In the UK, we’ve had ‘Sight as a service’ for decades. Thirty or more years ago we had the Personal Reader Service (PRS) that, from memory, provided people in work with someone to read to them for up to fifteen hours a week. Even though I had a “reading machine” called the Kurzweil Reading Edge at the time, PRS was vital because the machines couldn’t read hand-written material and weren’t portable.
Over the past twenty-five years, I have benefited from ‘Sight as a service’ in many more ways:
1. In work I used a ‘driver guide’ employed to drive my company car and guide me at events.
2. In work I used a ‘support worker’ to help me complete tasks that included hand-written items.
3. In work I had a ‘driver’ when I had the sort of workload that couldn’t be completed if I had to use public transport – it took me way too long to realise how much more relaxing walking out the house and getting into a car was, compared to a journey of three taxis and two trains.
4. At university I had a ‘personal assistant’ who helped me use a vital, but inaccessible, software package.
5. At college I had a ‘support worker’ who basically did everything for me other than the actual work, which made me v-lazy!
I could go on, I took a support worker with me once when I had to travel internationally, used to have someone with me at conferences (to help with networking) and on and on. The main thing to remember from all these examples is that these people where all provided (paid) by someone else, not me.
Although blind and visually impaired people in the UK had been receiving a benefit aimed at providing help with ‘personal care’ for decades, most people I met didn’t use this to purchase ‘Sight as a service’ as such, not in the way they would for work or at school, instead they would ‘have a cleaner’, eat out or take taxis and would ‘pay’ for it out of there benefit.
Eventually ‘sight as a service’ came to the iPhone – the two most popular (and surviving) apps being ‘AIRA Explorer’ and ‘Be My Eyes’. Both these apps connect you to a sighted person who can ‘see’ through your phone’s camera and tell you what they see. One is free, connecting you to a volunteer, the other requires a subscription and connects you to a professionally trained Visual Interpreter. The subscription service offers many ways to reduce costs, including schemes whereby individual companies and even specific locations can offer free access.
Blind people deserve choice and AIRA and Be My Eyes are both excellent services, I have used them both and in this case, the free service is as good as the paid alternative, within the limits of a volunteer-led model. I have used both and expect to carry on doing so in the future. But for now, AI has come to ‘Sight as a service’ and that will to be the subject of my next post.
For now, comments and questions are welcome. What is ‘Sight as a service’ like where you live? How have you used it? How would you like to?
Comments
United states, I grew up differently
My mother saw a child banging their head on the floor of the oldest blind school in America. Tears streaming down her face, she looked at her husband and said, "My daughter's not going here." Since then i do things by myself and failures be damned. I am not better then someone who uses such services as you described, however i'm just a fly by the seat of my pants person. I would rather feel obligated to pay. someone for a service then have it provided for free. There are agencies for the blind who will give out things like fancy Braille displays, but they want to be all in your business. I don't work like that. I may not be great a lot, but i'm great being in my own space. I also do have be my eyes and aira but would rather feel comfortable using a professional interpreter. Just my two cents.
I'm about to write about Access AI, by AIRA Explorer
I had to arrange my thoughts on what has come so far and liked the idea of 'Sight as a service' so much I wanted to get it out there.
Communicating is not my strong point
"Sight as a Service" does almost sound like a business name or a product. I suppose you would have professional seers or lookers, or would it be describers... Makes me think of those Amazon employees they call, "Pickers," who reach into the been a robot has brought them to find that talking tire gauge I just bought.
I recognize many of the things Siobhan says. Although, I did live at a blind school for a while after going blind. I can't put a positive spin on it.
Before I went blind, I was just starting to learn some advanced drawing techniques, at least for a little boy. I've never quite achieved that fine a level of detail in my visual art, and either pass it on to other artists to finish or stick to what I can achieve. All that is to wonder, is what I do entirely my work if I received help from the sighted?
Everything I described happened after I
was 18. there's no good time to go blind, but at least I had some experience. The photographic memory didn't prove to be as useful as I had hoped...should have gotten a refund!
AIRA call there people Visual Interpreters, which is clever.
Visual Interpreter
Not bad for a job title.
I was a few or more years younger than you when I went blind. I was also considered weird and... substandard before I went blind. Can I get a refund for being weird and substandard? I'm not sure it has been helpful. I think we've talked before about how, for me, everything, sounds, textures etc, became instantly visual, and sometimes cartoon-like, at the moment of becoming blind. It's a bit frustrating to not be able to fully translate that back into something that can be visually shared with the sighted among us.
In defence of the blind school, and my story
Lottie, I will say this for you: there's a lot of thought-provoking content that emerges from your posts. alas in a few years' time there'll be a swathe of youngsters with no critical thinking skills so it won't provoke any thought. I'm already seeing it with the law students whom i teach - the expectation that AI will do all your thinking for you, and that is not hyperbole; but for now it's jolly interesting stuff.
I went to a school for the blind. It was bloody brilliant. Equipped me splendidly and I headed off to Oxford thereafter, taking a double 1st class honours degree in English law with French law before becoming a barrister. whgen I hear about the ring of support workers surrounding people who went to a mainstream or normal school, I think to myself: goodness gracious how fortunate I was not to have that barrier between myself and normal socialisation! Speaking of which, yes, we did socialise and it's a nonsense that folk who go to special schools do not. So, to repeat, I am bloody glad I went to a special school. Hurrah for schools for the blind! god save the King!
Just to clarify something for those not in the UK - an ambiguity which occurred to me when I was reading this: there is no organisation called Sight as a Service. What Lottie's talking about emerges in several guises e.g. Access To work, which is an arm of what is now the department for Work and Pensions. Having clarified that, I will honour the spirit of the post by using the sight as a service terminology to refer to support workers, personal asistants and so on. No, not cleaners - I've got plenty of sighted mates who choose to have a cleaner. My wife and I (Mrs Bingo is sighted) have a cleaner. she's bloody good - almost as good as the special school central to the previous paragraph. She attends the Bingo Manor once a fortnight and does her stuff. Unfortunately, her client list is full so don't come on the radio asking me for her details.
I studied law at an interesting time. There's a hell of a lot of reading in law - far more than your bleedin' scientific subjects and what have you. Definitely more than medicine - blimey, honestly I never saw the blasted medical students doing any work! No wonder it takes them six years! anyway, where was I? Yes, I was saying that law involves a lot of reading. In the year 2000, when I matriculated at Oxford, we were at the crossroads: mroe and more material was being made available electronically but vast amounts were still paper-based. I did need the Disabled student's allowance to fund a reader, therefore, for (I think) one day per week. I would use her, and very occasionally him, strategically - to access sources in the main Bodleian Library which I could not easily scan into dear old Kurzweil, or to read cases that had still not been made available online. as time went on, moreover, I discovered that certain electronic resources weren't accessible - witness PDF files of journal articles containing only page images. Those remained inaccessible until the breakthrough virtual printer feature in, I think, Kurzweil version 8.0, which really was a game-changer. I did not, to be clear, use my reader to take notes. I took notes and attended lectures on my own or with my mates, which was much more fun. Nor did my reader act as a guide except when we were in the Bodleian Law Library.
Then there was a bit of a pause as I spent my third year in Paris studying French law. Now, the system over there is very different indeed and there isn't as much reading to do, plus it was rather easy as well, if I'm honest, so I'll gloss over that.
When I came back to Oxford for my fourth and final year, the digitisation of law resources had got to the point where there was no need at all for a reader or any other subject-related support. I still had to do mi' own fair share of scanning in using a flatbed scanner and Kurzweil, but the case law, journal articles, parliamentary papers, that sort of thing - all was easily available and accessible.
Bar school was interesting - there, you're learning the skills necessary to be a barrister (how to ask questions to witnesses, how to draft documents), rather than the substantive law. New challenges were presented by this but not sufficient to require a reader, save on one occasion where I had to prove my competence in paper-based legal research. aT the time, the bar standards Board was very anxious that we digital merchants would nevertheless be able to use paper sources competencly, so part of the legal research assessment we had to do had to involve paper sources.
Now then, we get to a paradox once I get to the bar: we're at the point where courts are requiring most things to be typed. It is no longer acceptable by this period, 2005 we're talking about when I was called to the bar, for policemen to put in handwritten witness statements. all witness statements must be typed. You're also beginning to see the requirement for draft orders, written submissionss, case summaries and other standard case management documents to be emailed to the court in advance. In short, about 99 percent of what I did was accessible. No help needed. But there remained that 1 percent - the handwritten documents, the photographic evidence, the legal research that must be carried out using sources not yet digitised and too compendious to scan, the sketch plans, where a support worker was necessary. Plus there were some right awkward bloody courts to navigate, such as the Royal Courts of Justice in london. For that 1 percent, then, I did need sight as a service. trouble was, I could not offer a peprson regular hours to provide sight as a service. I might have weeks on the spin where nothing was needed. why should taxpayers' money be spent on paying for someone to sit on their arse all day? I could only offer potential support workers what amounted to a zero hours contract, a bit like a lot of Labour MPs ironically offer. So I had a number of support workers and used to market the role as a paid internship or work experience. I had a good few aspiring lawyers assist me and they got a really hands on education as a result.
In my 13 years since joining BPP University in 2011 I have never had, nor have I needed, a support worker. This is the case even for the legal cases I still occasionally take in my capacity as a barrister. We're at the point now where trial bundles are digitised across the board and where handwriting is pretty much forbidden, even more so than when I started. sure, there are still photos and whatnot but I don't tend to do that sort of case these days.
One more point: I went back to Oxford in 2016 on an academic sabbatical to do postgrad study. Massive changes in this regard - Oxford now sdoes all the scanning in-house for its blind students. You ask them to scan something and they do so, emailing it to you afterwards. That's on the rare occasion something needs to be scanned in - not at all often. Most things, even medieval primary sources, are now digitised, and the biggest problem is deciphering the OCR results yielded from those images. The other massive change is GPS, of course. whereas my mates often guided me to different parts of hte University (Oxford University is spread all over the town) I was pretty much able to get around independently.
I hope that Lottie's still reading this. It's been long, hasn't it? If anyone else is too, well hurrah for that as well.
do I use sight as a service to help me find stuff, set stuff up, that sort of thing? Well, Mrs Bingo is sighted so she tends to assist with such matters, so that doesn't really count. I suppose I would otherwise check in with Be My Eyes from time to time.
Blimey this has been such a long comment I've pretty much forgotten what the post was about! we'll leave it there, then. Roger and out.
Another thing
If any applevisers have aught to do with The Craft, that presents certain challenges. They will know what I am referring to.
I did read all the way to the end
You filled in all the gaps - I wanted tonamecheck the PRS because it was an E.U. initiative. I do hope the DWP don't read appleVis, as they will be looking to slash there AtW budget for support workers!
The smartest hack you can do as a blind person - marry a sighted person! Aren't Motability cars lovely?
It sort of goes wrong if you find yourself a widow at fifty! Then you find yourself talking to some chap in Iran at six o'clock in the morning. A Be My Eyes volunteer who isn't really sure why you are showing him the road you live in and are asking him "what colour bin can you see?" True story.
I later found out the bin diary was online!
Oh, BTW, about those pesky law students
I find Ethan Mollick has ssome great ideas for getting his students to benefit from using AI. His newsletter is here:
One Useful Thing | Ethan Mollick | Substack
His recent book 'Cointelligence' is also excellent and available on Audible.
Never mind...
above my level.
Mollick isn't teaching in our context
I'm familiar with his ideas and, quite simply, they don't stack up in our context, not without a great deal of thought and changes to the way a lot of subjects are assessed.
I'm going to be controversial here, but AtW and welfare spending in general needs to be reviewed. aTW probably needs to be better targeted and should focus more on pre-work or into-work employment support. Certainly the DSA needs to be thought through better. There are still massively expensive recommendations and a fair share of abuse. There are adjustments universities are called upon to make which unfairly advantage the disabled student. I've thrown notetakers for blind students out of my classes before because they have turned up without the student in tow. There is no such thing as government money.
As for EU initiatives, the only EU initiative worth pursuing is a defence and security agreement, and only then if member states of the EU (with some honourable exceptions) get their act together on defence spending and intelligence. I certainly wouldn't be in the EU for the sake of accessibility - plenty of nations do very well for blind people without being in the EU. but that is to segway into political matters which is forbidden forbidden forbidden. Bingo's a Brexiteer, that much has been made very clear.