commands via spoken words rather than graphics.
"I predict in another few years we are going to come out the other
side of this ... We are going to start seeing a lot more things that
are currently highly visible on the Web go to an audio presentation
for the travelling executive, for the person on the cell phone in
the car or at the airport," Kutsch said.
And, said Tenner, some designers, faced with restrictions created
by copyright laws, are urging a return to text, replacing pictures
with words.
And Kutsch himself has headed back to the drawing board.
"On the home front, just in my own interest, I have been working
on some software to do an audio presentation of stock market charts,
" Kutsch said.
-----
To see more of The Florida Times-Union, or to subscribe to the
newspaper, go to http://www.jacksonville.com.
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