Innovators

Learn what has made this social networking platform and model hold up to the technology and generational changes. A good book and a good conversation are timeless!

No Gut Instinct Allowed! Dr. Jonathan Lazar discusses applying structured research methods to assistive technology and accessibility rather than just using gut instincts. See his latest project displayed at the Tech Expo, November 15th as part of the NCTI Technology Innovators Conference.

Get organized! Tom Keating discusses assistive technology and computing to set the stage for the purposes of Picture Planner™, software that allows persons with developmental and cognitive disabilities to conceptualize and manage their own planning and scheduling.

Thinking outside the box led Alexicom Tech to provide communication device users with an Internet-based, portable, subscription service.

Through OneWay and CyberCoach products, Applied Human Factors continues their production of products and approaches that expand the ways individuals interact with technology. Capturing reliable movement in one dimension for cursor control, OneWay provides a new interface. CyberCoach aims to empower a network of support to enable independence.

This robot is capable of analyzing its behavior in relation to its environment, and producing the most efficient walking mechanics for the context, even if an appendage is damaged or lost. What are the implications?

RJ Cooper applies his engineering know-how to create assistive technology. Learn how he makes business work one customer at a time.

Features developed in a universal design and open source development model have been maximized to meet the needs of users with disabilities. Danny Boice shares the R&D history of the tool and plans for the future.

Ron Hu emphasizes affordable, creative new approaches combined with simplicity of design. His recent Da Vinci Award for the KeyboardCommunicator and the successful SmartSpeakers for AlphaSmart systems showcase this approach.

This Innovator Profile of Jennifer Corriero spotlights the social networking platform for collaboration and activism which pays attention to inclusion and accessibility on a host of dimensions.

Find out how Fire and Ice is developing learning, collaborative action, and cultural relationships through web conferencing and social networking technology.

Read about WYNN, the literacy software designed with a graphic interface to accommodate a range of user needs and styles.

gh is an AT business success story. Find out how Dave utlized an incubator opportunity and venture capital to get started and how gh stays involved in standards and ahead of the development curve.

New York Times bestselling author, Dan Heath, co-author of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, is NCTI’s featured Innovator. Find out how can AT entrepreneurs make their visions more concrete and real for users.

Spark-Space mapping software allows users to visualize and organize ideas and documents in a 3-D spatial representation.

Australia’s ReadHowYouWant company configures text in a variety of formats to assist different types of readers recognize words more easily by manipulating or building new forms of cueing within the structure of text itself. Learn about the science and human story behind Chris Stephen’s entrepreneurial idea.

AbleNet is a company to watch given a unique business model that seeks to incorporate content and curriculum; software; assistive technology; and professional training into a single seamless solution for schools. AbleNet’s products are aimed primarily at students with severe/ profound to moderate disabilities, but the company also accounts for broad applicability to various populations.

Ray Schmidt knows communication devices inside and out – he is the designer of Cyrano, a device built with the HP iPAQ PDA, and is the father of a teenager who has used several communication devices through the years. These experiences give Ray incredible insight into the consumers – service providers and end users – of communication tools. The Cyrano is developed so that users can “build their own machines.”

People with disabilities do everything! That’s the message Roger McCarville, 2007 daVinci Awardee, is talking about on his national show, Disabilities Today. The show is a weekly television program airing the issues faced by the disabled. Check your local PBS channel for air times. The 2007 Da Vinci Awards will be presented at a gala event Friday, September 28.

Andrew Junker explores the background and possibilities of brain-activated technologies in this Innovator Profile. Brainfingers, an alternate computer access device, allows users to control any computerized technologies without touch, providing new means of feedback to those with even severe disabilities. Post comments and join Andrew online the afternoon of Wednesday, August 29, 2007 to discuss his profile and research.

Jason Hurdich represents a hopeful statistical anomaly, a person born Deaf who is not only employed, but impressively serving as the Lead Manager for the Sign Language Division and Chief Linguist at Vcom3D. Through their work, Jason and Vcom3D hope to make it easier for others to follow his lead.

Lars Liden (left) and Chris Whalen (right) are the cofounders of TeachTown, a system that incorporates therapeutic curriculum for children on the autism spectrum. Read more about how applied behavioral analysis and artificial intelligence can deliver a therapeutic curriculum.

Fraser Shein is the developer behind the successful WordQ and SpeakQ products. Read about Fraser’s background and business development model in the latest NCTI Innovator Profile.

Jim Schroeder chuckles a bit at the incongruity that his one-time work for the Army Research Institute preparing weapons simulation systems led directly to his AT products. It all began with a long-distance light pen he developed and patented in that early work. AHF now produces products targeted for persons with computer access and augmentative communication needs. Anecdotal reports suggest that persons with learning disabilities are using the programs to meet their unique needs, too. Various switches, pointing, and stylus devices can be used for input.

Larry Goldberg was keenly interested in technological “toys” since childhood. A self-described “geek from the AV (audio-visual) squad,” he began working with media in high school and studied cinema and broadcast journalism in college while working at TV and radio stations. This, coupled with a fierce commitment to “public service and the democratic applications of technology,” put him on a natural collision course with one of the most enlightened media organizations – WGBH in Boston.

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 with a universal design philosophy expressed in a belief that accessibility naturally arises as an integral component of good design using open-source standards.

Jim Fruchterman, CEO of The Benetech Initiative, has been awarded a 2006 MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Each of this year’s 25 MacArthur Fellows learned this week that they will receive $500,000 in “no strings attached” funding over the next five years.

Researchers at the SEAT Center at Illinois State University, together with Don Johnston, Inc. and a 6-county coalition of special education programs, investigated the outcomes for students with learning and academic disabilities when tech-savvy teachers were given professional development and access to SOLO®, Don Johnston’s new state-of-the-art software.

IntelliTools, Inc., represented by Arjan Khalsa and Ed Murphy, and David Chard pose a key question that no one has attempted to answer for students with physical disabilities: “How can software accurately detect mathematical automaticity?”

Karen Erickson at the University of North Carolina’s Center for Literacy & Disability Studies with Don Johnston Inc.’s President Ruth Ziolkowski and Product Manager Ben Johnston proposed a Tech in the Works project to research the benefits of Don Johnston’s SOLO software. The modest project took off—with surprises from subject recruitment through data analysis.

Tech in the Works Shows Potential Effectiveness of the Signing Science Dictionary: For researcher Judy Vesel of TERC and her partners at Vcom3D, developer of the Signing Avatar® assistive technology, Tech in the Works-funded research demonstrated that a preliminary, 300-word version of the Signing Science Dictionary raised science achievement among students with hearing impairment.

With an NCTI Technology in the Works grant, the team of Matt Kaplowitz, Director of Technology and Content Innovation at Bridge Multimedia, and researcher Wendy Sapp of Visual Impairment Educational Services compared the ease of use for students and teachers of Bridge’s My School Day Online scheduler to ease of use of Microsoft’s Outlook scheduler.

Sight Enhancement Systems produces the Sci-Plus Series large display calculators capable of performing scientific, trigonometric, and statistical calculations.

Ai Squared produces ZoomText, a premier screen magnification and reading solution for computer access. Tim says that inputs for development come both from internal ideas and external feedback.

Chuck is intrigued by complexities in marketing speech recognition. He frequently refers to core functionality and the glitz and attraction of relatively new functionality by using the analogy of “the steak and the sizzle.”

Traxsys, a division of Esterline Corp., develops a range of alternative computer input devices including desktop and fascia or panel mounted trackballs, joysticks, and connectivity accessories.

Assistive Technology Outcomes and Benefits (ATOB) is a peer-reviewed, cross-disability, transdisciplinary journal. It’s edited and published by two organizations: ATIA, the well-known Assistive Technology Industry Association, and The SEAT Center, the Special Education Assistive Technology Center founded in 2001 at Illinois State University.

When he had a “real job,” Tom was a clinical biochemist. He began Designer Appliances as a start-up using research on dynamic bio-mechanics of muscle and blood flow. A block of wood helped formulate his first conceptual model, leading to 5 or 6 fundamental iterations before going to market.

The Hearing Pill™, a patented technology that treats hearing loss due to noise exposure, was first developed by the United States Navy and then, through a federal technology transfer (TT) deal, commercialized by American BioHealth Group, a San Diego for-profit company. The collaboration is a rare one: Assistive Technology is not often born out of federal TT.

John is interested in the relationship between accessibility in the form of building architecture and access and that of information technology access. He has seen important gains for individuals with special needs arising from the Disability Discrimination Act in the U.K. Although he says “the snowball’s on the move.”

“Our current special education system has defined a series of ‘pigeonholes.’ Each hole has a label. If a student has one of those labels, they get help, but if they have no label, they must fend for themselves. It’s time that we provide access to assistive reading tools for everyone and leave pigeonholes for pigeons.”

Laureate Learning Systems designs, produces, and supports computer-based language intervention tools. Laureate programs are used to enable children and adults with special needs to build skills including categorization, vocabulary, expressive language, syntax, reading remediation, auditory discrimination, functional language, and concept development. The range is wide, and Laureate helps consumers find what’s right for them by organizing products according to seven stages of language development from birth to adulthood.

Ron is a self-described “techno-freak” and has worked with computers and electronics since he was a kid. Until recently, he owned an assistive technology vending company registered with the Canadian government. Through that work, he had a lot of contact with manufacturers of scanners, speech synthesizers, and other technologies that helped spark his desire to get back into design himself. “I was already familiar with the market, so to speak, and when I sold that business, I really wanted to get back into electronics more… this was a very good avenue for me to be able to design and play with new ideas.”

Annuska, the only female accessibility designer interviewed for this series of profiles, came to Microsoft Accessible Technology Group in 2000 by way of “an industrial engineering background.” She says, “I am really focused on customer research… a primary part of my job is making sure I’m understanding what the end user needs and then conveying that to the product developers, testers, and program managers on our team.”

Liberated Learning is an automated captioning system that enables teachers’ lectures to appear on a screen as they speak. Students can read as the professor talks and, at the end of the session, the system provides a text transcript and multimedia notes available on line after speech recognition errors have been edited out of the system. This alternative to conventional note-taking for students with disabilities also provides help to non-disabled students—they, too, can use the final notes and can benefit from having a visual lecture as well as an auditory one. The tool assists a range of learners, including typically-abled, quadriplegics, second language learners, students with learning disabilities and people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Eye Tech’s hands-free eyetracking software and hardware systems permit alternative access to a full range of computing applications. Three models work with portable or desktop computers and the Eye Science software collects and analyzes gaze patterns.

According to Jacobs’ analysis, incorporating accessible IT into a range of products can enable those goods to be highly competitive in global markets. This is particularly the case within large developing nations, where these items could improve economies by increasing the flow of capital. In addition, Jacobs holds that the manufacture and marketing of accessible IT by American companies could help to reverse the United States’ trade deficit and enable it to dominate the global IT market, not by selling products that are cheaper, but products that are more accessible, usable, and useful.

TextHelp Systems makes a variety of software products, notably Read and Write Gold, which supports reading and the creation and editing of text for persons with literacy and learning difficulties.

At the November 2004 NCTI conference, researcher Gaylen Kapperman met representatives from two separate New York-based businesses: Touch Graphics and Bridge Multimedia. He continued conversations with both. In one case, the talk led to an active partnership; in another, despite a productive exchange of ideas, no immediate commitment followed. Both processes, however, were useful and necessary exercises in collaboration.

Marina Bers, an assistant professor at Tufts University and the author of the new book, “Blocks to Robots,” has created a software program that aids in learning by letting children create their own virtual communities.

CanAssist, an 8-year old non-profit assistive technology group partially funded by the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, was recently recognized with a grant of $704k for the over 150 projects it has completed, by request, for members of the differently abled community.

The National Multiple Sclerosis Society have recognized individuals and organizations for their outstanding design innovations aimed at helping the disabled overcome barriers and further empower all people. The winners will be honored Friday, September 28th at the 2007 da Vinci Awards gala at the Ritz Carlton in Dearborn, Michigan.

The Microsoft 2007 Imagine Cup is an international competition with $25,000 as the grand prize with $170,000 given overall. Now in its fourth year, competition organizers are seeing student contestants take on the challenge of creating designs for users with disabilities. Final awards will be announced in August.

INDEX: is a non-profit network organization – based in Copenhagen – that focuses on Design to Improve Life worldwide. The organization works through a global network to ensure access to the best knowledge on design and the cutting edge of contemporary thinking.
Through a wide range of activities and events, INDEX: is the catalyst for Design to [...]