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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.
Special Guest:
Marty Schultz – President of Objecive Ed
Website: https://www.objectiveed.com/pre-ets
Stories:
MagTrack Story: https://b.gatech.edu/3tDYBmG
Captions Story: https://bit.ly/3MyMq35
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—– Transcript Starts Here —–
Marty Schultz:
Hi, this is Marty Schultz. I’m the President of Objective Ed. And this is your Assistive Technology Update.
Josh Anderson:
Hello, and welcome to 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 individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host Josh Anderson with the Indata Project at Easterseals, Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 563 of Assistive Technology Update. It’s scheduled to be released on March 11th, 2022.
Josh Anderson:
On today’s show, we’re super excited to have Marty Schultz. He’s the president of Objective Ed, and he’s here to talk about a new game they have to help individuals with some pre-employment skills. We have a story about a new assistive technology called Mag Track and some studies with it to see if it can help individuals better control the world around them, and a story about captions and how they’re being used in different ways in TikTok and other platforms. Don’t forget if you’d ever like to reach us for any reason with a comment, a question or somebody who’d make a great guest, you can shoot us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org, call our listener line at (317) 721-7124, or drop line on Twitter @ IndataProject. We thank you so much for spending your time with us today. Now let’s go ahead and get on with the show.
Josh Anderson:
So our first story today comes out of the Georgia Tech News Center and it’s titled “Mag Track Technology Opens Doors For Independent Operation of Smartphones, Computers and Other Devices For Wheelchair Users.” The story is about a collaborative research endeavor between Brooks Rehabilitation and the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. It’s thought to help the engineers at Georgia Tech transform their early research prototype into a user ready version. And this was tested by more than 17 power wheelchair users. So the idea and kind of the results of this engineering and clinical collaboration was something called Mag Track, that’s M-A-G T-R-A-C-K, describes it here as a cutting edge assistive technology that enables power wheelchair users to control their connected devices such as a smartphone or computer and drive their power wheelchairs using alternative multimodal controller. Says that in addition, the assistive device is designed to be wearable, wireless and adaptable to the users’ specific condition.
Josh Anderson:
This is a great thing that I feel like we’ve seen in assistive technology and in these assistive devices here lately, at least in some of the folks that I’ve talked to, of to find new input devices that don’t just allow for a new way of input, but kind of a whole new means of input so that it can be adjusted to the user so that whatever they can control, whatever they have the most function or range of motion with, they can use that in order to be the controller. It says here the mag track study is earning praise of patients and scientists alike and has recently been published in IEEE, Transactions of Biomedical Engineering. It says, in the beginning, the mag track studies were tested the performance of a head tongue controller, which was an early version of the mag track technology. It says that the HTC or head tongue controller allows the user to perform a variety of complex tasks and a single controller through the use of tongue and head movements. It says that these are actually detected by eyewear with a tiny tracer that is temporary glued onto the tongue using a biocompatible adhesive. Uses data processing and machine learning models to interpret the motions into specific commands.
Josh Anderson:
Says here’s the combination of input modalities allows the user to perform a variety of daily functions with customizable control. And this can be from complex computer tasks to completing advanced driving maneuvers in the power wheelchair. This is a very in depth story about the technology, so I won’t get into all of it because I do want you to be able to go and actually read some of it for yourself. But it does say down here, as we get towards the bottom, the team at Georgia Tech is already working on a new version of the mag track, something that’s a little bit more inconspicuous, but also includes detection of facial gestures that significantly augments its control capabilities. So again, more ways to control it, more control, more different ways to be able to access the things that we want to access. Says they’re also working on studying how mag track and this kind of technology can be used in different ways. Because it says here that it is core. It is really a new type of body motion tracking. Says it might be able to be used to assist with motor speech disorders, as a hand joint tracking system for physical rehabilitation, or even as finger tracking for VR and AR applications.
Josh Anderson:
So it sounds like there’s all different kinds of things they might be able to do with this technology. So in the end it sounds like a great thing because it’s something that can allow access to more people in more different kinds of ways. We’ll put a link to this over in the show notes and maybe try to work on getting someone on the show to talk about it a little bit more in depth so that you can find out even more.
Josh Anderson:
So our next story is from over at Forbes. It’s written by Steven Aquino, and we’ve actually probably had some of his stories on it before. He covers accessibility and assistive technology for Forbes, so pretty fitting that we included stories on here quite a bit. The story is how captions in TikTok videos and dictionary.com are remaking internet culture and how we literally talk about disability in tech. I won’t read this entire story to you because I want you to go check it out. It’s got some kind of good stuff and the way he tells his stories is actually pretty already good. But he talks about remembering growing up and talking about the big old device that you used to have to put on your TV in order to get captions and just kind of remembering when that happened and talking about how those things are as old as rotary dial telephones, phone books, pagers, answering machines, which he says gives you a good indicator of his age. But if I’m looking at that right, he’s probably about my age, so we won’t say anything bad about that.
Josh Anderson:
But it really gets into talking about how captions are kind of used today. Closed captions back in those days did have to come through this big box that decoded it so that you could actually get them on your screen. But I mean before that, and that was ’93, they weren’t mandated. You didn’t have to have these things on there and you might not be able to get them. You might have them, you might not. There were maybe some laws and some other things to protect you, but you couldn’t really access a whole lot of things. But if we really look at it today, everyone uses captions. I think in my home, many times if I’m actually trying to watch a TV program, which isn’t something that happens very often, I have the captions on. Not really because a hearing impairment, although I am getting older, so that’s probably showing up as well, but it’s because of just distractions. I have a six month old who’s cooing and making noises. I have a three year old who’s probably yelling and running around. And to actually listen to dialogue on a television is almost impossible. Although, actually taking the time to look at the screen to read it is almost as hard as well.
Josh Anderson:
But it talks about technology. And we think about zoom, FaceTime, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, all these thing kind of are starting to build in some technology and usually have some kind of captions available. And if you really think about TikTok, and I’m not a huge TikTok user, but we’ve had folks on to talk about it here before from Tech How and how they’re using it, if you watch a TikTok video to almost always has captions right there. And I would even go beyond that as it usually, if there’s text, it will read it right back to you. If you’re watching a TikTok video, most of the time, it has that voice that many of us in assistive technology as professionals, as users, as enthusiasts are used to. We’re used to hearing that kind of slightly female voice talking back to us in a screen reader form or a text to speech program. But people are really starting to get used to it because it’s how TikTok talks to them.
Josh Anderson:
So the great thing that’s doing is it helps get rid of that stigma a little bit. Because people might be you using a piece of assistive technology with that voice that talks to them and everyone’s using it with TikTok. So no longer do they stand out as they’re just using something that everyone else uses.
Josh Anderson:
Also down here, it gets into his interview with Heather Bonakowski, who’s a lexicographer at dictionary.com, who I must admit until reading this, I did not even know what that was. And I’m pretty sure I’m probably mispronouncing lexicographer, which is probably some sort of cardinal sin to mispronounce the job of someone that helps make a dictionary. But anyway, in part of his interview with her, she talks about really the inclusivity of language and how different words have been updated on dictionary.com and other things, including alt tech, screen reader, and other things like that. So how technology as a whole is becoming more inclusive, maybe not always in the code behind it and how our assistive technologies interact with it, but in the language of it, in the usability of it. It does go through here and talk, and this is Disability Awareness Month here in the States, that individuals with disabilities is the largest minority group in the world. So if you are not making your things accessible to these individuals, you’re cutting out a giant portion of the population.
Josh Anderson:
But what I really like about this story is, again, it talks about how dictionary.com is changing things in order to make sure that language stays inclusive and includes these kind of things. But also just talking about how so many of these accommodations, so much of this assistive technology, is being used by the masses. And it is not just help individuals with disabilities, but really and truly does help everyone. There’s a lot more to read and hopefully you get a chance to actually read the whole thing. And if you do, I’ll put a link to the story over in our show notes.
Josh Anderson:
Playing games can be a great way to learn new skills and sometimes it’s the best way because you’re enjoying what you’re actually doing. Well today I’m excited to welcome Marty Schultz on the show to tell us about Objective Ed and their new game that can help those seeking employment gain valuable skills through an accessible game. Marty, welcome to the show.
Marty Schultz:
Thanks, Josh. Thanks for inviting me out to the show.
Josh Anderson:
Yeah, I’m super excited to learn more about this technology and everything. But before we do that, could you give us a little bio on yourself?
Marty Schultz:
Sure. So I’m a serial entrepreneur I’ve started and made successful several companies over the past few decades in different areas of software technology. This one, Objective Ed, we started about four years ago with the mission of helping students with disabilities have better educational outcomes and helping teens in that area make the transition successfully off to jobs and college.
Josh Anderson:
Very cool, very cool. We already kind of started talking about Objective Ed a little bit, but the real reason we have you on the show is to talk about this game to assist pre-employment individuals with job skills. Can you start us off by telling us just a little bit about where the idea for this game came from?
Marty Schultz:
Yeah. So I was meeting with Kirk Adams, who’s the CEO of the American Foundation for the Blind, and we were tossing ideas around how Objective Ed could help students, not just those in grade school, middle school, high school, but really started addressing some of the needs of teens and younger adults who were going through a transition program. So as we were bouncing ideas around, I thought anything that we could build that would kind of substitute for a transition teacher, would just be way too hard and require too much artificial intelligence in there to make the situation real. But then we started talking about, well, what if we could somehow emulate what the student was going through and give them choices? And I started thinking, this sounds a lot like what’s called an interactive fiction game.
Marty Schultz:
And interactive fiction games actually date back to the early 1960s, 1970s where you’d be sitting at a computer terminal that would just text, no Windows or anything like that. And the computer would act like a narrator on the story and you would say, “Okay, you’re in a cave and there’s an the there’s an exit to the left, an exit to the right. What do you want to do?” And you might say, “I want to go to the right.” And then you’d walk a little ways and the computer would say, “Okay, you’re in a large cave and there are diamonds on the floor and there’s a pickax on the corner.” And you’d keep doing that and you’d explore through this cave. This actually one of the most famous interactive fiction games called Colossal Cave.
Marty Schultz:
Well over time, that concept of interactive fiction started moving into things like video games and very low resolution graphics, which eventually started doing games like … I can’t even remember some of the earlier games. I’ll have to go back and check. But eventually they started adding more and more graphics. And you had games like Mist, which eventually turned into games like Fortnite, which is so popular, or Roblox. But interactive fiction is any sort of storytelling games that ended up adding video animation to it that is now the most popular way people play games.
Josh Anderson:
Nice.
Marty Schultz:
When I started thinking about what we could do for people who are visually repaired in that same manner but make the game a learning experience, we said, “Well, we can make it a completely audio game and then you’d go through this adventure of getting a job. All the things like searching for a job, filling out your resume, going for interviews and going your first day of the job.” Well, Kirk, again from the AFB, thought it was a great idea. I talked to the people over the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind, they thought it was a great idea. I called a number of teachers who I knew who worked with blind or visually impaired students or low vision students. Everyone thought it was great, if it was all voice operated.
Marty Schultz:
So I started looking at how could we get this financed? And I reached out to the National Institute on Disability Learning and Rehabilitation Research, a division of NIH. And we submitted a grant to actually build this system. We set on a grant application that we would pull together a team of very impressive people. So on the grant, we had a couple of people who were researchers who studied pre-employment transition for teens. We had the former CEO or President, the chair of the American Council for the Blind, Jim Charleston. We had had Brian Charleston, who was a blind Director of Information Technology over at the Carrol Center for Blind. We had a couple of vision rehabilitation therapists from the Carrol Center and to interact with fiction writers.
Marty Schultz:
And then over the course of about a year, we would meet once a week and discuss what to focus on in the next chapter of the story. The interactive fiction writers would interview all these experts on blindness or low vision about what their world was like. And slowly over time, this five chapter story came together. And it takes about three or four hours to complete the story. And you go through all the experiences of what it’s like to get a summer job.
Marty Schultz:
So the story starts off where a teen is heading on a train to visit their aunt and uncle. And they get there and they decide they want to get a summer job while they’re in this town. And they walk around from store to store looking at what’s available. They hear about there’s a job at the cafe and a bakery. There’s a job at the country club and there’s a job at pool and a job at a flower shop. And they go through the process of putting together a resume and applying for these jobs. They go for interviews. If they do well in the job, they might get the job they want. If they did poorly in the job, they might have to start the classes over again. Then they get trained on the first day of the job and then they actually perform on the job. So it’s a lot of fun and we tested it with a couple dozen kids and every one of them loved it. And they said it’s a great way to learn how to get familiar with getting a job. So we think it’s a hit.
Josh Anderson:
No, that’s great. And I know I was a job coach before I kind of did this. So I know especially if that can kind of help with those interview skills and really kind of maybe just some of the anxiety that comes along with that, maybe kind of help them through that by sort of having that experience, even though I know it’s a game. But being able to actually kind of practice those skills as opposed to just trying to learn them and then kind of walk in cold.
Marty Schultz:
Yeah. Well the cool thing about this is the game can be played several times. And we noticed the adults who were testing this out, they could answer it in the best possible way to do as well as they could, or in the worst possible way because both paths were a lot of fun. And in this way, they’d get to practice these skills in a safe, virtual environment and see what works and what doesn’t work. You find out if you are rude to your boss during interview or you’re rude to your coworkers on the first day of the job, you might not end up keeping that job. So you get to experience these real world ramifications, but in a safe space. So that when you play the job the game of second time, it makes a little more sense and you’ll pick better decisions so that by the time you’re ready to go into the real world and do it, you at least know what to expect, as you were saying.
Josh Anderson:
Sure, sure. And Marty, I know this was made for folks with visual impairments, but could this really assist anyone that’s kind of in that pre-employment transition kind of phase in life?
Marty Schultz:
I’m glad you asked that question because after we finished it, one of the comments we had from reviewers is, “Why don’t you do this for people with other disabilities?” So since then, we’ve submitted about five or six grants to the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Education to build out more interactive fiction stories for people with other disabilities. We have three of them going in for students who are on the autism spectrum, some that just fit general disabilities, and a couple more for students who are blind or visually impaired. But the general concepts are applicable across the board. One of them is just going to focus on job skills and interview skills. Another one is only going to focus on college readiness skills. Another one is going to focus on workplace readiness skills that will actually be a series of one to two hour chapters that take a full semester completely do one chapter every week. So that by the time you’ve gone through this, you’ve seen so many situations so many different times, that you’re actually ready to just jump right in and win.
Josh Anderson:
Very nice. Marty, can you tell us what some of those situations are just to give our listeners kind of an idea?
Marty Schultz:
They would be things like, I think with the autism scenario, having a major disagreement with your supervisor and then maybe having some sort of meltdown because your needs not being tended to. Or another scenario, how you disclose your disability. Do you hide it in the resume? Do you hide it on the phone interview and then disclose it when you’re there or do you disclose it up front? And we go through different scenarios of what’s the best way to deal with this situation. If you’re having difficulties with your coworkers, how you handle those coworker difficulties. We always have a concept of making sure you have a plan B. So let’s say you are planning on getting to work through public transportation or something else happened, but it’s late and you’re going to be late for the interview. What is your plan B to make sure that you do everything right? Do you bring extra money with you? If you spent that money on the Uber to get there on time, have you thought about what you can do for lunch now that you don’t have money for lunch cause you just spent it on Uber? All those scenarios of things we took care of in this interactive fiction story.
Josh Anderson:
That’s great. And that gives you just so much experience without actually having to experience out in the real world. I can see how that could just be completely and totally invaluable to individuals.
Marty Schultz:
Yeah, it was interesting because the people who were advising us on it, in this case the blind adults, they always talk about the plan B that they’re going to use. They always talk about rehearsing everything ahead of time so that way, when they’re in the real world scenario, they’ve gone through it and they know what to expect. So all that’s built into the stories.
Josh Anderson:
Nice, very nice. And Marty, this is not all that Objective Ed does. Could you give us an idea of some of the other services and things that y’all do for folks?
Marty Schultz:
Sure. So we start off building out different types of gamified reinforcement curriculum for students, anywhere from pre-k up through high school. And since we’re looking kids with impairments first, we did games that teach concepts of orientation and mobility, way finding, brail literacy, assistive technology. For example, we have one game that just helps kids practice different voiceover gestures on the iPhone or the iPad. We have another game that helps them build things like working memory.
Marty Schultz:
We noticed with the pandemic, a lot of kids lost about four months of progress in building out the skills they need to survive in the real world, so we have been educating teachers now on how some of these games can be used between sessions with their specialized teacher to practice these type of skills whether executive function, working memory, things like that. And something as much fun as that might be simply like a card game where you have say three columns of four rows of cards. You turn, flip over, turn face side down, and you have to find the matching pairs. And as you build up your working memory, you can remember, “Okay, I saw that the car was in the lower right corner and I have to match that to the car sound, which is the upper right corner.” And then one of an IEP goal for a lot of kids is how quickly they can basically solve this type of problem, proving that they’re building out their working memory. So we have a wide variety of things like that.
Marty Schultz:
We’ve also done a number of things using artificial intelligence to help improve both braille skills and oral leading skills for students with reading disabilities or a specific learning disability in reading. So the braille version of this is we send a sentence to the students on braille display, then they have to read from that braille display speaking aloud the sentence that’s on the braille display. We use artificial intelligence space speech recognition to verify that what the child has read matched the sentence that we sent to the braille display. And that’s really kind of advanced braille literacy, where we’re helping the child read faster and faster and faster and more accurately. And we’re looking at doing things like that with speech recognition to help kids improve their oral reading skills who might have say a speech and language disability, or like I said, a reading disability.
Josh Anderson:
That’s awesome. And I can see how you teach all kinds of different stuff. And yeah, I didn’t even realize those tools were available, but I know, especially practicing those voiceover skills just because that really kind of piqued my interest, I know that’s always a really hard one as, as someone who does AT training, it’s always, how do you reinforce those when you’re not there? So that’s great that you’ve got that tool available for folks because a lot of that takes so much practice.
Marty Schultz:
And we did that as a game. If you remember the old Simon game, I think it was. So we did that with gestures. The game would say, “Okay, swipe down two fingers.” They’d swipe down two fingers and it would say, “Okay, swipe up one finger.” And you’d do that. And then it gets faster and faster and faster. And then we give them sequences, swipe down two, up one, left one, right one, tap twice. And you have to repeat the whole sequence.
Josh Anderson:
That’s great. That’s really great. Because especially, so many folks, you try to tell them that and it might even look to the trained eye like they’re doing it just fine, but only one fingers touching or something like that. So it really gets that home. So that’s really awesome, Marty. Like I said, I didn’t know about that.
Marty Schultz:
Yeah, all the games have been a lot of fun and all the games are designed both with teachers of visually impaired students as well as the kids so that we know what’s fun and what will help them teach and learn those skills.
Josh Anderson:
Marty you’ve been doing this a while and I’m sure you’ve probably got a lot of these, but could you tell me a story about someone that’s been assisted by either the game that helps you get those job skills or maybe one of the others? Do you have a story that sticks out about an individual that’s been held by those?
Marty Schultz:
Well, it was really cute because we had asked some of the teachers to send in videos of the kids playing the games and what they thought of them. And there was a girl, I think she was in seventh grade, completely blind working with the teacher. And she would say how much she liked the Simon game and there’s another game called Audio Asteroid. And the teacher [inaudible 00:24:50] back and forth. And the kid has actually taken most of the lead in talking about what games she likes and she wants to move up to harder and harder levels of the game. And then in the end I asked the teacher, Well, what’s the best part about this?” And the teacher said, “Well, the games are fun for the kids and the kids said, ‘And they’re so educational.'” So it’s not unusual for the kids to learn from these games and realize they’re learning, and they like the fact that they’re learning
Josh Anderson:
Nice and they still like it anyway once they realize that it’s educational. That’s absolutely perfect, perfect. Well, Marty if our listeners want to find out more, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Marty Schultz:
They can visit our website, which is Objective Ed, that’s O-B-J-E-C-T-I-V-E and then ed.com, and there’s access to all our products up there.
Josh Anderson:
Awesome, we will put a link to that over in the show notes. Marty Schultz, thank you so much for coming on the show today, telling us all about these really great games that you guys are making there at Objective Ed to really help folks with a lot of needs, but especially that pre-employment transition part of life that can be so challenging for so many individuals with disabilities. So thank you again for coming on.
Marty Schultz:
Sure thing. Let’s cross our fingers that we get more of these grants.
Josh Anderson:
We definitely will. We definitely will. Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on an Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at (317) 721-7124, send us an email at tech@Eastersealscrossroads.org, or shoot us a note on Twitter @ IndataProject. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation or INTRAC. You can find out more about INTRAC at relayindiana.com. A special thanks to Nicole Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guest are their own and may or may not reflect those of the Indata Project, Easterseals Crossroads are supporting partners or this host. This was your Assistive Technology update and I’m Josh Anderson with the Indata Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye bye.
