99% Invisible - 546- The Country of the Blind

Episode Date: July 25, 2023

Andrew Leland grew up with full vision, but starting in his teenage years, his sight began to degrade from the outside in, such that he now sees the world as if through a narrow tube. Soon—but without knowing exactly when—he will likely have no vision left. In this episode, Andrew takes us through the fascinating history of alternative reading technologies designed for blind people and discusses his fantastic new book The Country of the Blind, which is out today!The Country of the Blind

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. There's an old story by H.G. Wells, the science fiction writer, called The Country of the Blind. In it, he imagines the civilization of blind men and women who live in a hidden mountain valley without any knowledge of the sighted world. One day, an explorer stumbles across it. He's on an expedition in the Andes and gets separated from his team. And in a landslide falls into this forgotten valley

that has existed sort of out of contact with the rest of human civilization for many, many, many generations. That's a reporter and author, Andrew Leeland. And it's the proverbial country of the blind. This explorer, his name is Nunez, enters it with a kind of very colonial attitude like, oh, well, you know, he keeps on repeating to himself in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, and he sort of thinks he'll just sort of single-handedly dominate them,

and then he comes to discover that the world is really built for blindness and not for sightedness, and actually they're the ones with all the power. And it's a lot about this question of escape versus assimilation, which in a lot of ways reflected my own experience of becoming blind and gradual vision loss. Andrew compares himself to Nunes, an accidental and sometimes wary visitor to the strange and often beautiful country of the blind. Andrew was diagnosed with a degenerative eye disease during his freshman year in college. Over the past couple of decades, he's slowly been going blind, but he still has some side.

So he exists between worlds, based with a choice. Is this sort of dichotomy between, do I embrace this? Is do I assimilate? Do I become a citizen of this country, or do I rage against it and search for a cure and cling to the person who I was before losing vision. Andrew Leland has a book out today named after H.G. Wells's story. We're going to talk to him a little bit about the book later on the show, but first we wanted to re-air a story that Andrew did for us a few years ago about the long and fascinating history of blind reading technologies.

Enjoy. [♪ Music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in in the habit while everyone else played kickball. In middle school, he learned the trade names of the book imprints that published the drug y contemporary fiction that he was starting to get into. And in 2003, he dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco to work for his favorite publisher, McSweeney's. It was my dream job, and working there exacerbated my already intense fetish for print. That's Andrew. I got to live out my fantasy of being an ink stained wretch, even if that meant logging 12-hour days at an inkless computer.

I edited essays and interviews, laid out articles, and took a weird amount of pleasure in typographical minutia, like italicizing commas and rewriting headlines so they fit the frame just so. At McSweeney's, books and magazines were never just containers for words. They were works of art unto themselves. And I was trained to take as much care with the look and feel of the print as I did with the expression of the ideas in the text. But as much as Andrew loved print, he still loves it, in fact. He also has a condition that will eventually change his relationship to it pretty radically.

I'm going blind, really, really slowly. will eventually change his relationship to it pretty radically. I'm going blind, really, really slowly. Right now, it's like I've got a foot in both worlds, blind and sighted. I have it a generative retinal disease that's given me severe tunnel vision, so basically no peripheral vision. It's like I'm peering at the world through a toilet paper tube, one that gets a little narrower every few months. Ten. Alright, I'm going to try to read this and then see if I got it right.

Can we... My retinal specialist told me that I probably don't need to worry about losing the ability to read for another five years or so. But I've already started using a special digital program to learn Braille, which is not easy. Be cocky. What? I want to get a jump start before I actually need it. Recalc... Recacly...

What? A recycle. Can we recycle a metal can? I know I'll still be able to experience books for the rest of my life. I'm lucky to be going blind in the digital age and the golden age of audio. There's an abundance of well-produced audio books and technology that can read aloud almost anything that appears on a screen. Puzzles? My knees can ride a unicycle or do puzzles? My knees can ride a unicycle or do puzzles.

What the f*** did that mean? My knees can do no such thing. But despite all that, there's still some mellow tragedy in the idea that in a few years, I'll probably no longer be able to read print. After a life spent loving books, there's now a real urgency for me in the question of how blind people experience literature. I find myself deeply curious about what graphic design might mean to someone who can't see, and so I started looking into the history of reading technologies for the blind.

Traditionally, books are visual objects. And for centuries now, blind and sighted designers have been arguing over the most effective way to translate the visual ink print book into an accessible form for people without sight. For as long as blind people have been reading, there's been this tension between systems that try to stay close to the original form of a book and systems that dramatically depart from our ideas of what a book can be. Sighted designers have made incredible breakthroughs to create non-visual forms of reading for blind people. But, as one blind critic pointed out, sighted designers have a bad habit of,

quote, talking to the fingers in the language of the eyes. So the history of blind reading is really the history of finding a new language for the fingers and for the ears, one that captures the essential elements of the ink print book, but in a new language that's unbound from the visual. And that history centers around two main shapes, lines and dots. Our story starts in 18th century Europe before Braille was invented, before blind people were even taught to read at all. First off, no one thinks that it's possible for bonkids to learn.

That's Mike Hudson, the museum director at the American printing house for the blind in Louisville, Kentucky. And if they could, no one knows how to do it. Without access to education, blind people were overwhelmingly poor, and their employment prospects were dim. If their families had enough money and time to support them, they usually lived at home,

like adult children sitting idly around the house. Many others were forced to beg on the street. There were a handful of institutions in Europe to support the poorest cases, but they pitted the blind and hid them away from public view. But then this guy named Valentin Awee comes along. Awee was born into a family of weavers in France, and he was a skilled linguist.

He was first inspired to help the blind in 1771. We saw a group of blind people being mocked during a street festival in Paris. They had been given dunce caps and giant fake glasses, and they were made to play musical instruments and pretend to read books. So, how we founded the first known school for the blind. It was called the Royal Institute in Paris. But even as he's getting the school going, how we kept a side gig. And a wheeze side gig is as a translator for the King of France. And so every now and then you'll get these fancy embossed invitations to a various events. And one day, one of Awee's students, a kid named Francois La Sour, touched one of them. And Francois La Sour notices that he can feel something

on these, on these imitations. And that gives us the idea, the idea to develop this idea of embossed printing in raised letters. So in 1786, how he makes the first machine embossed book for the blind. A treatise on blind education. It's written in print, the kind that cited readers would recognise,

but the text is all raised so that blind students can feel the shape of the letters. And it's a radical move, not just the first book for blind readers in history, but basically the beginning of the idea that blind people can be educated. But there are a few problems. Well, first off, no one can afford to buy these books, okay? That's because the books are massive and prohibitively expensive, but they're also just really hard to read. They're filled with ornate 18th-century letter forms with their curly cues and flourishes which are confusing to the fingertips. It's not until many years later, near the end of Awee's life in 1821,

that a very different blind reading system begins to develop. One that uses dots instead of lines. It starts when a captain from Napoleon's army visits the school to share a system that he developed for French soldiers. The captain describes how the system allowed his men to silently communicate with each other on battlefields at night. This is a clip from a very lively educational movie about this history. Then I came up with a brilliant idea of making signs that my men could read in the dark merely by touch.

I called it nocturnal writing. The director of the school at the time led a group of students' experiments with the embossed pages that the captain had left behind, and in that group was a 12-year-old blind kid named Louis Braille. Over the next few years, he began to adapt that military code for blind people as an alternative to raised print. Louis, you've been working on that for days. Your mother's worried. Can't you take a break? No, I am so close. of two raised print. Louis Braille simplified the military code and maximized its efficiency.

He substituted the 12-dot system developed by the captain into a six dot system which allowed blind people to read faster by recognizing a letter with the touch of a single finger. And while this code was inscrutable to sighted people, it was the system that blind people needed, designed by a blind person who understood intimately the needs of those reading by touch. Another advocate for the blind would say of Braille, it bears the stamp of genius, like the Roman alphabet itself. But despite its effectiveness,

Braille didn't catch on right away. It wouldn't become the dominant system in France for another 30 years. And it'd be nearly a century before it became standard for blind readers in the US, because it was effectively suppressed by a well-intentioned, world-famous visionary of blind education.

Around the same time that Braille was quietly developing his new reading system, an American named Samuel Gridley Howe came to visit the Royal Institute in France. He was doing research in anticipation of opening the first school for the blind in the US. And I wish I could tell you that, well in France, how discovered the wonders of Braille, He was doing research and anticipation of opening the first school for the blind in the US. And I wish I could tell you that while in France, how discovered the wonders of Braille, but that's not how it went down.

Instead, he saw the raised letter books and he was intrigued. But in true American fashion, he found all their fancy flourishes, impractical, and typical of European excess. So he decided to make his own system that improved on the Europeans' work. And he came back and he modified it a bit. That's Kim Charlson, the director of the library at the Perkins School, which how established in Massachusetts in 1829. Because they were using a more gothic style font that he felt was a little too ornamental and more difficult to read by touch.

So if one of our wee's French books looked sort of like an ancient tomb in a horror movie, whose letters rise up in fleshy pretubrances, then House System is similar, but it looks more runic, Tolkien-y, elvish. House sharpened his letters' curves into points to make them more distinct under the fingertips. The letter O, for example, is shaped like a diamond. How calls his new system Boston Line Type? Boston Line Type is really the beginning of literacy as we know it as a movement for people who are blind in the United States. And like the older French system, Boston Line Type was designed to be read both by blind and sighted people.

If you're able to see and look at one of these books, the letters are totally easily legible. Boston Line Type allows blind people and sighted people to sit down together and to read. There's no barrier between them. And this idea was really important to how. He didn't want blind people to use a system, like Braille, that was separate from what sighted people used. He thought it would isolate blind people and prevent them from integrating into the wider world. Long before the concept of universal design had been articulated, it was informing how it was thinking about how to design for people with disabilities.

And also, you can imagine the argument, well, we want our kids that are blind and vision impaired to use the same system that our side of kids use, right? That sounds good, right? But it turns out that raise letters are just not as good as a braille. Why not? So it's harder.

It just is harder. That's not intuitive to people who are cited, but those letter forms are just not unique enough from each other. Sighted people look at brailing, oh, that all looks the same. But under the finger, those raised dots underneath your finger are just more tangible. They just are. And not only that, you can write in braille. Unlike raised print, it doesn't require a big heavy metal printing press.

All you need is a small, simple tool called a slate and stylus that fits in your pocket. By the 1860s, some schools of the blind in the US had begun experimenting with Braille. And while many faculty members still resisted it as an arbitrary, impenetrable system, the blind students who were exposed to Braille argued passionately for its superiority to raised letters. At the Missouri School for the Blind, students passed each other notes, and reportedly even love letters in Braille, since they knew their teachers wouldn't be able to read them if they got caught.

But how had invested a massive amount of time and resources into developing, distributing, and promoting Boston Line Type? And he'd become a hugely influential celebrity in the field of blind education. He was a master fundraiser, and key to that fundraising apparatus was the spectacle of a deafblind girl named Laura Bridgman, who how taught to read using Boston Line Type. Bridgman was the first deafblind person in history to get an education, more than a full generation before Helen Keller did. This achievement made Laura Bridgman and Howe, international stars, which Howe leveraged

to make Boston Line Type one of the dominant print mediums for the blind across the US. Like Howe, many of the directors and faculty at schools for the blind were sighted, and many of them believed that they knew which system was best. Well, it's easy for me reading a print letter, so it's going to be easy for them with their fingers, you know. And I think it's a failure of imagination or a failure of empathy or a failure of experience. Catherine Cudlick directs the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State, where she's also a history professor.

And she doesn't even really buy house argument that Boston Line Type was universal. You might have thought of this universal, but it's universal in that way that the colonizer thinks things are universal. It's like, you know, these poor native peoples need educating and we'll try to bring them up to my level and make them like me. They didn't get the blind people to be the experts. There's a crucial part is, I mean that's like a disability rights refrain is nothing. Nothing about us without us, yeah. In fact, the new way that people are starting to say it is

nothing without us. Period. I think how probably made a good faith effort to create a universal system, one that predicted universal design, one that he hoped would erase the line, dividing the blind from the sighted. But paradoxically, in committing so strongly to the universal page of Boston Line Type, how helped delay the adoption of a much better system by close to 100 years in the US? A system where the blind person, Louis Braille, was the expert. By the early 20th century, how had died.

There were growing numbers of organizations dedicated to serving the blind, and more and more of them were being led by blind people. In 1921, leaders from the most influential of these groups gathered in rural Iowa to form the American Foundation for the Blind. The AFB quickly became the most powerful blindness organization in the US, and one of their first priorities was to make Braille, the dominant system. But Americans being Americans, the same thing happened that it happened with raised letters. We decided that we could design things better than those pretentious Europeans could. So a whole cottage industry arose with all sorts of

competing systems, Braille knockoffs. So now we're heading into what we call the war of the dots. Have you heard of that? We could spend an entire episode on the war of the dots with Mike Hudson as our trusting narrator, but in a nutshell, before Braille truly won out in the US, there was another 50 years of competing tactile systems. This period drove many blind readers bananas because every library for the blind was filled with books printed in these multiple competing systems. New York Point, Moon Type, American Modified Braille. There are others, by the way. We're not going to go into them. But at one point, the head of the Perkins school says, you know, if anybody invents another code for the blind, we want to shoot them on the spot.

The decisive battle in the war of the dots finally came in 1909. Cities like New York were rapidly growing, and for the first time, they had enough blind children to start building day schools for the first time, they had enough blind children to start building day schools for the blind. And so they have a nice big, two day knock down drag out meeting of the New York Board of Education to decide which code they're going to use in the New York City Schools. So they bring in all the heavy hitters. Okay.

I mean, everybody's anybody in line is testifies before this body. And at the end, they take a big vote, and they vote for Braille, okay? It's the beginning of the end for the competing codes. By 1917, the rest of the country follows New York's lead, and the newly standardized English Braille becomes the main way blind children are taught to read in the US.

And with their increasing self-determination and literacy, blind people are more able to integrate into society than ever before. Blind children are starting to be mainstreamed into public schools, and for the first time, some blind people are getting office jobs using tech-like Braille typewriters so they can work alongside sighted people, as equals. It's what how had hoped Boston line-type would help them do. But for all braille's advantages over raised print, it didn't work for all blind people, like the thousands of soldiers who were coming back from war with eye injuries, who hadn't learned braille as kids. As you probably noticed, listening to me struggle to read that stupid sentence about my niece doing puzzles.

Puzzles? My niece can write a unicycle or do puzzles. Learning Braille as an adult is really hard. My niece can write a unicycle or do puzzles. But as sound recording became easier and more affordable, those people who'd become blind later in life had new options. Options that would transform our ideas of what a book can be. Translating ink print books into sound might seem more straightforward than building a

tactile reading system, after all books were born out of a few thousand years of people telling each other stories, and we all learned to read by having books read to us. But early efforts to make recordings of books for blind readers brought with them a new set of design challenges. The American Foundation for the Blind partnered with the Carnegie Corporation to publish experimental books on phonographic records. They called them talking books. They hired narrators and pressed the recordings onto long-playing records, 25 minutes aside. These books were circulated by blind people about a decade before LPs became available to the wider public. The first

audiobooks and the first LPs were made for blind readers. But these talking books raised big questions. What should a book sound like? How do you translate the elements of a codex, which is a fancy word for the thing that we usually call a book with paper pages, ink, and binding? How do you translate one of those things into sound? The definition of the book basically imploded

right after these talking books started to be developed because all sorts of producers started to come up with new ideas for things that they would call talking books that certainly had nothing to do with the Codex form. That's Mara Mills. She's a professor at NYU who works at the intersection of media and disability studies. And I promise she's the last academic I'm going to introduce you to. Let's treat our chat for a minute and let me do it.

Bringing the treat feedback like songs. The Cornell Ornithology Lab, for instance, decided that they wanted to take some of their bird song recordings and make a talking book for blind people out of them. They're songs that are among the finest of American birds and they're rival and perhaps surpass. When Snow White came out as an early animated talking movie, the AFB decided they wanted to make a talking book version of a talking movie. Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Worts recorded solely for the use of the blind. There was no book, origin.

They called it a book, and they circulated it as a talking book, but it was a audio description of the images in an animated film with some of the sound files and dialogue from that film. When he was right behind Snow White, he drew his big knife, then Snow White noticed a shadow on the ground. Whitey drew his big night, then Snow White noticed a shadow on the ground. Very quickly, all sorts of things began to be called books that had very marginal relationship to the book form. And as talking books became more elaborate and theatrical, more filled with sound effects and music, some blind people grew frustrated. More and more blind readers wound up breaking their record players trying to speed up the voices of the narrators. and the way the music was played by the band. The music was played by the band. The music was played by the band. The music was played by the band. The music was played by the band. The music was played by the band.

The music was played by the band. The music was played by the band. The music was played by the band. The music was played by the band. The music was played by the band. The music was played by the band. The music was played by the band. The music was played by the band. flourishes of music and sound effects got in the way of blind people's desire for speed. And so talking books began to sound different. The Holy Bible, the King James Version, read by Alexander Scorpio.

No nonsense narrators, like Alexander Scorpio, became more popular in the 1940s and 50s. And their voices became almost like fonts, standardized, legible, and most importantly, conveying information without getting in the way, more like the narrators of contemporary audiobooks. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, let there be light, and there was light." The book historian Matthew Rubery told me that if you bring up the name Alexander Scorby

with a blind person of a certain age, their eyes will fill with tears because of the associations they have with his voice. They grew up listening to him, reading him. So perhaps this is my consolation as I become a blind reader. I can just trade a visual typeface for a verbal one. Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters and let it divide the waters from the waters. In some ways, my fears about losing my visual relationship to books resembles the anxieties that sighted people have about the demise of print in the digital age. As more and more people read on screens, there's an old guard who bemoans these new forms

of reading as inferior. These critics believe that the trusty old technology of the book will always be the superior vehicle for ideas. You can hear this conservatism and condescension, not only in those people who malign the e-book, but also in the voices of people who say that you haven't really read a book if you listen to it. They contend that real reading only happens with the eyes. But the history of blindness and reading shows that the way we read has always been in flux. The media scholars and book historians I talked to all told me the same thing. Reading doesn't happen in the eyes or the ears or the fingers, it happens in the brain. And this is a nice thing to hear if you're going blind.

It makes me feel like, forget my stupid eyes, I'll still have my brain, and that's where all the good stuff happens anyway. But this idea doesn't really soften or mask the fact that blindness is inescapably a loss. No amount of historical research or conceptual reframing can hide the simple equation at work here. I love books, ink print books, with marginalia and typefaces and dingbats, and going blind will take that away from me. But I can't let that be my only conclusion that blindness equals loss full stop.

Mara Mills told me about someone she met, whose story could offer me an example of a different way to approach my life as a blind reader. His name is Harvey Lauer. He's a blind guy who worked at the VA, testing all kinds of technology for the visually impaired. When you turn on the machine, you hear all the sounds in the earphone. This is Harvey using an optophone, a kind of scanner that would look at text and turn it into a series of tones representing the shapes of the letters. It's another spin on universal design for blind readers. With an optophone, you wouldn't need to create special books for the blind at all, with training a blind person could read an ink print book using one of these devices. The Octophone was first developed in 1912, but this recording is from 1971. Reading sounds like this. First off, find the line.

And then we'll read. Incredibly, some blind people actually learned how to read this way. After a lot of practice, they could hear these sounds and decode the words they represented. Reading entire novels, using what came to be called musical print. It's at the necessary functions of the... Using the devices he tested for the VA, Harvey could read by vibration through musical print, plus Braille and super sped up talking books. He reads using more of his body, more of his senses than perhaps anyone else on the planet.

His colleagues called him a cyborg. He walked around with these devices dangling around his neck wherever he went, emitting vibrations and synthetic musical tones. I had to turn up the threshold after empirical... Mara told me that this sometimes led to funny incidents of confusion. Like the time Harvey walked into a 7-11 and heard all these electronic tones coming out of the various machines in the store. He tried decoding them because it seemed to him like they should be alphabetic. And then he realized, nope, there's just electronic tones. It's just the cash register.

Harvey's mistake in the 7-11 suggests to me a way that my future as a blind reader might actually signal something other than a total loss. Blindness could add something to my life, even as it takes something else away. Learning to read in new ways through new senses could increase my appreciation for the world around me. Harvey told Mara that he finds the electronic tones and chords of the optophone beautiful. He said they remind him of Debussy's music, which gives me hope that whichever way I end up reading, through sped-ups, synthetic speech, or braille,

or maybe some high-tech post-optophonic cyborg system that's yet to be invented, that I'll find the beauty in that kind of reading, too. I really should use the other earphones and plug in the other speaker. You have a pathesis or replace it with a more adequate one. Failure to find. Failure to find support for high pathesis. There's not necessarily reflect on the Wally.

Two. Coming up, updates from Andrew Leeland and more about his new book, That's After the Break. I'm back talking with Andrew Leeland about what's happened in the past few years since the story came out and about his new book. It's called The Country of the Blind and it's out today. So Andrew, I remember you were reporting this story and sometime early in the process, you learned that you might not be going blind as quickly as you once thought and it made you question whether or not you should do the story and We assured you that we thought you were the right person for the story and that you should produce it

and it was lovely and years later. I'm reading this book and That anxiety of whether or not you are blind enough for the right kind of blind It kind of pervades the right kind of blind, it kind of pervades the memoir in fascinating ways. And it's not just you, like other people that you interviewed expressed this. Can you talk a little bit about that and what it says about our societal conception of blindness? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a kind of imposter syndrome that I feel.

And it really began when I started using the white cane, which like all the blindness tools that I use, I had to kind of proactively adopt before it felt absolutely necessary, because that's how this sort of very slow process works, where certainly there could be a moment where I say, okay, I can no longer see the words on the page, so I need to learn how to use a screen reader, say, or learn Braille. You know, if I waited that long, I would be in deep trouble. Much better to learn that skill in advance. And the cane was that way, too, where I thought,

okay, I've kicked three dogs at this point. I think it's probably time to adopt the cane. But as soon as that cane comes out in public, you're really forced right up against that perception of blindness as a binary. And people say, you're not really blind. What are you doing with that cane? And that's something that I felt and I kind of could like, distantly sense on people's

faces. And then there were a few times where I heard it explicitly. Some guys say, you're not, you can see. And it really highlights that disconnect between the experience of blindness, which more often than not is ambiguous in that way. Where there is some vision, It's only something like 10 or 15% of blind people have no light perception. And whether you have just a little bit of light perception or, you know, like I do, like low vision where there's still a few good degrees of central vision that I can use to see a lot of stuff, all of that complicates blindness in a way. But yeah, the broader world has a lot of trouble understanding that idea.

Yeah, that number of less than 15% of blind people have no light perception. It surprised me and I don't know, I feel like I know things. Yeah, that's sort of stunning. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think about the definition of blindness means a destitution of sight.

And you know, that makes a certain amount of blindness means a destitution of sight. And you know, that makes a certain amount of sense that we want to define something in these binary terms. But the reality is that it doesn't work that way. And blindness is a spectrum. And even people who have had their optic nerve completely severed, which is to say, technically in a scientific sense, no light is being perceived by their eyes. They describe a kind of visual tinnitus where there's swirling and flashing and undulating

colors. And so, you know, the idea of vision and the idea of sight extends to all blind people, I'd say. You include this quote from Theodore Adorno at the beginning of the book. It goes that the splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass. Why did you include that quote? What does that quote mean to you? It's a quote that I wanted to kind of hover

above the whole book because my experience of becoming blind and losing vision is a splinter in the eye. I mean, literally, right? But, you know, not literally a splinter, but literally eye damage, but also, you know, it's a thorn in the side. It's a pain in the ass, but also, I think what Adorno is saying there is that we take these difficult experiences

and they have this tendency to illuminate the world and to allow us to really pay more attention than we otherwise would. And there's another quote that I like that's sort of related, which is that happiness writes white, which is to say, when things are going good, you're writing white ink on white paper. Like, I don't know, if you ever keep a journal, like, people don't tend to write a lot of journal entries, and things are going well. It's only when you're miserable

that you're jotting things down. And so I think I had that experience with this, like, losing vision, becoming blind made me a writer. It really like gave me that feeling of urgency that like, there's something I need to understand about this on a kind of existential level. And not just in like a journaling, like I need to therapeutically process my emotions, but also like, who am I becoming in a philosophical way, in a literal way, but also like, who are my people? And like, what are the ideas that are important to me now? And all that was shifting and it really Clarified it in a way that was did feel like a magnifying glass on my world Yeah

This quest for who are my people is a huge and fascinating part of the book I mean it is a a memoir of your own experience But there's so much history and reporting in it and you talk to lots of people for this story Could you talk about some of the more fascinating people that you met along the way and reporting in it. And you talk to lots of people for this story. Could you talk about some of the more fascinating people that you met along the way in reporting the book? Yeah, part of the reporting that I was doing, you know, and it really is like personal reporting, right? Like there are things where I'm being a good disability

journalist and trying to kind of cover the waterfront in that way, but a lot of it is just driven by my own existential feeling of like, well, if I want to be not just a successful blind person, but like a happy, engaged blind person, like let me find some people like that. So a lot of the people I write about in the book are role models in that way, kind of cultivating and collecting blind mentors. And so I found people like this guy Josh Mealy, who recently won a MacArthur Genius grant,

and I really think he is a genius, but also just funny and cool and down to earth, and he went blind as a kid, and really didn't like being blind, didn't identify as blind, and then he went to UC Berkeley in the 90s where he was telling me about this place in the basement of Berkeley's Moffitt Library called the Cave, where all the blind students would hang out, and they basically had free 24, 7 access to this suite of offices that was just like a laboratory of assistive technology where they would have these wild devices, like the first screen readers,

the first video magnifiers, and then these like much weirder devices like the optophone. And he really taught me this idea that blind people are hackers, like not just the hacker blind, there's not just like there's a subgroup of blind hackers, but like really to be blind and to solve the problems that blind this poses to you, you have to be willing to solve problems

in the way that we think of hackers doing. And you know, so somebody like Josh really made me feel like blindness was not just like this is gonna be okay, but like, oh well, like some of the most interesting people have met are inhabiting this world. You talk about that you want to cultivate an image of being an active protagonist in your own life. And it sounds like you admire that about Drosh. Could you talk more about that idea and how,

you know, popular depiction of blindness are generally, you know, un-todifying it or worse, or just mocking and diminishing because they evolve to non-active protagonists? or worse, or just mocking and diminishing because they evolve to non-active protagonists. Yeah, I mean, to be fair, I think that I recognize in myself a feeling of passivity. I don't think blindness encourages it, but I think that there is a risk where, you know, like in my own home life,

I notice like, okay, it's gonna be significantly harder for me to find the garbage and the place where the trays are bust in this restaurant. Maybe I'll just let my partner do it. And then I have this sort of internal conflict where I'm like, are you really gonna be that kind of blind person who just lets your wife tidy up for you all the time because you're too blind to take care

of yourself? That seems horrible, so no. And so I do think there's a certain degree of pushing oneself that has to happen, certainly that I've experienced, but I think what you're talking about in terms of public perception, I think that image of the passive blind person who needs to be taken care of is not only the dominant one, it's almost the only one that most people see, I think. You experience it as a blind person, that's what using a cane in public really showed me immediately was like as soon

as that came out, people were like, you're standing on Elm Street. I'm like, really? Like, could I have just been dropped out of a spaceship and like, I have no idea. Like, I'm on this road that I've walked a hundred times a day. You know, but it happens all the time. Like, the streets in front of you. Like, you know, I can hear the cars in front of me, and my cane is touching the curb,

but like what about me, and just this image of helplessness makes you think that I have no idea where I am or what I'm doing or where I'm going, and that is the, not only the popular conception, I think it's, yeah, it can't be overstated how much and how many people think that way about blind people. Yeah, you have this scene in the book where you mentioned like being touched for the first time

when someone's guiding you and the part of that just made me shudder like physically when I read it that people feel like they have the right to touch you and guide you. Yeah, I have a blind friend who told me that during the pandemic, when that kind of proximity to other people became much more taboo, she loved it because it meant that when she was in public, people just were touching

her far less. And she also told me that she kind of seized on sort of me too, era, and the language of consent that became much more widely understood and adopted. You know, somebody does that to her now, which by the way, it is a daily occurrence for many, many blind people. You know, she says, I didn't give you consent to touch me. That definitely has a much stronger message than I think if you're just a blind person and say, I know I'm good because people don't believe you. They say, no, no, no, let me just, the elevator's over here. You're like, no, no, no, I'm fine.

And you can't convince them. But if you say, you don't have consent to touch me, it reminds them. Like, oh, right. This is a human being who has the same kind of sense of personal boundaries that I do. You write in the book about this sort of uncomfortable encounter with this guy in the neighborhood who sort of presumes a kind of intimacy and starts asking you like intense questions about blindness. Yeah. And then you wrote this book. That's a memoir about it. Yeah. Are you prepared for what's gonna happen? Um, like, what's gonna happen? You're very ominous sounding.

Well, but I mean in terms of people, you know, presuming that they now know a lot about you and they feel closeness to you and feel like they can ask you questions. And there's gonna be people like me asking you questions. I mean, is this, how does this feel to have a story with lots of nuance, like it has some pain, has a loss, it has some triumph, you know, it has all this stuff into it, and how does it feel to talk about it? I think that guy bothered me so much in part because I hadn't

asked myself those questions yet. Like, he asked me, you know, what's it like going blind, and that was fine because people asked me that. It was still annoying, but then when he turned to my wife, I was like, what's it like being married to a guy going blind? And I was like, really, like now you're asking her that. And I think it bothered me so much because Lily and I hadn't really talked about it. When we had talked about it a little bit,

but like not enough to have an answer for ourselves, I think, let alone this guy we barely knew. And so I think I'm in a better position to deal with that now that I wrote the book. And I think I have a much stronger handle on what it means for me. And I think we have a better handle on what it means for our family. So that's one part. The other part I think is that there's no avoiding it. I think as a blind person, and I think this is probably true of anybody with

the disability, with a visible disability, that is people feel entitled to ask you about it. It's just like, it's almost as though you're wearing a sign that says, like, ask me about what happened to me. And like people saying, you know, oh, here, let me help you cause a street, or like, how do you eat, you know, those kind of invasive questions, they the street, or like how do you eat those kind of invasive questions? They just say, how'd you go blind? You hear this from people who I think wouldn't dare ask a stranger into my questions like that, but somehow disability invites it.

So part of me thinks like, that's a losing battle. Anyway, people are gonna be asking me this any time they see the cane. So I might as well give them the most thorough answer imaginable in the form of this book, rather than just hide it. Go to 13th century France to tell you how this is happening. Yeah. Exactly. So at the end of the book, you come back to HD Wells and you revisit the idea of the country of the blind and you flip it on its head that there that there isn't a country of the blind. You write the blind belong to our world, we belong to theirs, it's the same world.

How did your feelings about the HG Well story change over the course of writing the book? Well, it's hard, because I kind of, I kind of want to have it both ways. You know, I did write that at the end, and I do believe that. You know, and I think it's like this very cheesy sounding but also like incredibly important idea

that just like, where are people too? You know, and I think it's important to be reminded of, and I think there's a very human tendency to forget about the humanity of people who are different than you. And so like, in some ways that conclusion fell really important, even if it felt really obvious. And it's sort of like, I had to do all of this like really difficult intellectual work to arrive at a conclusion that I probably could have just told you in a cynical way at the beginning, but I think saying the exact same sentence, but really meaning it, you know, with all the force of the research behind it made it feel different.

You know, but I don't want to erase the difference either. And that's sort of the paradox of identity that I wrestle with a lot in my life and in the book, which is to say identity doesn't exist without difference. But then at the same time, you have to be a part of this bigger club of humans, I guess. There's this other idea that I really love. I hear it a lot from different disabled people. And the crux of it is, we need access to your world, right? Like, I want people to write alt text so that I can access images on the internet, but also non-disabled people need access to our world, right? And I think that's another way of putting the same idea

of flipping the country of the blind on its head, which is to say like, it's not just about how can you make a bridge to let disabled people understand and be a part of mainstream culture. It's like what can mainstream culture learn from disability culture? What can sighted people learn from blindness? And so I think that's another way that I concluded, I think, this journey was realizing that it's a two way street and there's a lot that sighted people can learn from blindness and vice versa.

Is there something about the book that you want to make sure that people get, like, that is meaningful to you? I guess the big one for me is that if you're sighted and you lose vision, there's inescapable pain in that. You're being disingenuous if you say like, whatevs, like lost my vision, figured out how to be a blind guy, cool. Like, you have to grieve the loss of your sight. But blindness does not have to be a tragedy, and the lived experience of blindness is not one of unremitting tragedy. Other things can make life inescapably unpleasant, and there's certainly aspects of blindness that are unpleasant, but like, in and of itself, there is joy, hilarity, pleasant, but like in and of itself, there is joy, hilarity, weirdness, fun, excitement, and so on in blindness.

And I think that people don't believe me when I say that. And if there's one thing I want people to take from this book, it's that like blindness is wild and fascinating and not sad as like its primary qualities. This is awesome. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed talking to you. I really enjoyed the book. And I'm just so glad we get to revisit it a few years later. Oh, thank you, Roman. I'm so glad that you read it.

And not only that you enjoyed it, but that you read it. Thank you again. Again, Andrew's book is called The Country of the Blind. It's out today. I highly recommend it. It is fantastic. You should check it out. The original 99% visible episode was produced by Andrew Leeland, edited by Delaney Hall, and mixed by Sheree Fusef.

The new content from this week was produced by Kelly Pran. Original music by Swan Rial, who actually used sounds from the optophone in the score, you can see some cool videos of the optophone in action on our website. Many thanks this week to Sorry Outtruler and David Weimer. We found out about the story of Boston Line Type from an exhibition they put together called Touch This Page. The exhibition is also online at touchthispage.com where you can see examples of Boston Line Type and other precursors to Braille.

Thanks also to Jen Hale and Jennifer Arnett at the Perkins School, Matthew Rubrie of Queen Mary University of London, whose book about the history of talking books is awesome and Walid Malise of Northeastern's College of Engineering. The rest of the 99PI team includes Chris Barube, Jason Dillion, Emmett Fitzgerald, Martin Gonzalez, Christopher Johnson, Kurt Colestead, Vivian Le, Washington, Madonna, Jaca, Modena, Joe Rosenberg, Interna, Anna Costanero, and me Roman Mars. The 99% of visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are a part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building, and beautiful. Uptown, Oakland, California.

You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at Nine-Nive-Guy org or on Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pid. at 99pr.org.