As many young blind children still are today, I was afraid of any noise that my 5 year old brain thought was loud. Thunder, sirens, and fireworks were at the top of the list; at least I didn’t hide under the bed like our dog. As i got older, i grew to tolerate loud sounds, and fireworks eventually didn’t scare me any more. Well, if someone shot one off right outside my window without telling, i’d probably get a shot of adrenaline and wonder what was up. My parents did enjoy the visual affects of fireworks, so when i was little they would drive out to a hill where they could see them. They were not audible from there, good when I was little, boring as I got older. When I was in middle school, we tried going back to the park where they were shot from. Not only was i ok with the sounds of the fireworks, i even tried to record them with a tape recorder. I had an external microphone that I would put on the roof of the car, and then roll up the windows to try and keep out the mosquitos; they snuck in anyway. It was cool at the time, but as I got older I became more indifferent to fireworks. I understood that they were visually spectacular, but they didn’t really interest me much any more.
Another technology i was indifferent to well into my adult life was cameras. Film cameras could do very little for a blind person, so it wasn’t until digital cameras became common, affordable, and not bad any more, that I could begin to benefit from them. I remember when the first cameras appeared in cell phones, and I thought “cool I guess, but not something I would use”. The Nokia 9500 was my first phone with a camera, but it wasn’t very good, not even when it was new, only 3 megapixel. When I got the Nokia N82, that was when the camera with 5 megapixel began to actually be useful. In July 2008, i was with my friend Jeremy, and with a little guidance from him, I took a picture of an approaching storm, that friends and family on facebook actually thought was pretty cool. The KNFBReader app was also available on the N82, which allowed me to read print documents using OCR. Then, it was several years with inadequate cameras on the early iPhones, but with the iPhone 5S, cameras again became useful to the blind community. The KNFBReader app was ported over, Prizmo soon after added features to help blind people center printed documents, and cameras were a thing blind people could use. Apple even added a feature, where VoiceOver would tell the blind person where and how many faces were in the image. Things have only improved since.
In the 1970s, Dr. Paul Bach-y-rita began experimenting with a project that would eventually become the BrainPort artificial vision device thirty years later. I had been part of his study as a kid, but then had not heard about it for over twenty years, but then Wicab, who makes the device, looked me up again.
In summer 2013, I wondered if the BrainPort would help me see fireworks, Fred and Rich working at Wicab thought it would work, so I went for it. A country club near by has been putting on a firework display for years, so I only had to walk about a block to see most of it, my friend Nate went along. The BrainPort actually did quite well. I could see fireworks that were up higher in the sky, but not the ones closer to the ground. Some of them seemed more conical some more spherical. The fireworks with sparkles showed up with little dots around the core of the firework. I had been told about the fireworks that flashed on/off, but the BrainPort seemed incapable of showing that to me. The thing that surprised me the most was how fireworks are visible a long time before the sound of their exploding, around 1 or 2 seconds, but not at all after; I had never known that before.
I have used the BrainPort to see a few more firework displays. It’s still kind of fun, though I wouldn’t want to shoot a bunch of them off in my back yard, even if that was legal here. Still, I at least have some appreciation for them occasionally, and have some understanding of why sighted people enjoy them so much.
Accessibility Insights 