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The problem with gadgets
Before she died, the popular and influential columnist Rose Hacker was working on several articles, which readers have requested we publish.Here she wonders whether our lives have become too dependent on poorly designed technology
LIKE so much technology, it seemed a good idea at the time. If you have the misfortune to go blind, you can expect support services to swing into action.
So just two weeks after my doctor registered me blind, a phone call told me I would be visited by a rehabilitation officer.
Rehabilitation! What was my crime? Actually she came from my council’s Sensory Team and on the appointed day turned up to carry out a needs assessment. Over previous months, as my sight deteriorated, family and friends had made my room as manageable as possible for someone with no eyesight.
My rehabilitation officer, a young lady blind from birth, was enthusiastic, brisk and efficient. To do her full-time job she was accompanied by a full-time guide/assistant.
Would I get a guide/assistant? No. A big button telephone? I already have two, although for the visually impaired their design is appalling.
A friend had got me a radio-cassette unit through a very helpful charity, British Wireless For The Blind, but I can no longer put cassettes in.
He also bought me a new radio which uses some smart speaking technology that announces which channel each button is set to when I change stations and states the time clearly when I tap its handle. Just as well, because the first talking clock my rehab lady brought me didn’t work at all.
Do I need a text magnifier? No. I already have one that cost me hundreds of pounds. While I could previously read, I can no longer read anything or identify the magnified images on its screen. To take full advantage of it you need above average eyesight. I’ve heard of a text scanner onto which you place documents. It reads them out loud but cannot decipher handwriting. Could I get one? Not from the council.
If I applied to charities that help the disabled might they buy me one? At a cost of nearly £2,000 I doubt any charity would offer one to someone of my age. I pray that they provide them to young people starting out on their careers.
After two visits, all I had to show for the assessment was a registered blind card, a working speaking-clock and a liquid level indicator. The latter’s technology is straightforward. A matchbox-sized plastic unit contains the works. Two hooked prongs sticking out of the top hang it over the side of a cup or glass. You pour and when the liquid reaches the required level it trills out a warning.
Unfortunately, if you are blind, it’s easy to hang it the wrong way round, with the box inside the cup and the prongs outside.
I did. The last sound I heard from it was a mournful, fading bleep as it drowned.
Whose brilliant idea was that to make a liquid level detector for the blind that is not waterproof?
I’m not against technology. I’m still thrilled at some of the wonderful ways we used it from the 1950s to 1980s in teaching the deaf-blind, and people with other sensory or communications difficulties .
In the 1980s, before Margaret Thatcher destroyed the Greater London Council, it was doing invaluable work on socially useful technologies under the guidance of Professor Eric Laithwaite, inventor of the magnetic levitation train.
That was another technology our governments failed to support so it went to countries with more farsighted governments such as Germany, China and Japan.
What worries me, however, is how dependent we have become on inadequately thought out, poorly executed, badly integrated technologies.
Computers are wonderful. Without computers this column could never appear. Using computers to help people without the ability to speak to communicate is phenomenal.
However, unquestioned faith in technology is dangerous and it is clear that in simplifying procedures and cutting costs, we allow technology to be used in ways often more harmful than helpful.
How often in recent months have we heard of disks or computers disappearing in the post and from cars, banks, insurance companies, hospitals, government or military departments along with all the essential information to enable crooks to create false identities or steal and exploit real ones?
In olden days, BC, before computers, an audit required auditors to be present on the premises where documents were held. They had to examine sheets of paper.
Can you imagine a headline reporting 26 million folders containing personal details of all the country’s Family Allowance recipients stolen from a car boot or lost in an unregistered envelope on their way to the auditors? I doubt it.
And how much intercepted or hacked data do we never hear of?
With each loss of personal data we are assured that “security is robust”, “everybody affected will be contacted” and told to “watch out for suspicious activity”.
I’m watching the government’s suspicious activity.
The prospect of universal, security-encrypted, biometric National Identity Cards makes me shudder.
Despite all the assurances about safety and access safeguards, why should I believe that their technology will end up being safer than a liquid level indicator which cannot survive exposure to liquids? |
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