Remember that old folk song “rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham”? Yes go ahead and Google it if you’re too young to remember. I wonder if boy scouts sing that song today around the campfire like we used to. The words that come to my mind at the moment are “so high, I can’t get over it, so low I can’t get under it, so wide I can’t get round it…”. That’s what it’s like when you come up against a barrier. Right? Well, yes, but only if it is a physical barrier.

Remember that old folk song “rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham”? Yes go ahead and Google it if you’re too young to remember. I wonder if boy scouts sing that song today around the campfire like we used to. The words that come to my mind at the moment are “so high, I can’t get over it, so low I can’t get under it, so wide I can’t get round it…”. That’s what it’s like when you come up against a barrier. Right? Well, yes, but only if it is a physical barrier.

The thing about physical barriers is that they are easy to see and understand. When the disability movement really took off in the late sixties and seventies, it built on the gains won by earlier movements that fought for racial equality. The first focus of the disability movement was to claim our right to live in the mainstream of society, to fight against discrimination in areas such as employment and access to public spaces. In this regard we have been largely successful I think, with many countries now having legislation to ensure that public spaces are basically accessible to people with disabilities and to prevent discrimination on the grounds of disability in various aspects of life.

It was easy for Society to confront the need for places like schools to be physically accessible, so people with disabilities could have equitable access to education. It was also easy for Society to understand what to do. You build buildings more appropriately, with ramps and other facilities for people with disabilities, and over the last thirty years I guess that has become pretty much an established practice for a lot of public buildings. Sure there are always arguments over resources and it’s not a perfect world but I think no one can deny the progress we have made in that respect.

I can recall writing an article in the early 1980s I think. It was in the early days of mainstreaming blind students in ordinary schools in New Zealand and I commented that now the school library was physically accessible it would mean that people with disabilities could physically go to the library, browse the shelves and read the books there. Right? Well not blind students. Blind students have always been able to physically get to the school library but we have never been able to read any of the books there. Our problem has never been one of physical access.

The problem with what we call the information barrier is that it isn’t physically there; you can’t actually see it. It can take a while for the penny to drop. I can recall comments from those earlier days like “we’ve done so much and still you’re not satisfied”. No we weren’t satisfied because, basically, stairs are not a problem to us. Those comments came from people who just hadn’t stopped to think about accessibility in terms of the final outcome. They only thought of it in physical terms. That was why I painted the picture in that article of the blind student in the “accessible” library, surrounded by books she can’t read. And I’m not sure it’s that different today, with many schools running their own intranet and e-learning centres which are still largely inaccessible to blind students.

But let us not forget though that in those days it was before the computer, well to be more precise, before computers became commonplace, because I recall I did have an Apple IIE in those days. In those days there was no practical solution that would give us access to that whole wealth of information on the library shelves. Blind people would have to wait, in the meantime relying on specialised blindness agencies such as our own Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind to help us get the information we need.

Now let’s fast-forward to today, some 25 years later. You might think that in today’s electronic world, blind people should at last be able to access all the information we could want. Surely, we blind people should at last be satisfied. Well the answer is no, I’m afraid we aren’t yet satisfied, and for good reason.

Over the next week or so I will be publishing three articles on this blog on the subject of overcoming the information barrier, and I hope these will help improve understanding of why this is still a fundamental issue for blind people. Actually I would say it is probably now the single most important issue for us.

The first will give you my take on the recent outcry that occurred when Amazon released its Kindle II e-book reader that has built-in synthetic speech. Synthetic speech is a major access technology for blind people, but for those of you who don’t know what happened, you will learn how Amazon had angered the publishers of information, what they chose to then do about it, and how that caused outrage in the blind community. I will give you my commentary on what I think are the implications of that episode for blind people.

The second article will look at the issue of copyright and why copyright exemptions are needed to ensure that materials in formats blind people can use can be readily moved from one country to another. It used to be for instance that blind people in small countries like New Zealand could readily borrow books on cassette from the big producers in the USA, the UK and other countries. This was a great way for blind people, particularly students, to obtain more specialised reading that we couldn’t expect to get from a local source such as the Foundation of the Blind.

But that’s all history now everyone has gone digital. I’ll be telling you why in this second article. The matter was recently discussed at a meeting of the World Intellectual Property Organisation. So did New Zealand behave itself when the matter was discussed? You’ll find out later this week.

The third and final article in this series will give you my take on where to from here. Why is it that as we progress more into the digital age, it seems to be harder for us to confront the issue and get over the barrier. It is sometimes said that there are none so blind as those who will not see. Is that the problem here? Is it just that the world still just doesn’t get it? Maybe, but I suggest also that our problems are to some extent of our own making and we really need to make sure we send a clear and consistent signal to the world to let them know what we want. I will be suggesting there is some conflict in the signals we are currently sending and we need to get our own act together.