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THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE 91Èȱ¬ CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. IN TOUCH – Hearing the Solar Eclipse?

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TX: 15.08.2017 2040-2100

PRESENTER: PETER WHITE

PRODUCER: LEE KUMUTAT

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White The many faces of access – it seems you may struggle to get your utility bills in braille and yet you’ll be able to hear the forthcoming solar eclipse. Buzzes We’ll tell you the how and the why of those stories in a moment. But first, meet tonight’s studio guest. Earlier this summer Allan Hennessey graduated from Cambridge with a first class degree in law. Rare enough for a visually-impaired student to be sure but his route is as interesting as his achievement. Born totally blind in Iraq he came to Britain as a baby for an operation which restored a small part of his sight. And his route then took him from council estate to comprehensive school via special school to Cambridge. Allan welcome.

Hennessey Thank you.

White I’ll stop giving the plot away and get you to do it yourself. Just explain to us why – why did your parents feel it was necessary for you to leave Iraq because this is earlier than the emigration that we’ve seen since isn’t it?

Hennessey Yes this was 1995. I was born totally blind and my parents realised very quickly that people with a visual impairment were and in fact still are the subject of many taboos and they decided that they wanted to leave Iraq to escape the ridicule but also to find medical treatment.

White It was partly ridicule and partly kind of over sympathy wasn’t it, your mother got all this stuff about how terrible it must be.

Hennessey Yeah when she brought me home, back to the village, all the other mothers were hugging her and saying they were very sorry and she said – don’t be sorry for me, he’s our one way ticket out of here. So you know every cloud has a silver lining or an emigration ticket.

White So you left Iraq. You grew up in Britain. Just explain where were you in your early childhood?

Hennessey I’m a Londoner so I’ve moved around from one council estate in London to the next. And these days I move around from one posh postcode to the next but always London and they absolutely love it.

White But it was – at the time it was a real kind of change of circumstance for your parents, I mean you wouldn’t have known this but for them it must have been quite a stressful experience?

Hennessey Yeah I mean I think they were expecting freedom because everybody associates the West with freedom when your country is being bombed to shreds but then you come here and there’s a massive culture shock.

White Your dad was a successful and important man in Iraq.

Hennessey Yeah so like my family in Iraq were quite well respected, they were very middle class, we’re quite lucky. That’s the thing with immigration, people always assume that people who have fled their homes come bearing nothing – no skills – but it’s wrong because people leave livelihoods to come to the West and to the UK.

White So what about you on this council estate how did you get on, how did you fit in?

Hennessey So in that way it was quite interesting because I was just like all the other kids, I was like an immigrant, but then I also had a disability. And so it was quite interesting because I never felt very different, I never got any sort of horrible treatment – I was never bullied – I just fitted in. I went to the local primary school, made really good friends, went round being really mischievous playing knock down ginger, throwing eggs at buses, riding bikes…

White Because you’re saying you were all outsiders in a way? Hennessey Yeah we were all outsiders, I was just a bit more of an outsider. White You went to a mainstream primary school….

Hennessey Yeah I did, yeah. White How did they cope with catering for your visual impairment? Hennessey They had like a special learning unit, which I actually didn’t like as a kid. And they tried to teach me braille and I was the most stubborn little twit ever… White Why – why didn’t you not like it?

Hennessey Oh because it was – braille is a medium to demarcates you from everybody else and it’s a point of departure and a point of difference so I decided I didn’t want to be different. And actually quite ironically I learnt how to read braille better with my sight than I did by touch.

White So you rejected the idea of braille but like it or not – I’m sure you realise now Allan that you were denying yourself the joys of receiving your utility bills in braille. This was something the banks started in the 1970s, energy and telephone companies have followed with varying enthusiasm. So I imagine Ronald Edwards’ surprise when it seemed that to get his Virgin Media bill in a format he wanted he had to prove he really needed it.

Edwards I wanted braille bills and any kind of correspondence because I’d read on a Facebook forum that somebody else had been sent a form saying that they needed documentation to prove that they had a disability. So I phoned them up and they said they would send the braille. I waited a few days and then I received the form asking for the doctor or social worker’s note.

White And what was your reaction to that?

Edwards I was fuming, I wasn’t happy at all, I didn’t think it was necessary, I thought it was unreasonable, I didn’t know why I had to justify my disability and I thought well I wouldn’t ask for braille if I didn’t need it.

White I must admit I’ve been trying to think of a reason why anyone who wasn’t a braille reader would want their bill in braille. Have you been able to come up with one?

Edwards No not at all.

White And what else did they tell you – because I think you got in touch to say why – why was this necessary, what did they tell you then?

Edwards I asked if I could speak to someone in authority basically and they said you couldn’t. I said well can you speak on my behalf. They said they couldn’t. So then I contacted you.

White Well we had a bit more luck than Ronald. We asked Virgin Media to explain, this is part of their statement:

Virgin Media Statement Virgin Media does not require customers to complete a form supplying medical evidence to register for alternative billing formats. There are specific obligations under Ofcom general conditions regarding alternate format billing and contracts which Virgin Media is compliant with. In the case of Mr Edwards the customer advisor followed an incorrect process and the request for billing in braille was not added to his account. We have now rectified this and made sure that Mr Edwards is registered for braille bills. To prevent this error from occurring again we will also be reminding our customer advisors of the correct process they should follow.

And when we spoke to Ronald yesterday he was still waiting for his braille bill. So Allan Hennessey you see what you’ve missed – all those utility bills.

Hennessey Yeah, well it seems like I’ve missed a headache. It would make good wallpaper wouldn’t it – braille. It’s really like tactile, it would interest everybody, it’s got all these like different patterns.

White That’s quite an interesting idea – turning it into wallpaper.

Hennessey You see I think – I think that’s probably why they came to that conclusion – they thought Ronald’s a fraud, he just wants free wallpaper.

White Let’s get back to your career. Why was it necessary for you to switch from a mainstream to a special school?

Hennessey It wasn’t necessary at all and I was sent off – I felt like the kids in the Parent Trap – like sent off to boarding school. I refused, I was taken there kicking and screaming.

White But they presumably thought it would be to your benefit?

Hennessey Yes well I’d come from a council estate where I rode on bikes, I played knock down ginger with my mates, like I was really active and then I get there and they say to me if you want to go to the shops opposite the school or go to the post box, which is 10 metres away from the front gate, you need to pass a mobility test. I was just thinking are you having a laugh?!

White In the end you left New College. With your clearly anti-establishment attitude why Cambridge and why law?

Hennessey Well where did you get the idea that I’m anti-establishment?

White I don’t know really, it’s possibly in your tone and your style – am I wrong?

Hennessey I wouldn’t call myself anti-establishment, I think that’s a bit too far. I just say I take issue with a lot of problems in the world. But why Cambridge and why law? I was in bottom sets for all my classes in year 9 and 10 and then I formed a crush on my chemistry teacher and then I thought actually I can do chemistry really well and I’m just as good as everyone else in the top set.

White So you began to realise you were clever basically, that you were academically able if you wanted to be?

Hennessey Yeah and then even when I was doing my first year of A Levels I didn’t even expect to get good grades and then I just – I ended up getting good marks and I thought okay sod it let’s give it a shot. But even when I applied I didn’t think I was going to get in.

White But you took a gap year, that was fairly adventurous I believe.

Hennessey Oh that was so adventurous, it was the best time of my life, I loved it. I went travelling by myself.

White Where did you go?

Hennessey I’ve said this so many times, when you’re meeting people I can do it so quickly. Okay. I went to Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and America.

White Right. And I mean you…

Hennessey Oh yeah and then I lived in Berlin for a few months.

White You went alone?

Hennessey Of course, of course you have to go alone, you don’t want to go with anyone else they just hold you back.

White And what do you think the main thing you got out of that year was?

Hennessey It changed my world view, it really did, I know it sounds so pretentious but I’d lived on a council estate, I hadn’t met people from all walks of life and I did and it was just amazing. And I came back a new person entirely.

White But you went to Cambridge and I think you discovered rather belatedly that you were entitled to some support, such as for example a Disabled Students’ Allowance. You do seem to have made a bit of a habit of making things difficult for yourself – I’m thinking of braille at primary school, the Disabled Students’ Allowance – would you acknowledge that?

Hennessey Well maybe, now you point it out, but I don’t think I – I don’t think I wake up in the morning and think good god do you know what I’m going to do I’m going to make life difficult for myself. I think it’s because I’ve always wanted to feel the same as everybody else and that integration is a drive I kind of maybe make things a bit hard for myself.

White Is that the point – there’s a bit of resistance to kind of any sense that you don’t want to feel part of a community, either a blind community, a disability community, you seem to react quite strongly against that?

Hennessey Mmm yeah, I always used to be adverse to the idea of like being part of a community, an institution, I used to be so anti-marriage, now I just want to settle down and buy a home in Hampstead.

White Let’s just take a pause for a moment because on the issue of access it seems that universities are still doing their best to prove their relevance to the wider community. So, for example, if you’re blind how were you thinking of making the most of next week’s solar eclipse? Personally I was planning to ignore it altogether, as a totally blind person, but NASA and a number of American universities are doing their very best to ensure that blind people can enjoy this rare phenomenon as well, if they want to. NASA has produced a tactile book showing the alignment of the earth, the moon and the sun and using a range of materials including sand, moss and cardboard to do that. There’s also the inevitable app. But Harvard has taken things a stage further so that visually-impaired people and would be stargazers, including those not even in the eclipse’s direct path, like us in the UK, can hear its progress. Well Allyson Bieryla managers the Harvard astronomy lab and this project as well. Allyson, how’s it going to work?

Bieryla I have worked with a few people on developing a thing called an Arduino, so an Arduino is a small device, a few inches, you can think of it like a little computer and it takes a – you can load a program on to it, we put a light sensor on it and a speaker output. And so basically if you have the device on hand you can plug in headphones or attach speakers, so the light sensor detects the light and then the program converts it to sound in its output. So if you have the device in hand you can listen to it. But we are going to be streaming it live to the internet so folks that aren’t in the path, like you said, or folks that can’t see it, can hear the event live.

White So what will they hear?

Bieryla We’ve been back and forth on different sounds and so we’re finalising which one we’re going to use but it’s basically like a beeping sound and so when you’re out of eclipse, in full light, you’ll hear like a higher pitch and then as it goes into the partial eclipse and in totality it slows down and goes really deep.

White So let’s get a preview, we can let people hear what it’s going to sound like.

[Beeps]

So as it gets darker it gets deeper?

Bieryla Exactly.

White Wouldn’t some kind of streamed commentary do the job just as well or maybe even better?

Bieryla What I found working on accessibility and tools for visually-impaired is that people like to experience things differently, some like tactile braille, some like sound, some like both. Wanda Diaz Merced is someone I’ve worked with in the past and she’s a blind astronomer and she’s actually going to be in South Africa and was part of the reason that we decided to develop this because she really wanted to bring this to her students and so this was her idea and her way to bring this to her students.

White So really if people in the UK want to make use of this all they need to do is go online and look for what exactly?

Bieryla Yeah so there’ll be a link provided and they can go on to that website and there’ll be a live stream, you might have to download a plug in or something for the stream to load properly but the day of the eclipse I’ll be in Jackson, Wyoming and so we’ll have it set up and streaming during the eclipse. So it should require not too much effort on anyone’s part, just a simple plug in or something like that.

White Well you may have one potential listener already, I’m not sure our studio guest, Allan Hennessey, what do you think, are you attracted by this idea?

Hennessey I wanted to know why this sound, what’s the logic behind it and how is it comparable to seeing the eclipse?

Bieryla I don’t know why any one particular sound, we were trying to find one that just made sense to what’s happening, so I guess if when you’re out of eclipse the sun’s really bright, so if you were to translate that into sound really when you think about this I guess everything’s just a number, so the higher number right, so we translated that to a higher pitch. And then when you start to go into the eclipse something’s getting eclipse and it’s getting darker so we thought a lower deeper sound made sense.

Hennessey I think it’s a brilliant project and if it works for different people I think I’d just get really annoyed by the beeping sound and put on some Janis Joplin instead. [Laughter]

White Well Allyson Bieryla thank you very much indeed. I’m sure we’ll get a lot of very interesting responses to that and thank you for joining us on the programme. Allan, you say blindness has some perks, what are they?

Hennessey Oh, wow, well…

White I mean you don’t always seemed to have used many of them, sometimes you’ve rejected them.

Hennessey It does have many unintended perks. So like I always go out clubbing with my friends and the first thing the bouncer says to me is – Oye mate you’re not coming in, you look absolutely smashed. I’m like – No I don’t, I’m just visually-impaired. And then they all get very awkward. So I get a lot of free pity/apologetic gin and tonics out of it.

White In terms of attracting people – is it a plus or a minus?

Hennessey Ooh, I think it’s a minus because a lot of people don’t think that blind and disabled people generally fall in love, they don’t assume that they have sexual desires. And the disabled person is usually either asexualised and have their sexual desires quashed or fetishized, so there’s never a moderate middle ground where we can just be seen as people who just fall in love in the same way as other people. And when I fell in love with a good friend of mine a few years ago I think the response – people would always say – oh this is how they dealt with Allan falling in love with them and it was like my love had to be dealt with and contained. And a lot of people felt sorry for the person who I’d fallen in love with and I think there’s a lot of ableism that goes on when it comes to love and people don’t realise that we’re just as capable and loving as anyone else.

White Well we are planning a programme in a couple of weeks’ time in which we wanted to kick around, in a way, the idea of choosing a partner and whether visually-impaired people have preferences when it comes to – if a partner is visually-impaired or not. There are all kinds of potential issues there – there’s compatibility obviously, there’s how much support you get or need, genetic considerations. Do you have a view Allan?

Hennessey Well I used to think I was really boring and gorgeous so I always thought go for somebody sighted but now I think I’m ugly and funny, so I think I might go for somebody blind.

White Well that may be the basis on which…

Hennessey No, no don’t, that’s very superficial. I don’t think I have a preference, I don’t think you should pre-emptively decide whether you want to fall in love with a disabled person or not. Look, let’s just put it like this – whether you’re blind or sighted, if you’re buying me a home in Hampstead I don’t care.

White Allan Hennessey, thank you. And we want people to contact us with your thoughts and experiences about this, you can call our action line on 0800 044 044 for 24 hours after the programme, you can email intouch@bbc.co.uk or via the contact us link on the website and that’s www.bbc.co.uk/intouch where you can also download and subscribe to the podcast. Allan Hennessey just finally, what’s next for you?

Hennessey I’m currently writing a book which is hopefully coming out at the end of next year. I’m going to law school in September to train to be a human rights barrister and I’m going to continue doing my journalism, which you can find by following me on twitter.

White Thank you very much for joining us… Hennessey Thank you, it’s been a pleasure. White That’s it. From me Peter White, producer Lee Kumutat, Allan and the team, goodbye.