Reinventing the Switch King

RJ Cooper is a practical man who looks for benefits, solutions, and partnerships.

He refuses to tolerate limitations, even those imposed by one’s own success. RJ was an early technology adopter and innovator who created switch interfaces and software, and believes even in the fast-changing AT world this has caused him to become a bit ‘pigeonholed’ by some, which he argues his record of broad innovation belies:

Over the years, old timers tend to remember you as you were. A lot of people will still peg me as the ‘Switch King’ even though I’ve moved on from just switches at least ten years ago. I’ve moved into literacy, keyboards, and other adaptations completely… So I like to highlight the non-switch things!

In the last few years, an additional focus for RJ has been literacy. He realizes he is not an expert in this area, so he thirsts for new sources of input, feedback, and collaboration.

Early Involvement in Assistive Technology

Assistive Technology was a revolution in search of RJ Cooper when he was searching for something, too — he just wasn’t exactly sure what.  With a background in electrical engineering and developmental psychology and a strong motivation to do good, he explains,

I was either going to join the Peace Corp or find or create something to use my computer talents to help people.

He found himself drawn to the rehabilitation center at the University of Utah to ask if there might be a way to help out — just a casual query.  He explains,

I knew nothing, I don’t think I had actually even met a person with a disability at that point. But I could program, make colors flash on a computer…  Little did I know they would heap the world right on me that very week! I became an established fixture in the department, and even had doctors and medical interns watching me work with a coma patient.

Along with the wizardly ability to use, configure, and design technology, RJ reports that there was an automatic assumption that he must know a lot about disability — yet it may be precisely that lack of previous training or experience that allowed him to look at disability and ability with a pure and unfettered perspective that has led to decades of passionate innovation.

Building from a Market of One

Despite the fact that history has continuously proven RJ to be substantially ahead of his time — he actually thought he had “missed the computer revolution” when he started getting involved in computers in 1983 — he remains in some respects an ironic anachronism.  Indelibly molded by those early medical center experiences, his idea of an “Assistive Technology Assessment” is to determine what a single individual needs, then to design and build a technology solution for that one individual — preferably within the same week! There is no market research, no sifting through demographic data — just a hope that once he builds something for one person, others will have a need for that piece of technology as well and some market following will develop.

RJ’s fundamental approach to the AT market is to ‘get out there,’ as he describes it — to take ‘road trips‘ to as many venues as he can reach. Part medieval cobbler, part faith healer, he travels about simply asking his audiences to throw challenges at him in the form of real kids and young adults with very severe disabilities:

I ask the teacher or parent, usually, ‘What is it that you’d like Johnny to do that he’s not doing now.’ They say, ‘I’d like him to be able to add…’ or they’ll say, ‘He knows his letters but he can’t put them together to make words.

On the spot, RJ begins talking through solutions. If he can, he recommends existing technologies, whether they are his products or not. If nothing relevant exists, he collects phone numbers and email addresses and begins to formulate plans for creating the technology that is needed for the ‘kiddo’ who has rolled up to him.

As he puts it,

I have a foot in both worlds, I think that completely separates me from any other vendor I can think of at Closing The Gap or ATIA [conferences]. Most vendors are just that — they’re professional business people. They spend most of their time in the business, creating things or doing tech support and administering their business. I don’t know of many other vendors, even people who started with hands-on in the field, who are still going out there like I do and trying to work directly with as many people as I do, in front of a room full of people.

Moving Into Literacy and Speech Recognition — Product Spotlight

Question and Answer. RJ’s penchant for moving into areas outside of his expertise has taken him to some interesting places, and it’s a habit he maintains. One of those areas he wishes to highlight is literacy — and a software program he developed six years ago, but has not yet released, called Question and Answer. He explains,

My background is not literacy or LD, but I decided to become more literate about literacy. I started rubbing elbows with people who were in the literacy area nationally, and learning about how people identify letters or string phonemes together to become fluent readers. What I discovered is that text-to-speech is always too fast. When I watched my daughter grow up, and watch the bouncing ball of systems that are out there, no matter how slow it goes by itself, it was too fast for her. There is no way that you can decode a word phonemically at the speed at which any text to speech goes by itself through a sentence. It has to be done one word at a time at their own pace. So Question and Answer is a software program in which you put in some text for the user to read using text-to-speech — be it an emerging reader, an early reader, or a non reader, and they can actually pace themselves completely, word by word.

RJ adds that Bruner’s concept of scaffolding is “a term that I live and breathe by”, and that Question and Answer is based on a hierarchy of experiences in which readers first listen to speech as they simply view text, without attempting to voice words themselves. The software provides targeting support with underlining and colorization. Next, learners listen to words and repeat them immediately, building up to phrases that are presented, leading to automaticity in phonetic processing as well as predictive capabilities in determining whole words based largely on initial orthographic patterns. He continues,

Not long thereafter, an amazing thing happens, they start to precede the (synthetic) speech with their own guesstimations. They don’t ignore the text-to-speech; they are still using that feedback, but they precede it slightly as they arrow across words. You can see this process unfold in a short one to two weeks.

Once this decoding ability manifests, there are questioning facilities in the system that unfold in a similar way, helping draw them through reading and understanding questions at their own pace, guiding them with signaling to target elements of text that help answer the question, and taking them all the way up to independent responses without prompts.

This is a product for which RJ wants assistance with refinement and release through people who might test his product against real world needs and research, drop him an email at info@rjcooper.com if you like to collaborate!

All Inclusive Environmental Control

Realizing a need for a simple, relatively inexpensive, computer-based way for people to control their home and/or entertainment that simply did not exist, he adapted one of his existing AAC programs and entered the Electronic Aids for Daily Living (EADL) market. He emphasizes, here again, that this work pushes well beyond the switch design history for which he is known, and explains that his simply named EADL Package is:

…A hardware/software combo for any PC or integrated augmentative communication device. It can control everything in the house for about $200-300. For infrared (IR) controlled devices, user-configurable software allows for almost any type and manufacturer of entertainment device. For actual appliances, from door opener to lights, it uses X10, a proven protocol for intra-home communications of this nature. No wiring is used, just a control that is about the size of a piece of soap and plugs in with a USB connection. It sends a low frequency digital pulse through the existing wiring in the house, which gets picked up by modules or, for example, the light switch itself. You can control the TV, entertainment center, and everything from a central point.

Speak To Me — Product Spotlight

When a need arises — often signaled by a request by an individual with a disability or professional working with a technology user — RJ enjoys toying with potential solutions. Such a need arose a few years ago when an individual with dysarthria (atypical speech patterns) wanted to be able to control her computer by voice. However, since current speech recognition systems require speaking in a more typical manner, she was unable to utilize commercial speech recognition programs. RJ worked to customize a utility reminiscent of the old Dragon Dictate. The resulting program, Speak To Me is trainable speech recognition that allows the user to control the computer. It can also work in concert with word prediction in order to allow people who are highly dysarthric to effectively dictate commands which can yield text. Speak To Me is an expanding system that learns commands and individualized vocabularies. RJ continues,

You can even say the word differently each time, it remembers three variations of the word you speak in when you train it. We don’t take an average, it uses all three inputs. You can do macros and have it perform multiple key strokes or mouse moves.

Collaboration with Users the RJ Way

For RJ collaboration is something that is also personal, not formal or institutional in nature. Usually he wants a family, a teacher, an expert to help him evaluate a product and directions it should take. He explains,

Sometimes I almost have to ‘beg’ for timely, detailed feedback. In asking for guidance, I have no criteria other than the ability to use email, receive attachments, save files, and a ready population test things on. Usually I give that person or school system freebies of hardware or software products. So that’s the collaboration.

It is exactly that type of collaboration that helped RJ refine Speak To Me. He reports that a woman in New Zealand suggested the process in which the system takes three separate samples of speech for the same word to account for daily variances in utterance. She reports using the product together with RJ’s Word Complete word prediction facility to dictate some 90% faster than ever before by her own estimate, with a personal dictionary of well over 17,000 words at last check.

The Business Model

One of the expectable outcomes of RJ’s build-it-on-the-spot approach is a broad mélange of products aimed at a range of needs and disabilities, a collection that, were it an essay, might draw criticism for not having a specific and narrow topic sentence. RJ readily admits,

The biggest disadvantage is that I’m simply not a true business person. So my business has actually not grown like other successful businesses in this field monetarily over the years… So the disadvantage is that I’ve not focused on growing a larger business. Fortunately, though, the recession has not hit us at all, we’ve not lost any sales over the worst of times either, and we are actually seeing our sales increase just a bit.

RJ is equally candid and unabashed about the benefits of his model and his ability to help individual human beings. He says,

The business advantage of doing things this way is I hear exactly what people truly need, and that gives me a small piece of the pie. I’m finding holes that I can fill — even if it’s for just one person, I’ll do it. For example, over the summer someone needed an accessible rock guitar — and nobody’s modified a rock guitar for commercial purposes to make it available. It makes it hard to get one product across to people, but the advantage is that a lot of people like ME personally. It’s a nice feeling. I always tell audiences that we men love external gratification, and if we don’t get it, we’re lost! I’m able to hear people say to me at least once a day, ‘Thank you, I appreciate what you’re doing.’ People actually tell me I’m a good person. That’s the biggest advantage of doing it ‘my’ way!

Creative Tech Transfer: What the AT Industry Needs

An ah-hah moment for RJ happened when he hiked to a mountain top in Utah in about 1985 with a friend. They were the only two AT developers in the state at the time — and there they stood overlooking a wide wilderness from a single shared peak contemplating the frontiers of an industry they felt was, also, rather isolated. RJ decried slow adoption and awareness rates to his friend, turning and asking, “When is this stuff gonna actually catch ON?!” His friend looked at him with a serious poker face, and deadpanned, “When you can buy it at Radio Shack.” This has continued to be one environment even RJ’s digital prowess cannot control, and his dismay continues nearly 25 years later:

To this day you still cannot buy any single piece of any Assistive Technology — not one thing you’d see at our conferences — at Radio Shack, Comp USA, or Best Buy. In 30 years of this field, not even one of the thousands of things that have been produced in our industry is available at a consumer retail outlet. And you won’t see one at major electronics shows like the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Not one!

RJ continues to believe that mental barriers in our belief systems about “those disabled people”, even for people in the field, continue to mitigate against creative tech transfer of existing standard devices and awareness of specially designed ones. Despite the market vagaries of his own experience, he continues,

My concept of growing this field — of answering ‘when are people gonna get it’ — is to get OUT there. It’s not demographics, dollar amounts, getting figures to Congress. One conference in Orlando, one in Minneapolis, [one in LA]… We’re not getting out there. Of course nobody knows about us. We don’t need a conference of that size everywhere, just somebody hosting a regional meeting at a district or community college level for maybe 200 people — in Dallas, Boston, Portland, everywhere. We need small forums for letting people know this stuff exists.

Look for RJ to be there, dreaming and evangelizing… out on the road.