A-Tech Review

Blind Fear Wafra Purchase of Freedom Scientific

The purchase by Wafra Partners, a private equity group based in Kuwait, of Freedom Scientific, which sells the market-leading JAWS screen-reader, is causing some fear among advocates for the blind.

Blind Confidential investigated and got a cool reaction from Freedom employees:

Communication with the FS rank and file has resulted in people telling BC sources, “we were brought into an ‘All Hands’ meeting and told that the company had been sold,” but no Freedom personnel is saying to whom the company may have been sold and details like the selling price remain undisclosed. Some FS employees have grumbled that their stock options turned out to be worthless but no one seems to know the threshold above which the company had to sell in order for the employees to make some money on the deal.

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.

What Will iCreate?

Singapore has decided to take the lead in assistive technology.

Its International Convention for Rehabilitation Engineering & Assistive Technology (i-Create) will be held at the Intercontinental Hotel in Singapore from April 24-26.

The conference is being held in conjunction with the 1st Tan Tock Seng Hospital, and will combine work on helping disabled work effectively with work on helping them become as able as possible.

Technology for Kids with LD

A blogger at Yahoo 360 has posted about technology for kids with learning disabilities.

I wish to comment on that here because I actually have some experience in this area.

Our daughter (right) was born with dyslexia. It was diagnosed at age 7. When she was 3, I remember sitting her down before a game called "Fun With Letters and Words", having her hit the keys and watch letters and words appear on a DOS screen. I never connected the dots. She would hit the same key again-and-again, she would finish a level and then repeat it, again-and-again. Something wasn't getting through.

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.

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.

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.

The New Platform is a Stick

When I was writing about Always-On technology, back in 2003, at the heart of my talk was the idea that a WiFi router should become an application platform, holding memory and processing power independent of the computer it's attached to.

This would allow medical monitoring, home inventory, or home automation processes to continue even when the main PC was turned off for the night, since these applications have to work all the time to be useful.

Now I'm learning about a new application platform built along those lines. It's the stick memory.

You probably know about memory sticks. These are memory chips connected to a USB port. You plug in the USB stick and gain access to the memory. This caused the final obsolescence of floppy disks, because a memory stick could have gigabytes of data and a floppy just a meg or two.

But it's now being used as an application platform as well. My first initiation into this was RoboForm, a program meant to hold all your personal passwords, sent me by the man who launched this blog, Martin Bayne. Seems they have a version called RoboForm2Go, which runs off a USB stick. This solves a big problem I have, namely the fact that I use a laptop. With RoboForm2Go, I can run my passwords off a stick, and use the same stick when I'm on the road, using my laptop.

One more important point. Once you can load software onto a USB stick, you can load it onto any device with USB memory and run it from there. You could have a screenreader loaded in your MP3 player, for instance, which would run when you're at a friend's computer. (That's what the illustration above shows, from RJ Cooper & Associates.)

Government Support for Assistive Tech Falling

The need for assistive technology limits one's ability to make a living, and may eliminate it.

Or, you may find yourself at a Catch-22. You don't have money, you can get money if you have assistive technology, but you don't have money.

This is a good job for government, but governments have other priorities.

A recent UN Survey showed that only half the world's governments had made progress, over the last 10 years, in meeting 22 key goals for assistive technology. Even in those countries that have made progress, as Inclusive Technologies notes, progress has been piecemeal.

And it's going to get more piecemeal. A blog for speech pathologists, called What Do You Hear What Do You Say, reports that many programs for the disabled have their funding slashed in the 2008 budget submitted by President Bush.

Always-On and Assisted Living

A recent Minneapolis Star-Tribune story illustrates what I call The World of Always On, and the enormous power of assistive technology based on wireless networking.

The headline most will see is a proposal to give tax credits for assistive technologies. In this it was carrying water for Ecumen, a non-profit in the business of building senior care centers that has lately focused on technology enabling lower costs and better care, specifically installing monitors from QuietCare in patient rooms.

HealthSense, which is based in Minnesota, also sells a sensor network called eNeighbor, essentially a movement sensor that monitors patients over a wireless network and alerts caregivers when patterns suddenly change.

Europe Takes the Lead in TeleMedicine

Medical help delivered by the Internet is going to be a huge industry, absolutely huge. A small investment in this research today can reap enormous dividends. And much of the chip and networking technology needed was developed in the U.S.

But we're giving that lead away, because it's Europe that is making the investment.

A 20-member consortium dubbed the SOPRANO Project is going to put 12 million Euros into practical investigations of what I call Always-On technology.

The World of Always On, which consumed many of my efforts in 2003-2004, posits using a WiFi network as a platform for applications which live in the air. RFID chips, sensors, and motes in our environment, and in us, constantly report via wireless data radio to programs that are always-on, perhaps in the WiFi router itself. These programs analyze the data, and give alerts when conditions warrant, perhaps to the patient, or a caregiver, a doctor, or an ambulance.

In the SOPRANO Project 600 people across Europe will test the technologies, aiming to find solutions that work, user interfaces that are comfortable, and an a defined application platform that can then be used by industry.

Open Source piggy-backing just for you

Since I write about open source as part of my living, I have to admit Microsoft's dominance in assistive technology is galling.

But this is more so.

Sun is bragging that its new ODF Converter, which will move files between the Open Office ODF format and that of Microsoft Office, is its big contribution to assistive technology.

"Right now, our focus is to ensure that people using assistive devices are able to join in with OpenDocument workflows," Simon Phipps (right), chief open-source officer at Sun said. "Because Microsoft hasn't published interfaces for those devices to use, they are all hard-wired to Office 2003, and their users can't migrate to other software."

That's spin, Simon. You're blaming Microsoft for not having interfaces, as an excuse for your piss-poor performance in delivering any assistive help in your product category. So you expect blind, deaf and/or handicapped users to all grab Open Office and your converter software, rather than use Office, which has that support natively?

Know Your Rights and Sue for Assistive Technology

You have a right to software you can use, regardless of your disability.

There are a number of laws asserting this, as Deafgeek notes.

The Americans with Disabilities Act, The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.  The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004. The Rehabilitation Amendments -- they are all there to be used.

Trouble is they are not used often enough.

Fast Help for Disabled Learners

People who teach kids with disabilities, whether physical, intellectual, or merely learning, have a tough time coming up with aids they know will work, in-time to use them.

There are, when you break it down, so many things that people must learn to be successful -- reading, writing, arithmetic, critical thinking -- and teachers are really given very little time to teach it all because most kids pick it all up naturally, and only have to be presented the information in order to get going.

Open source getting its assistive act together

The open source movement is starting to get its assistive technology act together.

The latest version of the Linux Screen Reader, which runs in the GNOME operating environment (there's another graphical user interface for Linux called KDE), is now out.

Version 0.4 now supports such things as Braille output, cyclic commands (as when you touch a key multiple times to get information on a Web 2.0 site), and its own icon, which can tell you (or others) when it is running.

Now want to get even more bang for your assistive technology buck?

Stop being victims, become advocates

It is vital that in every area of assistive technology, patients avoid the role of victim and become advocates.

Here's a good case study of what's possible.

Doug Rose is a tech writer for a small California paper called the Times-Standard. He's also blind. In addition to his reporting, he and his wife  Patti are members of the  region's technology consortium. 

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

More Than Words Are Needed

Following its Florida conference last week, the Assistive Technology industry Association hosted a full-day of gab in Orlando, where corporate executives tried to talk things up.

IBM was the main driver of the program, and the result was a business case with numbers like these:

• 155 million people in the U.S. need accessibility technologies of some type.
• Disabled Americans represent $175 billion in discretionary income.

Big numbers. But if the opportunity is so enormous, why are so few corporations pursuing it?

The reason is that this market, by its nature, does not speak for itself. Most of those who speak for the disabled are advocates, who speak from a non-profit or government viewpoint. They mainly see this area as a cost, not as an opportunity.

When your body is locked in a nursing home, or you are locked in your own home by blindness or paralysis, it's very hard to turn that buying power into a market force which must be respected.

Until the people within this market gain more control of their money, and demand entry to the mainstream, this won't change.

So I have the most optimism here regarding the aging of America, especially the baby boomers (of which I am one). We are accustomed to whining, to demanding action and holding out vast sums of money to those who meet our needs.

What Microsoft Has Done Right

Regular readers here know I have a tendency to bash Microsoft.

But there's something they're doing right, something very important.

They are bringing out all their accessibility features with Windows Vista and Office 2007 alongside the launch of the software.

This is especially important with regards the operating system. Microsoft has been working for three years on this release and hundreds of application programs will come out alongside it. These programs, too, can be expected to have accessibility features implemented.

Web 2.0 For All

One continuing frustration is the lag between technical improvements and their adaptation for disabled users. (Image from AndyBudd.)

The Apple iPhone, for instance, does not meet the requirements of Section 255 in the Federal Communications Act. That means your needs haven't been considered, and you really shouldn't be considering it.

As Chairman Mal (the newest addition to our blogroll) notes,

I’m still waiting for access to I Tunes and those nifty little I Pods.  During the ice storm last week, I thought there might be a chance this could happen, but hell froze over with no word from Apple!

The same problem exists with the improvements known as Web 2.0.

Is the iPhone Really a Step Forward?

The Apple iPhone is considered a giant step forward in user interface design.

But is that true for everyone?

Just like current phones, the iPhone features tiny icons. While it can be programmed for voice commands, that programming requires good vision -- it can't be done by voice alone.

The sad fact is that the cellular revolution has happened with almost no input, and no attention paid, to those with disabilities. It's a welter of proprietary designs and interfaces. When you change phones you lose everything you put into the old one.

And from here the iPhone doesn't really look different.