So, the title of this interview infers that there will be some discussion of audio description within this conversation. And there is, we promise. But can you really blame J.J. for being nostalgic when talking to the author of more than 14 NBP
books, and soon to be a retiree, Judy Dixon? UEB and Web Braille are some of the topics covered before the pair move on to her latest book Audio Description: What It Is, Where to Find It, and How to Use It"". Listen in, or read below, as Judy talks about the "independence of Braille" and how it impacted her journey with technology throughout her career. To purchase the book, visit the National Braille Press Bookstore page And to reach Judy directly, send an email along to judy@judydixon.net
Blind Bargains Virtual Exhibit Hall coverage is Brought to you by AFB AccessWorld.
For the latest news and accessibility information on mainstream and access technology, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offerings, access technology book reviews, and mobile apps, and how they can enhance entertainment, education and employment, log on to AccessWorld, the American Foundation for the Blind's free, monthly, online technology magazine. Visit <www.afb.org/aw>.
Transcript
We strive to provide an accurate transcription, though errors may occur.
Hide transcriptTranscribed by Grecia Ramirez
Direct from Orlando, Florida; St. Louis; Las Vegas; Dallas; Sparks, Nevada – everywhere – it’s Blindbargains.com virtual Exhibit Hall coverage brought to you by AFB AccessWorld.
For the latest news and accessibility information on mainstream and access technology; Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offerings; access technology; book reviews; and mobile apps and how they can enhance entertainment, education, and employment, log onto AccessWorld, the American Foundation for the Blind's free monthly online technology magazine. www.AFB.org/AW.
Now, here’s J.J. Meddaugh
J.J. MEDDAUGH: Welcome back to Blind Bargains virtual hall coverage, where we try to bring you some of the biggest names and biggest interviews from what would be conferences, but everything virtually here in 2021. Before podcasts, before tech blogs, and well before Facebook groups or Twitter, Judy Dixon has been at the forefront of emerging assistive technologies. This year, she wraps up a 40-year career at the National Library Service, where she has been responsible for fostering many of the largest technological innovations and programs which are currently enjoyed by thousands including NLS BARD and its predecessor, WebBraille, and the new Braille eReader pilot program. She was also the chairperson for the Braille Authority of North America during much of the transition from English Braille to UEB, and has written numerous books from “The Computer Braille Code Made Easy” – I had that – back in 1991, to “Capturing and Sharing the World,” a book about taking pictures using mobile phones. Her latest book – and let me see if I can get this title right – “Audio Description: What It Is, Where to Find It, and How to Use It.”
Judy, welcome to Blind Bargains.
JUDY DIXON: Thanks, J.J. Thank you so much for having me.
JM: So we’re definitely going to talk plenty about the book and audio description – and there’s so much to unpack as far as media and where it’s come in the last couple of years. But I notice we share a shared interest in online shopping, except that you got started in the ‘80s?
JD: I did. I was a CompuServe user back in the ‘80s. And I used to shop in the electronic mall. And remember CompuStore? That was also on CompuServe.
JM: Wow. How did that work, and how did the experience compare from then to now?
JD: I can remember doing it with a 20-cell VersaBraille. And you connected it to a modem. Remember modems?
JM: Oh yeah.
JD: And, you know – (modem sound) – connected it to a modem, you logged onto a service, and – I mean, it was – I guess it was slow. Must have been slow.
JM: Still faster than going to the store though.
JD: Well, yeah. That’s what I thought.
JM: Would stuff be delivered to you back then, or would it just be like an order online or just a browsing catalog?
JD: Well, I mean, they had mail. The ponies came, you know.
Yeah. Stuff would be delivered.
JM: It’s fascinating to see how much technology has changed or actually even stayed the same throughout time. But the really big constant for you -- just reading a bit about you and obviously knowing you for many years -- is the importance and the amount of Braille in your life, especially at a young age. What was it about Braille, or what is it about Braille that kind of took your imagination, took you by storm?
JD: When I started at the school for the blind when I was five, they – I had some vision, and I could read print. And they started me – they called it – in the Sight-Saving class.
JM: Oh yeah.
JD: They started me in the Sight-Saving class. And I was in Sight-Saving for three weeks. And I guess they decided my sight wasn’t worth saving because they moved me. I remember going to the principal’s office and feeling some different sandpaper, and they said, yup. You’ll be able to read Braille. Okay.
And my very first day in the Braille classroom, they told me to go get a Braille writer. And I picked it up and proceeded to drop it on my foot and break a toe.
JM: Oww.
JD: So –
JM: Those things are heavy.
JD: I loved Braille so much after that.
JM: For a five-year-old, six-year-old, those things are really heavy.
JD: Oh, they were very heavy, and I just didn’t – I wasn’t expecting how heavy it was going to be when I picked it up. But I think it’s the independence of Braille and the – I’m a visual person. I’m a visual learner. And, for me, if I read it in Braille, I can remember. If I listen to it, my mind is wandering, you know, and I’m thinking about something else. I’m terrible at learning with audio.
JM: Your mind wandered later on into, you know -- I guess part of what became BARD -- but Web-Braille was a thing, for those who remember, before BARD, where you could go online and you could download the Braille books that we’re used to. You can -- still can go to the library and touch, but having them online, especially in the ‘90s -- where did that idea all come from, because that’s really such an amazing feat?
JD: Well, what happened is a lot of people started asking NLS in the ‘90s, when are you guys going to put books on CD? And, of course, you know, we knew then that we weren’t, and we were just kind of waiting a while till everything fell into place when we could put out books in digital form. And, meanwhile, our then head of production control told the Braille producers, guys, start sending us your files. Since you’re going these electronically, we’re going to start saving them. And when the disks arrived at NLS, they threw them all in a big box. And that box was enormous. It was about 3 foot by 3 foot by 3 foot –
JM: Wow.
JD: -- and it was getting very full because they started in 1992. And about 97, I said to our director, you know, there’s something we could do pretty easily that would make, at least a few people very happy. You know, we’ve got all these books on disk – we actually turned out to have about 2600 of them in this big box -- and we can just take the files and put them on a little server somewhere and just let people download them.
So the original Web-Braille was pretty primitive, but it was -- it had – was a basic password-protected program, and people loved it. We did a beta test in ‘98 with about 175 people, and they liked it. And we launched it in 1999.
JM: Yeah. This is ahead of its time. This is pre-Bookshare and pre--- a lot of other ways – younger people, I think, especially, take for granted the ability to get a million or more books in Braille now, which is amazing, but, I mean, that was, really, one of the first.
JD: Yeah. We thought it was fabulous at the time.
JM: And of course, over time, that has developed into BARD and, you know, kind of, we have the pilot eReader program that’s going on. How has that been taking?
JD: That’s going very well. NLS is developing its own eReader. We have two different versions of that, and it’s being tested in a number of states.
JM: That’s really cool, and we’ll definitely be following up with that, although probably with someone else because you’re retiring in the fall. Congratulations. How does that feel?
JD: Yeah. It feels great. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll miss it after I don’t have it, but I – right now, every day, I’m more and more happy about it.
JM: I’m sure you’ll still be involved in quite a few things, just retiring from the day job and –
JD: I will.
JM: Yeah. For sure. I mean, the amount of technology that you’ve been into over your life and the amount of Braille. So you are the chairperson of BANA, the Braille Authority of North America for many years where you would have invigorating discussions about what types of parentheses should be used.
JD: Oh. You can’t imagine the minutiae that we can discuss. And I’m now the president --
JM: I’d love to be a fly on the wall.
JD: I’m now the president of the International Counsel on English Braille.
JM: I’d love to be a fly on the wall for something like that because I’m guessing there are – I mean, I know how people are passionate about, you know, EBAI versus UEB, but I’m sure even something as small as parentheses is a big thing to some people.
JD: Oh, yes. It’s amazing.
JM: How did you -- as the president, how do you manage all the various opinions, you know, and all the really passionate, very good insightful opinions I’m sure you’re getting, but to try to come to solutions that are really going to affect thousands of people?
JD: I send people away and say, you make a decision and come with a recommendation.
JM: That makes a lot of sense honestly. You know, UEB, it’s been here now, what, five years, five and a half?
JD: Well, the – it was adopted in the U.S. January of 2016, so yeah; a little over five years.
JM: Are you a – you personally – I would assume -- are a pretty big supporter of UEB, or where do you come down on that?
JD: I am a supporter of UEB. And what I keep telling people about UEB is, okay. We – I’m not real happy about these crazy syllables. I don’t like seeing ER in “erase” and things like that. I – you know, I think that’s kind of weird.
JM: It’s weird.
JD: But on the other hand, UEB is not about us. It’s about kids. And there are kids now who are being educated with BrailleNotes and iPads, and that’s it. No teachers. I mean, no teachers for blind kids. And they have to write their documents on these BrailleNotes or whatever device, and, you know, print them out and give them to the teachers somehow, and they need to be right. They need to be correct. And UEB is so much about back translation. That is a great reason for it. And it is way better at back translation than the previous Braille code.
JM: Yeah. We’ve all seen those – you can tell that a blind person wrote it when there’s a random –
JD: Oh, yes.
JM: -- B-L-E in the middle of a – you know, next to a number or, you know, a DD in the middle of something. Yeah. We certainly –
JD: And that’s why ATION and ALLY went away, because –
JM: Because of the capital.
JD: -- now there’s capital letters in the middles of words, you know, WindowNation. WindowNationNation, you know.
JM: Right. Oh, gosh. Yeah, that would be really confusing, because it’s kind of a recursive – you’ve said that it’s up to blind people -- it’s up to us to – who know Braille to encourage others to learn Braille. Why do you feel that?
JD: Because I think we’re the ones that people might actually believe. You know, we’re the ones who can tell people what it is they’ll get from Braille, why Braille is so important, what it is it does for us, what it could do. I mean, there was a study done back in the ‘90s about -- you know, we hear about employment and how few blind people are employed, and this is a terrible, terrible thing. And it – that number doesn’t seem to be changing, although I’m not sure who’s doing the statistics on it these days, but –
JM: Right.
JD: Still, there was a study done that said that 91 percent of totally blind employed people were Braille readers. And think about the people you know. The totally blind employed people are Braille readers.
JM: It’s often those ones – and you were lucky to be pushed toward Braille because it’s often a lot of the – the low-vision people or people who had sight, lost it, and now can’t read print or Braille.
JD: That’s true. And I was – because I would have been in exactly that boat because I haven’t had any vision at all for many years. And so I hate to say they were right. My sight wasn’t worth saving.
JM: You have an interesting collection – we talk about all this high-tech stuff. But you’re a fan of a big low-tech device that I think a lot of people look over these days, slates and stylus – is it styluses? styli?
JD: Styli, sty-lee, you know, slates.
JM: How many do you have, and what got you into that?
JD: Well, I saw a catalog. I got a few slates, I think some time in the ‘80s, and I saw a Micro-Braille slate from the UK. It was 11 lines of 26 cells, and it was the size of about a 4 by 6 card.
JM: Oh my.
JD: And I thought that was really cool. And so then, I saw this catalog of international aids and appliances, they called them back then. And I looked up things, and they were slates. They were slates from other countries I’d never heard of. So I wrote for catalogs and ordered some slates and, you know, the – you have 20 and then you have 30 and then you have 50 and – in, I think ‘83, I wrote an article for the Matilda Ziegler for the Blind, and at that time, I had 92 slates. And right now -- unique slates. And, of course, I have a zillion others.
JM: Yeah.
JD: Duplicates and things. But unique slates, I have 284. I mean, I don’t even count the styluses. There are hundreds. Some of them are specific and go with, you know, go with specific slates. And I have a lot of kind of micro-collections within the larger collection. For example, all the upward writing slates. It’s all cataloged. It has a website, brailleslates.org, which I haven’t kept up too terribly well within the last few years. But I probably have ten or so upward writing slates, and I haven’t seen any one yet that’s any good.
JM: What’s an upward writing slate?
JD: Well, it’s a slate that has a hollow-pointed stylus. This is a sighted person’s idea of what –
JM: Okay.
JD: -- what blind people need. Because, you know, oh. Wouldn’t it be so much easier to use a slate if you could write from left to right and make all the characters in the same way that you read them?
JM: Sure. Right.
JD: So let’s make the dots point up, and we’ll have a hollow-pointed stylus, and all you have to do is take that hollow-pointed stylus and push straight down on the dot, and it’ll make a dot, and everything will be fine.
Except it isn’t, because when a blind person writes on a slate, you take your stylus and you put it in the cell, and you kind of look around to find that right spot where you want to push your stylus down to make the dot. And that act of looking around in the cell causes shadow dots, causes those upward pointing dots to conform to the paper and make -- so it makes the Braille look awful. A sighted person can do it fairly well because if they can go right into the cell, go straight down on the dot and then never move that stylus anywhere else, it can make fairly respectable looking Braille. So when they test these things, oh, yeah, they work great. Well, they don’t. And I haven’t seen one yet that works great.
JM: Yeah. It sounded like an interesting idea in theory until you started to explain it more, and then -- yeah. I don’t think that’s going to work.
JD: Yeah. Really.
JM: Because even blind people have had that idea. Like, the slate would be so much cooler if – but –
JD: If. And there are a lot of – I mean there are many upward writing slates, but they just don’t work that well.
JM: So this may or may not be the same answer to two different questions. What’s your favorite slate in your collection, and what do you use on a day-to-day basis or most often?
JD: I recently acquired a slate called the Versa Slate. You might have even seen this because these guys were at – I probably wandered by your booth and said, J.J., you ought to sell this. It’s a paperless slate. So it’s a – you write with a stylus, and the words come up on the other side, and then it has buttons on it so you can just erase the whole thing. You can just press the button, all the dots go away.
JM: Yup.
JD: Write again. I keep it beside me all day long. And when I want to remember something, I already have six documents open, I don’t want to Alt+tab through everything, I just want to write something down. So I just grab this thing and just write it down. I just love it. It’s the coolest thing. It’s from South Korea. The downside is it’s expensive.
JM: Yeah. It is a little expensive, especially with the shipping. But maybe that will come down over time.
JD: Yeah. But it’s – and they’ve just come out with the – their original one was four lines of 20 cells. And they’ve just come out with a two-line, 12-cell one. It’s a cute little thing.
JM: So one of the advantages of that, to get us back to the original reason I brought you on is, hey, you could slate while listening, or watching a movie or a TV show, which brings us to the book, all about audio description and all of the different permutations of streaming service plus –
JD: Oh, yes.
JM: -- operating system – oh, my gosh. This must have taken a bit to finish up.
JD: It was fun. I certainly didn’t do every single – the hard part was the cable services because you can’t subscribe to three or four cable services and try them all out. So I had to depend on other people’s experiences with cable services because I cut the cord about four or five years ago. And – but as a cord-cutter, I certainly have that experience, how to get audio description on your Fire TV when you don’t have a cable service.
But what the main part of the book is, I took seven different streaming services and seven or eight different devices, whether you count iPad or iPhone as two devices or one –
JM: Right.
JD: -- that sort of thing. Anyway, seven or so different devices. It was the iPad and iPhone, an Android phone, a Roku Express, a Fire TV Stick, and the Chromecast with Google TV, and an Apple TV. So I – all of those things, and then tried each one with – let me not forget any here, so I’m going to look at the list – with Apple TV Plus, Disney Plus, HBO Max, Hulu, Netflix, Paramount Plus, Prime Video. So I tried each device with each service and talked about, you know, first of all, how you enable accessibility on that device; you know, how you get your Roku to talk; that kind of thing. And then each, sort of, video streaming service. How do we get – how do you get VoiceOver on that?
JM: How do you keep this up to date?
JD: Well, we can’t.
JM: So HBO Max – HBO Max just did a bunch of stuff –
JD: I know.
JM: -- right as you were probably getting the book done.
JD: Well, yeah. And apparently, it’s just been discovered that there’s some audio described titles now on Peacock. So – and PEACOCK’s not in here. It’s not out yet, and it’s not up to date.
JM: But still a wealth of information. Is it set up more as a reference material? It’s like, do you – would you pick the streaming service and your device, or how is it organized?
JD: Yeah. You – it’s organized by device.
JM: That makes sense.
JD: And then -- because I figure you have a device. You know, then you want to see what all these streaming services will work on it. And – but there’s a lot of other stuff in it. There’s – there’s a history chapter, just talking about the basic history of audio description and how – where it’s been, where it’s going. And then a brief summary of the legal requirements for broadcasting cable, and then also for movies. And then, audio description on broadcast and nonbroadcast televisions, antenna-connected, cable-connected.
And there’s a very, very cool – I love this app. There’s a very cool thing. There’s a – if you can get this device called an HDHomeRun –
JM: Yes. I have one.
JD: Yeah. Do you use Channels?
JM: Yes.
JD: I love Channels. Well, you can run Channels on your Apple – so your Apple TV can become a television.
JM: Mm-hmm.
JD: You know, and you get all your live channels on your Apple TV. Plus you have everything else on your Apple TV. And I have my Apple TV not even connected to a TV. So you can buy these little HDMI dummy plugs –
JM: Yup.
JD: -- and just stick one of those in your Apple TV and away you go.
JM: Yeah. It’s really an amazing app. I mean, so much has changed over the past, five years, probably, more than it has in the previous 30 or 40; right?
JD: Oh. That is so true.
JM: Where do you see audio description headed? I know for a lot of blind people, it has certainly changed the way that people consume media, where a lot of times people in the past would say, oh, I don’t want to go to the movies or I don’t want to watch TV shows because I don’t know what’s going on other than, you know, certain genres which lend themselves better to watching without description. But – you know, like, I know me, personally, I stayed away from a lot of action or horror or, you know, genres where it was so much music and no dialogue. But, you know, audio description has changed so much of that.
JD: I certainly went to plenty of movies in my day. And I, you know, thought it was – I certainly preferred ones with some dialogue and so forth and – it was really fun because just a few weeks ago, I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey with description. Now, in 1968, when that movie came out and I watched it in the movie theater, there are long, long stretches where there’s nothing but some Strauss music playing and, you know – I mean, there is nothing. And just like, whoa. That’s really nice music. And, you know, what’s going on? What’s going on? Well, just some planets are going by. You know, oh, right. Well – it was so interesting to watch it with audio description. It was like, I had no idea what was happening in that movie.
But, I mean -- but a lot of other movies certainly made a lot of sense. And it’s fun to watch a movie that you’ve seen many times, you know, Casa Blanca, for example. You know, I mean, I think we all pretty much got the gist of Casa Blanca when we watched it without description. But, you know, you watch it now with description, you get details you didn’t know. Certainly, I mean, I did. But I – did it incrementally increase my knowledge? Yeah. A little, but not hugely. But it was fun.
JM: Yeah. And also kind of gives you access to understanding, you know, the dress of a certain period or other, you know, visual stylings that, you know, we wouldn’t pick up on from just hearing the dialogue.
JD: And what we don’t pick up on a lot is, you know, facial expressions. You know, he frowned. Well, I didn’t know he wasn’t happy, you know?
JM: Right. So you’ve been up with technology since DOS and things before that even. That was 40 – you know –
JD: So I did use CPM.
JM: -- which was another computer – it was a mainframe; right?
JD: No. It was a little tiny –
JM: See, I don’t even know. I thought I knew.
JD: That – no, no, no. See – see? It was a -- ran flop – it had floppy disks, and it was a CPM machine that I connected my VersaBraille to.
JM: What did that stand for? Not cost per minute because that’s –
JD: What did that – what – you know, I don’t remember what that stood for. Oh, that’s terrible.
JM: I think some people have to look --
JD: Yeah, right?
JM: Because I know if I Googled it now, that’s what it would be is cost per million or something to that effect. Well, maybe one of our listeners can remind us, write in, you know, it’s all right.
VOCAL INSERT: Control program for microcomputers.
JM: Well, let’s go to the future. Where do you -- you know, next five, ten years, you know, in the audio description world specifically, but maybe in technology in general, what excites you the most?
JD: I am – I guess I’m really kind of – I mean, the reason I write books about photography and so forth -- I think cameras are just the coolest thing. I’m really excited about Lidar. I think Lidar is kind of the beginning of some precision that we can get with our cameras that we just don’t have now. And I think, you know, scanning has certainly gotten hugely better. And if you’re careful and consistent, you can get some fabulous results from scanning. And so I think – I still think cameras are just the coolest things for blind people, and we can do so many – I mean, with – you know, with our phones and all the really, really cool apps that we have to do with them, I just think that’s so fun.
JM: If you think you know a lot about phones, just go to National Braille Press and you – type in Dixon, and there are, gosh, quite a few different books –
JD: This might – my audio description book is the 14th.
JM: Wow.
JD: And most of them have been about iPhones in one way or another. And I’m – I mean, I am an iPhone – I do use an Android phone for work-related things. And so I decided I don’t want to leave Android out of the audio description book. That’s not fair to the Android users.
JM: Well, thank you.
JD: So – you’re welcome. So it’s, you know – I certainly use it some. But I mean, 99 percent of the time, I use an iPhone.
JM: Right. Which makes sense, especially given the Braille support on iPhone.
JD: Oh, yes. Now, Braille support on Android is not the best.
JM: No. That’s a whole separate conversation.
JD: That is a whole separate conversation.
JM: But definitely check out the book. It is coming out momentarily, if it’s not out by the time this gets released. “Audio Description: What It Is, Where to Find It, How to Use It.” I assume it’s going to be at nbp.org.
JD: Yes.
JM: Of course it’ll be there. Where can people find you? How can they get ahold of you?
JD: My Email address is judy@judydixon.net.
JM: And Dixon’s spelled D-i-x-o-n.
JD: Correct.
JM: And – thank you so much. It’s been an absolute pleasure to have you on.
JD: Thanks, J.J.
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Joe Steinkamp is no stranger to the world of technology, having been a user of video magnification and blindness related electronic devices since 1979. Joe has worked in radio, retail management and Vocational Rehabilitation for blind and low vision individuals in Texas. He has been writing about the A.T. Industry for 15 years and podcasting about it for almost a decade.
