I just listened to a very interesting TED Talk - given by Ron McCallum, chair of the United Nations Committee on the rights of Persons with Disabilities.  His talk is titled "How technology allowed me to read", which is quite a timely subject for our libraries as we will all be receiving adaptive workstations in the near future.  Mr. McCallum, who has been blind from birth, remembers his mother reading to him and explaining that he would never be able to read for  himself..  He then talks about all the advances in technology have changed the lives of blind persons - from the introduction of Braille, to tape recorders, to computers with speech synthesizers, to machines that scan books and read them out loud through a computer, and to all the new programs a people can have access to on their iphones.  Mr. McCallum also  mentioned  that the early books on tape and Braille books were done by volunteers who gave thousands of hours of their time to help blind people read.