The Sight Village experience

Younger blind people, myself included, are addicted to technology. If it talks, emits Braille or does something which might improve our lives in any way, we want to have a good feel and then, we hanker after it like heroin. And if you'll let me continue my dodgy heroin metaphor, like all hard drugs, these things come at a price much too high for the average Joe. So with most attendees probably thinking of applying to Access to Work, their local council or their bank manager for a loan to get some of this stuff, the blind massive travelled to the New Bingley Hall in central Birmingham and queued up impatiently to enter their utopia.

What I actually walked into on this second day of the 3 day extravaganza was a hot, busy, noisy space, just like any other technology exhibition but with an added layer of blindie access: dog bowls, 'spending' areas and hundreds of sighted guides on hand to help out.

The other immediately noticeable difference was that whether male, female, robotic or realistic, there was synthetic speech coming out of every corner. For a non-blindy, I'd imagine this was fairly unnerving, but for me, with a head full of questions about talking PDAs, accessible GPS navigators and print reading gadgets, I turned to Frank my facilitator saying "bring. It. On!"

The first stand we came to housed a man with a talking Blackberry. For the non tech obsessed, this is a portable communication device, allowing business people to do email, keep their diary, work on documents and take phone calls while on the go. Until now, blind people had no access to this widely used Smartphone and had to settle for less. It is exciting therefore that a piece of software called Orator is being developed to make it talk.

Don't run to your manager saying you want one now, though. Orator is still in Alpha, the testing stage before Beta, and isn't expected to be available until October. Lucky, because the test version I saw really didn't work very well and the speaking voice was extremely muffled, even with my own headphones plugged in.

When Orator does enter the market, it will cost £350 on top of the Blackberry, which, I suspect, most phone providers will not cover on contract.

As I wandered away, slightly disconsolate, I was collared by a very charismatic man promoting The Reading Room. This was an area at the exhibition where all the talking book providers and specialised audio player manufacturers had come together, to collectively encourage less techie blind people to move away from the audio cassette - surprisingly still widely used by talking newspaper providers - and get acquainted with the CD, or even better, internet downloads.

Being obsessed with doing everything digitally, I wasn’t keen to go in, but then I met the Sonata.

This internet radio has 5 buttons, space for an SD card and wireless internet. With an extremely clear voice as your guide, you can easily access thousands of radio stations, podcasts and books. Not only that, but it is hooked into the Talking Newspaper Association’s online service, so can access hundreds of local and national newspapers as they are published. Depending on your circumstances, The Sonata may be available if you talk nicely to the beautifully named British Wireless for the Blind Fund, but is £360 to buy for yourself, available to pay for over 12 months interest free. It's aimed at people who don’t want to use a computer, but frankly, even I fancy it as a bedside media centre.

That a gadget aimed at the very non techy end of the market had me so excited was worrying, but rather than force me to go find a 3 thousand pound Braille note taker to play with, it inspired me to see what else was new in the low-tech solution category. I hadn't bargained on quite how low tech I'd be going though.

Allow me a very blind niche moment if you will. Once upon a time, the main method of producing Braille was to use a Perkins Brailler, a sturdy, iron, mechanical machine on which you could bash out your dots quickly, easily and very noisily. At Sight Village 2009, not only did I find a new, lighter version sitting pretty on the RNIB stand, but low and behold, its predecessor, a Braille frame and stylus are completely back in fashion - which might come as something of a surprise to braillists who embraced electronic ways of doing it 20 years ago.

Let me explain. A Braille frame is a slow and painful method of producing Braille, by punching holes in a page with a sharp object. The new versions I saw were very light, portable and made from plastic rather than metal. In the old days, unbelievably you had to write backwards and turn over the page to read what you had written. I don’t know the mechanics, but it is now possible to write normally and proof read as you go along.

So while one set of companies were selling gadgets for thousands of pounds, with the primary purpose of allowing blind people to take notes easily on the go, others were going back to absolute basics to do the same thing. Very surprising. The only thing that saved me from a smelling salts moment was an introduction to the PenFriend. It's a nifty new label reader costing just £55, cheap in blindy terms.

So how does it work? Say you have picked up a tin of beans, a tin of tomatoes and a tin of dog food at the supermarket. When you get them home, unless you are incredibly organised and have put them in different pockets, there is no way of telling which is which. If you had brought along your PenFriend, as the shop assistant put each tin through the check out, you could pop a special little sticker on it, wave the pen over it and record the details using your voice. From then on, whenever you were greeted by a stack of identical tins, just wave the PenFriend over one and you would hear your own dulcet tones saying what it contained. Loving it! Other devices exist but this is the smallest most portable version I've seen and you can record hours and hours of notes onto it if you so wish.

Far from fawning over the TextScout, a £700 piece of software which turns your phone camera into a high tech talking print reading device, or the myriad of accessible GPS systems costing over a grand a pop, or even the lovely new little blue tooth Braille displays now available, I spent Sight Village playing with less expensive, but possibly more practical objects. Am I finally growing up? Or are manufacturers channelling their efforts into where the majority of blind people sit, in the over 65 tech shy category? Who knows.

I'm a bit anxious about returning to Sight Village next year though, in case a Rubik's Cube or talking basket weaving kit catch my interest. Nothing surprises me anymore.