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June 28, 2023 14 mins

As of the start of this year Vision Extra in Adelaide has been subsumed by Peter's other Wednesday night show Focal Point.  Please be advised that as of next week we will not be podcasting Vision Extra, however the interview from the broadcast show is available in the Focal Point Podcast: https://omny.fm/shows/focal-point 

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
S1 (00:15):
On Vision Australia Radio. This is Vision Xtra with Peter Greco.

S2 (00:23):
Let's do a bit of armchair travel or perhaps travel
vicariously through the words of radio veteran Stephen Jolly. Stephen,
great to catch up.

S3 (00:31):
Good to be talking to you again, Peter.

S2 (00:32):
Stephen, you've been away and it sounds like you've had
a pretty good time of it. Tell us a bit
about where you've been and why you decided to go
to the places you did go. Yes, it did.

S3 (00:41):
Work out very nicely. My wife and I, we like
to travel occasionally and we hadn't been to the UK
or really Europe at all. So we decided we would
do this three years ago and something went wrong. Peter
Three years ago and we didn't get there, but we

(01:02):
did have our long awaited trip in May. There were
three of us, a friend of ours, a long time
friend who was very helpful. She came along as well
and we went to the UK for three weeks and
then went across the channel to France for eight days,

(01:23):
stayed in Paris, and we went out of Paris one morning.
We talk about that in a moment because that was
quite an adventure. About 50 K out of Paris.

S2 (01:31):
Now we're Paris, home of Louis Brown of France. Home
of Louis Brown. Did you get to visit the Louis
Brown Museum? We did.

S3 (01:39):
Yes. The museum is located in a little place called
Coop Valley, which is about 50 K from Paris. And
the museum is actually based at what was the original
family home of the Braille family. Louis Braille, for those

(02:00):
who aren't aware, is the man who devised the Braille
system that so many of us love and use regularly.
And he was born in 1809. So if you think
of the home being just over 200 years old, we
were very well hosted by the curator of that Louis

(02:24):
Braille Museum. Stefan greeted us when we got there. We
got there a little bit early because it was a
bit hard to judge how long it's going to take
to get there. We went by cab from Paris and
he was very welcoming. We got two hours that we
spent looking over the museum. The first one of the
first things we did after we left a sensory garden,

(02:46):
which was very pleasant, was to have a look at
a tactile model of the Louis Braille family home. And
that was good because it sort of gave you a
bit of an idea of what we were going to
be seeing inside. Put it into context more. Then we
went in to the house and visited the various rooms.
One of them was the family room where Stefan said, Well,

(03:08):
let's sit down here now and have a talk. And
that's where we had a conversation about the life of
Louis Braille. We then moved across to another area, which
is where the actual museum with lots of items is stored.
And we saw some very early writing devices, tactile writing devices,

(03:32):
Braille devices, the arithmetic. Taylor Slate, which you might remember
from school and some people might remember the slate that
we used for arithmetic and algebra with the little holes
in it and what we referred to as the figures,
the little pieces of Led that had a bar on
hand and two dots on the other end. Each one

(03:54):
could be put in its hole in eight different ways
because it was excited, but because there were two ends
to it, it was 16 different arrangements. And that's how
some of us did our basic arithmetic and algebra back
in school days. So it was good to see that again.
I saw an abacus. And hello to anybody listening who
still has an abacus. I'm embarrassed to say I don't
have one, but they were a great little device. The

(04:17):
abacus with the beads moving around on the sort of
the felt platform. So we saw some other machines that
we used in the early days to produce mainly Braille,
but there was work done with trying to produce tactile
versions of the characters so that they could be seen

(04:39):
by sighted people. But that brings me to, I think,
my greatest sort of revelation from the day was the
simplicity of Braille. For years there were tactile systems being
used which were very cumbersome, so there were lots of
dots representing the printed characters. They were hard to produce

(05:07):
and they were not easy to actually read because the
characters were sort of crowded with all these dots and
the shapes weren't all that easy for the fingertip to discern.
Young Louis Braille, as in the early days of his
adulthood or late adolescence, hit upon the idea of the
six dots and the pattern of these six dots, the

(05:30):
two columns and three rows. And that platform or matrix
could be arranged in 64 different ways to produce the
various Braille characters. So he moved away from trying to
represent a printed character and said, Let's use something that
works better for somebody who's using their fingers to read it.
It's a bit of a long explanation there. Sorry about that.

(05:52):
But it was a very important sort of awareness that
came to me that that was the key breakthrough that
he made, and he probably wouldn't have had his system
if others hadn't been doing stuff with tactile arrangements in
the past. And Captain Charles Barbier, who was in the
French military, was credited with developing a number of systems,

(06:16):
including a system for blind people. And that was really
that was one of the the pillars in which Louis
Braille developed his Braille system.

S2 (06:26):
Stephen, you mentioned there were three that met with Stephane.
Was it just you three? Are they sort of organized
tours that the museum runs?

S4 (06:33):
Yes, they're very good.

S3 (06:34):
Personalized.

S4 (06:35):
Tours.

S3 (06:35):
As a matter of fact, they say we can accommodate
parties of up to three. So that means you get
very good attention to your questions and can put your
hands on the stuff quite easily. No, don't touch signs
or anything like that is very good.

S2 (06:52):
Yeah. Not when it comes to brow. What about sort
of modern brow stuff? Is that in the museum as well?
Because as you said, very simple. And you know, nearly
or 200 years ago since it was invented, What about
the sort of modern Braille exhibit today? Are they part
of it as well?

S4 (07:09):
We got to.

S3 (07:09):
The stains machine. We got to a Perkins Brailler. Okay.
I didn't see much about computerized Braille. Didn't see anything
about computerized Braille, though. I think we did talk about
it at one stage. But it was really a history
of the machines that were used for such a long time.
Of course, the simple Braille frame or slate was there

(07:30):
as well.

S2 (07:31):
Stephen, you also spent some time in London or in England.
Tell us a bit about that.

S3 (07:36):
Yeah, that was fun. We were three weeks in the
UK when we arrived on the Wednesday the 3rd of May.
We had planned to stay in London for a week, but.

S2 (07:46):
Birthday, I think.

S3 (07:47):
Isn't it two days after? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. My birthday,
the 1st of May. So it was a bit of
a birthday celebration, something different. But we didn't hang around
London as we had originally planned because it was a
big activity on the Saturday. The coronation, which made this
change our schedule a little bit because it was going
to be a bit expensive and very crowded and all

(08:08):
that sort of thing. But the coronation was sort of everywhere.
We've got the chance here. As much as you wanted
to on the radio, we went to Cambridge for a
couple of days. We then went to York, then up
to Edinburgh for three days. Then we went to Bolton,
Manchester for a couple of days. We saw the the
guide dog centre in Bolton, which was very good and

(08:31):
it was very interesting to meet with the people there
that work with the dogs. And my wife Vicki was
very interested in that because she has a seeing eye dog.
And then we went to Cheltenham for a couple of days,
then to bath for a couple of days and then
stayed around London for a week or so. Then we

(08:51):
caught the Eurostar train across the channel. There were some
interesting highlights in in London we visited a number of
iconic places that you'd be expected to go to museums.
ET cetera. And one of the things that impressed me
was the effort that's gone to those places to make

(09:14):
them inclusive. We were able to use audio guides some
of the time, which are actually designed for the public.
Though in a couple of places there were special versions
of the audio guides that gave more explanation for blind
people to enable us to be orientated. I noticed that

(09:34):
in the the tour of the of the Windsor Castle
and also the the war rooms of Churchill. And that
was a very interesting visit, all that sacred underground stuff
that went on. And often of course the audio guides
would be apps which were problematic for accessibility on your smartphone.
Then sometimes they were devices, but they were just touch screens.

(09:57):
But then others that were really done properly had buttons,
you know, old fashioned buttons that you press on the device. So.
That really did give you the freedom to take it
in really, really well. So that was good. Another thing
I noticed in London, which was in the UK as
we moved around, was the audible traffic signals that were

(10:20):
very consistent. The same sound nice and loud and you
could rely on them, not like some of the ones
in Australia where the volumes go up and down. These
were very consistent wherever we went. The train service, the
railway service was quite a revelation. Very good audible announcements.

(10:43):
No worries. Knowing where you were going, what stop you
were getting, you'd come to it, etcetera. It's quite a
complex system, particularly in London and very interesting.

S2 (10:52):
Stephen, did you book ahead and also, did you kind
of go out of your way to make sure that
either the people that you were going to see kind
of knew the fact that you were coming along as
in a person with a vision impairment and or did
you look for that sort of thing when you were
booking or when you were doing your research?

S4 (11:10):
Most of our.

S3 (11:10):
Tours we booked in advance because you had to do that,
and that's what I did for the Lords visit, which
was a highlight. What I also tended to do when
you meet up with a group with a guide, is
when you're introducing yourself, just indicate that I'm blind. So
I'm looking forward to your description. And the tour guides

(11:35):
responded to that very well. And instead of saying over there,
they'd say, I was left and things like that. They
were actually very good at it. So, well, it's a
bit like going to the MCG and doing a tour
of the MCG, except it's different or the Adelaide Oval
and I have actually done a tour of the Adelaide Oval. Peter,

(11:55):
a few years ago, very treasured memory of that. It's
really got to touch the surface of the ground. Yes.

S2 (12:03):
They're very strict with that for people that mightn't be aware,
there's a metre and a half around the edge of
the ground that they are very, very protective of. So you. Yes,
if you if you're lucky enough, you can get to
touch the surface. The grass didn't get.

S3 (12:16):
Shot or anything. It was quite good at Lord's. I
guess the highlight was being in the museum and standing
alongside the cabinet that contains the ashes and putting my
hand on the cabinet and the glass as close as
you can get to it. So that was good fun,

(12:38):
you know, very silly really, to make such a thing
of it. But it was a bit special because it's
part of so many, so many of us. It's part
of our lives, the Ashes battles. But it was just
other interesting things about the Lord's tour. It was good
to sort of get a feel for the size of
the the ground when you walked around outside in the street.

(13:00):
And also we got to sit in the stand, visited
the long room and the rooms of the players, which were.

S4 (13:08):
Nicely.

S3 (13:09):
Carpeted, which surprised me because I don't think all the
big venues in Australia have their change rooms carpeted. So yeah,
that was, that was quite interesting.

S2 (13:23):
Stephen, we'll have to leave it there. The old clock
on the wall has beaten us, but thanks for that
little snapshot. Thanks for your slide night and I'm sure
it won't be too long before we speak again. I
hope I.

S3 (13:32):
Didn't bore everyone too much, Peter, but very interesting to
chat with you and all the best to everyone listening.

S2 (13:37):
I think you've made us jealous. Steve and Jonathan telling
us a little bit of a snapshot of his trip
to Europe and the UK. That is it for the program.
If you've missed some of it, if you'd like to
hear it again, you can search for an extra on
the iTunes store on Spotify or your favorite podcast service.
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