Over the last six months I have been working on this project. Bill asked me if it was possible to put the magazine on-line. Well now we have all of Oscailt magazine up and running since the change over from the Dublin Calendar in December 2004. Before some of you ask why it is in the format presented, with no banners and the links at the bottom and not at the top of the pages, let me explain.
I came to the Dublin Church in 1998 to talk to a blind lady who wanted a book printed. I had been avoiding her for about three or four months. Finally, my wife Bridget said, “Just meet her and tell her you can or cannot print it”. So I arrived at about 12.15 one Sunday after the service to meet Beatrice Reid, and was presented with a disk with the text of her book on it, “I want you to print this,” she said. That’s how I came to join this church, thanks to Beatrice.
In 2001, 345 of us were made redundant from Smurfit Print and I went back to school to retrain at computer maintenance. In another twist, I ended up teaching students the basics of computers and I now work for National Council for the Blind of Ireland (NCBI) teaching blind or vision impaired people to use a screen reader. Some screen readers have difficulty breaking into and breaking out of the invisible frames that are used to order the information that you, without impairment, see as a web page. Blind and vision impaired people have a lot of difficulty accessing simple pages, such as banks, booking tickets, accessing time tables, because most of these sites ‘time-out’ before they can complete or access the relevant information. So with this in mind I helped design the Cork Unitarian Church web site (www.unitarianchurchcork.org ) and was a bit surprised when I was questioned as to how it had been designed. On further investigation I was told that the site had not faltered when every screen reader the company had, had been used on it. I was told, “That’s not possible.” Had I found a new compiler that they had not heard about?
In my classes I use the Dublin church web site as practice for my blind students. Now some of my students like listening to the podcasts on the Dublin web site, because Peter Geoghegan (who helped with this project) has made accessibility to the recordings easy, by making each link the title of the address; in this way the screen reader tells the blind person what title they are at. In some other sites these are listed with the link in ‘click here’ so when the impaired user gets the screen reader to list and then read through the links all they hear is ‘Click Here… Click Here…’ continuously.
Having succeeded with the Cork site I decided to apply the same thinking to the magazine web site, hence the present format.
But getting back to the beginning. That first Sunday I came through the doors of this church it was like coming home. There was a very welcoming sensation coursed through me; I knew that I had found a home. It was about nine months to a year after Bill had arrived. Some of the newer members, myself included, asked Bill on different occasions for copies of a service to read at our leisure. Bill’s first book was born out of that. I remember Bill being utterly ‘gob-smacked’ when he came to collect ten copies of this first book The Penultimate Truth at the house. There was a pile of books along one wall of the room about three feet high. “How are we going to sell all those,” asked Bill. Well, they are all sold and reprinted, along with numerous other titles.
So as you can see, you never know how events are going to turn around. I trained as a compositor, worked as a photographer, retrained as a litho-operator, trained in computer maintenance, became a teacher, learned how blind people use computers. That first meeting with Beatrice had started to change my life three years before I was even aware of it. Life has a funny way of playing out. Having my computer is, for me at least, like having my own private printing company, or as Bill calls it, ‘a John Bull Printing Outfit’. But he can tell you that story.

Paul Spain June 2008