Deborah Kendrick
A friend of mine was recently waxing ecstatic about an old radio and his joy at having found a shop that could revitalize both its cabinetry and sound. It was an RCA Victor floor model, a radio this man recalls gathering around with his family as a child in the 1940s, and he was thrilled to have located an electronics and furniture guru who could restore the beauty of the wood and the circuitry inside as well.
Technology has grown phenomenally in the last century — particularly in the last generation— from the wonder of a radio that could broadcast over hundreds of miles to a telephone that enabled you to speak to your friend across the country and, finally, of course, to a variety of devices that fit in our pockets that can broadcast music and movies, hold whole libraries, and facilitate conversations with friends and colleagues around the world.
Access technology for blind and low vision consumers has had its own unique trajectory. Sometimes technology benefitting blind people has enjoyed a parallel journey, sometimes it has piggybacked onto a mainstream product, and, a few times, it has actually pioneered, leading the way for products that blossomed into tools for blind and sighted people alike.
Starting Somewhere
Of course, when talking about the history of technology for blind people, we could go back to the first typewriter or to braille itself, but this particular discussion begins around 1971.
That year, the invention by a father who wanted his blind daughter to be able to read print, came to market with the birth of a new company. That product was the Optacon (Optical to Tactile Converter), developed by Dr. John Linvill. The California company that was launched by Linvill and Dr. James Bliss was Telesensory. Over the next 25 years, some 14,000 Optacons were purchased by and for blind people and, although the product ceased manufacture in 1996, many of its dedicated and competent users consider it to this day to be the most valuable tool in their sophisticated technology toolbox.
One such devotee is Richard Oehm, a San Jose electrical engineer and entrepreneur, who says there is just simply no other way for him to see schematic drawings and diagrams and no more efficient way to read his daily mail. Oehm not only uses the Optacon, he is also one of only a very few individuals in the world who repairs them for others. "There are probably now only about seven or eight thousand Optacons in use around the world," Oehm estimates. And he has worked on well over 2,000 of them himself.
What is an Optacon anyway?
I'll leave the technical explanation of an Optacon for more sophisticated engineering minds, but here is a simple explanation of how it works and what it accomplishes. With the index finger of one hand placed in a groove that contains an array of potentially vibrating pins, you guide a small camera along or around a page with the other hand. The pins under your finger (for most people, this is the index finger of the left hand), vibrate. Pins vibrate to correspond with the image seen by the camera, as it's guided by your other hand. In other words, you are only restricted by your own level of expertise in examining the printed page and the quality of the print itself. A blind Optacon user can look at print of all styles and sizes, examine diagrams, illustrations, and more. Richard Oehm says, for instance, that he can probably check seven envelopes from his mailbox in a minute-and-a-half—a task that would take him much longer even with some of today's snappy text-to-speech apps that employ optical character recognition. Of course, learning to guide that camera and interpret that vibrating array requires a certain skill set, and plenty of blind people were trained accordingly in the 1970s, 80s, and even 90s. When the Optacon was being produced, training for it might be part of a traditional blind rehabilitation program, and consumers could reach at least a minimal level of proficiency before going back to home, school, or work to incorporate the device into daily life. Today, of course, if you acquire an Optacon and are a newcomer to the device, you would most likely be on your own for learning how to use it.
Repairing Optacons was never a career Richard Oehm thought to pursue. Rather, the work, as they say, chose him to do it.
In 1979, Telesensory hired Richard Oehm and brought him from Southern California to its Palo Alto facility in Northern California. He later built his own business building, selling, and repairing cable and industrial control equipment. He says he didn't have to look for work because the work just kept coming to him. And the same phenomenon occurred with his work in repairing technology for blind people.
Oehm's friend and mentor, Bill Gerry, called him to say that Telesensory was going bankrupt and someone needed to keep Optacons going. Gerry believed that someone was Richard Oehm, and he convinced Oehm to repair Gerry's own ailing Optacon. Word spread, first throughout northern California, and eventually nationwide, that if you had an Optacon and it needed repair, Richard Oehm could fix it for you.
Telesensory stopped producing and selling Optacons in 1996, and continued supporting them till about 2000. In 2005, the company abruptly closed its doors in a bankruptcy storm that kept access technology vendors, trainers, and consumers talking for quite some time all over the world. Fortunately, for those who had come to love and depend upon the company's products, there were those few gifted individuals who surfaced among us who could find replacement parts and keep units running.
The Optacon is by no means the only vintage access technology product that is still in use by dedicated blind customers, and it's also not the only product supported by Richard Oehm and a few others. His workshop (which is located in the two-car garage in his San Jose home, but also, he admits, spills into his dining room and even living room areas at times), includes a host of other products waiting attention. The other flagship product for Telesensory was the VersaBraille, a cassette tape-based braille machine with a 20-cell braille display. Designed initially for the National Library Service (which ultimately rejected its use), the VersaBraille was the first popular refreshable braille product used by blind Americans. Oehm has repaired VersaBrailles over the years as well, although currently his only hope regarding this particular product is to reconstruct one worthy of being added to a collection for historical value. Back burner projects for Oehm at present are to eventually assemble enough working parts from various machines to add up to one working VersaBraille and maybe one or two working TeleBrailles. The TeleBraille, as its names suggests, was a refreshable braille machine that enabled a braille-reading deaf person to make telephone calls. Using the TeleBraille, the caller contacted a relay service. A trained interpreter conveyed the typed conversation to the hearing person at the other end of the call, and conveyed that person's spoken responses to the user of the TeleBraille by typing words that appeared on the braille display.
What Oehm sees most in his business of repairing access technology products, however, are the popular Blazie products as well as early HumanWare and other braille displays.
In Part II of this series, we will look at the next wave of popular products, primarily from Blazie Engineering and HumanWare, that Richard Oehm and others are maintaining for blind customers around the world. We will also meet a few other talented individuals who are repairing these vintage products.
For now, Richard Oehm says he works from one crisis to another. His hope is to find eventually an interested younger person who can carry the work forward. If you want to talk to him about your own technological crisis for repair, you can email Oehm Electronics or call him at 408- 971-6250.
If you have a story of your own regarding vintage access technology that you would like to share, feel free to email me.
This article is made possible in part by generous funding from the James H. and Alice Teubert Charitable Trust, Huntington, West Virginia.
Related Articles:
- Braille in the 21st Century: How Far Have We Come? by Jamie Pauls
- Looking Back on 20 Years of Assistive Technology: Where We've Been and How Far and Fast We've Come by Bill Holton
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