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By Root 228 0

mathematicians, businesspeople, musicians, and artists. A war veteran named Scott Smiley, who lost his sight to a massive car bomb in the northern part of Iraq, is the Army’s first blind active-duty officer. He also competes in triathlons, skis, and jumps out of planes. He has summited Mount Rainier and surfed solo in Hawaii.4 Erik Weihenmayer is a mountain climber who became the first blind man in history to reach the summit of Mount Everest. He has also conquered the Seven Summits, climbing the highest peak on every continent. David Blunkett is a member of Parliament in Britain. Blind since birth and raised in a very poor family, he served as Tony Blair’s education secretary then served as home secretary from 2001 to 2004. A blind photographer named Pete Eckert recently won a major photography competition in New York City. His work was singled out over hundreds of submissions from photographers in fourteen countries. “I am not bound by the assumptions of the sighted or their assumed limits,” he said in a recent interview. “The camera is another means of making art to me.”5

In a recent conversation, Marc Maurer, the current president of National Federation of the Blind, was asked for a list of professions that are still largely off-limits to blind people. He came up with two. Professional sports are very visually oriented, and while blind people participate in athletics all the time, to be a competitive football player with the technology available is “quite unlikely.” The second area off-limits to the blind is any job that requires professional driving. “Beyond those two, I haven’t identified any others,” said Dr. Maurer.

While pro football might be off-limits for a while, driving blind could just be in my very near future. While I’ve driven a car a few times around Palmdale, UC Irvine, and the parking lot at George’s Burgers with my sales force, it was always brief and just for fun. I needed a sighted person as a guide because the technology did not exist for me to drive public roads safely and legally. But that is changing, with some new technology in development under Dr. Dennis Hong, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory at Virginia Tech. The project is designed to allow blind people to independently drive automobiles one day through novel nonvisual user interfaces. I haven’t had the chance to try it out yet since it’s still in development, but I’ve heard it involves a special steering wheel used to communicate with and direct the car. A second-generation prototype is now in the works, using a modified 2010 Ford Hybrid Escape with even better interface technology. Someday soon I’ll be able to take Karen out for a drive.

The technology revolution that began with Ray Kurzweil and his reading machine for the blind is still rolling, with the need for technology in the blind community driving innovation in the larger business community. The success of the reading machine also demonstrated that “addressing the problem of blindness by building a piece of technology that is useful for blind people means there quite often will be additional technological developments resulting from that piece of technology that would be useful and sellable to the rest of society,” said Dr. Maurer. The needs of blind people are driving technological advances for all drivers. Besides the smart driver technology that, when adopted by the big automobile manufacturers, will help make driving safer for everyone, blind technology has been adopted and developed for many other uses. There are some extraordinary GPS devices in development that will make it to the sighted market at some point. Kurzweil developed dictation technology that has crossed over and is built into the Dragon NaturallySpeaking computer programs. And a new e-book reader called Blio will be released by the time this book appears. Blio is a platform-independent piece of software first developed for the blind, but now available for all to read books and magazines on a computer, phone, or other mobile device. The Blio will read