To Read Is To Swagger

I never dreamed it would be possible for me to read the newspaper—and then suddenly—it was.  I couldn’t see the newspaper, never had been able to.  But seeing and reading are, after all, not the same thing.

What can I say about how it felt?  It was like throwing a chocolate lover into a vat of chocolate.  It was like a January thaw!  It was like winning the lottery.  To be more precise, it was just plain wonderful! 

Computers were the thing that made it possible, computers and humans who knew how to make them work and cared about making them do amazing things.  It was the perfect collaboration.  Newspaper publishers wanted their papers on the Internet.  Computer nerds had invented ways of making computer screens accessible to blind people through speech and Braille, and organizations for the blind, like the CNIB in Canada, were there to put it all together.  

What’s it like to have the newspaper read to you by a program called JAWS in a voice created by crossing a man with a computer chip?  Well, it’s not quite like spreading the whole paper mess over the table so that anybody who comes to breakfast has to set their coffee on it.  The sections come up in alphabetical order.  Body and Health always comes before the City section, and News is way down in the middle, after culture, after driving.  It’s not quite like curling up with the paper in a sunny living room chair, or the swing on the back porch, though the wireless laptop is moving it out of the office chair.  And it’s not quite like reading the paper version because the business ads, the comics, the personals and the classifieds are missing.  But it’s still wonderful!

To understand how wonderful it really is, you have to understand how blind people used to read the newspaper.  They read it through a filtered lens, the filter of the people who loved them.  The people who loved them chose the articles they thought would interest the blind person, and then, if nobody had to leave for work, and if the reader didn’t develop laryngitis, and if the phone didn’t ring, and the dog didn’t throw up on the rug and the kids didn’t interrupt, and the blind person didn’t insult the reader by making some tactless comment about the reading, then the reader would read some of the newspaper out loud.

Reading the newspaper makes me want to swagger.  What’s it like for a blind person to swagger into somebody’s office and announce: “I read in the Edmonton journal today that begonia bulbs need not be brought in until after the first frost?”  Well, it’s like dropping a hint that the person’s socks might not be exactly a matched pair, or observing that a person’s breath is better today than it was yesterday.  You get a brief silence, and people don’t quite know how to respond.  They don’t know exactly what you mean when you say you read it.  But you know you read it.  For just one moment, you are powerful, so powerful you just might be able to do anything in the future, and maybe there is nothing that can really hold you back. 

 

Wendy Edey