New Technologies to Meet New Challenges

I awoke with a start. No, the room was definitely not the way I had left it. For one thing, it was shaking! My first night in California and this, I surmised, was what an earthquake felt like. It lasted about ten seconds, then I rolled over to go back to sleep. Slowly the thought penetrated my bemused brain- had I really signed on to spend the next year living virtually on top of the San Andreas Fault?

My father and I were in San Diego, spending a couple of days with my brother before traveling north to San Francisco where I would spend a year as a Fulbright student at Stanford University. We just happened to arrive on the night of one of the biggest quakes to hit the Los Angeles area, just north of us. Well, I thought, best to get the earthquake thing out of the way and adopt that blasé Californian attitude toward Mother Earth as soon as possible. I’d soon discover that this kind of easy adaptability was just what my new environment required.

I had been working in Glasgow as a sound engineer with BBC radio when my mother sent me an ad for the Fulbright Program she’d seen in an Irish newspaper. The program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State working with countries around the world. My curiosity aroused, I wrote off to find out more and discovered I would need to find a placement at a U.S. university as part of the application process. On the recommendation of a friend, I called an eminent professor at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Looking back, I realize he must have been astounded to receive a cold call from an Irish woman who is blind, living in Scotland, and said she wanted to research ways for blind people to use computers to edit sound. To his credit, he wasn’t even slightly fazed and immediately wrote a letter offering me a place to work for a year.

Like many professors, he can be forgiven for being just a little out of touch with the day-to-day realities of his department. When I arrived, I discovered that places to work at CCRMA were at a premium. They had been badly hit by an earthquake a few years earlier, so even broom closets had been pressed into service as offices. The motto was, “If you find a place and tidy it up, it is yours.”

So on my first day, a fellow researcher helped me move junk out of an old workshop and lay some pieces of carpet, and my office space came into being. Now had I planned, I would have approached the Fulbright Commission in Ireland for money to buy an adapted computer, which I am sure would have been forthcoming. But I didn’t think of this, and ended up building a computer out of spare parts lying around the lab. I learned so much about how computers work from doing this and it came to exemplify a fundamental part of my American experience: Don’t be afraid to try and if it doesn’t work, learn from the experience and try again.

So began my year at Stanford, researching a new technology called haptics, the study of sensing and manipulating through touch. For instance, a regular mouse helps the user navigate through the graphic objects, or icons, displayed on a computer screen. The haptic mouse looks significantly different from the mouse that most people use, but it provides a similar function. It makes it possible to display graphical icons as tactile representations. This can be of particular value to people who are blind, for whom graphical interfaces are not accessible.

For our research, we built our own mouse, initially out of the innards of an old mainframe computer, and called it the Moose. As the user directs the Moose through the objects on the computer screen, a haptic representation of the object is presented for the user to feel and explore. We also developed the software that allows blind computer users such as me to receive the images on a computer desktop through this robotic mouse. Thus the Moose loped into history!

Toward the end of my fellowship, I was persuaded to apply to the Ph.D. program at CCRMA. Before I knew it, a one-year sojourn had suddenly become a six-year stay and I found myself working at the forefront of a brand new field of research. Now that I’ve finished the program, I realize my time at Stanford proved one of the most rewarding and challenging experiences of my life working alongside some of the most amazing and creative minds in the world, and supported by a disability resource center that is second to none. I reached for horizons beyond my wildest dreams. The Fulbright Program really did give me the opportunity of a lifetime and I have no doubt that it will continue to change the lives of many students in the future, including those who just happen to have disabilities.