A-Tech Review

Price vs. Service in Assistive Technology

As the price of a product drops, and its market increases, the amount of service and support you can get on it goes down.

I first learned this important law from my late father. In the 1960s he ran a TV repair shop called TowerTV. He got out of the business in 1973 for personal reasons, but it turned out his market timing was excellent. TV repair quickly disappeared as chip technology made TVs more reliable. (This picture, believe it or not, was taken when my dad was 65. He passed away in 1999.)

And anyone who got into repair soon found that the same forces would work faster-and-faster as they moved up-market. Fact is it's now more expensive to repair a consumer video camera or PC than it is to just replace it.

That's what people do now. Lots of niches, like the one occupied by my friend Alex Randall back in the day, have virtually disappeared, and the biggest problem with the electronics industry today is its environmental impact -- pollution on the front-end, landfills on the back end.

Support, training, some help here? Fuhgetaboutit.

Assistive Technology and Mental Health

At this moment of horror and grief, I don't have answers. Just a question.

How can assistive technology help with our mental health challenge?

We already have many great tools for learning disabilities, such as Inspiration.

We need more tools for other mental health problems.

We need computer tools to assist in diagnosis. We need Internet tools to link people to the help they need. We need computer tools to assist in whatever remediation is possible.

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.

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.
  

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.

One Ring To Rule Them All

There are so many disabilities, and their needs contradict. Getting them onto the same technology page may be impossible.

So Mike Davies, a leader in trying to build accessibility technology into open source through Isolani, has come to believe. (The ad, on behalf of Joe Clark's Accessibility Research Project, is from Mike's site.)

Recently Davies called out some of the groups he feels haven't met user needs:

GAWDS has failed. Accessifyforum has failed. Accessites is fundamentally flawed. WCAG 2.0 is in trouble.

Naturally, a spirited discussion followed. Mike was quoted, writing "we need a community of people working on the Web (as a content producer, as a browser - or plugin - vendor, as an assistive technology provider), focused on accessibility. And that we simply don't have." Some users attacked Mike while others, like Mike Cherim, defended the efforts he derided.

The truth is something common to open source. Money. Money is needed to get work done, to have that work incorporated into Web standards, and to turn that work into Web sites that are accessible to all.

The money's failure to materialize in the free market is a chicken-and-egg problem. We want something to invest in. I need money to create that. You need protection for the resulting IP to get the money. Which takes you out of the Web standards game entirely, because imposing a fee for using Web standards is just impractical.

Real Help for Dementia Victims

We often think of assistive technology as being items that help you use technology, or items that help you get through the day.

How about items that save your soul?

That's what Francesca of the blog Towering Flat in London pointed me to today.  It's dubbed CIRCA, and it's produced by the computing department at the University of Dundee.

Here's how Francesca explains it:

It is an interactive interface which allows patients to freely reminesce by choosing between a selection of songs and photos. Often progressive states of dementia lead to silence and a period of non-communication, and these memory boxes act as a trigger for patients and their relatives, as well as their caregivers. They also lessen the burden of care on overworked and understaffed residences.

AT Help for Dementia

Laurie Blanchard has been helping compile some great resources at her Long Term Care blog.

Today she offers help on one of the least-noticed areas in assistive technology, dementia.

We are accustomed to looking at assistive technologies helping the blind, the deaf, even the paralyzed. Those with mental problems, we think, not so much.

But that's not true. There are products that can help these people, too. The site's product listings are divided into groups:

• prompts and reminders.
• communication
• leisure
• communication