Since some time I have been drawn to research Minitel, a French Videotex-based system for accessing information that predates the Internet. It was a revolution in terms of digitalization which made activities such as buying train and plane tickets, signing up for classes and reading newspapers digitalized as early as the 80's. You can read more about it in the following Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
There were many devices invented to make Minitel accessible to the blind, although the system itself wasn't designed with this target group in mind. Mostly, they were external speech synthesizers like in the case of Lectel:
https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1986/12/10/les-ordinateurs-ont-la-parole_2931817_1819218.html
or the Valentine text-to-speech card for the Apple II:
https://blog.atalan.fr/valentine-carte-de-synthese-vocale-nee-en-1986/
The history of the Eurobraille company, the makers of the popular Esys, Esytime and B.Note Braille displays, starts also with a speech synthesizer for the Minitel terminals.
https://www.eurobraille.fr/notre-histoire/
As I found out, however, most of France's blind community at that time did not have access to this kind of technology and Minitel only became accessible on a global scale in the 90's when regular PC's did but then it was almost the time of the Internet so it never gained the same momentum as it did with the society at large. Pity as this could have been an opportunity to push the inclusion of blind and partially sighted people to whole new levels.
Always design with accessibility from the start!
#Accessibility #Blind #AdventCalendar #France #Internet #Minitel #Videotex #RetroTech