One Can Make a Difference by Ingrid Newkirk Page B

classes.” They were great. No one but me questioned that I was going to keep on going.
    I didn’t know anything about being blind. I didn’t know where to get the little white cane. One of the worst things was not being able to tell time. My father-in-law got me a talking clock, and later I found out about talking watches. But more than anything, I needed a way to communicate. My students were recording things on tape and a university reader would read me my mail and so on, which was helpful, but made me feel dependent. So I began studying Braille. I’d never used Braille before. All I knew about it was that it’s made up of little dots. I learned it in a few weeks, which isn’t hard to do. It’s like learning basic piano. But it was slow, I had to keep stopping and thinking, and I wasn’t exactly playing Rachmaninoff. The problem is that Braille is all about contractions, it’s shorthand of a sort. The original Braille was punched out on a stylus. Then, when repetitive stress syndrome was identified (the realization that punching all those little dots is too much for a person), it became contracted, not everywhere—the Spanish and Italians and Swedes have a better system—but for English Braille you have to use contractions, which makes reading very arduous. When I discovered that blind people can use a computer it was a very happy day! It was only words, but it was something!
    When it comes to math, there’s a way with Braille to convert numbers into letters, but there are no symbols for such things as a plus, times, or equal. Letters are used instead, with “a” being “1,” “b” representing “2,” and so on. It’s just impressions, and it’s impossible to do serious math this way. I heard of a new computer that made heavy wax printings that you can feel, and I bought one, but the wax was sticky and came off on my fingers. Additionally, as a physicist, my real problem was graphs. Students have thousands of points plotted on a graph as a function of time, and all of a sudden I couldn’t see the graphs, so I didn’t know if they were good or bad. In the end, access to graphical information became the serious problem I couldn’t overcome. I thought, “Why does this have to be so damned hard?” About a year after losing my sight, someone overheard me complaining during a visit to the National Science Foundation. He said, “If we give you $30,000, could you come up with a solution?” That began my new career.
    Together with my graduate students, I developed a software and printer that was able to print Braille, mathematical symbols, and, most importantly, graphs. The letters and graphs are identical to what might appear in a book or magazine except they’re larger and embossed so they can be understood by touch. Today you can read charts, graphs, and diagrams in Microsoft Word and Excel. You can even add a little bit to Math Editor, it’s a five-minute job, and then you can print everything out on our machine. The first blind person I showed the system to was fascinated. She said, “Oh my, here is a fraction! And here’s a numerator over the denominator. I’ve heard that, but I’ve never actually seen one! There’s a radical sine. It’s so easy to see what goes under the sine. It’s wonderful!” Blind people of my own generation say, “Boy, if I’d had this when I was in college, I would have majored in science or in math.” Now blind kids find that door is open to them, completely.
    I knew this new technology could solve a host of problems not only for blind people, but for anyone. People with dyslexia are now using it, as are disabled folks who can see; it gives them alternative methods of access. I’d been quoting from a speech in which my friend, a teacher, had said that about 45 percent of all the information in any professional literature, in