A-Tech Review

The Market Charity Model

Most assistive technology is delivered with a charity model.

Governments and private entities, organized on a non-profit basis, unite to create solutions for clients.

This is not the only model for assistive technology.

What I would like to see more of is the market charity model. This is what the Skoll Foundation (right) promotes as social entrepreneurship.

This model first developed as dot-com millionaires and billionaires started setting up foundations to give away their money several years ago. The idea was that, instead of giving money to projects which would help people, they would give money to projects that would seek profits in helping people. In this way, they felt, their gifts would become self-sustaining.

Most of what we've seen at events like the recent SKOLL Forum and the CSUN Conference has been based on the charity model. While there is nothing wrong with such conferences, in creating solutions, I think they're all missing the ultimate point, which is self-sustainability and the market.

Social entrepreneurship, in other words, needs to accelerate.

It's possible many of the market charity foundations may also be missing the boat here. Instead of creating a single entity and sending that into the market, I think it would make sense to fund multiple entities, and to keep funding new entities as new ideas arise, in the same solution areas.

What Cellular Teaches Assistive Technology

What is most vital in creating an active market is real competition. (Picture from Vision Connection.)

This is a problem in assistive technology, where we usually have maybe one and one half competitors. That is, Microsoft delivers, and open source tries to catch up. Those are the only two choices. Thus Microsoft is able to use its technology lead to dictate to those needing assistive technologies, then use their needs to dictate to the rest of the market.

Thus it doesn't matter that there are multiple vendors within the Microsoft space, in, say, screen readers. There aren't enough to create a competitive market, because they are all working on the same platform.

If open source could match Microsoft, feature-for-feature, and match Microsoft's delivery schedule, date-for-date, and if open source were also as able to innovate on behalf of its customers as Microsoft has been, then we would have a competitive market, even if Apple never entered it.

The Global Opportunity of Always-On

What I call Always-On technology, sensors and monitors using a wireless network as an application platform, sounds like science fiction. It also sounds like an opportunity that can only be real in the most advanced countries, like the U.S. and Japan.

But that is simply not the case.

The Singapore blog Dream Ink details some of the real opportunities, in discussing the need to treat seniors better:

• China will have 174 million senior citizens aged over 60 in 2010, and the number will peak in 2030 when the national population hits 1.5 billion.
• About 80 million Indians — more than the entire population of Britain — are over 60 at present. This figure is projected to touch 100 million by 2013 and 198 million by 2030.

Singapore itself now has 291,000 elderly and this number will double by 2020.

The Importance (And Danger) Of A Warm COAT

The Blind Bookworm reports that some 45 organizations -- state, local, and federal -- have gathered together into a grand coalition they are calling the Coalition of Organizations for Accessible Technology, or COAT for short. (The coat at the right is from the 18th century. Why will become obvious.)

COAT has some big dreams:

• Extend disability protections to the Internet, forcing Web sites to support assistive technology.
• Make all TV-like devices support closed captioning.
• Apply closed captioning to IPTV
• Restore video description rules that were knocked out by the courts, and extend them into digital TV.
• Extend relay service taxes to VOIP
• Require accessible interfaces on all consumer devices.
• Demand accessibility for 911 services.
• Get Universal Service Fund money for people with disabilities.
  

How Useful is EyePoint?

If you have a neck injury but retain use of your fingers, you can get relief at the computer by using EyePoint, a system recently developed at Stanford. (Thanks to Access on Main Street for pointing me to it.) The demonstration above, posted at YouTube, describes the system.

EyePoint works using a four-part process. You look at a page, you press a key, you look again and you press a second key. There aren't the multiple mouseclicks that disturb people with carpal-tunnel syndrome, and you're actually getting work, not just sight, from your eye glances.

Happy Spin Betrays Unhappy Truths

Back when I was writing about the World of Always-On, wireless routers as platforms for applications which live in the air, no one was following me.

Now they are. Mostly they're doing it with happy fun talk, but they are following.

Here is a good example. It's the blog for Gilbert Guide, a nursing care directory. It calls Always-On applications "ambient intelligence environments," which is a fancy way of saying that sensors track the patient's activities, reducing the load on caregivers.

I don't object to any of this, including the renaming of the technology to something complex and forbidding. What I object to is the presumed sales method and the power relationships built inside it.

When Always-On applications are sold as a system, to the family, the patient loses power (and so does the family -- it's a system sale like buying the nursing home itself). When the application is sold directly to the patient or the family, when you're able to get a heart or sugar monitor at BestBuy, or get the plans for a complete home makeover at Make Magazine, now you have the power and control.

The Importance of PDF Equalizer

One of the most important bits of assistive technology around may be PDF Equalizer. It's from Premier Assistive, which has been in business since 1998.

As the name implies this is a tool for dealing with Adobe PDF files. PDFs are commonly used for reports posted on the Web, and in electronic books.

One of the big problems with PDFs is that they're highly complex. They don't have to be linear like book pages. They can have nested charts, links, dependencies of all sorts. These are quickly apparent to those with sight, but to those without it's not so obvious.

So it's not enough that software support reading the text of a PDF to you. If it just does that, you've lost most of the meaning. Given the technical nature of many PDF documents, plain reading won't really help you.

So PDF Equalizer does a whole lot more.