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Your weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs.
Show Notes:
Dr. Gregor Wolbring, Associate Professor of Community Rehabilitation and Disability Studies, Dept. of Community Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Calgary
www.fixedthemovie.com | http://buff.ly/SjRFrw | www.resna.org/conference |
SoftBank’s Pepper proves robots really do care about us – CNET http://buff.ly/1oQEY1B
Hear text read aloud with Narrator – Windows Help http://buff.ly/UqTZyf
Google Apps update alerts: Improved accessibility, editing and ease of use in Google Sites http://buff.ly/UqU3ho
App: ToDoMath www.BridgingApps.org
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——-transcript follows ——-
GREGOR WOLBRING: Hi, this is Gregor Wolbring, and I am associate professor at the University of Calgary in the community rehabilitation and disability study program, and this is your Assistive Technology Update.
WADE WINGLER: Hi, this is Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana with your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up-to-date on the latest developments in the field of technology, designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs. Welcome to episode number 159 of Assistive Technology Update. I’m super excited this week to have our guests, Dr. Gregor Wolbring, who is the start of the movie Fixed and one of the plenary speakers at the RESNA conference in Indianapolis this week. We’ve talked about RESNA quite a bit and it’s actually happening. This podcast will be released on the Friday right in the middle of the RESNA conference. We will have a RESNA follow-up show here in a couple of weeks, but if you’re not at RESNA now, you’re probably not going to be at RESNA this year. However, we brought a lot of the speakers to the show. We hope you’ll enjoy today.
Also today is an interesting episode because we have a bonus episode. My interview with Dr. Wolbring went a little bit long and actually had some great conversation after the interview, so you’re going to find a bonus episode in your feet today. We’ll hope you will click the play button on that.
Also we’ve got a story about a new companion robot from Softbank out of Japan. A way to get Windows to talk to you with the narrator program, and some accessibility updates for Google sites. We hope you’ll check out our show notes at www.eastersealstech.com. Shoot us a note on Twitter at INDATA Project. Or call our listener line at 317-721-7124.
I said it before and I’ll say it again. I’m always a sucker for a good robot story. On CNET not too long ago, there is an announcement that Softbank, which is a Japanese-based mobile telecommunications company, is going to be releasing a new companion robot called Pepper. Pepper is a humanoid style robot with a display and apparently has the ability to understand spoken commands and emotions and then provide feedback and companionship based on that. It’s scheduled to be released this winter in February and is supposed to be having a starting price of ¥198,000, which is just a little less than $2000 US. I’m going to pop a link in the show notes. You can learn more about maybe your new friend Pepper who is this robot who’s going to be a companion. Check out our show notes.
I get an accessibility newsletter from Microsoft on a pretty regular basis, and recently they sent me one that has a link to a Windows narrator page. It has a video and it has some basic tips on how to use Windows narrator, which isn’t, I don’t think, a full service screen reader for the Windows operating system, but does a pretty decent job I think at providing some basic access. So here’s a little clip from the video.
>> Narrator is a screen reader app that reads text on the screen and describes what’s happening on your PC. Narrator has keyboard commands for reading what’s on the screen. Most of them use a combination of the caps lock key plus another key. Press caps lock and F1 to open a list of narrator commands. You can filter by basic commands, navigation commands —
WADE WINGLER: So if you haven’t had a chance to check out what Microsoft offers in terms of their Windows narrator product, it’s free, it’s built into Windows 8 and previous versions, but I think this one focuses on Windows 8. Check it out. We’ll have one in the show notes and you can learn more about this interesting alternative for screen access on Windows.
Are you a user of Google sites for your work project or a classroom project? Well they just increased the accessibility of Google sites a little bit. They’ve included a whole bunch of keyboard shortcuts. Things that will let you move a page, edit a page, create a page, search or do things like toggle site subscriptions and share sites. I’m going to pop a link in the show notes from a blog post from Google that talks more about how these keystrokes are going to improve accessibility for Google sites.
Each week one of our partners tells us what’s happening in the ever-changing world of apps, so here’s an App Worth Mentioning.
AMY BARRY: This is Amy Barry with BridgingApps, and this is an App Worth Mentioning. Today’s app is called ToDo K-2 Math Practice, by locomotive labs. It’s a wonderful, easy to use math app designed for kindergarten through second grade students that uses visuals, auditory prompts, and purposeful touch. Even though the app is geared towards K to second grade, we have used the app with high school students who are developmentally on a K-2 to level as it differentiates skills in a way that worksheets cannot.
Upon opening the app, you have a choice of timed practice or free choice. Timed practice is broken down into grade levels with common core standards for each grade. For example, grade 1 has four areas of practice: adding, tallies, equation maker, and quick facts. Students are given eight minutes to complete the practice. If the user chooses free choice, they have three areas of concentration: numbers and counting, visual representatives, and math facts practice. Within each area are subcategories and grade levels.
The goal of the app is to improve fluency of math sums and differences while also supporting the conceptual understanding of early math concepts. This is a go to favorite for many of our struggling learners. The app is colorful and extremely engaging. A favorite minigame is called “cookies” because it uses visual representation to help kids with their addition and subtraction. The student is given a problem on the left side of the screen such as 13-4, than they are given a visual presentation of 13 cookies, but four are empty circles. On the right side of the screen, there are numbers 0-9 for the student to choose from. Students who are struggling with handwriting can just drag the correct answer to the bottom of the screen. Students who are able to handwrite the number can write the correct answer.
The ToDo K-2 Math Practice app is free at the iTunes Store. This app can be used on iPads and iPhones. For more information on this app and others like it, visit BridgingApps.org.
WADE WINGLER: Before I jump into today’s interview, I need to let you know that something interesting happened with this. Typically our interviews are half of the show which is what you’re going to hear now, but after I st stopped op the conversation with our guest, Dr. Gregor Wolbring, we had some even more fastening conversation, so after this episode you are going to find that we released to podcast episode today: the regular show, the one you’re listening to right now, and then a sort of extended version where our less formal, more casual, very interesting conversation continues. So when you’re done with this interview, and you will have heard the current episode of Assistive Technology Update, but if you want to press play on the next episode that shows up after this, what you hear some pretty interesting conversation with Dr. Wolbring. After the show, feel free to click play and listen to the extended version. First time we’ve done this on assistive technology update. Pretty cool conversation.
So I’ve been talking about the RESNA conference coming up over the last several weeks, and I’m excited today to have another person that I have met and learned about through his role coming up with the RESNA conference in Indianapolis in June. Before I introduce him, there is a movie out called Fixed that deals with some pretty interesting aspects of assistive technology and human augmentation and some ethical questions that fit into that.
So I’m excited to have Dr. Gregor Wolbring with me today on Skype. Dr. Wolbring, are you there?
GREGOR WOLBRING: Yes, I am here. Thank you Wade for having me.
WADE WINGLER: Good. Thank you so much for spending some time out of your day. I know that we are not quite a month away from RESNA now, so I know that you’re looking for to coming to Indianapolis and spend some time here. But before we get into the talk that you’re going to give at RESNA, I was wondering if you would tell me a little bit about yourself, your career as a professor at the University of Calgary and some of the research that you been doing.
GREGOR WOLBRING: Sure. I’m kind of a strange bird. I’m actually a biochemist by training and I worked on all kinds of topics but did policy work all the time on the side on new emerging technologies. In 2008, I switched around by getting a faculty position in the disabilities study program here where my role is, in essence, to look at emerging technologies and their impact on disabled people. That’s where the talk comes in. That’s where the movie comes in. Indeed, the Fixed movie was conceptualized when the person, the director of the movie, Reagan Bashir, heard me at the 2004 talk I gave in San Francisco. That triggered in her the 10-year idea to get the movie done.
WADE WINGLER: Well. So that’s interesting. Before we talk about RESNA, and this is related to RESNA, tell me a little bit about Fixed the movie. What’s the subject matter and what’s your role in the movie?
GREGOR WOLBRING: Fixed is in essence a movie that tries to look at human enhancement and where it’s going. Part of the trans-humanist movement which is really a coastal movement which wants to move away from what we would call maybe today species typical body structure. As a human, you’re supposed to walk, but not to fly. A bird supposed to fly. This is leading to all kinds of areas where we are “unhealthy” if we don’t fit the species typical. They in essence say, well, our body is a work in progress, and because we can modify the body more and more by adding things into the body which gives us abilities which are not really part of our species’ genetic makeup, so they want to push that.
Then there are those in there who actually build devices like the exoskeletons, bionic legs. And then there are disabled people in there, some who point out the problems about more compliance and more operability. Once people feel this is how disabled people are supposed to behave, the question is how many of them really get access to these kinds of gadgets. My role really was to use the abilities expectation, the ableism lense, to look at the implications of human enhancement in general.
WADE WINGLER: And Dr. Wolbring, before we move ahead, it would help my audience and I know it would help me to maybe drill down a little more and help understand these terms of human augmentation or enhancement and ableism. Can you give us a quick definition of those?
GREGOR WOLBRING: Sure. Human enhancement is used in two ways. Many people use in the traditional way where it’s really about restoration. You have someone who can’t walk and now you restore them back to walking and that’s seen as enhancement. But that’s not how it’s used in the contemporary discourse. That’s really about adding totally new abilities to the body which we normally wouldn’t have.
For example, in interface which is used for disabled people, so for example, people who can’t move, they can short control their environment, that is obviously something new because we normally as humans do not short control our environment. We have therefore, with human enhancements, the gaming industry which you short control games which is not necessarily for disabled people, but for anyone who wants to short control their environment.
As to ableism, it’s really a reflection of the cultural reality that we expect certain abilities from people. One really defines oneself or others based on that expectation. Life is always, “I can’t by the newest dot, dot dot.” So the ability of consumerism. Within the disability field, it’s that we expect people to walk, and if they can’t walk, they’re just deficient. So that’s what ableism is. Ableism was coined from the 1960s when the disabilities rights movement coined the word to have something to highlight the problem with the behavior of people towards them and use the term similarly to sexism, racism, so now you have ableism.
WADE WINGLER: Thank you for those definitions. That makes a lot of sense. I think that that probably still is very pervasive even if it’s more subconscious from a lot of folks. You mentioned the history of ableism reaching back into the 60s. If you think about the concept of human augmentation or enhancements, can you give me some early examples in human history that might help us better understand that? Has this been happening for a long time?
GREGOR WOLBRING: It depends on how we think of human enhancement. Outside of the body, we do this all the time. People say we are called “homo-technicals” or “techno-sapiens” because our whole evolution is based on using tools. In the bronze age when we were able to make fire and bronze. When we fly, we use a plane. Our body doesn’t fly by itself. We use planes. This external means of enhancement we did for a long time.
But now we have increasing ways to actually modify the body. So far we could eliminate things which didn’t fit, like for example genetic testing. The hold eugenics movement was based on certain expectations and that just doesn’t fit so you use elimination practices. Down the road, we will be able to modify our genetic code to design humans. We will add things into the body where our organs will behave differently. There’s some people talking about an artificial hippocampus. In essence where the chip on which your memory will be put so it’s not your hippocampus or your biological one, use a chip for that. So these are new developments where the very body gets modified, not just using external tools, but actually modifying the body.
WADE WINGLER: So you’re hitting on some of the more controversial kinds of things. When we talk about somebody’s human essence in their knowledge put onto a chip, talk to me a little bit about the ethical implications of this because it sounds like we’re going into a new area and it’s going to be slippery slope.
GREGOR WOLBRING: Every single intervention product has its own issues. Obviously if you have a chip where your memory is on, there are issues around how do you know it’s your memory. There’s a whole field of bio hacking and brain hacking. Assuming that one can simply upload memory into us, there’s issues with that.
In general, when I look at — and what the Fixed movie also talks about, and where my talk at RESNA is, is future enhancement and its impact on people with disabilities and the people who work with them. We see a shift which I look at the enhancement version of ableism. Each new ability becomes the new norm. Then it’s really for the so-called “traditional” disabled people have to complete with the so-called “normal” people who then want to get upgrades to their bodies. These people are much better positioned because they have a higher level of education to push through that they get access to these enhancements where disabled people they likely will lose out more in this fight on a broader scale.
The problem is then if you change the norm, you have all the people going for enhancements, and the so-called” normal” people who are better positioned to get that, then the issue is really about access. The issue is about more modernization. The person who doesn’t have access to the newest upgrade to their body.
It will change even the meaning of health. There is stuff being pushed out where people say I’m only healthy if I have the newest upgrade to my body. If all of a sudden these people come and then want healthcare to get these upgrades, something else falls off the wagon because we only have limited money. So you will see a fight about the health consumer, who will actually get the treatment. Will people still do the traditional stuff like disease curative areas, or will people really focus on enhancements because it brings in better increase in productivity and so on. Even with the field like OT, PT, and so on, who will be your new client? Do you train people on exoskeletons and make money there and then you don’t focus on the amputees to have legs?
When you look at speech therapists, there is a device out there where it translates your thoughts into words. There’s actually no active speech required. That’s the whole field of speech pathology and speech therapy which has a change. Because now it’s not just about speech anymore, it just trains them to control their thoughts in the brain. So the speech comes out as you think. Your brain pattern actually gets translated into the speech. But it’s not like your mouth is moving. It’s just a new way. It’s a new opportunity for the field of speech therapy. Or do they lose their job because ordinary speech is not an essential ability anymore.
There’s all kinds of things depending on the products where people can think about. When you look at the ethics guidelines of all these professions, they all say it’s about the well-being of their clients. Do they really understand the social dynamics and what drives the product? That’s what the Fixed move is about, where I say if you really believe in productivity and competitiveness and consumerism as an underlying ability expectation of people, then certain people will push for certain products and certain people will not be on that bandwagon. So depending on how we look at the expectation of equality, the discussion would be totally different. So really depending on the ability expectation discourse and the ability expectation governance like which ability expectations we cherish or which we don’t cherish. Discourse will be totally different on the professional level and the individual level.
WADE WINGLER: Absolutely. Dr. Wolbring, it’s interesting because I’m very really at a loss for words but this conversation has my mind going in a lot of different directions. I’m looking at my clock and realizing we have just a minute or two less. I want to ask you a quick question. If you were to project 50 years into the future and look back upon the movie Fixed and where we are right now with human augmentation and the ethics, what do you think we will look back on this in a few generations and say — what does this mean at this point?
GREGOR WOLBRING: I think that Fixed is one of the first movies to show that. It took 10 years to even get funding, to get the editing, because people don’t want to write a more cautionary note despite Fixed gives both sides. I was part of the original conference on the National Science Foundation in 2001. It was called converging technologies for the improvement of humans. They focused on human enhancement, formal enhancement. They asked me, what would you like to see in 50 years down the road. I said Star Trek, “beam me up, Scottie.”
WADE WINGLER: Transporters.
GREGOR WOLBRING: Right. Because the reality is if I could have that then we would not have to worry about if they are this or that. Of course, reality is this is also a very rich country centric discourse. People who are poor, people who have no money — technical solutions are often not feasible. I think it would be much better if we first look for social solutions with as little technology as possible, because that allows more people to be part of it. Any technology takes money. A lot of people will never be able to afford something. How many people can really afford a bionic leg of the [Oscar] Pistorius type, the bladerunner? These things are expensive. How many people can really afford this on a global scale?
WADE WINGLER: Absolutely. Dr. Wolbring, I have to now issue a challenge to my audience. This is a fascinating conversation and it obviously can go very deep and very wide. We are out of time for today. My challenge to my audience is you have to come to RESNA in Indianapolis this summer so that you can meet Dr. Wolbring and hear his talk there where does not only going to be a screening of the movie, Fixed, but also a discussion of this.
The last thing I need to ask you for, Dr. Wolbring, is where would people learn more? If they wanted to learn more about the movie or if they wanted to learn more about you and your work, how would they find that?
GREGOR WOLBRING: Well, it’s all on the Saturday, June 14, where the movie and my talk is. You can find that on the RESNA website. The URL for the movie is fixedthemovie.org. With me, they just have to Google. I hope that my university website comes up on top. A lot of my stuff is open access. A lot of my publications are open access due to my university paying open access fees. So I do this on purpose so people can access stuff they don’t have to be part of an academic setting. A lot of my talks with my students online are also open access. We have podcasts. We have PowerPoint. We have all kinds of stuff online. People can also email me if they want to have something which they can’t access or if they have questions. I’m all the time available.
WADE WINGLER: Excellent. I’ll pop a link to fixedthemovie.com in the show notes. I’ll also do the Google work for folks and put the link to your website in there as well. Dr. Gregor Wolbring is a professor at the University of Calgary, and I’m looking for to meeting him at the RESNA conference in Indianapolis this summer. Dr. Wolbring, thank you so much for being on our show today.
GREGOR WOLBRING: Thank you, Wade. I look for to meeting you also.
WADE WINGLER: And before I sign off here, one of the most interesting parts of the conversation actually happened after the interview, so you will find in your podcast feed another episode released today that continues the conversation with Dr. Wolbring. So for the first time we’re going to bring you an extended episode and we hope you enjoy our less formal, more casual, very interesting and insightful conversation with Dr. Wolbring.
WADE WINGLER: Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? Call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Looking for show notes from today’s show? Head on over to EasterSealstech.com. Shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAProject, or check us out on Facebook. That was your Assistance Technology Update. I’m Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana.
