I think that for a blind person there is no intermediate space. Things are either there or they’re not there. You know, you are walking along the road and suddenly a tree hits you smack in the face. It wasn’t there a minute ago — now it’s there. Of course that would be unimaginable for a sighted person, who would just never walk straight into a tree.

Says John Hull in his auto biography “Touching the Rock”.

That non-existence of intermediate space, is something that the brain has to adapt to, and adapt it will. So much so, that I think that this is the cause of my photographic stagnation: as the perception of space disappears from my way of knowing the world, it can’t be expressed by the medium that is the eminent expression of that: photography. So after fading gradually away, photographing has now all but ceased to be a means of artistic expression for me. Sound is, and time based things perhaps can be, and tactile objects, but that’s developing, and it’s groping at the moment. I wish there was a “blind multisensory artists” group, like there is a blind photographers group.

It’s a struggle, and an experience of profound loss. Maybe my main mode in art is the photographic, because I start from the fullness of reality that’s in front of me: that is the input for my thought process. But no longer, or not at the moment, for that delicious click of the shutter, the moment of capture, because it has started to mean Nothing.

Postscriptum: I lifted the John Hull quote from an essay by composer Darren Copeland, titled Associative Listening. In that essay, there is this tantalizing passage:

Without conscientious efforts to approach environmental sounds with some imagination and a sensitive social awareness, the language for coping with the everyday sound world will remain crude and ineffectual. If sound shapes people’s experience in the world, then a vocabulary for documenting this interrelationship needs to develop. John Hull provides one example. He hears a sound around him. It affects him in a certain way. The impact on his mind leads to a chain of related thoughts and musings. He then records these thoughts into a Dictaphone and later shapes them into a piece of writing. The whole process in my opinion is informed by associative listening. On the basis of such listening can one ever approach the enormous task of reading the acoustic environment as a record of social experience?

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More than two weeks ago I wrote about my excitement concerning the iPhone 3GS, because I figured it would be an accessible camera. By now I’ve got more than two weeks’ worth of practice behind me. So how did the iPhone work out for me as a camera? First of all, I think I need to make clear that we’re talking about a toy camera here. Although the iPhone’s camera now has autofocus, it’s 3MP, has a hideous lens, so it can in no way be compared with, say, a DSLR or – Gd forbid – my Leica M8. So just like with a toy camera, you use it to give you interesting results, you use it for a certain randomness, for the stuff you wouldn’t perhaps do with your proper, grown-up camera. And so, after checking out the basic features for a bit, I decided to go overboard entirely and buy a toy camera app, and a fake tilt/shift app and use those to process the camera’s images. But more about the apps later.

Shooting the camera is a very straightforward affair: you open the camera app, and then the camera is in viewfinder mode: you double tap the screen to focus, place one finger on the camera button just above the tactile “home” button and use another finger to split tap anywhere on the screen. This fires the shutter and the photo is stored in the photo app’s camera roll. That’s simple enough, but of course, I also wanted to process and upload, because I figured that with the iPhone’s accessibility features I would be able to control my entire workflow start to finish. Usually, I do the capturing myself, then the processing and uploading with the aid of a sighted assistant, because Lightroom, that I use for editing isn’t accessible for me. But with the iPhone that’s different. I installed Camera Bag, an app that imitates, among other settings, Holga and Lomo style processing. Apart from four unlabeled buttons, that are easy to learn, the entire application is accessible. The same goes for TiltShift, and app that does fake tilt shift processing. There’s a caveat here, because the central settings part, that let’s you drag the “sharpness” area to the spot and the size that you want, is inaccessible, and so can’t be changed if VoiceOver is running. However, I chose to use that as a shooting parameter, but then, I’m very much into selective focus, so that setting might be too much or cheesy to other users. I archive all my work online, at flickr, so the next task was to find a way of uploading. I tried a couple of dedicated flickr uploader apps, that either lacked accessibility or lacked features. Then I settled on Moby Picture, which is a media sharing environment for Twitter, but it also distributes your media (photo, sound and video) to other services, like flickr and facebook. I was pleased to discover that the application that comes with Moby is entirely accessible with exactly the features I was looking for. So that took care of uploading.

The fun is that I can process and upload the photographs I capture within a couple of minutes after pressing the shutter. Both TiltShift and CameraBag allow you to use the iPhone’s camera from within the application. That means that I use TiltShift to capture, save the file to the Cameraroll, open CameraBag to pick the photo from the Cameraroll, run it through CameraBag and save it, and then use MobyPicture to upload to flickr and twitter. I’ve found that it pays off to do this one photo at a time and use the entire workflow every time. It beats storing a couple of photos and processing them afterwards, because the processing apps leave the original photo intact and store a processed copy. If you have a lot of work to process, this may cause you to upload the originals instead of your processed work unless you keep good track of the filenumbers of your files inside the Photo application.

All in all I’ve had an enjoyable two weeks with the iPhone’s camera. To have control over the entire workflow again is a godsend and an unexpected gift. And the results, if I understand the comments on flickr correctly, are nothing to be ashamed of, even if we’re talking about a hyper expensive toy camera.

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This time last year I was bemoaning the general state of accessibility and new technology and grieving for the accessible camera that might never be (accessibility vaporware) But now, you get a fully accessible camera and you get a great smartphone to go with it, the iPhone 3GS. Reading the flood of blog posts since it introduction it seemed that most missed the revolutionary thing Apple has done: produce a mainstream, cool device that is accessible right out of the box. And they made a touchscreen device accessible to boot. The viphone email list has been positively buzzing since the iPhone went on sale, on june 19th. It is interesting to see how liberating this is. No longer is it necessary to use expensive after market solutions to make a device like a nokia smartphone accessible. I own a nokia E71 + Talks and Wayfinder Access, a combination which set me back 1200 euro and kind of works but not quite. Now that the iPhone is accessible many things I could only dream of having at my disposal suddenly are. To have a camera, albeit a toy camera, that is fully accessible, that I can control, is an unexpected gift. Now if there are photo apps like ezimba, or camerabag and the flickr uploader that are voiceover compliant, I could control my entire workflow again, from capture to post processing to upload. I already wrote to Peter Meijer, who has developed vOICe, which I use as a sonified viewfinder on the Nokia to ask him whether he could port to iPhone. He does have an Android version available, but even with the eyesfree initiative gathering traction, Android is far from an accessible operating system. But I could imagine having an app that adds a sonified overlay to the camera and so acts as a viewfinder if you drag your finger on the screen. I can imagine all kinds of possibilities.

One of the things I considered was how I would be able to use the iPhone as a note taker if it could pair with the Apple Blue Tooth keyboard. This is not possible at the moment without jailbreaking and hacking the iPhone to load a bluetooth keyboard driver. But it should be possible now that a new group of users is starting to use the iPhone. It is remarkable what Apple’s move has unleashed. One thing is that the blind/visually impaired device market may possibly implode. Pricing in that market is aimed at subsidizing government bodies, not at individual users. But who needs the KNFB reader when someone can code an accessible ocr app that reads the text it scans with the camera? I’d pay $0.99 for that, instead of $1200. Heck, I’d pay $75 for that! A number of viphone regulars have already indicated that they’d take up coding for the iPhone, and I’ve been tempted too. It would be great if a community of blind iPhone users were to develop their own apps. In that sense, the current iPhone is an immensely empowering device and Apple cannot be praised enough for its efforts. But now I must wait for my iPhone to arrive. I’m on a waiting list.

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