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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: Ed Roberts Campus and Universal Design | Susan Henderson (Executive Director, Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund) and Dmitri Belser (Executive Director Center for Accessible Technology) | www.EdRobertsCampus.org | Center for AT: http://cforat.org/ | AT Coalition: http://atcoalition.org/
Social Media and Accessibility: Resources to Know http://buff.ly/142gnSm
Bayonetta 2 Named “Most Accessible” Game of 2014 – GameSpot http://buff.ly/1xFHIGb
Marco says: “Apple are losing their edge also in accessibility quality” http://buff.ly/1xSujwk
App: Rock My Run www.BridgingApps.org
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SUSAN HENDERSON: Hi, this is Susan Henderson, and I’m the Executive Director at Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, also known as DREDF, and also a board member of the Ed Roberts Campus.
DMITRI BELSER: Hi, this is Dimitri Belser, and I’m the Executive Director of the Center for Accessible Technology, also known as CforAT, and a board member of the Ed Roberts Campus, 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 189 of Assistive Technology Update. It’s good to be released on January 9 of 2014.
Today I’m excited to have Susan Henderson and Dimitri Belzer on the show. They are residents of the Ed Roberts Campus are going to talk to is kind of extensively about universal design and how they’ve implemented it there at their location in California.
Also we have some resources on social media accessibility, which game was named the most accessible game of 2014, and an opinion piece from Marco about Apple and whether they’re losing their edge. Also an app review from BridgingApps on an app called Rock My run.
Check out our webpage at www.eastersealstech.com, shoot us a note on Twitter at INDATA Project, or call our listener line at 317-721-7124.
I’m looking at a story here from digitalgov.gov, and one of the first things that talks about is an interesting point. Back in 1990, when the Americans with disabilities act was passed, there is no such thing as Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn or a lot of the social media platforms we all rely on and use all the time. Therefore accessibility wasn’t addressed with those platforms back then. There is a resource available from the digitalgov website about social media and accessibility and it really is a listing of resources. It talks about events that they posted. The point you to some blog post about accessibility. And then also points to a social media accessibility toolkit which is an extensive collection of information. It talks about platform specific kinds of tips, all kinds of general social media tips, and gives social media managers a lot of good advice on how to make things like YouTube videos and Vine posts and blogs more accessible to people who have disabilities and rely on assistive technology.
The first link that I’m going to give you take you to this listing of resources, and then I really would encourage you to click on the toolkit link which takes you into this very detailed information on how to improve the accessibility of social media. Going to pop a link in the show notes. I’m going to encourage everybody to keep using your social media tools, but check out his resources on how to make them the most accessible that they can be. Check our show notes.
If you’re a gamer, you probably heard of the game called Bayonetta 2. If you’re interested in accessible gaming, you might be aware of the fact that AbleGamers, one of the world’s foremost authorities on accessible videogame technology, has named Bayonetta 2 the most fixable game of 2014. The talk about the fact that it has a single button combat mode. It allows all kinds of different connections in terms of controllers like the Wii U gamepad pro controller, or the gamepad’s touchscreen gives lots and lots of options for interfacing. It talks about the fact that it has a colorblind mode that allows people to understand better what’s happening without having to rely on colorful meaning. It really did, for an action game especially that’s a very visual media, get accolades all kinds of accessibility built in. Other games that were in contention for the award were Hearthstone, Pokemon Alpha Sapphire/ Omega Ruby, Tropico 5, The Sims 4, and Civilization: Beyond Earth. I’m going to pop a link in the show notes over to the GameSpot.com review where you can read more about Bayonetta 2 and why AbleGamers named it the most accessible game of 2014.
So for a self-admitted Apple fan boy like me, it’s really hard to read this headline. But from Marco’s Accessibility Blog, the headline reads, “Apple are losing their edge also in accessibility quality.” Marco’s Accessibility Blog is written by Marco who is somebody who is blind and has been working at the Mozilla company working in accessibility for some time. We present to him before and his material on the show a number of times, and I like most of the things that Marco says. But this article gets a little bit edgy and a little bit interesting. He talks about the fact that there is a lot of scuttlebutt in the Apple industry world that says the apples quality is lacking and that they are falling behind some of the competitors specifically in the area of mobile technology in their war against Android.
In this article, he gets into some pretty specific things. He talks about the fact how the iPhone was a game changer for him and allowed him to have access to things that he never had access to before as a blind user. Then he gets into some specifics about some of the OS X operating system and some of the bugs. Then he gets into some of the things that he considers sort of unforgivable sins when it comes to accessibility on the iPhone. Things like Safari freezing up when you’re using voice over on webpages and things like that. In the end, he comes back around and talks about the fact that Apple still has been legendary in terms of their advances in accessibility and their products, but that they are kind of lagging behind right now. It’s an interesting article. That’s a lot of nuance and detail. I’m going to pop a link that you notes and encourage you to go over there and see what you think about what Marco says about the fact that Apple might be suffering in terms of quality and accessibility and then chime in. Pushback a little bit. Let me know how you feel about this issue of Apple and accessibility. Call our listener line at 317-721-7124 and tell me what do you think Marco is right in that Apple is lacking in their accessibility. I’d love to hear from you.
Each week, one of our partners tells us 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 Rock My Run, amazing DJ playlist for running fitness, the gym, and exercise. What do you have been hitting the pavement with your feet for years or are a beginner runner, there’s nothing better than a new pair of running shoes and fresh new music to put the hop in your stride. There is not enough for new shoes yet. There is an app for adding fresh new music to a work out.
Rock My Run is a fantastic and fun music app that offers cadence to paste playlists created by DJs to put some fun in a run. The uses for this app go beyond running with cadence in the form of beats per minute as the key to its flexibility. The main feature of Rock My Run is the use of beats per minute as the basis of each DJ mix. A user searches and selects specific playlists in a genre of their preference that also matches their natural running or even cycling cadence. The genres are diverse and include options such as oldies, rock, classical, Christian, hip-hop, and country music. The interface is simple to use and is organized with three main functions: storage, search, and music currently playing. Playlist search options can be based on choice of genre, beats per minute, and playing time. A filter to exclude any explicit lyrics is a nice touch. Any DJ mix selected can be streamed or even downloaded for use at times when Wi-Fi is not available. Playlists under 45 minutes in length are part of the free version of the app. Longer play mixes are available with a monthly subjection based on premium membership.
The ability to have a music app with a choice of playlists based on specific beats per minute was an exciting find for the post stroke survivor. He is out of his wheelchair and has relearned to walk with a cane despite continued difficulties. The days of insurance approved physical therapy are long gone, but his neurologic impairment and the need for continuous daily activity remains. He challenges himself constantly with goals of improving his gait and form. And his caregiver determined his natural cadence with a metronome app and then formed playlists on Rock My Run that matched his gait speed. He really loves the fund the app has added to his walking work and want to add it to his arm bike exercise time as well. His caregiver loves the improved rhythm and smoothness she sees in his gait. They both see this as a positive step forward in neurological improvement and love the fun it adds to his home exercise program.
The Rock My Run is free in the iTunes and Google Play stores. This app can be used on iOS and Android devices. For more information on this app and others like it, visit BridgingApps.org.
WADE WINGLER: We live in a world where we take physical access to places and things for granted, that is until we had a barrier. Today we’re going to meet some folks and learn about a place where that’s probably less likely to happen. I’m excited to have her via Skype today Susan Henderson who is the executive director of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, and Dimitri Belzer who is the executive director of the Center for Accessible Technology, or CforAT. Both are board members of the eyedropper’s campus. That’s mostly we’re going to talk about today.
First and foremost, Susan, Dimitri, thank you for joining us today.
DMITRI BELSER: Thank you for having us.
WADE WINGLER: Folks, before we jump into the concept of — we’re going to talk about universal design and the eyedropper’s campus. Can you tell me a little bit about your day jobs, what you do in each of your organizations?
SUSAN HENDERSON: I’ll start. I am the director at DREDF. DREDF was founded in 1979. We’re a policy center directed by people with disabilities and parents of kids with disabilities. He worked to end discrimination on the basis of disability.
WADE WINGLER: Excellent. And Dimitri?
DMITRI BELSER: I’m the Director of the Center for Accessible Technology, also known as CforAT. We are an assistive technology resource. We started in 1983 as a center for people to come to to learn about assistive technology. But with the rise of the Internet, we’ve now become an Internet-based resource that people can use to learn more about what kinds of assistive technology are available.
WADE WINGLER: So you’re both in Berkeley, California, but having a worldwide impact.
DMITRI BELSER: That’s correct.
SUSAN HENDERSON: Right. DREDF also has an office in Washington DC.
WADE WINGLER: Excellent. Our main topic today to talk about the Ed Roberts Campus. For folks in my audience who aren’t familiar with the name Ed Roberts, can one of you tell me a little bit about that name and what it significant and then why the Ed Roberts Campus is named that?
DMITRI BELSER: Ed Roberts was one of the early leaders in the independent living movement. He was a student who had been at Cal during the free speech movement and there were a bunch of people there who started a group called the Rolling Quads. They were the ones who really push the University of California to have a disabled students program which is one of the first in the country, and then they went on and founded the Center for Independent living in Berkeley, which was the first independent living center and spawned independent living centers all over the world. Ed did a lot of things in his life. He won a MacArthur genius award. He became the director of the California Department of rehabilitation. He was the first person with a disability to hold that job.
When Ed died in 1995, people in the community came together to talk about how we would honor his life. We came up with this idea of building a center that would really become the hub for the independent living movement in California and a place that would give us real visibility as people disabilities. That was how the concept of the Ed Roberts Campus was born.
WADE WINGLER: That sounds like a great way to honor a man who had a dramatic impact on the lives of folks with disabilities. When I think of campus, I think back to college days. I think about an academic campus, but I don’t think that’s exactly what we’re doing with. Can you tell me, it’s a safe place, a business, a community? What kind of things happen there?
SUSAN HENDERSON: We like to think of ourselves as community. It’s primarily a community of organizations that serve the independent living and disability rights movements. There are seven partners of the Ed Roberts Campus who did all of the fundraising, the planning, the development and worked on the design. We are all located at the ERC, which is what we refer to it most of the time. We also have tenants in the building who also serve people disabilities. We’ve become a bit of a hub in the Bay Area. Also we become known internationally because of the universal design aspect. But we really do like to think of ourselves as a place where the community of people disabilities, their families, and the broader community come and come to understand disability and inclusion and access.
WADE WINGLER: So the two of you have given me some idea in the intro about the organizations that each of you represent. Susan, can you tell me a little bit about who else is in the community there, the other tenant organizations?
SUSAN HENDERSON: Like you mentioned, there are seven original organizations. Center for Accessible Technology and DREDF are two of them. They also include the Berkeley Center for Independent living; the computer technologies program which re-trains people in computer technology application; through the looking glass with works with parents who have disabilities; the world Institute on disability, which is another organization founded by Ed Roberts along with Joan Leon and Judy Heumann; there is the bay area outreach and restoration program; and I think that’s it for the partners. And then we also have CTAP which provides death and disabled access telephone program for California; the Department of rehab; we’re just about to have a health clinic in the building; we also have two organizations that primarily serve people with developmental disabilities doing job coaching and independent living support. That’s pretty much as. We also have a café which we are pretty proud of too.
WADE WINGLER: Because you’ve got to eat, right?
SUSAN HENDERSON: We all have to eat and definitely get our coffee.
WADE WINGLER: Absolutely. I live in central Indiana where public transportation is actually fairly minimal, but I know that the proximity to the BART station there is a poor and period can you tell me a little bit about that?
DMITRI BELSER: That is critical to the whole building. When you realize you wanted to build this facility, it made no sense to build if you were going to be right at a transit hub. So BART, which is Bay Area Rapid Transit, is the regional transit system for the Bay Area. We realize we had to be that even near BART but really at BART. So we ended up building the Ed Roberts Campus right on top of one of the BART stations, at the Ashby BART station in Berkeley.
WADE WINGLER: So that makes it easy for folks who are using the BART to get there and have access. I assume that’s not only for recipients of services but the folks who are employed there as well, right?
DMITRI BELSER: Exactly. It gives people direct access to BART which is great because BART also connect directly with San Francisco Airport and Oakland Airport. We always tell people anywhere in the world, if you can get to an airport, you can get to the Ed Roberts Campus. It’s completely accessible when you’re here.
WADE WINGLER: That’s great. Our main topic we want to get to today is universal design and why the Ed Roberts Campus is an example of that. I think most of the folks in my audience are aware of universal design, but can one of you take us to school for just a few words about what is universal design?
SUSAN HENDERSON: Universal design was a term that was coined by Ron Mace back in the 1980s. The concept was floating around for a while but it really is designing both the environments and products to be usable to the greatest extent possible by everyone regardless of their age, their ability, or their economic status. So when we first had the concept of building the Ed Roberts Campus, we had the concept of using the principles of universal design.
WADE WINGLER: And when we talk about the Ed Roberts Campus specifically, I know that is fairly unique in terms of universal design. I know it is not just about the architecture, although it certainly is, but it also deals with things like fragrance and landscaping. Can you give me some ideas and examples of how universal design takes form there at the Ed Roberts Campus?
DMITRI BELSER: There’s a lot of different ways. You’re right. We do maintain a fragrance free building and we try to always minimize what we do in terms of any kind of treatment of landscaping in terms of pesticides or anything like that. We try to make it a place where everybody can come. That’s not always easy. There’s a lot of differing needs. It’s something we struggle with quite a bit. We mostly have been pretty successful in making a building that’s really usable by everybody.
SUSAN HENDERSON: When we were building the building, one of the things we make clear with both the architect and contractor was that the materials used needed to have very little impact on people with chemical sensitivity. So we got no VOCs, glues and paints. The carpeting we used had been made from recycled materials. All of the cleaning products and soaps and restrooms are all fragrance free and unscented and to the maximum extent use very little chemicals that people might be sensitive to. We are always watching what we use, and because the clientele in the building is pretty sensitive, we try to be pretty sensitive to what’s going on too.
DMITRI BELSER: Building a building that’s really universally designed is pretty complex, and it started at construction because one of the things about the Ed Roberts Campus is the seven partner agencies are the owners of the building. As owners, we wanted to inspect it as it was being built, which meant that the construction site had to be made accessible to us. The contractors had to not only build this building but make sure that a wheelchair user or plan person could actually navigate through the construction site to inspect the building which was a pretty big challenge in itself.
WADE WINGLER: I bet the greatest problems that were interesting to solve. That’s fastening. Other times and situations where universal design or accommodations being made for one person’s needs conflicts with somebody else’s needs? Have there been any conflict in these situations?
DMITRI BELSER: Absolutely. We’ve run into that a lot. Is a concept that we actually started to call dueling disabilities. We never had a banjo solo to go with it. We always felt like there were a lot of issues like that that we ran into. It’s really easy to describe. The way I described it is talk about curbs. As a blind person, I really like having curbs because it’s a man on the street. But wheelchair users hate curbs. They would like them all to go away. How do you accommodate that? One of the ways that we accommodated it is in front of the building, the front of the building has a Plaza and wanted to make it easy for someone to find the front door who is blind. Our first thought was we can put planters all along the sidewalk and have them turn and lead into the front door. But that would break up the Plaza and also, for a lot of people particularly wheelchair users, they like to be able to cut across and take the shortest route. That way we saw that is we came up with using tactile concrete. The walkway itself is actually [Inaudible] for blind people, but is not enough that a wheelchair user will feel the difference when they are rolling over it.
It’s really thinking about creative ways of solving problems.
WADE WINGLER: I have to assume that was a very collaborative process so the people who have more experience with blindness versus wheelchairs can get together and kick that stuff around.
DMITRI BELSER: That’s right. It took us from the time that Ed died in 1995, we open the building in 2010. We had 15 years. We didn’t break ground until 2008. Part of that was because we had to raise all the money ahead of time before we could break ground. But he gave us a lot of time to really talk about this. We had charrettes and various meetings very brought people together to discuss all the needs that people had. We had a series of meetings about bathrooms and about all the different ways people need bathrooms to be configured. That’s why the Ed Roberts Campus has batteries that are configured in many different ways. We were trying to get all this information. We had a lot of time to build the building which seemed frustrating to us at times but it really gave us the time to do it right.
WADE WINGLER: It sounds to me like there are a lot of things that you have had a chance to think about and plan for, but other areas where there is still work to be done? Are there things in the future that could be done better or need to be changed?
SUSAN HENDERSON: Absolutely. One of the things that we admittedly missed during all of our planning even though we had talked about it was the building has elevated walkways for the second floor that you can see over into the atriums and the ramp lobby down on the first floor. Those walkways have panels like any walkway would to keep people from falling off. The panels are made out of a material which is made out of recycled milk crates. And all of our discussions, we had a discussion about what we want those panels to actually be? Do you want them to be glass and transparent? Do you want them to be not transparent? During the conversation, which had many people in the room, people who are blind, people who use wheelchairs, which are to have these panels made out of a white material. Right as we moved into the building, a couple wheelchair users were going down the walkways and they said if you’re walking, you can see over the railing. If you’re in a wheelchair, you can’t. We realized right away that we should have probably used a transparent material for those panels. At some point some day we probably will, but it’s a matter of funding at this point. But that was one of the things that we missed even though there are many of us in the room discussing what the materials should be. That is one example.
DMITRI BELSER: That was an interesting one to miss because all of the people in the room looked at the height of the railings and everyone said this is fine. People will be able to see over it period but it wasn’t until he got into the building that seeing across isn’t really the issue. People stand at those railings and look down. In order to be able to look down, a wheelchair user would be looking lower and they would need to see through the panel. No one thought of that. People just that we can see over this, this is fine.
WADE WINGLER: I think that kind of interest the point that when we are talking about assistive technology and disabilities and universal design, it really is a process and is a collaborative process. It’s usually a work in process. If folks were interested in learning more or perhaps scheduling a visit, where would you direct them? How can they contact you guys?
DMITRI BELSER: The best way is just to go to our website which is EdRobertsCampus.org. From the website they can get information about us, they can get information about the partner agencies, they can get contact information so they can reach us. We love to have people come visit. We’ve had visitors from all over the world. We’ve given to us to people from literally all over the place. We love to show off the building. As you can tell, we are enormously proud of it and we really want to see this replicated. We want to see people come and learn from us and go back and do the same kind of work in their communities.
SUSAN HENDERSON: It was our hope that universal design will take the place of drain, sustainable design and become just popular and happen everywhere.
WADE WINGLER: Susan Henderson is the executive director of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund and Dmitri Belser is the executive director of the Center for Accessible Technology. Susan, Dmitri, think is much for sharing information with us today about the Ed Roberts Campus.
DMITRI BELSER: Thanks for having us.
SUSAN HENDERSON: Thank you. You’re welcome.
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.
