Innovations in Electroacoustics and Computing: Print Disablity and as a Model for Technology Innovation and Transfer

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Through archival research and interviews with innovators, the PI will produce a history of electronic reading technologies for blind and print-disabled people, and their co-evolution with mainstream reading practices. Beyond the introduction of new formats such as audiobooks and electronic books, print access efforts in the twentieth century gave rise to numerous technical innovations that transferred to other branches of electroacoustics and computing. Innovations in long-playing records,pitch-shifting with magnetic tape, scanning, optical character recognition (OCR), and synthetic speech ultimately retooled reading for both humans and machines. The project will contribute to the history of computing through attention to the overlooked topics of optical character recognition (OCR) as a mode of data input, and pattern-matching as a technique for artificial intelligence.Based on these historical examples, this communications scholar develops new tools for understanding and stimulating innovative technology design and transfer. The work will contribute to the subfield of disability and STS, will train two disabled students, and will help destigmatize the category of assistive technology by tracing the ways these devices intervene into media policy, are repurposed for broad use, or in fact are marketed to multiple audiences. In addition to a monograph, the project will result in a website that will preserve and make publicly-available examples from several historical reading formats (e.g. Talking Books, text-to-tone, and text-to-speech systems). The website will model best practices of electronic accessibility.