You're listening to part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.
Guess what, Mango?
What's that will?
So a lot of us listen to audiobooks these days, But something I learned just the other day. Did you know that they were created almost one hundred years ago. That's right, Mango audiobooks one hundred years ago, and they were originally produced specifically for blind people.
Wait, really, I thought audiobooks were invented like twenty years ago.
Nope. Actually, back in the early twentieth century, the main way for blind people to access written text was braille. But you know, braille wasn't widely taught, so most folks didn't know it all that well. And after World War One there was this influx of soldiers coming home with vision impairment from various war injuries. They didn't know how to read braille either, so there was this sudden need
for technology to help them out. Now Conveniently, around the same time, there had been this huge advancement in phonograph technology. Early records only played five minutes of sound per side, but now they could make records that could play up to twenty five minutes of sound per side. So an organization called the American Foundation for the Blind worked with the US government and other organizations, and they produced these
spoken recordings of famous titles. They called this new medium talking books.
I love a straightforward name. So what did they record first?
Well, the first talking books, which came out in nineteen thirty four, included two Shakespeare plays, The Constitution, you know had some good listening, and Washington's Farewell Address. But there were also books by popular authors at the time like Rudyard Kipling, PG. Woodhouse. And the creators of talking books had some disagreement about whether they should focus on serious books or things that people might actually be interested in
listening to. So they decided to compromise a little bit, as you could from what we just mentioned there, and so they did a little bit of both.
Yeah, I mean no shade to George Washington's farewell Address, but I'd rather curl up with a good novel.
I agree with you on that. Now you'll be shocked to learn that Talking books listeners also agreed with us. The audio novels were especially popular, and as the program grew, celebrities like Joan Crawford and Ossi Davis they all recorded books for these. There was also an actor named Alexander Scorby who became famous for his talking books work. He recorded over four hundred of these things, including heavy tones like the Iliad or in Peace, even the Bible, which you can actually still listen to.
That's an impressive amount of reading and listening, I guess well, from talking books to hearing aids to faucets of the future, today's episode is all about assistive technology. It's high tech, it's low tech, it is every tech in between, and it makes life a little easier for millions of people every single day. So let's dive in.
Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to part time Genius. I'm Will Pearson, and as always, I'm here with my good friend Mangush hot ticketter and over there in the booth recording his audiobook autobiography titled Here It is the Shocking true story of a Palain producer. That's our Palain producer, Dylan Fagan.
I cannot wait to listen to that on my next road trip at full volume because Dylan talks softly. Okay, so quick note before we get started, the terms assistive technology and adaptive technology are often used interchangeably, but there is a slight difference. Assistive technology includes things that can assist anyone. Adaptive tech is specifically designed for people with disabilities, and today we'll be talking about both.
That's exactly right. And while we're mostly talking about innovations from the past couple of centuries, it is good to remember that assistive and adaptive technology has been around for thousands of years because people with disabilities and assistants' needs have always existed.
For example, take the wheelchair. Today, there are all sorts of specialized versions, right wheelchairs for athletes, wheelchairs for kids, and hands free wheelchairs. But the history of the wheelchair actually goes back to China around five twenty five CE, and that's the date of the first known representative image of a wheelchair. It's a stone carving of a man sitting in a chair with three wheels. Now, over the next century, wheelchairs gave people mobility, but they didn't provide
much autonomy. Early wheelchairs had to be pushed by someone else, and that bothered a young German watchmaker named Stefan Farfler, who had become paraplegic after breaking his back as a kid. He was sick of relying on others to get around. So in sixteen fifty he built the first self propelled wheelchair. It looked like a bulky recumbent tricycle, but it worked by turning hand cranks attached to a gear front wheel.
Of course, he was a watchmaker. He knows his gears right.
Yeah, he certainly did. Now fast forward to nineteen thirties California, there is a mining engineer named Herbert Everest, and he too relied on in a wheelchair to get around after being paralyzed in an accident. And like Farfler, he had issues with his wheelchair, namely because it was really heavy and hard to transport. So Everest talked to a mechanical engineer named Harry Jennings, and together they designed a new lightweight
wheelchair that was also foldable. And this X frame wheelchair is more or less what the standard wheelchair you see in a hospital is based on. And what is so cool about these stories is neither Farflur nor Everest were trained in this kind of product design, but as people with disabilities, they knew firsthand what the problems were and they decided to solve them. Well.
Sticking with the historical angle for our next fact, let's talk about ear trumpets, which is just such a great name for our product. And now the idea of an ear trumpet has been around for hundreds of years and actually maybe even more than that.
It's funny because I really associate them with like the nineteenth century, Like didn't Beethoven use them?
He did, yes, you remember from your history books, and that was in their heyday. But there are reports of folks using hollowed out horns to help with hearing issues as far back as the thirteenth century. So the way they work is pretty simple. You can actually picture these things. The funnel shape strengthens the impact of sound waves on
the ear drum, making the sound easier to hear. Now, of course, hearing aids have made them obsolete, but unlike hearing aids, ear trumpets came in all kinds of incredible elaborate designs. So today the largest collection of ear trumpets in the world is owned by a man named Michael Briggs. He's this retired engineer from England and he's also the owner of the website eartrumpets dot net, which, if ear trumpets are your thing, that is pro probably worth bookmarking.
Mango I'm definitely going to check that out right after this. How many trumpets does he own.
So as of this recording, because I feel like he's probably going to have more soon. It was five hundred and sixty four, and he has some great examples. There's this one from nineteen hundred that looks like a beehive, or one from eighteen eighty six where the trumpet is concealed within a folding fan, another one where the funnel is made from a conk shell. But you know, I'm partial to the tortoises shell one that has this pair
of matching glasses attached to the end. It's just pretty fun to look at.
I know, I like the idea of assistive devices as basically doubling as fashion accessories Like that feels like a great.
Thing, totally stylish and functional, sort of the best of both worlds.
So next, I want to talk about a technology that has become absolutely much more recently. It was created in the nineteen seventies and it was called the opticon.
That sounds that sounds like something from a sci fi novel.
Yeah, or like a shape right, Well, it definitely seems futureteristic, and it was when it was invented. As you were saying at the top of the show, braill is useful, but it has limits. So not only do you have to know how to read it, someone has to translate the original text, which may be possible for books and public signage, but not for all the text you encounter
on a daily basis. Like I was reading an account by this woman named Debbie Stein, and she was reflecting on her life in the nineteen sixties and early seventies. Now Debbie is blind, and she gave the example of cleaning out her purse. If she wanted to sort through her receipts and old grocery lists in order to decide what to keep and what to throw out, she'd have to wait until a friend or a paid reader was there to help.
I mean that sounds like a constant hassle.
Yeah. And so these days there are text to speech devices and other technologies that can scan and read written text. But back then, people like Debbie were stuck. Enter a Stanford electrical engineering professor, his name was John Linville. Now John was cited, but his daughter Candy was blind and she struggled with limited materials in braille. So in nineteen
sixty two. With help from his colleagues, John began work on a solution, a portable device that could read almost any written material, regardless of what or where it was, and in the early nineteen seventies the opticon was born. So here's how it worked. With one hand, you'd move a small camera over the text you wanted to read. In your other hand, you'd have a fingertip sized receiver filled with one hundred and forty four tiny metal rods.
When the camera scanned the text, the opticon would convert each letter or symbol to a specific vibration pattern that was sent to the rods, which you would then detect with your finger.
So I'm trying to understand how this works. So would you feel the shape of the words or what?
Basically like? It took some practice to get the hang of it. In fact, a two week training course was required with each purchase, but for people who learned it it was life changing. Like Debbie, you know, the one
with the clutter purse. She got her first opticon in nineteen seventy seven, and while she said it was slower than using braille, it gave her access to a lot more text so she could read whatever she wanted whenever she wanted, not just magazines or newspapers, but like bills or flyers, menus, LP jackets, basically anything.
This guy's a lemon. I feel like you should keep naming, just keep going.
Well almost deb said the only thing that optacons struggled with was cursive writing, but clearprint was generally fine. So if you're going to write her a letter, you had to do it neatly, which is probably good advice anyway, I think.
All right, so what you said, this is obsolete now, though like it sounds like it could still be pretty handy, right, Yeah.
I mean a company called Telesensory Systems manufactured and sold opticons for a couple of decades, but they discontinued them in nineteen ninety six as optical character readers became more popular. If you dig around on eBay, though, you can still find some vintage opticons out there.
That's very cool. All right, we have to take a quick break. But when we come back, synthesized voices, future faucets, and the assistive technology that was so powerful started its own effect. Don't go anywhere. Welcome back to part time Genius, where we're talking about assistive technology. All right, mego, I got a question for you. How many times a day do you use the sink?
I mean, wash my hands, brush my teeth, and glass of water? I don't know, maybe a dozen times.
Yeah, we don't always think about them, but the fact is we all depend on faucets. Now. The problem is, if you have a spinal cord injury or something that limits your arm or hand mobility, standard faucets might not work well for you. Of course, there are motion sensor faucets, as you probably know, but those aren't perfect either.
Yeah, I know. I mean I feel like I was in airports this week trying to get the sinks and the motion tests with work, and you've just spent so much time like waving your hand into these things. Yeah.
Yeah, you got to find the combo of the sink that works and the soap dispenser that works, So you end up like just waving it under the soap then squirts, then you move on to the wrong sink and it's just but anyway, but think about the nozzle too, Like it points straight down, which works for washing your hands, but isn't great if you have limited mobility and you're trying to wash your face or brush your teeth.
Yeah. I actually I hadn't thought of that, but I can see how that would be a problem.
Yeah, and it's a problem that a new faucet called the Access H two O is actually trying to solve. So what's cool about it is instead of just one way to control the water and one way to access it, there are multiple options and it really depends on the user's needs and their various abilities.
That's really interesting. So tell me how does this work.
Well, it's not available to the public just yet, so most of what I know comes from this study that was published last year. But according to that study, there are three ways to activate the faucet and adjust the temperature and the water volume. There's a motion sensor, an I gay sensor, and a voice sensor, so you can choose what works best for you. Plus there are different
nozzle options. There's the downward facing nozzle and two on the top that can point up and can be used like a drinking fountain or you know, for washing your face or something like that. It's all still in development. So the study was testing its effectiveness with a group of eighteen people with various spinal cord injuries. So with standard faucets, most of the people needed some level of assistance for drinking or rinsing their mouths or even washing
their faces. But with the access H two O faucet, almost all of the testers could do these tasks independently, which is pretty great.
You know, what I'm really taking from my conversation today is the best assistive tech lets people do the things they need and want to do on their own terms.
Right, Yeah, that's exactly right. It's all about allowing people to live their lives as autonomously as possible.
So another new device in this vein is something called the Obi robot. Obi's creators call it assistive tech for inde pendant dining, and it is for people who can chew and swallow on their own, but have trouble with the mechanics of feeding themselves. Because if you're relying on a caregiver to like help you eat, not only do you not necessarily get to choose when to eat, you might not get to choose the exact bite you wanted at that moment or the piece you want to eat at.
Which I know can be incredibly frustrating and losing that independence and making those choices. So how does the OBI work.
Put Simply, it mimics the human arm, So it does require another person to put spoon sized food into one or all of its four bowls, but then Obi takes it from there. The robotic arm connects to a spoon or a spork, It scoops up a bite of food and then brings it to your mouth.
And the person eating is controlling all of this or what?
Yeah? Exactly? They can choose which bowl Obi takes from and when they take the bite. And also it's portable, so you can take it to restaurants or a friend's house, or you can use it whenever you'd like. There's this
example from one user, a ten year old girl. She said one of the things she liked about OBI was that now she could join the school book club, which meant during lunchtimes, she could bring Obi with her to the meeting and eat her meal with everyone else, all while they hung out and talked about books.
Hey, you got to love anything that makes it easier to join a book club. I think that's top of the list there. But all right, mego, So for my next fact, I want to talk about augmentative and alternative communication or AAC. Now, the term actually encompasses any way you might communicate without speech, like even physical gestures. But I'm going to focus here on something called aided modes,
which refers to using a device that assists in communication. Now, the overarching goal of AAC is to give someone with speech disabilities a way to communicate, either through words or expressing emotions or opinions like indicating yes or no. Now, when it comes to aided AAC, perhaps the most famous example is Stephen Hawking. So Hawking had als and had of course lost the ability to speak, and this was
back in nineteen eighty five. So he used a computer system where he could select letters, words, even phrases on a screen and a synthesized voice would speak them. Now, after losing the ability to press the switch with his hands, he began using his cheek muscle to control the selection. But what I actually find most interesting is that he used the exact same voice for the rest of his life, and even when his software became outdated, he didn't want
to give it up. And I kind of see that, right, like, there was the voice that we all associated so strongly with Stephen Hawking.
In some ways, I totally get that, because, like, you want that continuity. But I'm also kind of surprised like someone in that position, you know, a professor, a scholar, like public intellectual, like, it also feels like you might want to keep your cutting edge and it's funny that you relied on older technology.
Yeah, it was kind of interesting to hear him talk about this. So when he was asked about this, he said, quote, I keep it because I have not heard a voice I like better, and because I have identified with it. And if you think about it, your voice is such a strong personal thing, like it's of who you are, and so it'd be tough to give up a voice just for a software update, you know. But here's the thing.
There are millions of people with communication disabilities, and not everyone has access to high tech AAC devices like the custom Intel setup that Hawking was using, and people who aren't as famous as Hawking often run into other challenges like people getting impatient with the time it takes for them to express themselves, or people assume that a lack of verbal ability indicates a lack of intelligence.
You know.
So while there is incredible AAC technology out there, it only makes an impact if people who need it have access to it. And if people are given the time in the space, they need to communicate in their own way, you know, whether they want to talk about theoretical physics or the latest Marvel movie.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, we did say at the beginning of the show that we talk about some low tech, and this next tech is about as low as it gets. I'm referring, of course, to the curb cut. So you know those little inclines that lead from the street to the sidewalk or vice versa. The first intentional curb cut was built in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in nineteen forty five. But the movement that really made curb cuts such an integral part of American sidewalks happened
in Berkeley in the nineteen sixties. It was a lot of progressive activism in Berkeley at that time, and among the people calling for change was a group of students with disabilities. And for all the peace and love going around Berkeley, sidewalks were not accessible for wheelchair users, so people had to roll down the street hoping they didn't get hit by a car.
It must have been terrifying.
Yeah, I mean, these activists call themselves the Rolling Quads, and they did whatever they could to make themselves heard.
There are even stories about members blowing up curbs and installing their own ramps in the dead of night as protests, and some of these stories are probably exaggerated, but the point stands right like, the city needed to change, and thanks to these activists work, in nineteen seventy two, Berkeley finally installed its first curb cut, right on the edge of the university campus on Telegraph and Bancroft, and the disability rights movement kept up the pressure and slowly other
cities began to install curb cuts as well, and finally, in nineteen ninety the Americans with Disabilities Act made curb cuts mandatory in a lot of places. The law is not perfect. I'm sure you've seen examples of sidewalks without them, but it has made a huge difference.
You know, for most of my life, I didn't really have to pay attention to curb cuts, but you know, once you have kids, and especially kids in strollers, like that makes you really notice them and you know where they were and where they weren't.
Yeah, same, And that's one of the great things about this humble dip in the pavement right. It is like such a great example of assistive technology because it helps people with strollers, people using walkers, people pushing carts or carrying luggage. Right, Like curb cuts basically make life easier for everyone, so much so that there's even a term for it, the curb cut effect. It's the idea that if you design for all abilities, you actually make a better product for everyone.
Well, speaking of inclusive design, the last item on our list is another example of something that's become so much more than it was initially meant to be. I'm talking, of course, about closed captions.
Yeah, I mean, even if you're a hearing person. Captions are great when you're trying to watch a show without waking someone up, or if you're watching something in another language, or even with like a thick British accent.
I feel like it's helpful, super helpful, you know. So a couple quick definitions because the terminology is a little counterintuitive here. Captions are different from subtitles because they include descriptive sound information like sound effects or music. They'll also indicate if someone is yelling or singing or whatever they happen to be doing. Close captioning refers to the text that you can choose to see or not. Open captioning means the text is always visible on the screen anyway.
To get back to our story here, in the early days, TV wasn't made with deaf and hard of hearing people in mind. By the early nineteen seventies, there were some education films with open captioning, and PBS had a few shows with open captions, but it wasn't until March nineteen eighty that the first closed caption programs were Broadcast networks worked with a newly formed organization. It was called the
National Captioning Institute, and they provided this service. However, to access the captions, you had to have a separate closed caption decoder set up on your TV.
So in practice it was still pretty limited.
Yeah, the selection was also limited, so before long people began asking for more closed caption programming. Soap operas, kids shows, talk shows, all the things that people watched in the eighties when you think about it, and over time those started getting captioned. But all of these programs have something in common. They are pre recorded, which meant there was an important category that was missing.
I know, live TV, right like you think about sports or like the Oscars, no one wants to watch that the next.
Day, right, And the same goes for things like breaking news. So in nineteen eighty two, real time close captioning debuted to minimize lag time as much as possible. The National Captioning Institute actually hired court reporters who are notoriously fast hypers.
By the early nineteen nineties, all new TVs came with a caption decoding microchip built in so you didn't have to buy a separate device, and almost all shows were required to have captioning, which is how we got to where we are today, where it's ubiquitous and again useful for so many different people.
Well, well, because you introduced me to my new favorite website, ear trumpets dot net, I think you deserve today's trophy.
Oh man, I can't believe you had this trophy made in the shape of an ear trumpet. I think I feel like you saw this coming.
Yeah, well, it's easier to do that than a curve cut. But that is it for today's episode. If you have a questioner idea for the show, please give us a call at three oh two, four oh five, five nine two five. We really really love hearing from you. You can also email us at High Geniuses at gmail dot com, Hi Geniuses at gmail dot com, or find us on Instagram and Blue Sky at part Time Genius. Today's episode was written by the wonderful Marissa Brown. Thank you so much, Marissa.
We'll be back next week, but in the meantime, from Will, Dylan, Gabe, Mary, and myself, thank you so much for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. It is hosted by my good pal Will Pearson, who I've known for almost three decades now. That is insane to me. I'm the other co host, Mangeshatikular aka Mango. Our producer is Mary Phillips Sandy. She's actually a super producer. I'm
going to fix that in post. Our writer is Gabe Lucier, who I've also known for like a decade at this point, maybe more. Dylan Fagan is in the boot. He is always dressed up, always cheering us on, and always ready to hit record and then mix the show after he does a great job. I also want to shout out the executive producers from iHeart my good pals Katrina and Norvel and Ali Perry. We have social media support from Calypso Rallis if you like our videos, that is all
Calypso's handiwork. For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio.
App, Apple Podcasts, or.
Tune in wherever you listen to your favorite shows. That's it from us here at Part Time Genius. Thank you so much for listening