Optacon - Optacon Training

Optacon Training

With a number of operational prototype Optacons available, an effort was made to get them in daily use by blind people in the community. The engineers were anxious to know how well the Optacon components held up in a real life environment, what uses were made of the Optacon, how much was it used, and how important was it in educational, vocational, and daily living. Several blind people in the Palo Alto community volunteered to participate, and Carolyn Weil was hired to coordinate, teach, and document this part of the project.

The first issue was how should a blind person be taught to read with and Optacon? Some blind people were unaware of letter shapes, and most were not familiar with the various type fonts. In addition spelling was usually not a strong point, since the education of blind students had often been in Braille, which has about 180 contractions. Of course, none were familiar with recognizing vibratory tactile images of letters moving across their index finger.

Weil developed lessons to teach recognition of letters presented in this fashion using both the computer simulation and the Optacon prototypes. It soon became apparent that while letter recognition could be taught in a few days, building reading speed was much more time consuming. However, there were soon a number of blind people effectively using an Optacon prototype in their daily lives. These people contributed greatly to the project not only in providing important information for the design of future models, but also for motivating the Optacon development team toward making the Optacon widespread. Among this group of pioneering Optacon users were:

• Candy Linvill – John Linvill’s daughter who was a Stanford undergraduate at this time. She used the Optacon in her studies. Once when her Optacon needed a repair, Bliss went to her dorm room to pick it up. She wasn’t there so Bliss wanted to leave a message with her roommate. Her roommate told him “You can leave her a note if you print it like a typewriter and she can read it herself.” This was unheard of for a completely blind person.

• Sue Melrose – Another blind Stanford undergraduate who was taught to read with an Optacon by Candy Linvill. Both Sue and Candy participated in many Optacon presentations at conferences and meetings.

• Bob Stearns – A blind computer programmer working at SRI. Bob used the Optacon in his work writing and de-bugging computer programs.

• Loren Schoof – Another blind Stanford student who initially used the Optacon in his studies. In his mathematics textbooks he would have Braille transcribers put the text in Braille but he would read the equations and graphs with the Optacon. After graduation he was hired by SRI as a data analyst on the project. He did an important statistical analysis showing the relation between age and the Optacon reading speed achieved after a certain amount of time. Hewlett Packard had just announced their pioneering HP-35 hand held calculator. He did this analysis using the Optacon to read the screen of the HP-35 calculator.