The following text by Ana Maria Fontes from Portugal takes us back to the early 1990s, a time when new technologies were being introduced to blind people for the first time. She vividly describes a demonstration of devices like speech synthesizers and scanners, which offered a glimpse into the possibilities of a more accessible future. This moment also highlighted the adaptability and relevance of Braille, as the technology extended its application in impressive ways, proving the enduring value of this tactile writing system. Her account provides insight into a period of initial experimentation and discovery—a fascinating phase of technological advancement that continues to resonate today.
Thank you very much Ana Maria for sharing this text with all of us here today!
Introduction:
Hello! This is Ana Maria Fontes. I am blind from birth, 77 years old now and I come from Portugal.
I attended a school for the blind for 12 years, then a mainstream secondary school and finally the University of Coimbra.
Professionaly I taught English and German for 15 years; but because my pupils were sighted I decided to become proofreader and co-adapter of school material. The last 3 years before retirement were spent as a foster teacher, where I taught Braille with enthusiasm.
For pleasure I translate, knit and lay my hands on the keyboard.
The same generation, two different eras
That afternoon in the early nineties we gathered eagerly round a man who would introduce us to the dawn of a new era.
He named two devices on the table: a desk computer connected to a small box containing a speech syntesiser called Apollo. Most of us already had a notion of what could be done thanks to these new tools; but experiencing the wonder ourselves in reality felt like a dream come true! Apollo could even read in different languages, we could even change the speed! The amount of cables spread on the table, which we would find disturbing nowadays, passed almost unnoticed at the time.
Judged by our present standards, the voice coming out from Apollo sounded robotical; but what did it matter, if for the first time in our adult lives we could hear which caracter we were typing whenever we pressed a key on the computer? What a huge difference it made by comparison with our welknown typewriter! True, for many years it proudly stood as the only quick gateway for us blind people to communicate in print with the sighted community; but, oh dear, its keys merely rattled along, providing no information whatsoever about what we were typing! How hard we had to concentrate in order to avoid spelling mistakes! How many sheets had to be torn and started all over again because of a single fault! Gone were those days, forever! How lucky we were! Blind people of this generation who managed to use their mute typewriters at almost perfect level deserve our respect and admiration!
The group leader moved on to show a device in the shape of a heavy, rectangular box. He named it a scanner – a new word to our ears. In his hands he held a magazine. He placed a page on the scanner plate, pressed a knob on it and a few moments later, to our amazement, Apollo began revealing the contents of the seemingly blank page! We were innocently unaware, then, that this combination doesn’t always work well and that technology sometimes plays embarrasing tricks… The joy of witnessing such a wonder was to strong to allow for worries.
We thought we had marvelled enough; yet the highlight was still to come: the man put another sheet on the scanner. And this time (we could hardly believe it) each character printed on that sheet appeared under our own fingers on the attached, big braille display!
We were fascinated. I dare say as fascinated as Louis Braille’s schoolmates were when they experimented with his tailor-made six-dot system for reading and writing.