S2E7: Inclusive Reading Technologies
Summary Keywords
Inclusive Reading, Assistive Tech, Audiobooks Access, Screen Readers, Universal Design, Digital Accessibility, Disability Inclusion, Singapore Accessibility, Library Access, Tech Enablement
00:03 Host, Loh Chin Ee
When you purchased your new mobile phone, it was unlikely that the assistive technologies available swayed your choice of which phone to buy. For example, today's mobile phones have a talk back feature which reads what is on the screen, and color adjustment features for individuals with color vision deficiency, flash notifications can help alert the audio impact to incoming notifications, and accessibility shortcuts make it easier to use the phone for typical interactions. While we take many of these features for granted or do not use them. They are essential communication tools for the disabled. In today's episode of the How We Read podcast, we explore the design and place of inclusive reading technologies in Singapore.
Chapter 1: Designing Inclusive Reading Technologies
To find out more about the disability community and technologies for inclusive reading, I speak with Victor Zhuang and Wong Meng Ee, two of the co-editors of the edited book Not without us: Perspectives on Disability and Inclusion in Singapore, published by Ethos Press.
01:18 Victor Zhuang
I'm Kuangsong Victor Zhuang. I'm a disability studies scholar. I'm trained in disability studies, but now that I'm in the Wee Kim Wee School of Communications and Information, I always tell people I'm masquerading as a communication scholar. So today, wearing this black do shirt and khaki pants, brown shoes, wearing my gold ring spectacles, I'm a male presenting Chinese Singaporean and that’s me.
01:44 Wong Meng Ee
Hi, my name is Wong Meng Ee. I teach at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. Areas of interest include inclusive education, special education, disability studies, assistive technology, and I'm wearing a dark brown short sleeve shirt, I believe, lighter color trousers, and have short hair.
02:10 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Meng Ee is himself visually impaired, and I ask him how he does his reading.
02:17 Wong Meng Ee
I'm really thankful that your books have become a lot more accessible these days. When I was growing up, the range of available titles were so limited. So in fact, your choice of what you can read is dictated by what the publishers put out, that wasn't very fun growing. I mean, I suppose it also affected what you had access to and what you could read. So if it were, you know, titles that were not to your interest, then clearly your range of options were highly, highly constrained. So I'm really glad that, I think, in today's context, audio books serve not only the visually impaired, but there's a huge consumption. For example, I know people in the US who drive, right, and they drive for long distances, and what they normally keep them company is putting in an audio book. They can drive three, four hour drives, and if they get through a book, which is great, because then it takes the bottom of driving, push it to the secondary part of your activity and foregrounds the books that you are reading.
03:18 Host, Loh Chin Ee
In a way, designing inclusive technologies for reading is really about universal design, which seeks to ensure that excellent environmental or product design should fundamentally serve all people, regardless of their ability, or disability.
03:35 Wong Meng Ee
We can look at it from two line angles. I think one is the assistive technology that as a person who might need additional technology to help them read, is how do I get my hands on these technologies that can be a bridge, as it were, to the printed text, and how I can make that printer text somehow accessible for me. So I think usually someone who has a visual impairment, that would be a screen reader, having the technology read the text, it has to be soft copy, in this case, convert that into an audio input. Of course, you can also nowadays use your smart devices and use the in built cameras to maybe snap a picture. It can also convert that to text, and you can read that. But the nature of that kind of Snap and Read kind of technology is very much important, recommended for reading an entire book. That's more for what's this piece of paper in front of me? What's the price tag on this item? Right? So it's a very quick, quick and dirty way of finding out, you know, what's that printed content? And I just need to know what that is. The technologies have advanced tremendously in the past 5, 10 years? In addition to that, the Optical Character Recognition technology, the OCR, also has improved tremendously. Because of the cameras have improved. I think the technology has improved to process that information. So we have a lot of these combinations of technology and engineering coming together and making it a lot more accessible. On the other hand, I wouldn't call it so much assistive technology, but the technology that comes with, say, for example, a Kindle, an ebook reader that's more targeted for the mainstream population. But for these companies, to what extent are they, or have they, included some of these accessible features? And I think that's an interesting space, because increasingly, manufacturers of these devices are now thinking, not so much as the population who have a disability, treating them as a customer, that is an afterthought. How do I include some of these features for them. But I think increasingly, what we are seeing is right up front, maybe they are beginning to realise that I cannot afford to ignore this population whether they are consumers with or without a disability, it doesn't matter. They are just consumers. So we need to provide those features for them, and have these features, whether it's enlargement, speech, contrast, color, having all these adjustments readily available. I think a good example for me to share is iPhone. Apple was one of the leaders in incorporating all these accessible features into their i-products. You didn't have to buy third party software to access the computer or to access your iPhone or iPad and so forth. All these features were already in your devices, so you either go in, turn it on or turn it off, depending on who needs it. So it really caters to a wide range of users. And I think this comes about with very thoughtful, inclusively minded designers and company that seeks to make this a lot more inclusive for everyone.
07:07 Host, Loh Chin Ee
An essential element of inclusive technologies being embedded into mainstream technologies is that it takes away the focus from the disabled person and creates affordances that can be utilised by both the able and disabled. Victor tells us more.
07:33 Victor Zhuang
You see the mainstreaming of technologies that used to be assistive technology specific for a particular group of people that's really now built into mainstream technologies that has been pretty fundamental. So instead of buying a piece of expensive equipment, voiceover software used to cost like $2,000 for the first purchase, and then every year you have to renew it, and you pay another sum. Now it's embedded in the iPhone, you can just turn it on or off. And I think the other thing that really struck me was that actually a lot of this kind of assistive technologies, we use them. Non-disabled people or other people in society might use them without recognising them as assistive tech. I used to remember using iPhones with buttons, and the buttons always used to spoil. So instead of buying a new iPhone, you turn on the assistive touch button, right? That's actually assistive technology that's designed for people with limited strength in fingers. So, you turn that on, you just touch the screen and becomes the button., right? With this kind of embedding of assistive technology. What this does is to turn away attention on the disabled body, slash mind, to the way in which the environment is constructed. So instead of saying, look, the blind cannot see, hence we should get someone to wait for them, or we should try to kill blindness. We change the technology. We change the way in which products are designed. We create voiceover we use text-to-speech software to eliminate the barriers that exist. So that turns the attention away to the environment, to the external barriers that exist, away from the body. And that's a fundamental shift, both in terms of what the disability movement internationally have been advocating for, but also embedded within the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability, right, which is something that Singapore has signed and ratified. This brings me on to my second point, which is that conventions like the UN Convention, as well as national legislation, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the European Accessibility Act, they matter. It's great that iPhones, Androids are more accessible, but if you really trace how they became accessible, a lot of it has to do with their fear of being sued in American and European markets because of accessibility laws. So because they needed to comply to laws around accessibility in the US and in Europe, right? What we're seeing in Asia, in Southeast Asia, is spiral on effects that technologies are becoming more mainstream, they have inbuilt accessibility features because they needed to comply with laws in the US. Take, for instance, in the US, if you wanted to sell a product, and also in Europe, right, to state governments, to national and federal governments, you needed to voluntarily declare the accessibility features in your product and how it's complied with current laws and legislation so that, in itself, is, you know, high bar, which is why a lot of devices today are becoming more and more accessible.
10:52 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Chapter 2: A Lived Experience of Reading
The availability of inclusive technologies has enabled the visually impaired to access reading resources with greater ease. Josh Teng, creative director and co-founder of Three Blind Mice Media, and an Accessibility Advocate, is an avid reader. He shares about his journey of dealing with his vision impairment and how technologies have supported his reading habits.
11:21 Josh Tseng
I am legally blind. I have congenital glaucoma in both my eyes, so I was most likely born with this condition, but I was only actually diagnosed at age seven. My parents actually noticed that my eyes weren't looking in the same direction, so they thought it was lazy eye. But no, it was much more serious. Congenital glaucoma is characterised by fluid getting trapped in the eye and causing the eye to sort of swell and increase in pressure, kind of thing like a water balloon. And so with this pressure in the eye caused damage to my optic nerve, and that's what caused the vision loss over time. Right now, my vision in both my eyes, on my left eye, I can right now, the vision in both my eyes I can see less than 5% of what a normal person can see. So in my left eye, it's very blurry color, and in my right eye, the vision kind of looks like frosted glass. And in both of them, the vision is very, very narrow. So that's called tunnel vision. So in some sense, I'm not totally blind, like I still can see things through my eyes, but I call myself functionally blind, meaning that I don't really use my vision in day-to-day life.
12:24 Host, Loh Chin Ee
The mobile phone is Josh’s best friend when it comes to reading.
12:28 Josh Tseng
For people like me who have more severe vision loss, there's, of course, braille, but because I lost the majority of my eyesight later in life, I mostly lost my eyesight around the ages of 15 to 16. I actually never put in the time to learn braille, because it's an entirely new language. So what I use instead, actually, is this assistive technology called a screen reader. So based on the name you might be able to tell it reads what's on the screen, and it talks to me, basically. So my my phone, my laptop, every device that I use is basically some kind of talking device. So actually, if I were to take out my phone and show it...
[Plays audio to demonstrate]
So some people have wondered, Is this Korean, or is it moss code or something like that? No, it's just English. So if I were to slow it down...
[Audio becomes clearer]
There you go.
13:17 Host, Loh Chin Ee
So you can actually process it at that very fast speed.
13:33 Josh Tseng
Yes, that's something that I had to learn over time. When I got my first smartphone at about 16 or 17 years old, that's when I really started to use it every day. So that's the kind of thing that I use to read all my emails, to type text messages, and, yeah, to also read books. It really runs my day-to-day life, and that's how I'm able to stay connected with everything.
13:58 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Josh shares about the people and the institutions that were crucial to helping him get back into reading and encouraging him when he lost his sight.
14:06 Josh Tseng
So one of the things that really got me back into reading was when I was just recovering from the point where I had lost my vision to the point where I couldn't read anymore. No matter how hard I stared at the screen, the words wouldn't be any more clear, and so that that's what I call, you know, functionally blind. I was feeling very discouraged, and also just trying to come to terms with the state of my vision and loss by that point. I had a friend who he really supported me during this time. When we'd go out, you know, he'd guide me and, you know, make sure that I wouldn't get into an accident. But he did not also patronise me. I think that helped a lot.One of his friends happened to run a bookstore. Unfortunately it's no longer unfortunately the bookstore is no longer in existence, This guy named Anthony, I just happened to accompany my friend to visit that guy's bookstore at one point, he started talking to me, and he asked me, “oh, what kind of books were you interested in when you still could see? Do you read anymore? Do you listen to any audio books?” I told him, yeah, I know there were all these books that I used to read. To read in the past. He gave him some examples of fiction books that I enjoyed, like The Book Thief, that was that was one that I really resonated with for some reason. But he went, “Oh, okay, that's so interesting. Like, I hope you get to enjoy the book some someday again.” And I didn't think much of the conversation until another time when I accompanied my friend. And Anthony, he was like, I have something for you. So he went to the bank, he retrieved an audiobook collection, and he gave it to me. And he said, go ahead and go back to read books. And I was, I was very touched by that. He gave me this collection of audiobook CDs. It might sound a bit antiquated, but I think even more than the medium, because, to be honest, I also didn't really have a CD player at the time. More than anything, it was a physical reminder just holding the box of CDs that, yeah, you know, there are other ways that I can enjoy this thing that I really enjoyed. To read the read the book, I actually went to get CD player. But moving forward, you know, exploring other options, like now on NLB app, you can borrow audio books. So that's one way to enjoy accessible reading, and also finding other means, like ebooks and those web series that I'm currently reading. So those are some ways of enjoying myself and making sure that I still engage the part of my brain that enjoys reading books. In terms of organisations that help, one organisation that really was there for me was iC2 PrepHouse. So they are an MOE registered school that specifically caters to student, persons with vision impairments. One of the founders is a doctor, her son actually has vision loss, and so she was frustrated by the lack of help that existed in Singapore for people like her son, so she founded this charity to solve that problem. When I was having that transition period of getting used to not being able to see anymore, iC2 PrepHouse was actually about one or two years old. So in a way, it was very timely, because before then, there weren't many resources to help people like me. And so I got connected to iC2 PrepHouse, and they taught me everything that I know about how to use a computer and a smartphone in a more advanced way. So in the past, I would struggle a little bit, but I still be able to get by learning the little tips and tricks on how to really maximise the use of technology, because it can be a learning curve, but having that kind of guidance from the teachers from iC2 PrepHouse, I think really make a big difference, and I think it's really the big reason why I can be a productive citizen in the workforce today.
17:36 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Chapter 3: Building an inclusive community
In Singapore, persons with disabilities include those with permanent physical, sensory and intellectual disabilities, and autism. The SG Enable website notes that the disability rates are at 2.1% among students, 3.4% in the 18-49 age group and 13.3.% in those aged 50 and above. The role of conventions and organisations is important for creating structures to support persons with disabilities. A little known fact is that the First World Congress of the Disabled Peoples International was held in Singapore in 1981 and that the first chairperson of the organisation is a Singaporean, Ron Chandra Dudley. Dudley lost his vision due to a freak rugby accident in his teens and was the first visually impaired person to be elected to the board of the Singapore Association for the Blind. That marked a turning point in the society, which had previously been run by sighted people. Here's Victor Zhuang.
18:36 Victor Zhuang
So Ron Chandra Dudley, for those of you who might not know, he is a blind person, and he was, and is, of course, the founder chairperson of Disabled Peoples International. So Ron Chandra Dudley is the first international cross disability organisation of disabled people. I use "of” very deliberately here, rather than "for”, meaning that this is an organisation that was formed by disabled people, for disabled people, and led by disabled people. It was the first time internationally, internationally disabled people came together to do so, and that was in 1981 so they all came to Singapore, and they formed this organisation and held the first World Congress at the old Hilton Hotel, right across the Thai embassy. So Ron got elected as the first chairperson. So you're talking about disabled people who are famous luminaries today. You have the father of the independent living movement in the US, Ed Roberts. You have people like Vic Finkelstein, who's fundamental in British disability movements, and you also have Ben Lindquist the first UN Special Rapporteur for disability all coming to Singapore, and they decided that a Singaporean would be the first chairperson, which was a very interesting historical phenomenon that we don't talk about today.
19:56 Host, Loh Chin Ee
The Disabled People’s International is an organization geared towards changing negative attitudes and policies that affect the world’s disabled. Today, the organization has national assemblies in 110 countries worldwide and collaborates with international agencies like UNESCO to further disability rights.
Victor highlights that it's the how and not the why of inclusion that we need to do better in.
22:25 Victor Zhuang
The why of inclusion is not in question, actually, you see a lot of government agencies initiating efforts to try to say, to make a case why inclusion is important and why it's happening and this all going for the past close to 20 years. In fact, SG Enable was formed in 2013 but some of the efforts preceded that. SG Enable is the national agency for disability, right? They've been doing a lot of efforts, you know, trying to create and support new policies. Work with disability sector organisations. You have public education campaigns, See the True Me, you have The Purple Parade every year. There's an annual celebration reminding people that inclusion is important. That's been ongoing since, I think, 2012, 2013. So a lot of good work, right? The museums. Questions of how to do better with regards to inclusion and accessibility is there. So the why is not in question. I think the how is where maybe people need to learn how to do, what to do. There are efforts, right? SG Enable, at the Enabling Village, this is just right around the corner at Lengkok Bahru, they have a tech centre called Tech Able, where they showcase the latest assistive technology. So it's really a place for people to go try out different kinds of technologies. You get your mainstream one, you also get your specialised one that costs a lot of money. What happens there is, you can try them out without buying them, and then when you decide that, you know, you like them and it works for you, you then buy them. There's a lot of variety, like screen readers. There's so many different varieties, OCR scanners. There's like, tons of products out there and different forms of assistive technology. So that's one way in which you know the how is being enacted.
22:08 Host, Loh Chin Ee
One example of how inclusion is enacted in everyday spaces is in the design of the Punggol Regional Library, which has a range of accessible features designed for persons with disabilities. The borrowing and payment terminals have been tweaked. Higher screen contrast makes the screen more readable and extra knee space makes it easier for wheelchair users. Wheelchair users can also roll into the Borrow and Go passageway where all they have to do is scan their library card and confirm the number of books on their lap to borrow books. Catalogue and multimedia stations also feature different assistive technologies such as having larger and high contrast keyboards, joystick and trackball mice, as well as a magnifier for reading. These design details are another way to enable inclusion.
23:02 Josh Tseng
I'm also quite happy to see today that there's many other organisations that are stepping up. So for example, SG Enable offers different forms of assistive technology that you can borrow or buy. They don't sell the assistive technology, but they write you a recommendation for you to be able to buy it, and you can get grants through SG Enable to offset the cost. And there's also the Singapore Association Of The Visually Handicap and Guide Dogs Singapore. Both of them have their own IT training programs specifically catered to adults. That is very encouraging to see, really highlights the fact that there are people with vision impairment who want to be able to be IT literate. Both organisations have their slots fully booked, so it's a good problem to have. It really demonstrates that people are keen to learn. But I also do hope that moving forward, there's more resources that are put towards these programs, because it's really essential, and based on my personal life experiences, I know how much of a difference it can make. So I happen to sit on the board of the Singapore Association Or The Visually Handicapped. I also sit on the fundraising subcommittee, not to mince words, but really we need the financial support from the community, so we are very appreciative whenever donors send us money and say that we want to support educating people with vision impairments, young and old, it's not just the children with vision impairments. Of course, they are very important because they have a bright future ahead of them, but there's also hundreds or thousands of people every year who acquire vision impairment because of age related conditions, because of accidents, things like that. These people need help adjusting to life with vision loss. Every dollar counts. So really, a lot of the time, what we're looking at is for people, individual donors who contribute a few dollars here and there, or corporates who really have a keen interest in supporting education for the disability community, these are areas where we look at funding for programs that help people like us.
25:13 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Indeed, we can all do our part of create a more inclusive community. And in the area of reading, ensuring the availability of assistive technologies as well as training to help disabled persons find the right technologies and use them well are vital. More importantly, as a society, we can be more aware and supportive in building a Singapore where ALL persons, abled and disabled are recognised and supported.
Thank you for listening to the How We Read podcast episode, Inclusive Reading Technologies. Thank you to Victor Zhuang, Wong Ming Ee, and Josh Tseng for their insights.
This episode was written and hosted by me, Loh Chin Ee.
This episode was produced by Kenn Delbridge of SPLiCE Studios, with administrative support by Koh Yu Qun. The Singapore Book Council provided funding and support for Series 2 of the How We Read podcast. Swipe on the cover art to see show notes with links and references.
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