An Oral History Interview with Deane Blazie, Part 5 of 5

Listen to Blazie Interview, Part 5

Tony Candela: Deane Blazie, you know we all recognize, on the outside, that it must have been a very difficult time to leave Freedom Scientific and we know that eventually Ted got back on the Board and we know that you've stayed in retirement. Are you happy to not be in the business anymore, or with Freedom, at this point?

Deane Blazie: That's a difficult one. I really wish things had worked out the way we intended, where [we] would each stay on, at half to three-quarter time and continue working for the company. I think we could have added a lot to the business. We could have added a lot to the technology that is coming out of the business. It just didn't work out that way and I am sorry it didn't.

I wish I could change that but it's just the way it was. When you get personalities together, especially at that high end where we were, you tend to have disagreements on things and different people see things in different ways and you need to all follow one leader. And that basically was what the problem was.

Tony Candela: Do you see the technology that Freedom is going with now, deciding to go with the PacMate versus continuing on in the Braille Lite series, do you think if you had still had a hand in the company and could have influenced that decision, that it would have gone this way or would you have pursued the Braille Lite a little bit longer?

Deane Blazie: I think I would have continued to pursue the Braille Lite, for sure, and I would have also probably tended to be, to have the PacMate look more like a note taker instead of a computer. I think it would have...I don't know the PacMate very well so I'm telling you what I know based on what I perceive of the PacMate. But not knowing it very well, I just know that when you're dealing with kids in school, which is where we were the biggest with the Braille 'N Speak, that it's got to be fairly simple and it's got to be quick and easy to learn.

I know if you put a computer in front of a kid learning Windows and JAWS or any screen reader, it's a steep learning curve because there's just a lot to it. Whereas with the Braille 'N Speak it's a pretty easy learning curve because it is very simple and it doesn't give you as many options as you would have with a screen reader.

So I would have kept that interface. At least the ability to go into, when you boot the thing up, to go into a very simple note taker.

And if you wanted to get at the operating system underneath, you can get at it if you want to. But I think it's really important to have a very simple user interface and give people that access.

Tony Candela: Is there of all the things that you and your team have developed and all those things that were once on the drawing board that in order to stay focused your companies have had to put aside, is there any one thing that you really feel personally regretful that did not get invented, or did not get as far off the drawing board as you would have liked it to?

Deane Blazie: I guess two things. One is braille cell technology. I would have really loved to have put more energy and time into pursuing a braille cell technology. I just think by now we could have come up with something. So I regret that we didn't have the time and mostly the energy to do that.

The other one was probably we were working on a replacement for the Optacon. I still think that is something that somebody should do. And I regret that we weren't able to pursue that any further. We were well on a course to getting somewhere with that and we just had to stop with the sale. The way that the energies were refocused after we sold, the Optacon just didn't fit in.

Tony Candela: Well, let's speculate a little bit on each of those. ... If in the future a better braille cell gets developed, how will this change the world of blindness technology?

Deane Blazie: I think most every blind person who is schooled today, not necessarily someone who went blind later in life, but at least the kids will be learning braille. I think there's no question about that now with the new braille laws and with what we know about braille. It just makes sense.

And if that's the case, giving them access to a real good machine, like the Braille Lite or whatever, with braille on it and it has to be reasonably priced, from the very beginning would I think would create a, would just make life so much better for everybody. Braille literacy would go up, considerably. I think it has in recent years anyway but I think it would climb even further, back to where it used to be. It used to be very high because no matter what, you learned braille, partially sighted or not. You just learned braille in the school for the blind and that was it. So literacy rates were very high.

I think it would make a huge difference if we could come out with a low cost braille display [in] a low cost device.

Tony Candela: So braille would be available electronically at a lower cost. More people would be able to buy a machine. Is there anything else that makes for a better braille cell or do we right now have a really good braille cell in the sense of, say, how well it feels to the touch, and part of the struggle is to make sure that anything else is developed is as good as that?

Deane Blazie: I would say yeah. We have a good braille cell. Everybody who uses braille cells would probably agree with that. Once in awhile you find someone who says they're too light to the touch. But we have good braille cells. The technology behind them is good. They're too large. That's one thing. They can't be stacked so you can have multiple lines easily and they're too expensive.

If you could get rid of those three items, we'd be there.

Tony Candela: And the ability to have more than just forty characters or eighty characters at a time would be more possible, at least more affordable if there were inexpensive ways of producing braille.

Deane Blazie: Yeah. My feeling is that you don't really want more than forty characters. We would not really want more than forty characters. We would tend not to want more than forty characters, on a single line.

But if we could do multiple lines, say three or four lines, I think we would be real happy with probably shorter lines but three or four of them. Probably four would be the maximum we would care about. But there's a lot of debate about that and a lot of research that needs to be done to prove it.

Tony Candela: I spoke with Jim Bliss at length and of course John Linvill about the development of the Optacon. And I think there's a lot of regret out there by some of the old time users of Optacon that it faded away.

What would your vision be, what might have you wanted to try to do to get a new and perhaps better Optacon?

Deane Blazie: The Optacon is a very special device. It's one of those devices that it's difficult to convey to another person, unless they're the user of the Optacon. The actual value of it. Because it's hard to describe what you get out of it by looking at something, not just reading but looking at something, tactually.

I mean you can look at circuit boards, you can look at things, a piece of cloth, and you can look at all kinds of things with an Optacon that you can't look at any other way. You can't see it in braille. You can't describe it with braille. So it's a different animal than braille. And a lot of the rationale for getting rid of the Optacon seemed to be that you can read so much in braille. Optacon is so difficult to learn...

Both of those are true but there are just things that the Optacon can do that you can't do any other way, still.

So we felt like that that was true and there are so many things more that the Optacon could do if it were a different device. A better camera, maybe a more dense array, although maybe the array was fine the way it was. You just needed some better way to zoom in and out.

The repackaging of the device. Mostly, getting the cost down. People would buy it. Just getting the cost down.

More intelligence in the software so that as you were reading something or scanning something, you could actually have the software do some signal processing to maybe increase the contrast or help you follow a line or help you track. There are just a number of things that can be done with the Optacon, with the computers we have available today that would make it just a tremendously better device.

Even if you kept the same array, and left the packaging alone you could do so much with software internally. But because the Optacon sort of stopped being developed, in the early '80s really. There was an Optacon II but it was just a repackaging more or less of the Optacon I with some changes.

We have never really pursued what that technology can do. And I think we're on the track to doing some of that with a couple of NSF grants that we got. But it just couldn't be done.

Tony Candela: And we know that in the last twenty years or so, since the Optacon stopped being improved upon, let's say, and ultimately stopped being produced, the technologies on every scale have changed completely. From software to hardware. Optics to everything.

Deane Blazie: Everything's brand new with the Optacon. If you started out with a new one you're no longer limited to a linear array. You could use a full array camera and do signal processing to pick up detail, if you needed it, that you couldn't before.

There is just so much. It's really a shame. I really think that's a technology we should be pursuing. And maybe we will. Who knows? Somebody may pick that up and take it to the next step. I hope so.

Dr. Linvill did so much work on that and he worked with us on this NSF grant to try and figure out better ways to do it and he was definitely a proponent of it. Certainly, the Optacon users out there were very much in favor of us trying to resurrect the technology.

Tony Candela: Of all the technologies that you've been involved with directly, which one is your favorite?

Deane Blazie: Gee, I guess if I could work on anything right now, pick any single thing, it probably would be working on a braille cell. Trying to come up with a better way to do a braille cell, even though it doesn't involve much computer programming to do that. It's mostly mechanical electrical thing. It would be a lot of fun.

Tony Candela: And of those things that did make it to market, do you want to be remembered for any one of them or do you think you are already associated with any one of them in particular?

Deane Blazie: I guess my name is pretty associated with the Braille 'N Speak and the Braille Lite. And I'm happy with that.

I often tell people when they ask me, "What did you do for a living while you were working?" I tell them I was one of the luckiest guys in the world. That I managed to do something that helped a lot of people and I made money too. Not many people get to say that, but the satisfaction I've gotten from watching kids go through school and go through college and have them come out and say, "I don't think I ever could have done it without a Braille Lite." It's just amazing.

One of our users, Mark Mulcahy. I think Mark will be one of the people you'll be interviewing, AFB will be interviewing, thirty years from now. Mark came to a convention, an NFB convention, with his mom and dad and he was, I don't know, twelve, thirteen years old and they showed him the Braille 'N Speak.... I showed him how to do O-chord T for time and D for date and then I said, "Look, you can type and read it back." I showed him maybe fifteen minutes of stuff. He played with it and I said, "Here, we're getting ready to close up. Why don't you take it to your room and you can play with it. Bring it back tomorrow."

And his dad said, "Do I need to sign anything?" I said, "No. Just take it. You'll bring it back." So he took it back and the next day he could do anything in there. I showed him how to access the help file and he completely learned that machine.

I mean Mark is an extraordinarily bright guy. He has a computer science degree now and just knowing that I helped him, as little as I did, is just great. In fact, the reverse translator that is in the Braille 'N Speak is written by Mark now. The one that's in there currently. He rewrote the one we had and made it much, much faster. And he actually wrote a lot of the code in the Braille 'N Speak, after he graduated from college. That was just one of the things I want to be remembered by is guys like him who I might have helped.

Tony Candela: Well I think there are more blind professionals out there using Blazie products in really high productivity situations, where they just wouldn't have been that productive. I've seen people give speeches that they just wrote five minutes ago and use the braille display coming off the Braille Lite and this is the envy of blind people, who never had a real way in real time with a moment's notice, to produce material that they could write down and read back quickly.

There are a lot of blind people out there. They key for your products, of course, is learning braille. You have to be good at braille. Even if you're not good at braille, there's an awful, awful lot you can get out of the speech side of it and the braille side too, even if you're not good at braille.

So, I think the group of blind people who have benefited from your products and even indirectly, because your product drove the development of other products. Competition does have its good side.

Deane Blazie: It sure does. Yes, it does.

Tony Candela: So there's a lot of grateful blind people out there.

You've watched two things going on through all these years. Wonder if I can get your thoughts on some of them. You've watched how the technologies were evolving around you in general so that you could then take those technologies and adopt them and adapt them to your technologies.

So you trained as an engineer. You've always been very good working with materials and putting things together. How hard was it to keep up with the latest chip or the latest material that might be out there for you through the years, so you could stay with the state-of-the-art?

Deane Blazie: Well, I actually spent a lot of time doing that. I'm glad you asked because it's not something where you just go get a degree. I got a master's in computer science too so that helped with the computer side of things. But keeping up with the electronics, in particular, what chips are available, what's the latest technology for laying out chips and boards in the manufacturing processes even. That all takes a lot of time and I still, less so now than I used to be, but I used to come home from work and after dinner I'd sit there and read magazines, electronics magazines. EE Times and half a dozen good magazines and it took me a long time to stop reading them.

Just recently, I started reading other things instead of electronics magazines. But keeping abreast with technology is getting more difficult now, too, because things are changing quicker and you almost have to specialize now to be really up to date on things.

I was speaking with Mike Romeo just yesterday, in fact, and he was saying how things are getting so small now, so tiny, that they were still workable but now the next transition is to be so small that you literally can't even build these with a normal soldering iron in an office, or even the tools.

If you don't have very specialized machinery, you can't even put a circuit board together. The resistors are too small. A puff of air and they blow away. You have to have special heating instruments to put them on. You just literally can't even build these things with this new technology that's now available.

And I saw some of the chips they were using that you can just barely keep them on the head of a ballpoint pen. They're so tiny, and they may have four, six or eight leads coming out, just like little hairs, you can hardly see 'em. It's getting very difficult to bread board something like that.

What you're going to be coming to now is having to design a board along with the parts to go with it and just send it off to a company and say, "Send me working boards." And they'll build a board, mount the parts because you can't see 'em and then send them back to you. So things are changing really so rapidly.

Tony Candela: How do you think it's going to be for blind people to become engineers today? Do you think there's more of a chance that that is possible today? Because on the one hand, things are getting miniaturized but they're getting miniaturized to a point where you can't see them. Some of this breadboard work is becoming impossible for even normally sighted people to do, unless you have special machinery.

Do you sense more blind people interested in the engineering profession?

Deane Blazie: I think there will be. I know it's been a very difficult profession for blind people because of mostly the math and science. Still, they have been very inaccessible, the books and the material. I think with computers now, they're going to become just as accessible to the blind and the sighted. So I think that will eventually have an increase, but it's going to be a slow upturn.

As far as parts getting smaller, I think that may aid the blind anyway, because even sighted people won't be able to put them together so you'll have robots. So a blind person can sit at a computer, design a board and transmit it to the board house and two or three days later have some working boards.

I think things are generally going in the right direction.

Tony Candela: And if we can get some good braille graphics up there for ways of getting a pictorial representation of some of the diagrams, that might help blind people out too.

Your other two dreams kind of meld together there, a little. The Optacon dream and the braille cell dream.

Deane Blazie: Yes. A tactile braille display would be very nice but that's so pie in the sky so far that I just figure, if we can concentrate on getting a better braille cell, the tactile display will come then only.

Tony Candela: We've speculated on and off a little bit and you've given me some observations about how you've seen the business, the industry, change through the years. You dealt with a lot of mainstream business people in your career. Do you have any thoughts on how the blindness business world might be the same as and might differ from we'll call it the mainstream? Are there things that go on in our business that you don't see, let's say, in mainstream business? Or any similarities at all?

Deane Blazie: From a faraway view they're the same. You still run the business the same way. The difference is, some of the differences are, the blindness market is a very niche market. It's a very small market. It's relatively easy to reach the people, believe it or not, because the blind are very well organized and you can reach a pretty large number of them easily.

The marketing is more expensive. The market to the blind is more expensive, per capita, per unit, when you sell. Because it's a pretty small number and it still costs as much to reach them. So it's different in that respect. The gross sales for any one company are still going to be less than $50 million, more than likely, for quite a while. I don't see the market coming together like we thought it might. So I think there'll be a lot of separate companies.

And I think there's a lot of room in the blindness market for a lot of mom and pop companies, because a person can see a piece of technology and work on it without thinking that "how can I compete against an AT&T or a Microsoft or someone like that.

Tony Candela: And would they think, "How can I compete against a conglomerate company?" The one that comes to mind, of course, is Freedom Scientific. This is the apparent recent trend. Pulse Data Humanware, Freedom Scientific. I'm sure there are others that started out as smaller units and now are, I guess I'll call them, conglomerates.

That seems to be the trend. So you think that perhaps individuals can still find a place, at least temporarily, in that environment?

Deane Blazie: I think so. I think you'll see that. You may not see that this year or next year but I think you'll definitely see new companies pop up that will come up with blockbuster products that will really go somewhere. Because the bigger a company gets the less competitive, not less competitive, less innovative, they generally become. And I'm not saying that those companies are less competitive than they ever were, but you just have a tendency to do that. For one thing you need to focus somewhat and some individuals got to see a market for something that's needed that nobody else saw.

Something that comes to mind, for example, music software. Nobody was really working on music software but yet you have dancing dots. And they're doing a great job in that market. I think that's what it takes is somebody focusing on a pretty narrow piece of the market. And then once he gets that piece done, he may look for another product, just like I did with a Braille Blazer. And pretty soon you become a competitor out there.

Competition's wonderful. If there's any country that can spur the competition, it's the United States. We really have it.

Tony Candela: And you've maintained your friendship with Ted.

Deane Blazie: Oh, yeah.

Tony Candela: And I think we're all happy to hear that and you're going to see him in the near future.

Deane Blazie: He's supposed to be here Monday to go sailing. So we're going to head down the waterway here.

I still keep in touch with a number of people in the industry. Not a great number but I talk to people, now and then. I still talk to Lee Hamilton from time to time. Keep my contacts with Dr. Maurer at the NFB and I serve on a few of their boards.

So I keep my fingers in things but I'm sure enjoying life.

Tony Candela: And would you admit it if you had a secret desire to go back into business or are you sticking with your "I'm enjoying retirement" stance for right now?

Deane Blazie: Well, it's no secret. I definitely would be working on braille cell technology or something like that, if I had the opportunity. Yes.

Tony Candela: We could go on for a very long time with questions but I think this is a good time for me to say thank you to you for a wonderful interview.

Deane Blazie: Thank you for doing this too. I think it's a well needed, it's a needed thing to do.

(End of Part 5 of 5—End of Interview)