The RNIB Closes Its Giant Print Library; The Disordered Eye On The BBC iPlayer

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IN TOUCH – The RNIB Closes Its Giant Print Library; The Disordered Eye On The BBC iPlayer

TX: 10.11.2020 2040-2100

PRESENTER: PETER WHITE

PRODUCER: MIKE YOUNG

White

Good evening. Tonight, the RNIB’s plans to close its large print library – is this the predictable end of an outdated underused format, as many of us switch to eBooks and audio services, or could loyal users of this service have expected it to survive?

And disabled artist and filmmaker Richard Butchins will be telling us about his latest programme, challenging the importance of good vision in making great art.

Butchins

The vision issues that they had meant that they worked in a different way from the way they worked previously and that they added a kind of whole other layer of work, intentionally or otherwise.

White

More from Richard Butchins in a few minutes.

But first, the RNIB has announced the planned closure of its large print library, which is based in Peterborough. They say borrowing numbers are falling while costs are rising and users are switching to devices, like iPads and Kindles. But how much warning have regular borrowers had for this and what alternatives are open to them?

David Clarke is the RNIB’s Director of Services. So, David, this has come, as far as I was aware, out of the blue, what are the reasons for this?

Clarke

Well Peter, there are a number of reasons that have led us to this decision. There is no doubt that customer behaviour has changed significantly and people are taking advantage of digital services and digital downloads. I think whilst our large print library or giant print library has some really positive features, there are some significant restrictions. The books we have are of a limited number – around about seven and a half thousand – the way we produce them means they are particularly bulky and have to be mailed and they are one size fits all, literally, in terms of 24 size font. And I think customer behaviour has said that actually within three swipes on many devices I’m now able to get the font I want, the colour contrast that I want and much more wide access to many, many titles. And so, I think that’s why you’ve seen a major drop off in usage.

White

But that won’t apply to everybody, will it? I mean there’ll still be some people for whom using online services or using other equipment is technically quite difficult. What about them?

Clarke

We have actually thought about those people and there’s two things we can do in that regard. The first thing is, of course, that we have a personal transcription service which is free of charge, so we are still able to provide books in whatever format people choose. We, also, of course, continue to hold these books and therefore are very happy to give these to schools and to individuals who need them, as a result of the closure of the library. But where people are not confident with technology or indeed can’t afford technology, our Tech for Life people will assist in terms of helping user technology and where affordability’s an issue we have our grant scheme that will enable people to get the equipment they need.

White

Can we just dig into the numbers issue a bit more? You say borrowing numbers have been steadily falling, your own figures state that 11,700 large print books were loaned out in 2017, that number was 11,200 the next year and 10,700 last year – it’s hardly a collapse in lending is it?

Clarke

Well the pro-rata number is actually reducing significantly and is down to about six and half thousand this year on 1200 customers. And in 2014 we had 4,000 customers using the library. And one of the things that we have been able to do is assist people using digital services by providing a number of suitable devices that’s helped meet customer demand in that area. So, I think there definitely is a reduction and I think the quality point comes into focus here as well, in terms of sustainability. We were able to put on about 500 new books a year but in actual fact, if you look at some of the digital services, there is very much out there that people can get through those services. And if you compare it with, for example, our talking book service, where we’ve gone from 21,000 users to 45, 000 users over the same period, you can see the difference in demand. And I would also add, the other thing we’re doing is working on our online reading service to bring many, many more books in ePub, which, of course, you’ll be aware of has grown significantly, so that we can bring those books to people as well and development work undergoing at the moment, coupled with our Kindle skill that links with Easy Reader app, again, are making it easier for readers to access the books they want when they want them.

White

You’ll continue to run a braille library service I assume?

Clarke

Absolutely, we will, yeah.

White

You’re loaning out just over 10,000 braille books a year and that number is gradually falling as well, if falling borrowing is a criteria you’re using, how long before that service goes to?

Clarke

I can commit to you that we will continue to provide hard copy braille but there is no doubt that customers are choosing to use digital braille more often, there are more low-cost devices. I was on here a couple of years ago talking to you about the Orbit reader, which is making books more accessible. But we are still committed to providing braille. And it makes logical sense that a charity using charitable money would only commit to provide services that people are using and people are continuing to use hard copy braille and we will continue to provide it.

White

You said you’ve got quite a lot of – well obviously – you’ve got a lot of large print books. What exactly are you planning to do with those?

Clarke

We’ve been in touch with a number of schools, a number of individuals, who’ve clearly, as I said, some people who expressed disappointment about our decision but we’re very happy to provide those books to schools and individuals, so anybody who wants to get hold of particular books is very welcome to contact our helpline and we can arrange for those to be sent out. People will be welcome to keep the books that they’ve borrowed. We’ve had a number of partnerships over the years, across the world, with various people and charities who need books and we will make sure that those books are put to good use.

White

Just to look at audio books for a moment. I mean there are lots of RNIB readers who are favouring CDs and USB sticks for their talking books but there are commercial services, like Amazon Audible as well, will you be able to compete with the likes of them in the future?

Clarke

Well I don’t think it’s a matter of competing with commercial audio library services, I think it’s a matter of dovetailing with them and we have some excellent relationships with publishers and other audio content providers who share their concept with us free of charge and that’s largely why we hope to significantly increase the amount of ePub content. I think the way that we’ve managed to change the way we operate – you’ll be aware that we were on late last year talking about our online reading service – I’m delighted to say that we’re nearing 9,000 users of that service now compared with the maximum of 5,000 users under the old system of Overdrive. And we have an obligation, I think, to react to customer behaviour, which is why I say we worked with Dolphin to create the Easy Reader, we’ve now created the skill that goes with Easy Reader and the Kindle and we’ve also invested significantly in our online library that brings many more titles to blind and partially sighted people.

White

David Clarke, thank you very much indeed.

And thanks for all your emails sent to [email protected]. Using public transport still remains a concern and particularly in London, where the rules about assistance that requires physical contact between customers and Transport for London staff have still not currently been agreed. That’s despite assurances from TFL that discussions with unions are taking place which should have finally been sorted out last month. Well Lenita Conradi [phon.] got in touch to say: “I’ve always had excellent service from TFL as a totally blind person, however, when I was hoping to travel on the Metropolitan line the staff at Kings Cross told the staff at Pinner that because of covid TFL is not currently offering assistance. TFL provided a taxi but the taxi took a while to come and I missed my train out of Kings Cross.”

And Naki [phon.] also emailed us. He said: “I’m a blind Londoner, I’ve been travelling on the Underground for many years and have always loved it. Recently, though, the experience has been horrendous due to the pandemic and I’ve been getting mixed messages. I’ve been pushing for better guidance and policies since June and it felt as if we were in the right direction but I’ve now been getting mixed messages again.”

Well Naki so have we. So, we’re going to be seeking clear answers for you on next week’s programme, after all lockdown or no there are still visually impaired people who need to travel for the same permitted reasons as anyone else – work, education, caring duties etc.

And to what extent is this a London issue? We understand that other train operators elsewhere have been offering physical sighted guiding assistance again.

Well, do let us know your own experiences of travelling by public transport during the pandemic wherever you are in the UK.

Now, on the BBC iPlayer right now, to watch whenever you wish, is a programme by disabled artist and filmmaker Richard Butchins. It’s called the Disordered Eye and it aims to challenge the importance of good vision in making great art. Richard suggests that visual impairments have contributed positively to its creation.

Here's a flavour of the programme with Richard visiting an exhibition of paintings by the celebrated blind artist Sargy Mann at the Attenborough Centre in Leicester.

Clip – the Disordered Eye

One of the things I particularly like about this gallery is they provide sensory suitcases, which is pretty awesome right, because it’s a blind person’s exhibition and these are for people who are ND – neurodivergent – like myself. And inside it’s got loads of really cool stuff that helps you look at the paintings, like weird sunglasses and stuff and a kaleidoscope. But the serious point is that not everyone can look at art in the standard way and providing stuff to help people experience the art is like a really good thing to do. And it’s fun.

White

That’s a taster of the Disordered Eye and a little earlier I asked Richard Butchins how he came to make this programme.

Butchins

As a disable artist I’ve always been interested in the impact and contribution of disability of all kinds to art and I think it’s very much under-recognised or under-valued. And so, this was an idea that occurred to me and fortunately the BBC said yes, let’s make this programme.

White

But is there an assumption, do you think, that people make that somehow if there’s something wrong with your eyesight then that’s going to really make art a no, no for you?

Butchins

Well I kind of suppose it’s implicit, isn’t it, people assume you need good vision to – particularly visual art, say painting, for example, or photography – that you need good vision to make good art and I’m saying that that isn’t necessarily the case.

White

Now, of course, there are plenty of examples to back up your thesis. I mean the classic artist with sight problems that comes to mind is Monet, who had cataracts, and you also focus on Degas, I think, who had retinal eye disease. And your programme talks about how they used their disabilities in a positive and clever way doesn’t it?

Butchins

That’s what I think, I mean it’s not necessarily, shall we say, a standard approach to the subject. I mean most traditional art historians – sorry art historians if I’ve got you wrong – don’t really take that approach. I think that it’s clear to me that whether they intended it or not their vision issues that they had meant that they worked in a different way from the way they worked previously and that they added a kind of whole other layer of work, intentionally or otherwise, but I don’t think it really matters because that’s what happened. I mean there are other artists who are – I didn’t have time to do all the artists – but in their particular cases I think they’re very well known and you could see very specifically how their art changed as a result of their vision issues.

White

So, perhaps, just to give an example, I mean with Monet, for those who are not art buffs, how did his eyesight – how did it affect how his paintings look?

Butchins

Well, I mean the first thing, I suppose, that you would notice is that cataracts causes your visual colour palette to change, so it becomes increasingly yellow and sort of like a sort of sepia toned painting. So, he increasingly applies layers of colour to his paintings based on – you know, he knows where the colours are on his palette because he lays his palette the same way and so he puts a bit of red or blue or whatever in, but of course he’s not really sure quite how much he’s put on because he can’t see it, so, he tends to sort of like put on more. And I think the thing I notice is that the Water Lily paintings, for example, become increasingly abstract as his vision changes. And after he had his cataracts removed his work kind of reverts back to a more traditional Monet style of painting. And the interesting thing is that when he saw the paintings that he’d done he burnt pretty much all of them. I think his family saved some sort of 25 or 30 of them but he just destroyed them all because he hated them.

White

But what you’re saying, in a way, is that when he had the cataracts it gave his painting an individuality?

Butchins

Well they had an individuality before that, I mean let’s not underplay Monet, a brilliant painter. He had to adapt his way of painting and his way of seeing to a new – a new arena and that that changed his work. And I think that contributed to the way art itself changed in the next century, shall we say.

White

I mean really you want to talk a bit in your documentary about sight, how we see with our brains, if you like, and not necessarily with our eyes.

Butchins

Yeah, absolutely, I mean I think the kind of standard idea that obviously the eyes are optical equipment, if you like. A lot of comparisons are made between a camera and a computer and it’s not really the case, I mean there’s a very complex neuro-system going on in the brain and different parts of the brain process different bits of vision – so movement and colour and form and content and so on – actually the raw information is fed into the brain and that’s where the picture, if you like, is created. For those who have got vision, for example, it allows an apple to stay green when you got from like a bright sunlit outside to a darkened room inside with a tungsten lamp, for example, as far as you’re concerned the apple is green but in terms of reflective wavelengths the apple changes colour.

White

This is an issue that we looked at before on the programme. I remember interviewing the painter Sargy Mann and this was at a time when he had not long begun to lose his sight but he’d begun to think about the effect that this was having on his painting. I’d just like to play you a little extract of this, it was about 20 years ago that we did this:

Archive – Sargy Mann

Losing my sight to the level that it’s at now meant that I couldn’t really see other people’s paintings or books anymore, hardly. And in a way I think that was quite good for me because I may have been rather too influenced by other painters. And I think that possibly I’m painting better now because I’m more left to my own resources, such as they are.

White

Very much really in line with what you’re saying and of course Sargy lost most of his sight and still went on painting. I think you’ve talked to his family for your documentary, haven’t you?

Butchins

I talked to his son and his widow. Sargy Mann is a brilliant painter, first of all, for any of your viewers that don’t know his work and he painted, I think, some of his best work actually after he’d lost his vision. It freed him from the kind of constraints of the norms that he learnt. It’s true, I mean it’s for him to say, not anyone else, I mean production of art is an internal – it’s an internal thing, it happens inside the person that’s making it and you look at art with your eyes but actually, if you think about it, when you look at a painting your response to it isn’t really about what you’re looking at is it, it’s about how you feel or what things it sparks off inside you and stuff like that. So, yeah, I mean I’ve got great admiration for Sargy Mann and his work.

White

I mean are there other contemporary painters that you talked to or indeed artists in other fields that you’d like to draw our attention to?

Butchins

Yes, well I mean in the film I talk to a Scottish landscape artist called Keith Salmon, whose work, I think, is lovely. He’s got diabetic retinopathy which is the same condition that I posit that Cezanne had, but we’ll touch on that another time, it’s a big subject. And he paints beautiful landscapes and they are still landscapes, you can see they are landscapes, there’s some sort of abstract feeling about them. And he’s in the film and he explains his working process and what it’s meant to him and how it’s changed his work. And I mean we have another artist, who’s a sculpture, called Aaron McPeake, who makes sculptures out of bronze, some sort of metal, but he casts – I mean he’s blind and he casts them, he wonders about with a crucible full of hot metal. But he makes his sculptures so that you can hit them – they’re like gongs as well – so he’s very involved in sound and sound as part of the sculpture. And I think he’s very talented and we talked to him. There’s a couple of other people. I do focus on, if you like, contemporary artists who are alive because I think that is what we should be doing. There are a few, yeah.

White

Was it your intention that this programme should challenge the perceptions people have about vision loss?

Butchins

I think it was my intention that this film should challenge perceptions that people have about disability in general and vision loss, specifically. I mean this film is about a sensory loss, if you like. Really I’m interested in challenging the kind of perception that people have of disability in all its forms.

White

Richard Butchins. And the Disordered Eye is on the BBC iPlayer now and I know Richard is very pleased to know that there is audio description available with it.

That’s all for this week. If you want to give us your views on anything that you’ve heard you can email [email protected]. Do go to our website bbc.co.uk/intouch where you can find this and other editions of the programme. From me, Peter White, producer Mike Young and studio managers Jonathan Esp and Carwyn Griffith. Goodbye.