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Steve Noble and Neil Soiffer: Two Technological Visionaries
Tags:Collaboration, Innovators, Marketing, Profiles
Steve Noble, Director of Accessibility Policy and
Neil Soiffer, Senior Scientist (Engineer) Design Science Incorporated
Inquiries:
http://www.dessci.com
1-800-827-0685
The Company and the Technology
Design Science may represent the future of technology inclusion companies: it is a mainstream producer of accessible mathematics authoring and workflow software for the publishing industry and science, technical, and medical fields. Led by CEO Paul Topping, with a vision spearheaded by Neil Soiffer and Steve Noble, the company has a passionate universal design philosophy expressed in a belief that accessibility naturally arises as an integral component of good design using open-source standards – primarily MathML.
Within their product line, Steve and Neil focus first on the production of accessible and manipulable first-generation math content through either their MathFlow editor–designed for use at the enterprise or corporate level–or their flagship authoring tool, MathType, commonly used by individual authors and math teachers everywhere. MathType is highly interoperable with MS Word, DotsPlus, web-publishing software, and other applications. Secondly, they emphasize direct access to readable, easily navigated content that can be speech-enabled through their MathPlayer application. Content then can be accessed and modified by persons who are blind or learning disabled without the need for scanning, dictation, or translation.
Unique Aspects of the Company
Design Science is unique, for a small company, in that it seeks to actively shape and create market share through its own actions rather than passively await the impact of external forces – in large part by positioning itself with the right people.
Steve was hired expressly to bring to bear potent public policy experience – including ground-level involvement in the development of NIMAS standards (the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard) and successfully authoring extensive accessibility legislation when he worked for state government in Kentucky. Steve indicates that the vast majority of his efforts are externally focused: “My work involves a broad concept of marketing in that I’m not out there to sell a product, I’m really out there selling the concept of making math accessible.”
Neil was a comparably enlightened hire: he had become interested personally in accessible math design, but was not successful in persuading his prior company of the value of accessible products. Convinced he could garner an NSF grant, he approached and was hired by Design Science. “There is a business case to be made for accessibility. Paul Topping has always been keen on pushing it as a way to improve sales of various products.” As a result, Neil and NSF grants came to the company.
On Collaboration
Neil and Steve work together intensively at Design Science. Neil is the “tech guy,” involved at the engineering level, focusing on the production of code for math software that contains natural “accessibility hooks.” Steve is the one who “knows a lot of people and knows the process – how things go through the government or organizations.” As Neil says, “That’s something that, as a technical person, I never learned, and other people within Design Science were not as savvy about.”
Steve’s catalytic role, in the thick of communication efforts, is to build understanding, then an expectation, that MathML is essential for accessibility, starting with initial content authoring. He remarks “In markets where supply and demand do not automatically make connections, if you just let supply and demand rule everything, people with disabilities are going to be left out.”
Policy, Legislation, and Standards
Neil and Steve agree that government action “primes the pump” in ways that let the private sector innovate and deliver. Steve credits the No Child Left Behind legislation for driving much of the demand from schools as they seek to obtain accessible assessments and drive scores upward for persons with disabilities in science and math. Neil says, “My real hope, though, is not that publishers will see a mandate and do a minimal job to comply, but that they see an opportunity to compete better.”
They are, then, passionate in their evangelizing about rational open-source standards, focusing now on NIMAS. Steve indicates, “It provides the level of accessibility that we needed.” Neil adds, “NIMAS is a subset of DAISY [Digital Accessible Information System], they have a set of required and evolving optional tags. Once math gets into DAISY standards, then it will not be limited to graphical images. This can make a huge difference in the amount of content that will be accessible for math.”
Knowing Users and User Requirements
Collaboration is echoed again in the influences on design thinking within the company. Steve and Neil have benefited from mentoring, product testing, and feedback from experts like John Gardner, a pioneer in alternative access for science. Neil also indicates that “wild ideas” are sometimes fielded to experts before design attempts, then products are informally tested, and finally formal beta testing occurs with small groups of users prior to major releases. Neil also thrives on feedback from users at conferences: “It’s personally fulfilling to hear what kinds of problems people confront, then to hear someone say they can now read content they never could before.”
On Design
For Neil, “customization” and “simplicity” are critical principles. He is mindful of research that shows the limitations of short-term memory. For speech output, he tries to, “come up with ways that are unambiguous to ‘speak’ something, while reducing the number of words or even syllables.” Neil also tries to address the conventional wisdom in customization that “only about one percent of all users will ever change the default [settings].” He has to reconcile that with the fact that “for people who use screenreaders, they actually do spend time to customize it because it’s such an integral part of their daily lives – the numbers may be as much as 10% for that.” Therefore, they provide multiple default settings that allow a user to identify general preferences associated with one of them and then easily customize beyond that if desired.
Navigation is also a central focus: “When you are working with a larger mathematical expression, it’s easy to lose track of where you as you listen to dense material in a short time. You have to be able to use (embedded) structure, as with section headings in text, to be able to back up and explore the expression.”
Changing Perspectives
Steve indicates, with some lament, “When I try to give presentations on more global issues of accessibility and universal design concepts, people inevitably are thinking of an individual they know. They came because they want to know what is the particular AT product that will fill this (short-term) need.” While he is responsive to these questions, he is really trying to change mindsets. He wants to teach people to think in “broad” ways that allow them to call for accessibly authored content, then to re-engineer environments, including modes of instruction, “Such that you won’t have to do these individual accommodations one after another.” He continues, “We’re working on perfecting the outreach message – it’s one that can be hard to communicate.”
Etceteras
Of federal SBIR (Small Business Research Innovation) grants, Neil says, “The government acts as a venture capitalist” that rigorously evaluates whether product ideas are technically feasible as well as economically viable and that a company is stable enough to bring it to market. Meeting these requirements is not easy. Design Science invested a total of “four man-months” of dedicated work by two employees to garner one SBIR grant.
Neil and Steve consistently credit CEO Paul Topping with a philosophy that embraces such efforts - a simultaneously humanistic yet market-centered approach that seeks return only in the long term for its accessibility efforts.
