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

通过档案研究和对创新者的采访，PI将为盲人和印刷残疾人创造一部电子阅读技术的历史，以及它们与主流阅读实践的共同演变。除了引入有声读物和电子读物等新格式外，20世纪的印刷品获取努力还带来了许多技术创新，这些创新转移到了电声学和计算机的其他分支。在长时间播放唱片、磁带音调转换、扫描、光学字符识别(OCR)和合成语音方面的创新最终重塑了人类和机器的阅读能力。该项目将通过关注作为数据输入模式的光学字符识别(OCR)和作为人工智能技术的模式匹配这两个被忽视的主题，为计算的历史做出贡献。基于这些历史例子，这位通信学者开发了新的工具，用于理解和激发创新技术的设计和转让。这项工作将有助于残疾和STS子领域，将培训两名残疾学生，并将通过追踪这些设备干预媒体政策、被重新用于广泛用途或实际上向多个受众营销的方式，帮助消除辅助技术类别的耻辱。除专著外，该项目还将建立一个网站，保存并向公众提供几种历史阅读格式(如有声读物、文本到音调和文本到语音系统)的范例。该网站将模拟电子无障碍的最佳做法。

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.