Full Transcript for Talking Vision 843 Week Beginning 3rd August 2026 (Repeat 260108)

Peter White as a mentor to you, a blind broadcaster, and I'm sure you're influencing lots of other people. Now, um, tell us how you got into journalism and about the barriers that there might have been and why you wanted to do it. 00:07:13 S5: Well, my first real break was, um, a complete accident. Of course, these things often are. Is that my dad, who I think I mentioned was a cab driver. He picked up a blind chap called Kevin Mulhern, who was a blind producer of television programmes back in the 80s. And he got talking to him about me. I was at university and Kevin, bless him, said, well, why doesn't he come and have a long come along and have a look at my television production company, and we're putting a programme together and come and have a look. And I came and had a look and, and he introduced me to some people at the BBC. And then during some of the, the summer vacations at Oxford, I got some sort of, you know, unpaid researcher work on various programmes on radio four in the UK. And that's really how it started. I hadn't no real interest, you know, when I went to university in being a journalist, although I'd been editor of the school newspaper, um at Worcester for a period of time. Um and then it was the sort of, it was the radio side of it that really grasped me, and I got to the end of my career at university, and I applied for some of the BBC's prestigious, you know, training schemes. They have a thing. They have a certainly then a thing called the news training scheme. And I applied and I didn't get it. And I applied a second time and I didn't get it, although they did ask me in and had a chat. And, you know, there were some pretty senior people, one of whom said, you know, I don't think a blind person can be a reporter. And of course, in those days you could say that perfectly, you know, legitimately, you could in those days, of course, reject people for jobs on those grounds openly. Um, there were no anti-discrimination laws at that point in time, but there were enough people around Stephen, fortunately, who were prepared to take a punt on me, not least Tina Heschel, the great producer of the In Touch program for so many years who has given me stuff, but also in the areas where I was more, I felt more, I felt more interested, which was politics in particular. Um, so people on, you know, programs like today in Parliament in the UK. Um, and, and that gave me a, gave me a break and one particular, a couple of particular people in the politics department there, uh, a man called Bob Eggington, another one called Richard Eyre who ran the politics department at the time, just, you know, this untested, untried 22 year old, uh, they gave me a chance. You know, they gave me a chance, you know, short little contract. Mhm. And it was around the time of the 92 election. And I did a bit of that for local radio at Westminster, the service that delivers for local radio. And, and I absolutely loved it. And, um, and I didn't mess up as far as I could tell. And, uh, the contracts got longer and longer until I, you know, got a job about a year later, permanent job. 00:10:00 S4: Gary, has technology helped that because in your early days, you really had to, to struggle to find out what was in the newspapers. You'd have to have friends in the very early days to, to read it to you. Content has now become so easily available, so accessible. The challenge is to decide what to read rather than to find something to read. 00:10:24 S5: It's absolutely right. I mean, I used to have to get people around on a Sunday to read the Sunday papers to me. I used to have to get people to read sort of cuttings from the research library, where they would photocopy cuttings if you were researching a story. And I remember, you know, I had a girlfriend who, you know, made her read cuttings at night. And I'm sure she sort of thought that was probably not what, what you were meant to do of an evening. But, um, um, things have got a lot easier with technology, but at the same time, the numbers of sources of information, you know, the amount of stuff has just multiplied beyond absolute recognition. You know, back in those days, if you kept yourself across 3 or 4 newspapers, you were okay. Yeah. I mean, it's just not like that anymore, isn't it? So our problem now is, I think, to sort of how do we most efficiently use the tools we have, like on the iPhone, on the PC or the Mac? How do we most efficiently use those to get to what we need quickly and to sift through the noise? So I, for example, I tend to farm out things like the sort of trawling of things like X to my producer. And I say, just keep an eye on it for me because by definition it's linear. So you kind of have to read everything to, to get an idea. Whereas, you know, if you can see and my producer is cited, she can scan it for me, you know, just keep an eye on, you know, anything that's relevant to what we're doing. Same with some of the other social media channels. You know, we have these sort of teams. We use Microsoft Teams a lot and we use WhatsApp groups a lot as well. And sometimes the the sheer volume of messages is just too much. And, and again, we can only read them in a linear fashion. Um, and it can just take ages to learn nothing or, you know, to to have not help in any way. So I try to be quite ruthless about what I do, read what I do focus on. 00:12:27 S4: I was having a conversation recently with my brother actually, and he said to me, Steven, you might think your productivity is going to go up with AI and associated technologies, and it will. But for people who can see, it'll probably go up even more. Yeah. And so there's sort of a bigger gap. The bar is is higher. I thought that was pretty insightful. 00:12:52 S5: Yeah I think so. I mean this digital divide that people talk about, um, it, it hasn't, it certainly hasn't gone away. Um, and often we find don't we, we take a, you know, two steps forward and one step back. And then, but also

suddenly, just suddenly things can break as we know. Um, you know, someone rolls out a new version of this or that and suddenly something's broken and and you're kind of floundering around. And also, I think, um, it's very difficult to explain to one's employers or people, the people you work with, the sort of usability issue. They just, they'll just say, is it accessible? And of course, it's very often very difficult to answer that question as straightforward way because, well, yeah, I mean, it kind of talks, but, you know, can I use it in a useful way quickly? Mhm. Um, and by the time you started to say that they've lost interest, um, so it's, you know, I mean, I'm constantly frustrated in my environment with things being rolled out. And you, you say, has it been tested? Has is there any is there a sort of a tutorial for someone who can't see the screen and they say, well, not really, you know, and, and I say, well, okay, well, why don't you unplug the mouse, turn the screen off and see how you get on with it. 00:14:08 S4: It's more than voiceover speaking when you open the app. 00:14:12 S5: Yes. That's right. That's absolutely right. It's there's so much more to it than that. But that's quite a hard thing to communicate at times. 00:14:25 S2: I'm Sam Corley and you're listening to Talking Vision on Vision Australia Radio. Associated stations of the Radio Reading Network and the Community Radio Network. I hope you enjoyed the first half of Stephen Jolly there with Gary O'Donoghue. If you missed any part of the interview with Stephen or Gary or you'd love to hear it again, you can either find it through Talking Vision on the podcast app of your choice through the Vision Australia Library, or through the Interview Highlights feed, where you can find an extended version of the conversation with Stephen and Gary. However, in the meantime, let's get back to Stephen right now. 00:15:12 S4: I'm speaking with Gary O'Donoghue. He's who's the BBC's chief North America correspondent. You might have heard him on BBC World Television or BBC World Service Radio. I hope you have, because he does a great job. He's blind and he's telling us about his work. Tell us about the place of Braille in your life. 00:15:30 S5: Braille is absolutely essential. I was taught Braille as soon as I lost my sight. In fact, you know, like a number of days after I emerged from hospital at eight years old. The partially sighted school I was at, you know, took me out of my classes, sat me on a bench outside, and a Braille teacher turned up and started teaching me Braille. And that carried on through the blind schools I went to, you know, at Worcester. We had a whole year at the beginning dedicated to getting people up to a Braille, you know, a good Braille reading standard. Um, you know, the first year was that was what it was all about. Um, and I use it all the time. I use it in my work all the time for reading scripts. Um, I use it Usually electronically. Also, when I'm on the road for reading scripts and taking notes and taking notes in press conferences or, uh, writing out a piece for BBC online or something like that. So it is, it is central. I use, I read a little bit with Braille for pleasure. I do use audiobooks probably more, but with the advent of things like the Kindle app and also Apple books, you know, sometimes I, I, I increasingly nowadays kind of do a mixture of reading, particularly with nonfiction, where I'll read a couple of pages with the speech, and then I might read a page or two with the Braille display. And I find that kind of really aids my concentration. Mhm. And it, you know, it keeps up my, my Braille reading as well. Make sure I'm doing plenty more of that. Um, and, and it's just a, I find it a very enjoyable way of consuming a book, actually. 00:17:05 S4: It's challenging when to step in and buy a new device, isn't it? Because it's changing all the time. 00:17:10 S5: Yes it is. Um, but, but in many ways. right? You know, not some things haven't changed, which is, you know, 40 cells of, of electronic Braille. You know, we had that 30 years ago and we still have that now, don't we? And now there's all sorts of things that are changing with multi-line Braille displays. And we'll see, um, how they, I mean, that would be a joy for me in a studio environment presenting. I do some presentation of live programs now on the world Service like NewsHour and the weekend. Um, and, you know, I'm still working off paper with that scripts being printed run into the studio handed to me three seconds before I read them and stuff. 00:17:48 S4: Because you've got all the lines and under your fingers, you're not absolutely. 00:17:52 S5: Yeah. You're not scrabbling around and you're not reliant on, you know, devices. But if they could produce a multi-line display that would allow me to just use the computer and have a sort of, because you get a sense of how much there is to read and where the audio comes in. For example, when you've got it physically in front of you that you don't get when you only see a line at a time on a Braille display. So a multi-line thing would The thing I've noticed, though, is that when they refresh these multi-line things there too, it's too noisy for a studio environment. You can't can't have that noise going on in a studio. It'll be too distracting. So hopefully at some point there'll be a technology that refreshes, gives me ten lines of Braille. Refreshing silently. I'd definitely go for that. 00:18:33 S4: I want to take you back though, to another application of noisy, very busy environments. Give us with your time in America three. Let's call them high adrenaline moments. 00:18:47 S5: Three high adrenaline moments. Uh, well, I suppose. We don't just, for example, we don't just do politics in America. So I remember things like, you know, being sent on, um, uh, you know, sent out from on various mass shootings at times. And, you know, and times when we were sent to, to cover these

mass shootings, which are all too regular in America, as you know, you know, when the the gunman is still on the loose and you're hanging around a place that he's, you know, where he shot people up and, uh, not knowing what's going to happen. And we certainly had that in a couple of the deployments I went to, uh, also going to hurricanes. You know, I've stood in hurricanes. I stood in a category five hurricane in, um, in Florida, Hurricane Michael, um, which absolutely devastated the panhandle of Florida. Um, and that was pretty, uh, pretty high intensity. But I suppose the, the, in terms of the, the most pressurised, one of the most pressurised moments has got to be when I was there, when um a man, um, Thomas Crooks attempted to assassinate, uh, President Trump, um, just before the 2024 election. 00:20:00 S4: Absolutely sensational radio that you were at, at the rally and then outside. 00:20:05 S5: Well, it was a it was quite a moment. And, you know, it's one of those things where you kind of it was a it was an early summer's evening. Uh, we were just, you know, doing some gentle lives. Thought this is just on our way, actually, to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. We thought, okay, here's a he's doing a rally in in Pennsylvania. We can drive there and then fly from Pittsburgh and get to the RNC the next day, do a few lives. He may or may not announce his vice president tonight. Who knows? And then suddenly the whole world kind of comes apart when you hear these shots. And and I knew straight away it was shooting. You know, the one thing about the sad thing about living in America for so long is that you you do know what shots sound like. Um, and, uh, and then the next few hours was absolute. I mean, that's, I've never felt been under such pressure as a broadcaster, as a professional, uh, as those few hours. And we were fortunate enough to, just because of where we were placed, that we weren't really under any restrictions. Um, because a lot of journalists who were there were sort of penned into a pen and we weren't, um, for various reasons, and it meant we could talk to everyone who'd been there. And we we, um, we found this guy who'd actually seen the shooter and tried to warn Secret Service before he took his shots at, uh, at Donald Trump. 00:21:29 S4: He saw him on a roof, didn't he? 00:21:31 S5: He did. He saw him climb onto the roof. He saw him and he pointed him out. And the Secret Service, you know, he was trying to get their attention, trying to get them to take it seriously. And then he was, uh, he was it was a very interesting moment, Stephen, from a visually impaired point of view, because, you know, only afterwards did someone say to me, do you know what that guy looked like? And I said, no, I don't know what he said. Well, he's got this kind of weird fake orange hair. He's like, um, uh, got a can of beer in his hand, etc. and I was thinking, if I could see, I wonder if I'd have put him on air. Yeah. You know, I wonder if I'd have been a bit worried about what he was going to say, because it was a really explosive situation. People were were very angry, very upset. It was a you know, one guy walked past me when I was on air and said, they shot first. This is war, right? So, you know, the atmosphere was was absolutely fever pitch. And if I put someone on air in any kind of spouted a load of nonsense, that could have made things a lot worse. But I just listened to him. I obviously I didn't know what he looked like, but I listened to him and he kept saying to me, this was off air beforehand. He was consistent and I kept asking him to repeat himself and he was consistent with what he was saying. I think, okay, this guy, you know, does know what he's seen, you know? And so I put him on air and he told this story. And what he said has completely stood the test of time. He was, you know, genuinely the first eyewitness to what had happened. Um, and that clip, um, ended up getting sort of, you know, sent around. I mean, I think the last time we looked, that clip of him had been viewed like in terms of social media 300 million times. And you realize with that kind of thing, you realize that you kind of you're reaching like the whole globe. 00:23:25 S4: Now, you and your team have been recognized for that piece of broadcasting, haven't you? 00:23:31 S5: We were we have we were fortunate enough to to win a Royal Television Society Award earlier this year for for breaking news in London. And so we went into went to a fancy hotel in Park Lane and um, had a few sherbets and um and uh, got an award and uh, and I, I hadn't really thought about what I was going to say if we won, but I did, I did, I decided that as I was walking up to the stage, I'm going to make a point here. And I did make a point there about, you know, the blind people and, and how, you know, there are barriers and there are still barriers for, for blind journalists and how, you know, I hoped that this would, you know, put some of that doubt to bed, you know, about blind people working in television. And and it got a very, very good, very positive response, not just from the room, which was very warming. You know, this is all your peers. Um, but also in the sort of online as well, it got, it got very well received. So we're very, very lucky. We also got nominated for an Emmy, which we didn't win, but I'll take an Emmy nomination any day, which is very nice. Yeah. Pretty good. 00:24:40 S4: So tell me when you're doing a project like that, an assignment like that, um, who do you have with you? You're, I'm sure you're, they're your best friends, um, in that particular situation, but your friends and colleagues working with you, how does that work? How many of you are there and what happens? 00:24:56 S5: We tend to work in teams of three. So what we tend to have is a cameraman who's also what we call nowadays a shoot edit. So they can also edit video. Uh, there's a correspondent and a producer. Um, and that's true for, you know, me. And it's also true for my sighted colleagues, that team That tends to be the basic team. Um, and you might be doing a mixture of lives, what we call lives. In other words, you know, stand up in front of a camera, talk live to the presenter in the studio in London. You might be, you're doing a lot of what they call digital stuff now. So live these live pages on the website that are kind of, you know, have sort of bite size hundred word contributions on rolling stories. Those are a huge priority for us. Now you sort of witnessing stuff, writing stuff up, doing little bits of analysis. You might be filing radio voice pieces, which are like the 42nd bits that go in the news bulletins. Um, you might be doing radio packages, you might be doing television packages. Um, you might be doing, you know, sit down interviews, but yeah, it's three of you and a car is what you need. 00:26:05 S4: So when you were in, I think it was New York, when Joe Biden was confirmed as winning the 2020 election, it was a Saturday night, high excitement. Uh, and, uh, BBC World Television were crossing. World news television were crossing to you. Um, you would have had a producer helping you source the content that you needed to explain, etc.. 00:26:29 S5: I think 2020, I was actually at the white House. Um, I was in New York for 2016 at Hillary Clinton's party when, um, she lost. And that was an extraordinary experience because this sort of party suddenly evaporated and all these people dancing were then crying. Um, but in 2020, I was, yeah, I would have had, um, uh, a producer, we probably in those circumstances, when you have a sort of big story, you sometimes have engineers around as well. And there might be more than one team. So there could be two teams of 3 in 1 location. One could be doing, um, lives and another one could be gathering, uh, to cut a package immediately. So, um, so there can be a mixture of things, but yeah, the basic unit is a, is a team of three. 00:27:21 S2: And that's all the time we have for today. You've been listening to Talking Vision. Talking vision is a Vision Australia radio production. Thanks to all involved with putting the show together every week. And remember, we love hearing from you. So please get in touch anytime on our email at talking vision at vision australia.org. That's talking vision all one word at vision australia.org. 00:27:52 S1: You can contact Vision Australia by phoning us anytime during business hours on 130847466, that's 130847466, or by visiting vision australia.org. That's Vision australia.org.