My friend John Evans, a leading light in the Independent Living movement of disabled people in Britain and internationally, had a marvellous collection of documents which have been added to the Disabled People’s Archive in Manchester.
In 1981 John took a trip to the USA to talk to the leaders and staff of CILs (Centres for Independent Living), travelling from coast to coast and recording 32 interviews on audio cassettes. On his return to the UK his friend Virginia Mason typed up the recordings on her Amstrad home computer, creating nearly 200 pages of closely typed A4 sheets.
By 2018 the Amstrad “floppy” disks were long lost and only one paper copy survived. John Evans then trusted me with his last, unique copy to add it to the Disabled People’s Archive, and I agreed to carefully scan it and share copies before handing over the original.
At that time these sheets were scanned using OCR tech (optical character recognition) to try to create a new digital copy, but the error rates in the tech trying to read the letters on the page then were too high. A PDF copy was created, but it was visual rather than digital.
However, seven years later in 2025 the tech had improved so much that an accurate digital copy became possible. After a few weeks of further work and consultations, here it is.
Plus:
Tony Baldwinson 