Listen to Bliss Interview, Part 3
Tony Candela: Let's talk about J. Bliss and Associates. When did you actually create the company?
Jim Bliss: Actually, we incorporated in 1994 and started developing our first product, which was software, mainly for allowing people with low vision to use a personal computer as a reading system. And we felt that there was a need for this because personal computers, by that time, had become very powerful and inexpensive enough that...a person could put together a computer and this software at a cost that was very similar to the cost of a CCTV, but would have unlimited applications.
It would do more than just magnify. It would allow a person to write, use word processing, connect to the Internet, which was just coming into the forefront, participate in e-mail and process the images so that more than magnification was used as a help in reading for a person who has low vision. And visual research has shown that magnification isn't the only thing that can help. It's an important ingredient but some people aren't even helped very much by magnification. What's also important is to be able to change the letter spacing, to change the type font, to change the colors and all of those things can lead to an optimized kind of presentation of text and if you couple that together with being able to reformat the whole page you can achieve reading rates that are two to four times or six times faster than a person can do with a CCTV.
So when you consider that you can have this and all the capabilities of a personal computer for about the same amount of money that you can acquire a CCTV for, you can see the need for, the opportunity for something that is much more powerful at a comparable cost. So that's been our objective.
Of course you do have other problems with computers and most of the seniors today, which is a large part of the market, are computer novices or computer illiterate and so there's a challenge in getting them up to speed.
And computers today, while they have a lot of technological power, are also vulnerable to a lot of things that can cause problems. For example, one of the early communications needs that has been very important to us has been our listserv. We have all of our users on a listserv which means that if I send an e-mail, it goes to all of them and they can each send an e-mail that goes to everyone on the list and everyone can help each other, point out things that are new or interesting or new uses or new ways to do things.
And today I opened the listserv and someone had sent a virus to our listserv.
Tony Candela: Ouch.
Jim Bliss: So that's the challenge of today. How to get a bunch of low vision seniors that have probably a small amount of computer know-how to clean their systems (of viruses).
Tony Candela: You jumped into the fray with J. Bliss and Associates, we'll call it after the Windows revolution was well under way. Do you recall when the transitions were happening between the old systems and the new systems? Did you have to get involved very much in that aspect, the GUI interface?
Jim Bliss: The GUI interface. The graphical user interface. That was definitely a big challenge. Before the graphical user interface originally we had had a computer lens for the Optacon which we put up against the screen.
I saw that there was going to be much better ways to do that and so the next step was that when Canon designed the new Optacon, the one feature that I was able to convince them to put into it was a serial port that allowed you to connect to a computer. And we wrote software then that would allow on the Optacon screen, for the tactile screen, for you to feel the images differently than on the computer screen.
So by moving the mouse, instead of a camera, on the screen, you could just move the mouse and feel the various icons and things on the screen. That was fine as long as things were relatively black and white. And the first computer that we did that on, because it was a very important computer at the time, was the Macintosh. So we had software that would allow you to see a Macintosh screen. The first Macintosh's and a blind person to use a Macintosh.
But I ran into a really big barrier there in that the whole blindness field, the system—the teachers, and everything—were violently opposed to Macintoshes because they thought the blind person couldn't use the Macintosh. So I would say yes, but they can use it, with an Optacon, but that didn't really sell. I was never really able to convince anyone that it was good for a blind person to use a Macintosh because of the Windows push.
So we also developed that software for PC, Windows-based systems but it never really caught on. It sort of missed its window of opportunity at that point and the Windows interface was getting much more complex, with much more multimedia and so forth. And the other competing technology was synthetic speech. And it was so much easier to listen to something that was scanned than it was to write or read it in Optacon that people weren't willing to invest the time and effort it took to master using an Optacon and reading tactile things and it was always going to be slower in any case.
So the Vista was Telesensory's product in the computer field but Telesensory really sort of missed the window of getting heavily into the software business to make the computer access[ible].
I have a paper dated June 16, 1997 from West magazine which is one of the magazine sections of the Sunday San Jose Mercury News which shows me with our first Bliss product. I'll read you the first paragraph:
"1991—James Bliss was president of Telesensory Corporation of Mountainview, which made and makes well-respected reading machines for people with low vision. But he couldn't persuade his Board of Directors that the company should explore possibilities of computers. So, this being in Silicon Valley, Bliss went off on his own to try to reinvent his industry. He started J. Bliss Imaging Systems, now based in the USA, and raised more than $500,000 to create his first product, which was launched last fall, the Versatile Image Processor (VIP), which is regarded as a major development in the quest to help visually impaired people read books, newspapers and other documents."
Tony Candela: You had to once again go back to school, in a sense, to learn all about the visual side of human functioning, just as in the Optacon days you had to learn about physiology of touch. So you've gone back to school?
Jim Bliss: Yeah, to some extent, but another thing that I didn't explain is when I was working at SRI, back in the '60s, I became head of a group at SRI called Bioinformation Systems. It was an in-depth group.
I was fortunate enough to get some major researchers. And they turned out to be major researchers in the field of vision: Don Kelly, Tom Cornsweet, and Hugh Crane. And they had projects developing devices related to vision while I was developing the Optacon and the tactile device. So while I was doing tactile research, they were doing vision research.
And one in particular, Tom Cornsweet, who is a psychophysicist in the visual area, really educated me a great deal about vision and was quite instrumental in the concept of using the personal computer as a low-vision aid. Before then, it had been viewed as an aid for totally blind but not so much as a replacement for a CCTV, which was objective and it was really through discussions with him and going to conferences with him and meeting a lot of vision researchers that educated me, sort of, in the visual field.
Tony Candela: So whereas most people think about the computer as a thing that needs to be adapted so that visually impaired folks can use it, you've gone into the realm of the computer being a tool in and of itself.
Jim Bliss: Yes, and that's the concept that is hard to explain to people because even today, one of the pioneering kind of challenges I have is that a lot of computer courses for visually impaired people are taught by people who think that a visually impaired person should do the same thing that a normally sighted person would do with the computer. That is, they would use it to do their finances and their word processing and they would need to know how to file things away, the concepts, the folders, and Windows, expanding the window and minimizing the window and those kinds of things. And they don't, I feel, appreciate that the use to meet the needs of a visually impaired person may be totally different than the way that a normally sighted person would use a computer.
For example, our customers probably spend maybe half their time on the computer reading printed documents. And a normally sighted person would spend zero time on a computer reading printed documents because they would simply read the printed document from the hard copy.
And so, if you consider [that] the value of a personal computer...to a low vision person is to read a printed document, you won't find that aspect in very many courses for low vision people in any center. I've been discussing this issue with the senior net in the local city here and they want to teach low vision people to use a computer to do Excel and genealogy and various programs and they feel in order to do that they have to spend six months or so teaching them Windows technique on how you change files, how you expand your window, and so forth. It doesn't matter that they can't see the window they're expanding but they want to know all about how to control the size and placement of the window on the screen.
I've seen many cases in which a low vision person takes one of those courses, becomes frustrated after a short period of time because of the difficulty and the lack of any kind of usefulness that they see in a short period of time, from their effort, that they end up dropping out of the course because it just really isn't meeting their needs.
Tony Candela: In mainstream markets, they don't think this way either. They basically make a "one size fits all" product, and don't pay attention very often to universal design. And when they do think about universal design, once again, it's so the person can use the product as the product was meant to be used. Whereas what it sounds like what you're saying is that the very same products, or variations on them, can be so much more than what most people think they can be: making a tool out of something as opposed to making it something that needs to be conquered.
Jim Bliss: Exactly. It's really using it in a way that maybe wasn't the intended way but it's a tool nevertheless and it has a lot of power. And the personal computer is the least expensive way that you can get that power because of it being mass produced. If you had to build a special purpose system just for the visually impaired, that did the tasks that a personal computer could do, it would cost several times as much. And so it's a matter of trying to take advantage of the economics of what is already there and the beauty of the personal computer is with software, you can turn it into something that's useful to you, even though it wasn't necessarily something that it was built for.
Tony Candela: The business has changed since you first got into it. The actual way that things get done, the companies that form. Yours is a small company but we see a lot of companies combining and conglomerating.
If you were to kind of say how you see the business has changed over the years, how would you put it?
Jim Bliss: One of the ways I think it has changed most dramatically is that when we first started we were the only commercial company in this field, and now there's literally dozens and dozens of commercial companies in the field.
And being the only company, we were somewhat dominant in the field. Up until I would say even until the '80s, our predominance was actually expanding as we went into low vision and other aspects of it. And now that's no longer the case, of course.
And developing products, when it's software development it's something that is labor intensive but you don't need a lot of expensive facilities and equipment to do. Hardware development is tougher. But a lot of the hardware and the manufacturing has gone offshore. Even Telesensory no longer makes CCTVs in the US. They've gone to Malaysia for their production.
...[O]ne of the profitable aspects of Telesensory's business was making braille displays and I think at one time we were making as many or more braille displays, dynamic braille displays, as anyone and now I don't think there's a manufacturer of braille displays in the US. It's all gone offshore. There's been a lot of those kinds of changes.
And the research and development is probably, I would think is probably diminished over what we were doing in the '70s and '80s.
Tony Candela: Does that mean it's just not being done or it's being done in different ways, or hidden ways, or are we in for a dry spell, perhaps?
Jim Bliss: That's a good question and I wonder about that a lot. I think there are a few aspects, like global positioning technology and so forth in which things are being done, perhaps, but still it's probably not the same level of innovation. It's more just applying things that exist, that we had back in the '60s and '70s.
I think today it's more relying on things that are being invented in other purposes, in other areas, probably more mainstream, our defense-related technologies being applied rather than trying to develop those technologies from scratch, just for our small field.
Tony Candela: If you could invent something that hasn't been invented, or something you always wanted to invent but you haven't done it yourself, what might that be?
Jim Bliss: Good question. I'm so focused on what I'm doing right now that I'm not sure. I don't have a good answer to that question because a lot of the needs are being met now and it's almost like maybe there is going to be a dry spell of revolutionary new products, at least that I'm aware of.
The one area that I think that could stand something new and revolutionary is in the area of dynamic braille displays. Piezoelectric technology tends to be expensive and somewhat difficult to manufacture. There have been a lot of other technological approaches that have been tried. None have been successful so far but I think that it could use a revolutionary change in technology.
Tony Candela: Any idea how it might happen? Not necessarily what might happen, but what path might lead to it, given the way things have evolved?
Jim Bliss: That's also a good question. I suspect it'll be someone in a research lab somewhere that's playing with some technology that he doesn't know what the application will be. And some one will suggest: "Well, I bet you can make a braille display out of that." And that'll happen.
Tony Candela: Someone will be looking for that perhaps, out there. That's almost a throwback to the past, in a sense of somebody tinkering somewhere in a lab but what it sounds like might be different now then in the past that it will be fortuitous, more so than the way it would have been thirty years ago where you were actually doing it on purpose.
Jim Bliss: Right, that could be the difference though.
The thing that made the Optacon go was really the first concept was the use of Piezoelectric crystals to make the tactile. Before then, the only technique for moving pins around was solenoids, which is a very cumbersome and awkward and expensive technology. When John Linvill had the concept of using piezoelectric reeds for that, that was kind of a breakthrough idea. And there needs to be a similar one, I think, for braille displays.
Tony Candela: Do you remember any people from the old days? Do you remember any people who you would say influenced the technology that you were working with? The inventor of that transistor, the developer or some other component part? Were you aware of the devices or the little components that were being made or were they just there and you grabbed hold of them?
How do you know about what's the newest and latest technology is the question I'm asking?
Jim Bliss: Well, a university is a great place for finding out those things because of seminars between people in industry and research labs in industry and people on campus and the professors and so forth.
For example, at Stanford we were trying to develop a silicon retina and there was a company that was local that had an approach and we discussed fabrication and fabrication methods with them and there was an exchange of information there that was probably influential in making the silicon retinas at Stanford. It's really networking and exchange of ideas between people working that leads to these things.
Tony Candela: Do you like the way the business has evolved?
Jim Bliss: Well, there's been frustration in times. I think the part that I like is that the business of technology for blind and low vision people seems to be now well-established and will exist on its own and the products are very good, from a lot of different companies, and the competition has probably resulted in a continual effort to make them better. I think all of that is quite good.
Tony Candela: Do you think that there is a trend toward conglomeration, businesses combining forces?
Jim Bliss: Yes. Definitely. I think Freedom Scientific is an example of combining Arkenstone, and Blazie. That's certainly an example of that kind of a trend. And that creates probably a more powerful kind of corporation that can do more things.
I think the danger, though, is that investors, if they don't see the returns that they expected or joined in on this kind of an effort under the impression that it was going to be a different kind of company than is probably possible in this field, they can become disenchanted and also do disruptive things, which is what I think happened to Telesensory to some extent. The investors became disenchanted. They wanted out, basically, and that's very destructive for the company and it's very hard to go forward when you're for sale.
Tony Candela: And how long do you think you'll stay with J. Bliss and Associates?
Jim Bliss: That's a good question. I haven't really faced that issue but I'm getting of an age where it can't be very long. I guess my goal is to see it continue as a viable company, with or without me. I would hope that I would have some kind of a role for the foreseeable future but it doesn't necessarily mean that I would be running it.
Tony Candela: Do you ever long to be back on the hands-on side, with these days software development probably dominating over hardware development, do you find that you want to go back into the lab at any point and tinker?
Jim Bliss: I would like to refresh all my tools and my knowledge and so forth about programming and maybe go back into programming. But it's a big challenge because I would probably have to spend quite some time doing it and I don't know if I'd ever be that good at it. It's amazing how after a lifetime of challenges in learning something like that that these young kids can really program fast.
Tony Candela: They've got programming tools that you didn't have back when you...
Jim Bliss: Right. We were programming in Assembly language... It would take me quite some time to get up to speed on all of that.
Tony Candela: Do you have a neat story to tell that you wouldn't want us to forget? Something that happened out there that is a deep, dark secret or a fun story, something that just pops into your mind?
Jim Bliss: Well there are some deep, dark secrets but they're not any fun.
Tony Candela: Try one. We can always edit the tape.
Jim Bliss: Well, I suppose I could tell a deep, dark secret. It's been probably long enough but it's not necessarily fun.
Tony Candela: Well, go for it.
Jim Bliss: Let's see. When I was in Germany and I was trying to set up distribution there and really set up a Telesensory Euro which would manage Telesensory's business in all of Europe, there was some of the engineers back here [who] had started kind of a skunk project, skunkworks, on developing a new CCTV. They had made very significant progress and so when I came back I looked in and saw what they were doing and kind of joined in with them and thought this was going to be great. We were going to come up with a revolutionary CCTV that was quite different and had some of the features of a computer system built into it, in a very short period of time, something like six months or so.
But at that point I was fired from being President and engineers decided to leave that were developing this and take their new development with them. And they started their own company with that and ended up licensing that to another company which became that company's entry into the CCTV field. And it's a product that still exists today and was a competitor of Telesensory and a big loss to Telesensory because Telesensory then took the next two to three years developing the Aladdin CCTV when they could have had something much more advanced in six months. That's something that they don't know still.
Tony Candela: Do you dare say the name of a competitor?
Jim Bliss: It was a company that turned it into a product but it wasn't nearly as good a product as it could have been but the name of the competitor was Pulsedata (the SmartView). But it was a setback and it was kind of behind a little bit of what it could have been. The prototype that was developed by the guys here was actually more impressive than their final product.
Tony Candela: Well, thanks for that juicy tidbit. I appreciate that.
Do you have any more memorabilia over there?
Jim Bliss: Well, something that you might be interested in, that I think is the best history of the field that I've ever seen. The reading machine, part of it. It's a thesis that was done by a guy by the name of Scott Hager at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the title of it is: "Reading Machines for the Blind: A Study of Federally Supported Development Technology Development and Innovation, 1943–1980."
The guy did a remarkably good job, I thought, of describing the development of reading machines for the blind, the history of it.
There's also some juicy stories in there, about conflicts we had in developing the Optacon and things, as well as other juicy things. It's a good history, particularly of the very early days. And it describes John Dupress and the people at MIT, and so forth.
Tony Candela: Did you help this fellow to do this research?
Jim Bliss: Yes.
Tony Candela: That's how you have this dissertation I take it.
Jim Bliss: Right.
Tony Candela: Any other memorabilia?
Jim Bliss: This is just an interesting experience that was kind of a fun experience. It's at the world Optacon conference, September 28–October 2, 1980 and what it was was that we made a deal with a Russian ship called Shoto Rusta Vella, we call it the Rusty Valley. I took sail from Genoa, Italy, to Tunisia and back, across the Mediterranean and we had people attend who were our distributors from all over Europe and the world, actually, and so the people who were here were from Austria, Hong Kong, Sweden, Iceland, Austria, Egypt and New Zealand, Cypress, Germany, four or five people from Germany, a couple from Italy, couple from Portugal, Hong Kong, Norway, Denmark, Spain and so forth. And so every day we'd have seminars and then get off at Malta or Tunisia. It was sort of a combination conference—business and pleasure together.
Tony Candela: Do they still have world Optacon conferences?
Jim Bliss: No.
Tony Candela: I wouldn't think so.
Jim Bliss: What happened with the Optacon was that while John Linvill was a key to having it ever come into being, he also played a key role in its demise. And essentially made decisions and pursued a direction that ended up in it really becoming the end of the Optacon.
Tony Candela: Were they business decisions or were they design/engineering decisions?
Jim Bliss: More business decisions. It was more thinking that the Optacon wasn't the product that was going to lead to the continued growth of Telesensory and so it was a business decision of a sort. Let's milk it for...and it was priced, the price kept going up and the cost of producing it kept going down so it ended up having the largest margin of any product that Telesensory had. The cost of producing it, particularly when we got the Japanese Optacon, was less than a thousand dollars but it was being sold for more than four thousand dollars.
And so that sort of priced it out of the market, number one. And then the other business decisions, of course, were first of all discontinuing it, selling everything to Blazie, the whole blindness products to Blazie, and nothing ever happened to it at that point.
Tony Candela: When did John Linvill leave Telesensory?
Jim Bliss: He was on the board and Chairman of the Board until, I'm not sure, maybe I don't know when he stopped being Chairman because it was after I left. I'm not sure whether he is on the board now or not but I think he's totally retired now.
Tony Candela: He's still with us. He's still alive?
Jim Bliss: Yes, he's still alive.
Here's another, this is another article that was published in the IEEE Spectrum in February of 1982 and it's a design case history, "The Speak and Spell Learns to Talk," and it's a design case history of the Speak and Spell, which was a product Texas Instruments came out with [as] a learning aid for kids in school, normally sighted kids.
But, it has a little sidebar in the article about the design of the Speak and Spell. It has a picture of the Speech Plus calculator. It says: "When the Speak and Spell learning aid was introduced in 1978, one other solid state speech synthesis product was already on the market: Telesensory Systems of Palo Alto, California, had been selling its Speech Plus calculator since 1975 and like Speak and Spell, which is marketed to the general consumer to teach children how to spell, the Speech Plus Calculator had a narrower function: to teach arithmetic to blind people. Its development by Texas Instruments was funded internally."
It goes on to describe the development of the Speech Plus calculator, but we predated Texas Instruments by three years with that which I think is an illustration of [how] we were at the forefront at that time of technological development, ahead even of the major corporations. But we had a smaller market but I think that happened many times in the blindness field, that things have been developed for blind people that later become technologies that are applicable to the general market.
Tony Candela: And let's hope it continues to happen at least once in a while. It sounds like the trend is making it less likely that it will, what with people borrowing from the technologies out there. Let's hope there are more Jim Blisses out there who are willing to stubbornly get into that lab and stick with something for awhile.
Tony Candela: Any other memorabilia?
Jim Bliss: Well, there's a report here from the Richard King Mellon Foundation which was one of the foundations that put the Optacon on the map, in that they gave us a million dollar grant to make the Optacon available to everyone who needed it in the greater Pittsburgh area. And this was a key breakthrough because a million dollars enabled.
And they were very smart, I think, in how they set up the program because they realized the importance of training so part of the grant funding went to establishing a program for teaching teachers to teach the Optacon at the University of Pittsburgh and then bringing in staff from all of the agencies, the Greater Pittsburgh Guild for the Blind and the Pennsylvania Association for the Blind and some of the school districts around to teach those teachers how to teach the Optacon.
And then when a blind person passed a course it actually provided the Optacon for them. So it was a dramatic demonstration of the Optacon in one geographical area which triggered the rest of the state of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia area and the Pugh Foundation to establish summer programs and then that triggered the Federal government, through the Office of Education, to set up a school program for the whole country.
Tony Candela: Where they would train, provide the funding, for teachers?
Jim Bliss: Right. Universities, all the universities across the country, or the major ones at least, that had programs for teaching teachers of the visually handicapped were given funding to set up programs, teacher training programs.
And there was a person at the Office of Education then, Jo Taylor, who you probably heard of.
Tony Candela: Yes.
Jim Bliss: And she was instrumental in this whole program. She was really a key leader in it. While it was going, it was a wonderful program. It hit a bureaucratic snag that pretty much turned out to kill it but it was a great program at the time.
The bureaucratic snag was that, and this was part of Reaganomics, was that they had to spin it off and so she tried to get all of the Optacons to the school districts but bureaucratically she wasn't able to give them title to the Optacons or fund maintenance of the Optacon so the school districts ended up with this equipment on what amounted to a long-term loan but not the ability to maintain them and the school districts were typically unwilling to maintain them unless they owned them. So in that stand-off ...they ended up in a lot of closets and not being used.
Tony Candela: That's a shame.
Jim Bliss: Let me just describe one other publication thing. This is an article in the Stanford publication. It's about technology of the Optacon development of Stanford. Stanford sort of published a little short history of that.
But it has a sidebar that was interesting. We all got a chuckle out of it. It says: "Joel Moses, now Dean of Engineering at MIT, once said that Stanford really got the lead in an integrated circuit of technology because of the Optacon."
(Chuckles)
I thought that was an interesting admission.
(End of Part 3 of 4)
