NY Times on Access Tech

From: Kelly Ford (kford@TELEPORT.COM)
Date: Mon Sep 15 1997 - 10:19:06 PDT


This is a long article so my apologies in advance. Nice to see this
subject getting such coverage. This article ran in Sunday's New York
Times.
Kelly Ford
kford@teleport.com
See my home page at http://www.teleport.com/~kford/index.html
      September 14, 1997
Technologies That Enable the Disabled
      By BRUCE FELTON
     With meetings, paperwork, phone conferences and a travel schedule
     that eats up three weeks a month, Urban Miyares doesn't get much
     reading done during the workday. So Miyares, a San Diego
     businessman who runs the Disabled Businesspersons Association,
     rises at 6 most mornings and spends an hour or so catching up on
     E-mail, reports and business magazines before leaving for the
     office. In the evening, he picks up where he left off, typically
     reading into the small hours.
     Although Miyares is blind, Braille is of little use to him because
     the diabetes that destroyed his vision also deadened the nerve
     endings in his fingertips. Instead, he reads with a remarkable
     device called a Kurzweil Reading Edge optical scanner, which takes
     about five seconds to absorb a page of print and begin converting
     it to spoken text.
     Miyares exemplifies the degree to which so-called adaptive or
     assistive devices have allowed people to sidestep their
     disabilities and perform at peak levels. Some devices, like his
     Kurzweil scanner, rely on highly sophisticated technologies; others
     are as low-tech as amplified telephones and motorized wheelchairs.
     "If I had been born 50 years earlier, I'd be sweeping floors
     instead of running a business," said Christopher D. Sullivan, a
     former Wall Street technical analyst who is deaf and heads Merrill
     Lynch's Services for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Investors in
     Plainsboro, N.J. "Technology is what makes the difference."
     In recent years, an entire technology sub-sector has burgeoned with
     the express purpose of capitalizing on the growing market for
     assistive devices. A spokesman for Henter Joyce Inc., a company
     based in St. Petersburg, Fla., that specializes in computer screen
     reading devices for the blind, would not disclose earnings figures,
     but said its work force had tripled to 24 in the last year. LC
     Technologies, a small company in Fairfax, Va., that makes
     eye-activated computers, said orders had increased sharply in the
     last six months.
     And, according to Voice Information Associates, a market research
     firm in Lexington, Mass., the market for speech-to-text products,
     projected at $410 million in 1997, should top $4.3 billion by 2001.
     Top-tier technology companies like Xerox, which makes the Kurzweil
     scanner, likewise joined the parade.
     But this isn't to suggest that all mainstream technology companies
     have kneed and elbowed one another in the race to make their
     existing products accessible.
     "It's only been two years since Microsoft finally agreed to make
     its Windows software accessible to the disabled," said Lawrence
     Scadden, who is blind and serves as a senior program officer for
     the National Science Foundation in Washington. "I'm positive they
     made the decision only when the states of Massachusetts and
     Missouri and the Social Security Administration said they wouldn't
     buy Windows because it wasn't usable by blind persons."
     Luanne LaLonde, the accessibility product manager for Microsoft,
     said, "It's no secret that these actions brought pressure on us to
     place even greater emphasis on an effort that had already been in
     place." She added that the company had made accessibility a
     priority for six years and that Windows 98, the next version of its
     signature operating system, "will be inherently even more usable by
     vision-impaired users," with automatic adjustments of screen size
     and contrast, among other features.
     Not surprisingly, technology has made its greatest difference in
     the seven years since the passage of the Americans With
     Disabilities Act. Along with banning employment discrimination
     against disabled persons, the act requires businesses with 15 or
     more employees to provide "reasonable accommodation," a catch-all
     phrase that ranges from gadgets that allow disabled workers to do
     their jobs to ramps and widened doorways that let them get to their
     jobs in the first place.
     Large companies appear to have moved most quickly toward making
     those accommodations. "The problem is that 80 percent of all jobs
     are with smaller businesses, where there is more misinformation and
     discrimination," said Doris Fleischer, co-author, with Frieda
     Zames, of "From Charity to Confrontation: The Modern Disability
     Rights Movement," soon to be published by Temple University Press.
     "Big companies doing business with the federal government have been
     required to provide accommodations since 1973. Smaller companies,
     which typically don't depend on federal contracts, are still
     struggling to accept the idea."
     One common fear is that accommodating disabled workers is
     expensive. "Building a one-step ramp to make a store
     wheelchair-accessible costs less than $400," said Dr. Fleischer,
     who teaches humanities at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
     "Mounting a table on blocks so that a mobility-impaired employee
     can use it costs virtually nothing. These are minimal investments,
     but they open a large and invaluable talent pool to employers."
     Just how large is open to debate. The National Organization on
     Disability, based in Washington, says 49 million Americans are
     disabled, with 29 million of prime working age, from 21 to 64, of
     whom half are employed. But some say those figures are low. "Start
     counting people with dyslexia, diabetes and other hidden
     disabilities, and you're over 100 million," Miyares said.
     Whatever number is used, the disabled account for a sizable part of
     the work force. As the general population ages, adaptive
     technologies continue to evolve and employers become more
     welcoming, that segment seems sure to grow. Some disabled workers
     will rise to the top of their professions, others will coast and
     the vast middle will perform adequately -- the same as their
     able-bodied colleagues.
     Then there will be those like Miyares, Sullivan and others who rely
     on technology to help them push the limits of creativity and grit
     and force a careful reconsideration of what it means to be
     disabled. Some of their stories follow.
     Endowed with large hands, dazzling virtuosity and a brilliant
     future, musician-composer Jason Becker learned that he might be
     suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis a week after he was
     hired as lead guitarist for David Lee Roth, the rock star. The year
     was 1989 and Becker was 19.
     Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis -- better known as Lou Gehrig's
     disease after the New York Yankees superstar who died in 1941 -- is
     a degenerative neuron impairment that gradually shuts down the
     muscles, bringing atrophy and paralysis. It is incurable and often
     fatal, but Becker's grim diagnosis "sort of went in one ear and out
     the other," he wrote recently in A.L.S. Digest, a magazine
     published on the World Wide Web. "All I knew was that I'd just
     joined Dave's band and I was going to be the guitarist."
     He performed with the band even as his symptoms advanced. When his
     hands weakened, he switched to lighter-gauge strings and then a
     guitar with an easier action. He started taking more than 100
     vitamins a day and bought a $200 pair of Nike Air Jordans in an
     effort to steady his shaky balance. Finally, he quit the band and,
     after a brief stay in Los Angeles, moved back into his parents'
     house in the San Francisco Bay area.
     In 1991, unable to play the guitar without pain and shaking, Becker
     began composing on a Macintosh Classic computer linked to an
     electronic keyboard and a digital synthesizer. Later, as his
     condition worsened, he tapped out musical lines on the keys of an
     on-screen keyboard with a device held in his mouth.
     He also wore a wireless "Head Mouse," which allowed him to control
     a cursor and compose on screen solely by moving his head. A result
     of those efforts is "Perspective," a haunting compact disk
     recording of his music that departs radically from his hard-rock
     roots. It was released this year by Apallon International.
     "Not playing guitar has been the hardest thing about having
     A.L.S.," Becker said in a recent E-mail message. "It has also made
     composing more difficult. But the music from 'Perspective' just
     flowed out of me, almost as if it came from somewhere else."
     Since the release of "Perspective," Becker's muscle control has
     continued to erode. At 27, he can no longer speak or walk, and has
     limited movement in only three fingers.
     He lives next door to his parents in Richmond, Calif.,
     communicating with them and his fiancee, who take turns caring for
     him, largely by means of an alphabet board designed by his father.
     If he's in distress, or simply needs to have a fly brushed away
     from his face, he rings an electric bell that sits in his lap.
     In Becker's current condition, the devices he used even a few
     months ago to compose music are largely useless to him.
     "Jason is in a kind of artistic holding pattern, waiting for a
     technology that will let him resume composing," said his friend and
     computer guru, Mike Bemesderfer.
     That may come in the form of the Eyegaze computer from LC
     Technologies. At the heart of the $20,000 system is a retooled
     casino surveillance camera that tracks the user's gaze with an
     infrared beam. While looking at a grid of characters displayed on
     the screen, the user is able to type by allowing his or her gaze to
     settle on the desired key for a fraction of a second.
     Becker took the system for a spin recently at his home. As he
     shifted the gaze of his left pupil from key to key, letters, and
     then words and sentences, appeared.
     But Eyegaze does not lend itself to composing and orchestrating --
     not at the moment, anyway. That is because it lacks an
     eye-activated mouse, which Becker needs to operate his music
     software. A spokeswoman for LC Technologies said that such a device
     was under development and could be available next year.
     The composer is eager to try it. "There's music that's been in my
     head for years," he said. "I can't wait to make it a reality."
     Deaf since infancy, Chris Sullivan attended a special school at
     which pupils who used hand signals were smacked with a ruler. "The
     idea was to read lips and to speak like hearing people," he said.
     "Signing was considered a sign of weakness."
     Sullivan learned his lesson well: as a successful Wall Street
     investor and entrepreneur, he lived exclusively in the world of the
     hearing, with no deaf friends, no interest in deaf organizations
     and, almost as a matter of pride, no knowledge of American Sign
     Language. Even his first wife had normal hearing.
     All that is changed now. Sullivan, 50, is married to a deaf woman,
     signs fluently and subscribes to Deaf Life and Silent News along
     with Forbes and Institutional Investor. And at Merrill Lynch's
     offices in Plainsboro, N.J., he runs a first-of-its-kind service
     focused solely on the needs of deaf and hard-of-hearing investors.
     The needs of such investors were not foremost on Sullivan's mind
     when he joined Merrill as a technical analyst in October 1987. At
     another firm, where he had tracked the commodities markets, he had
     proved himself a canny reader of tea leaves. But he was caught off
     guard, along with much of the rest of the world, when the stock
     market cratered two weeks after he started at Merrill.
     Over the next four months, he worked 90 to 100 hours a week feeding
     market data and forecasts to jittery clients and helping Merrill
     rebuild from the wreckage.
     Around the same time, Sullivan's new wife, Vicki Joy, was doggedly
     trying to raise his consciousness about being deaf. "She introduced
     me to other deaf people, got on my case to learn signing, exposed
     me to deaf culture," Sullivan said.
     Notwithstanding his successes, he learned that deaf people often
     found Wall Street distinctly user-unfriendly. "If you wanted
     investment advice or a product brochure, you'd have to have a
     hearing friend make the call for you," he said. "A lot of people
     decided it wasn't worth the trouble."
     In 1990, he gave up tracking the market to set up the unit serving
     the deaf and hard of hearing. Technology has figured large in the
     success of the unit, which began with $21 million in assets and
     today has more than $628 million.
     Sullivan recalled that a few years ago, a cadre of 85 financial
     consultants served the unit's clientele. "It was easy to find new
     business," he said, "because the market was totally untapped and
     clients tended to be clustered in clubs and community groups, ripe
     for the taking."
     But the consultants quickly reached a point where they could not
     handle more clients. Small wonder: "Even a simple phone
     conversation with a deaf client using a TTY took way too long,"
     Sullivan said. A TTY -- or telephone teletypewriter -- has a small
     display screen and keyboard and attaches easily to virtually any
     standard phone. The system, which is subsidized by small fees paid
     each month by all phone users, allows users to converse by typing.
     "With our sales force turning down leads for lack of time, I had
     visions of the business imploding," Sullivan said. "I was very
     nervous."
     Deliverance came with the Americans With Disabilities Act. The law
     laid the foundation for Relay, a telecommunications service, which
     went into operation in 1993 and lets the deaf communicate easily
     with those who hear.
     A specially trained operator acts as go-between, conveying the
     hearing person's spoken words to the deaf person on a TTY, and
     reading aloud the TTY messages to the hearing person. The process
     takes longer than a conventional phone call, but it is measurably
     faster than TTY -- and frees the hearing person from having to
     install special equipment.
     "With Relay, we suddenly had all 13,000 Merrill financial
     consultants in a position to take on as much new business as we
     could give them," Sullivan said. "Business surged."
     For entrepreneurs with disabilities, Urban Miyares likes to point
     out, one of technology's most compelling benefits is the way it
     screens them from their customers.
     "Reading an E-mail I've sent, or talking to me on the phone,
     there's no way you can tell what I look like," said Miyares, who
     founded the Disabled Businesspersons Association in 1985, a year
     after losing his sight. "Technology gives me the time to win your
     trust and build my business -- without having to overcome your
     reluctance to deal with a blind person."
     The diabetes that eventually left Miyares blind had first surfaced
     in 1968, when he was an infantry leader in Vietnam. Besides
     deadening the nerve endings in his hands and feet, the disease
     would leave him with wobbly balance; the impact of bomb explosions
     and mortar fire also damaged his hearing.
     Medically discharged from the Army, Miyares moved to New Jersey and
     started a construction company -- the first of nearly a score of
     enterprises he began over the next 15 years, including a hardware
     store, a public relations firm and a German restaurant. He made
     enough money to start the Disabled Businesspersons Association and
     finance it out of his own pocket for the first 11 years. It is now
     supported by private donations.
     The association, which operates out of a one-room office at San
     Diego State University, enlists volunteers to help people with
     disabilities to get back to work.
     "For many disabled people, self-employment is often the best road
     back to the workplace, even if their ultimate goal is a salaried
     job," Miyares said. "It's a way of rebuilding your confidence and
     gaining work experience on your own terms."
     Because so much of Miyares's work involves reading, the Kurzweil
     scanner he uses, which costs about $5,000, has proven an essential
     part of his success.
     "The clarity is excellent, but it's always going to be slower than
     normal sight-reading," he said. "You can save time and get more
     reading in by turning up the speed." Miyares typically revs up the
     device to two and a half to three times the speed of normal speech.
     But it is important then to take one more step. Regularly switching
     between male and female synthesized voices, Miyares said, breaks
     the monotony and "keeps me from starting to talk like a robot,
     too."
     On a recent Tuesday morning, Brian Dickinson awoke with a mild
     fever and a gnawing realization that he had picked a bad time to
     get sick. Tuesdays are when the 59-year-old newspaperman normally
     files the second of two weekly columns for The Providence
     Journal-Bulletin in Rhode Island.
     Another writer might have welcomed a guilt-free day in bed to surf
     the channels and catch up on reading. But Dickinson, a fixture of
     New England journalism since 1964, misses deadlines rarely -- and
     never in good humor. Besides, enforced idleness isn't his idea of a
     good time. Dickinson normally writes from eight to nine hours a
     day, seven days a week.
     Like Becker, the young musician, Dickinson has amyotrophic lateral
     sclerosis, which has stripped him of the power to speak, swallow,
     move his legs or arms, wiggle his fingers or turn his head. But
     because he deals with words rather than musical notes, Dickinson is
     producing some of the best work of his life, thanks to the Eyegaze
     computer.
     Seated in a wheelchair, his arms resting limply before him on a
     pillow, Dickinson pumps out a steady stream of columns and book
     reviews, composes letters and E-mail, and shoots the breeze with
     his wife, Barbara, and their three grown sons.
     In short bursts, he can hit 40 words a minute, but the going is
     usually slower and bumpier. No problem there: by budgeting three
     days to write each 800-word column, he builds in ample time for
     "planning, reflection and reorganizing," he told a visitor,
     conversing via the keyboard. "Having A.L.S. has freed me to take
     risks with style -- plus I have an indulgent editor," he said.
     "Over the years, I've learned the importance of turning in
     letter-perfect copy, but it's especially important now, because
     revising is so time-consuming."
     Before his illness, Dickinson was best known as a political
     commentator. He traveled often and widely, filtering his views of
     world and national events through a liberal lens. These days, his
     writing is more droll and contemplative, and less tied to breaking
     news. "The Labor Day holiday always seems to lack a clear
     identity," he wrote recently. "If the purpose is to recognize us
     all for toiling all summer, the term 'Labor Day' is a howler. No
     one works any harder in summer than he absolutely must."
     Dickinson discusses his illness in print a few times a year;
     otherwise, his prose doesn't yield a whisker of evidence that there
     is anything wrong with his body. His first symptom -- a tingling in
     his right leg -- appeared in 1992. When he grew too weak to type,
     he composed his columns orally with a Dragon Dictate
     voice-recognition device, which converts speech into type.
     Eventually, he recalled, his speech failed, "so that the machine
     couldn't understand me."
     Later, he pecked out his columns on a specially configured computer
     with the one finger he could still move. Ultimately, that ability
     vanished as well. He began using the Eyegaze system in 1995.
     For all its world-of-tomorrow remarkableness, the Eyegaze system
     isn't without its nits. "It can be hard on the eyes, and after a
     few hours of gazing, I take a break for eyedrops," he said. Also, a
     cough or a random glint of light from Dickinson's eyeglasses can
     send the cursor skittering out of view, stopping him in his tracks
     while he takes the time to recalibrate the camera beam.
     Occasionally, that requires help. "There are times he's sat there
     stuck for 45 minutes before someone has walked into the room and
     fixed the problem," his wife said.
     In all fairness, sometimes the villain isn't a computer glitch, but
     old-fashioned creative block. "If I get stuck, or need a break, I
     flip to a game screen and play solitaire," Dickinson said. "It's no
     different from when I worked in a newspaper office. If I hit a
     wall, I'd go out for coffee or schmooze with my colleagues about
     the Red Sox."



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