by Daniel Gill, Queen Mary University of London
It’s 1989, a year with lots of milestones in Computer Science. In March, Tim Berners-Lee puts down in writing the idea of an “information management system”, later to become the world wide web. In July, Nintendo releases the Game Boy in North America selling 118 million units worldwide over its 14-year production.
Come autumn, a 24-year-old arrives in Ithaca, US, home of Cornell University. He would be able to feel the cool September air as it blows off Cayuga Lake, smell the aromas from Ithaca’s 190 species of trees, and listen to a range of genres in the city’s live music scene. However,, he couldn’t take in the natural beauty of the city in its entirety as he started his PhD … because he was blind. That did not stop him going on to have a gigantic impact on the lives of blind and partially sighted people worldwide.
T. V. Raman was born in Pune, India, in 1965. He had been partially sighted from birth, but at the age of 14 he became blind due to a disease called glaucoma. Throughout his life, however, he has not let this stop him.
While he was partially sighted, he was able to read and write – but as his sight worsened, and with the help of his brother, mentors, and aides, he was still able to continue learning from textbooks, and solve problems which were read to him. At the height of its popularity, in the early 1980s, he also learned how to solve a specially customised Rubik’s cube, and could do so in about 30 seconds.
Raman soon developed an interest in mathematics, and around 1983 started studying for a Maths degree at the University of Pune. On finishing in 1987, he studied for a Masters degree at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, this time in Computer Science and Maths. It was with the help of student volunteers he was able to learn from textbooks and assistance with programming was provided by an able volunteer.
Today people with no vision often use a screen reader to hear what is on a screen. It not everyone is lucky enough to have so much help as Raman and screen readers play the part of all those human volunteers who helped him. Raman himself played a big part in their development.
Modern screen readers allow you to navigate the screen part-by-part, with important information and content read to you. Many of these systems are built into operating systems, such as the Narrator in Windows (which uses a huge number of keyboard shortcuts), and Google TalkBack for Android devices (where rubbing the screen, vibration, and audio hints are used). These simpler screen readers might already be installed on your system – if so have a go with them!
While Raman was learning programming, such screen readers were still in their infancy. It was only in the 1980s that a team at IBM developed a screen reader for the command-line interface of the IBM DOS (which Raman would later use), and it would be many years before screen readers were available for the much more challenging graphical user interfaces we’re so accustomed to today.
It was at Cornell University where Raman settled on his career-long research interest: accessibility. He originally intended to do an Applied Mathematics PhD, but then discovered the need for ways to use speech technology to read complicated documents, especially those with embedded mathematics. For his dissertation, he therefore developed the Audio System for Technical Readings (ASTER) to solve the problem.
What he realised was that when looking at information visually our eyes are active taking in information from different places but the display is passive. With an audio interface this is reversed with the ear passive and the display actively choosing the order of information presented. This makes it impossible to get a high level view first and then dive into particular detail. This is a big problem when ‘reading’ maths by listening to it. His system solved the problem using audio formatting which allows the listener to browse the structure of information first.
He named this program after his first guide dog, Aster, which he obtained, alongside a talking computer, in early 1990. Both supported him throughout his PhD. For this work, he received the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, a prestigious yearly worldwide celebrating the best PhD dissertation in computer science and related fields.
Following on from this work, he developed a program called Emacspeak, an audio desktop, which, unlike a screen reader, takes existing programs and makes them work with audio outputs. It makes use of Emacs, a family of text editors (think notepad, but with lots more features), as well as a programming language called Lisp. Raman has continued to develop Emacspeak ever since and the program is often bundled within Linux operating system installations. Like ASTER, versions of this program are dedicated to his guide dogs.
Following his PhD, Raman worked briefly with Adobe Systems and IBM, but, since 2005, has worked with Google on auditory user interfaces, accessibility, and usability. In 2014, alongside Google colleagues, he published a paper on a new application called JustSpeak, a system for navigating the Android operating system with voice commands. He has also gone back to his roots, integrating mathematical speech into the ChromeVox, the screen reader built into Chromebook devices.
Despite growing up in a time of limited access to computers for blind and visually impaired people, Raman was able, with the help of his brother and student volunteers, to learn how to program, solve a Rubik’s cube, and solve complex maths problems. With early screen readers he was also able to build tools for fellow blind and visually impaired people, and then benefit himself from his own tools to achieve even more.
Guide dogs can transform the lives of blind and partially sighted people by allowing them to do things in the physical world that they otherwise could not do. T. V. Raman’s tools provide a similar transformation in the digital world, changing lives for the better.
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EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1,
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