# On Your Own Terms

> On Your Own Terms is the first exhibit of the Museum of Access and Assistive Technology: the return of the ordinary freedom to browse for a book and choose it alone.

**Canon.** This entry is written from inside the CharliVerse, so its people and companies are fictional. Behind the scenes says what is real.

***On Your Own Terms*** is the first exhibit of the [Museum of Access and Assistive Technology](https://charli.info/charlipedia/museum-of-access-and-assistive-technology/), filed under Access to Ordinary Life, Shopping and Browsing, from 1997 onwards. It is also the founding exhibit of the [Sideways Breakthroughs](https://charli.info/charlipedia/sideways-breakthroughs/) strand.

## What it holds

A bookshop on a Friday evening, with wine and music. Browsing worked beautifully and socially, but always through someone else: you were present in someone else's wandering. Then, around 1997 or 1998, with no announcement, there was a screen reader, a keyboard and a list of book titles that linked to other book titles. You could look for anything you wanted, with no goal, alone, for the first time.

Amazon was not designed as assistive technology. It was a warehouse company that built a bookshop out of text, links and structured pages a screen reader could navigate. The accessibility was accidental. The impact was not. Shopping stopped being a request and became exploration.

The exhibit holds both: the social browsing that was warm and mediated, and the solitary browsing that was private and unlimited. One didn't replace the other. What returned was something sighted people never notice losing: the ability to look around.

## How it is met

[Tamsin](https://charli.info/charlipedia/tamsin/) designed the approach. It begins with one line, "Imagine stopping a book halfway through and not being able to continue it for six months", and only then do the machines appear, each reopening a little more of the same life: a talking-book player, a reading machine that cost £9,000 in 1990, a screen reader, a website. At the end there is no machine at all.

## How it was filed

[Iris](https://charli.info/charlipedia/iris/) first filed it under Reading Devices, and moved it, on the record, when she saw that this reduced a life to a piece of hardware. The Steward, [Charlotte Joanne](https://charli.info/charlipedia/charlotte-joanne/), put it plainly: "The real subject is not the machines. It is the return of ordinary human freedoms."

## Behind the scenes

This entry is drawn from the Museum Court Soul Document, version four. The exhibit is built from real testimony, given to the museum by its depositor. Amazon, and the online bookshop it opened in the 1990s, are real.