Lex is the guide dog; affectionate and slightly silly, she's the charismatic member of the trio.
“She got loose on a plane once, and it took me 10 minutes to get her back. Everyone had to pet her,” Mr. Lutz said.
While the android is no competition in the cuteness category, it definitely upstages Lex in the office. The dog provides Mr. Lutz with eyes for travel, but the android opens entire worlds.
The android is actually the robotic voice of a computer speech program that allows people with low vision or no vision to read nearly as much as any sighted person.
Mr. Lutz's job at the Sight Center is showing people that technology can make even blindness navigable.
He makes it look easy.
Born with a genetic disease called retinitis pigmentosa, Mr. Lutz learned when he was young that his eyesight had an expiration date. By the mid-1970s, he could no longer see well enough to drive.
“It was a gentle way to go blind,” he said. Today, at 65, he can see patterns of light and dark in shades of yellow.
Before the final fade, he drove race cars and piloted airplanes - enjoying his sight to the limits while it lasted.
But, with the irksome exception of transportation, Mr. Lutz says blindness needn't get in the way.
“It's really not much of a barrier for me. It's not a major hassle,” he said.
The trick, it seems, is the technology, and willingness to listen.
“More things talk now than ever before,” said Phil Scovell, a salesman in Denver, Colo. Mr. Scovell is blind.
“The first thing that came out was probably the talking wristwatch, in the late 1970s. They were probably $1,500 a piece.” Now you can get one at RadioShack for about $20.
Talking clocks, talking calculators, talking microwaves, even talking instruments for Ham radio operators - Mr. Scovell says such technology is now so common, it's easy to forget how it has transformed the world.
“When our kids were little, when we were able to get a talking thermometer, it was hard to believe. It seemed like space-age technology,” Mr. Scovell said.
Now Gil Lutz's talking computer lets him surf the World Wide Web, read online books, and even read bestsellers.
Mr. Lutz uses a standard optical scanner to enter the latest books into his computer. The same voice program that helps him write or search the Internet also reads the books he's stored with the scanner.
“It takes seven and a half hours to scan 300 to 350 pages,” Mr. Lutz said.
It's a lot of time, he acknowledges, “but look at the alternatives.”
Just as the scanner is now an unintended innovation for blind people, so is a product called the Voice Mate, made by Parrot SA of France. Mr. Scovell markets the Voice Mate, which was first developed for seeing customers. It's essentially a talking Personal Digital Assistant or Day Timer.
The first Voice Mate had only a few talking functions, Mr. Scovell said. But urged by blind users in Europe, the company made an all-talk Voice Mate that does almost anything a Palm Pilot can do. It will store and retrieve information by voice, dial phone numbers, and keep a record of 600 addresses with six phone numbers each. There's a talking calculator, talking datebook, talking clock, and memo keeper.
Naturally, Mr. Lutz has one of these cell-phone size gadgets too.
Geographic Positioning Systems are another invention now tailored for the blind. Mr. Lutz carries one in his backpack when he and Lex are out walking.
The voice system not only provides specific directions to wherever he's heading, it's also laden with information about his surroundings.
“The real challenge is blind people have never had detailed location information,” said Mike May, one of three founders of Sendero Group, the Northern California company developing GPS technology for the blind.
“Right now, with a sighted person who's really good at describing things, you might learn 1 percent of the information” about what is around you, said Mr. May. “If you have an electronic device, you can have as much or as little information as you want.”
While GPS has important applications in agriculture and geology, much of its appeal is for recreational use in boating and even automobile map-navigation systems.
“For a blind person, getting around is much more than a recreational item. It makes the difference between sitting around at home doing nothing and maybe getting a job,” Mr. May said.
“The main thing is it has to be verbose enough for a blind person to use it,” said Mr. May. In this instance, verbose means information-dense.
“Sighted people would probably go nuts with something that talked that much,” he said.
Sendero Group piggybacks its software on the latest hardware created for the sighted market. Right now, that means units may be too large for some elderly people. The GPS-map system requires a small computer, such as a sub-notebook, hauled in a backpack.
But Mr. May says future users will have all the information they need via a cell-phone-size device. Instead of installing compact disks with map information, data would be relayed via airwaves anywhere in the world.
Because the market for adaptive technology is relatively small, price is an object for many of the latest developments. Voice programs for computers can cost between $700 and $1,000. The GPS-Talk system is $899, plus the cost of a portable computer.
Probably the biggest problem with adaptive technology isn't in the technology, or the cost, or the blind person's ability to learn it. The biggest barrier continues to be the sighted world.
Employers either don't know about the jobs blind people can fill with the advent of adaptive technology, or they remain reluctant to hire people with severe vision problems.
“The technology is there, but it's not like it's opened the job market for blind people,” Mr. Scovell said. “It's opened some fields, but not like you would think. Any bind person could go and get a $5 an hour job. But I really thought the talking computer would open things up.
“It didn't do what a lot of us thought it was going to do.”
First Published April 1, 2001, 1:36 p.m.