Electronic aids for blind persons: an interdisciplinary subject

Abstract
Aids for the handicapped is an emotive subject; ‘electronic aids for the blind’ is highly emotive because of the innovation the field has seen over the past 20 years and the controversy over what is best for the user and what is appropriate as a manufactured technology. The subject is reviewed against this background, showing the advances in reading aids to have had a smoother and more successful passage than has been experienced by the mobility aids. Many ideas which reached the stage of demonstration and even evaluation could not be covered because they were lost to posterity during the searching years of the 1970s, this following a productive period in the 1960s. Instead, emphasis has been placed on the history of those innovations which have survived to today and those which have yet to be fully tested by a critical field. It is seen that the very rapid advance in electronic and computer technology has been quickly adapted to the problem of nonvisual reading ink print and computer output data. There are some very fine, highly innovative aids now available to the field of blindness. By comparison, mobility, or more generally spatial perception which is a prerequisite to mobility, has seen less benefit from the new technologies. The reasons are discussed and the opportunities for innovation highlighted; but little seems to be on the horizon, which leads one to beleive that a new technology is likely to be forthcoming which will enable the realisation of artificial vision, a concept which demanded much attention during the past decade. The less obvious approach of acoustic spatial perception with its fundamental limitations may instead survive longer. Above all, the blind will not be served unless engineers find a way to make reliable aids of low cost, yet capable of powerful information transfer to the remaining senses of the blind person. This is a tough yet highly rewarding field in which to test one's technological stamina.

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