2008 NCTI Technology in the Works Award Winner

The Company and the Technology

gh is a company of 50 employees that produces software, hardware, and accessible media—both traditional and digital—for an expanding range of populations (talking and Braille books, accessible PDF forms, large print, etc.). Its flagship software product is the gh PLAYER™, which offers visual, speech, and tactile user interfaces for access to text. Dave elaborates,

The visual user interface is really divided into a couple of components. We have a display area where the book itself is displayed the content panel, then we have a navigation pane where the hierarchical structure of the book is displayed… like the table of contents. There’s an accessibility tool bar and a navigation tool bar and more. The navigation and media toolbars really work just like any media player like Windows Media Player or iTunes. That’s very familiar to people… Kids say, ‘Hey, he’s got this cool media player, where can I get one of those?’ At the same time it has support for a Braille display—it’s all native and built in.

In its eight years, the company has also established consulting and custom development activities for publishers or government organizations that result in licensing and private label arrangements.

gh PLAYER™

A burgeoning area of gh’s business model is in testing, including formal, high stakes state educational assessment with a product called ‘Accessible Testing Systems,’ or ATS. The system is designed to precisely mirror the look and feel of gh PLAYER™ to create a seamless experience during both learning and testing processes.

The next horizon for the company involves incorporating features for generic E-books with greater cross-compatibility through DAISY [standard]: ‘You’ll be able to buy a book on Amazon and just open it up in gh PLAYER™.’

Fundamental Design and Company Concepts

The company’s philosophy integrates high levels of quality, aggressive pricing, and an eye toward self-contained products. Dave indicates that gh has patents in areas that allow for a combination of flexibility yet individualized and targeted support:

We have something we call the accessible feature design template permeating all our products. The idea is that we take the concept of feature matching to the next level. When you fit an AT intervention for a student, you go through a feature matching process, determining a student’s skills, abilities and capabilities. You select the intervention that augments the areas in which they have weaknesses. That intervention shouldn’t do anything in excess because you want to give the minimum burden to the student. The beauty of having a software product with our template is we have all those features built in, but only certain features are visible to the user at any one time. So we have kind of a ’skinability’ concept if you think of how a media player works.

This extends to format handling, as well:

Our thought process was to develop something that would allow this enhanced access for as wide a variety of file formats as we could support, but with DAISY being the star. We get a lot of people calling us to get our player who are frustrated because they bought a thousand dollar thing saying it includes DAISY and NIMAS support, but it crashes, doesn’t show images, won’t render tables, the text is jumbled, or it doesn’t support MathML.

Then they find out it’s something the basic $150 gh PLAYER™ is able to do for them. The product’s completely accessible for virtually any type of disability.

Getting Involved with the AT Community

Dave describes the history of his company as one that turned a negative experience into positive opportunities:

My wife is blind and in college she was unable to get textbooks and ended up dropping out because she couldn’t get access to Braille versions of her books. I was actually a chemist, so was only sort of tangentially involved. It was really disappointing that in the modern day and age this kind of thing was the norm. I got sidetracked with disabilities and actually entered into the Ph.D. program in special education. We started the company with that goal in mind—trying to help these students.

This initial motivation has led to very deep policy involvement with open source and open standards at the core of their company philosophy:

We sit on almost all the standards bodies, we’re heavily involved in DAISY specifications and I’m on the NIMAS committee. We were instrumental in developing the MathML in DAISY modular extension, worked on WC3 [standards], and helped to write a big chunk of the NIMAS specification—all these different kinds of open standards to try to promote the idea of better literacy in the community in general.

Scientifically Based Research

Research is an instinctual core value for gh, which actively engages in studies with Purdue University, school districts and schools for the blind, and with beta testing and focus groups. For instance, gh has also pioneered a curriculum and standards based product called MathSpeak™ to help teachers communicate mathematical equations vocally to blind or other students in a standardized, intelligible way. Dave describes one study in this vein:

We did an efficacy study to take a look at the success of MathSpeak™ to disambiguate equations versus ordinary spoken math. The idea is if you have something you’re reading off the chalkboard or out of a textbook you read it with an ordinary method —the teacher just reads the book as they ordinarily would to the student. That’s conventional, but there’s no set way—everybody does it slightly differently. When we did the study with that technique, about 50% of the time the student guessed correctly which equation it was, which is what you’d expect, complete random chance. When we incorporated MathSpeak™ with just a ten minute training session for the student and teacher, the success rate with the same equations was 95%!

The company added synchronized highlighting of equations in gh PLAYER™, and now is studying the impact of strategic parsing and pausing in the communication of mathematical language to add to its existing standard. Consistent with company philosophy, the standards and grammatical rules are openly shared.

The benefits of this rigorous work have included potential increased market share,

After a similar study, we had a number of regular ed teachers come up to us and say that they would like us to produce training materials for them to use to get better at speaking math to their students in regular education. We’re developing a product line of training materials and handbooks to help people to learn to speak mathematics better and to support this open standard that we have.

There are additional benefits as well:

One of the big plusses is when you are introducing a product to a parent or teacher they want to be sure what they are doing for their kid is the right thing. I also want to know that I’m doing the right thing, I don’t want someone spending $250 (for the advanced version of gh PLAYER™) if it isn’t the right match. Most of our sales are to institutional buyers. Research helps with RFP’s in establishing credibility. It provides supporting evidence we meet requirements and puts us in a favorable light.

Incubation

While biotech and mainstream IT companies are leading major growth in start-up through business incubators, few AT companies have gone this route. It was an extremely successful route for gh, the first completer of Purdue’s Gateways incubation program:

They gave us a ‘bird’ trophy because we hatched! Then in 2004 gh was selected by the National Business Incubator Association out of 16,000 companies as the number one incubator graduate in the country. It was quite an honor. And then in 2005 the Purdue Research Park was selected as the number one tech transfer park in the country.

We didn’t have any kind of financial support, but we did have a building to start in, access to meeting rooms and common facilities, assistance with payroll… that got us started. They helped us to find investment through their venture capital network. We actually had a group of farmers in Indiana who wanted to invest in a high tech company, the first time they’d ever done that. They were really interested in the social impact. They gave us a very small amount of seed money and we basically bootstrapped from there.

On Collaboration

Dave echoes the importance many developers cite in seeking collaborative ventures to improve product design and company success. Among the most important for gh are connections with major test publishers, including making electronic state exams accessible while maintaining complete security and equivalency of delivery. Dave explains that all content remains the purview of the publisher, and the state determines what functions can be used on assessments:

Students can open an accessibility module and turn on synchronized highlighting, speech, Braille support, enlargement, whatever the case might be as allowed by their IEP with a profile they set that will remember who they are. What’s interesting is all of the test part, from the content to the deployment of the data to the machine to the scoring, is handled by the test publisher’s system. We just have a modular plug-in that sits on top.

Dave says the results of this collaboration have helped to head off potential litigation for publishers and school districts, while offering profound results for youth:

We just completed a deployment in Florida with the FCAT exam in which we worked with kids who are severely disabled—they used sip and puff switches and wheelchairs—and would just plug in and go. The process took a population that basically had completely failed, and turned them into students who actually performed above state average. Kids who were getting F’s before were getting A’s and B’s. We met with parents, and they were literally breaking down in tears because their kid is doing something they’ve never seen him do before. It’s very emotional.

Further, Dave indicates a willingness to do difficult things and partner in creative ways can lead to new market opportunities. As one example, he explains:

We do a lot of work with the IRS. We have a multiple year contract to make tax documents accessible to tax payers. This is very sensitive [work]… That’s our specialty, we handle all the things no one else wants to deal with. We have a secure facility for handling tests and we handle secure government documents. We take on that responsibility.

Views on the Legislative Environment

Dave maintained an apartment in Washington D.C. for over a year so that he could communicate with policy makers. Although initially cautious about politics surrounding AT, he came away with the sense that officials genuinely care and that kids with disabilities are on their radar screen—but with a lot of other competing spending priorities. He says,

As far as the legislative environment as a whole, the good news is disability is a non-partisan—everybody wants to help kids with disabilities. The problem really comes down to the proper allocation of funds—it’s inefficient. That will get better. We have some very good laws, but it’s like the civil rights movement, it took a long time for the laws to get to the point where they are today where you have more or less equal rights for everyone. This is generational change and it takes a generation.

In regard to NIMAS, he continues:

A lot of education has to go on. Publishers or government agencies have a lot of sophistication, but when you start dealing with individual customers like teachers or actual users with disabilities, they don’t really have an understanding of the complexities of all this stuff—nor do they have the time for that. They just want to do something. I have to be pleased, NIMAS has worked more than just a little bit. I find all the communities: the publishers, the advocacy groups, the politicians, and the users themselves all are fairly pleased at the process. You can get books and convert them into formats faster than you could a few years ago. That was the intent.

Successes and the Educational Value of AT

Dave has pride in the efforts gh has to maintain contact with users:

The thousands and thousands of people who use our media or our software products or even in some cases the hardware—we go out and meet these people. We see them at conferences, go to on-site deployments, talk to parents, teachers, and government officials who make procurement decisions. It’s a very human industry… Let’s make people productive and let them be self-empowered and anything can happen. The power of that impact is overwhelming, almost like a religious experience. The greatest single thing I enjoy doing is taking a new employee to a conference or a customer visit because I know they’re going to experience what I’ve experienced for close to 15 years now, which is that magic that you’ve changed somebody’s life. You can’t measure that in dollars.

Future of the AT Industry

Both substantial optimism and a vision of change characterize Dave’s sense of the future for the AT industry:

We’re seeing a real awareness in the general environment of the importance of universal design and that puts AT vendors in a good situation. Our company and others are being approached by mainstream educators and companies involved in that market space saying, ‘Hey how can we work with you guys to have better design for our products?”

He adds,

In my opinion the industry is ripe for some sort of consolidation… Eventually there are going to be public companies entering our space and when they do, I think it will actually be to our benefit. There’s always going to be a role for small businesses and ‘mom and pop’ organizations, but you’re never going to see an economy of scale until you’ve actually got the might of a public company involved. We’ve worked on a number of projects with some exciting partners ourselves. I think within the year we will see some consumer-based devices that actually have AT built in, but are reasonably priced. Maybe two years. When you start being able to go buy it at Best Buy or wherever, that’s going to make a big difference.