ATU651 – Public Library Accessible Workstations with Brian Norton

Hi, my name is Brian Norton, Director of Assistive Technology at Easterseals Crossroads, and this is your Assistive Technology Update.

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 651 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on November 17th, 2023. Today, I am super excited to welcome well a guest we’ve had on here quite a few times, our own Director of Assistive Technology and head of our INDATA Project, Brian Norton is on today to tell us about an exciting project that he did with the public library here in Indiana and just kind of helping access for the folks that they serve.

We also welcome back Amy Barry from BridgingApps with an app worth mentioning. Don’t forget folks, as I always do, encourage you to do, please reach out to us if you have any questions, any comments, or any suggestions for future guests. You can send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org or call our listener line at (317) 721-7124. But for now, let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

Folks, if you’re listening to this show, it’s obvious that you like assistive technology and you love podcasts. Well, if you like assistive technology and podcasts, have I got a treat for you? Assistive Technology Update is not our only podcast here at the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads. No, we actually have two others. Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions or ATFAQ is a question and answer show where we take your questions as well as questions that we receive through our other programs and do our best to answer those with our panel of experts. I use that word very loosely, but usually it’s myself, Brian Norton, and other members of our team sitting in to try to answer your questions. This show relies on our listeners not just for our questions, but sometimes for the answers. Let’s not lie, we do not know everything that there is to know, so we always kind of try to throw those questions out and sometimes our listeners’ feedback, well, we get to learn stuff as well, which is always a great thing.

Or if perhaps you’re short on time. We also have Accessibility Minute. Now, Accessibility Minute is just a little taster. It’s going to give you just a little bit of information about a new piece of assistive technology, a new app, program or something else cool that might be able to help individuals with disabilities and they give you some resources where you can go and check out more about it on your own. So remember, if you like this show, if you like assistive technology and you like podcasts, check out our other shows, Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions and Accessibility Minute to go along with Assistive Technology Update, which you’re listening to right now. You can find those over at eastersealstech.com or anywhere you get your podcast. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and give us some comments and feedback. We always love hearing from you, and thank you so much for listening to this and all of our programs. Next up on the show, please join me in welcoming back Amy Barry from BridgingApps with an app worth mentioning.

This is Amy Barry with BridgingApps and this is an app worth mentioning. This week’s featured app is Exercise Buddy Professional, also known as EB Pro. The app both inspires individuals with autism and related disorders to exercise and helps professionals and parents. EB Pro takes exercise usually a source of frustration and failure and turns it into a new source of success and confidence. Exercise Buddy addresses five components of physical fitness, body image, posture, motor coordination, muscular fitness, and cardiovascular fitness. It presents with picture cards and videos of over 130 exercises.

Coach Dave, an autism fitness specialist and the designer of the program provides suggested workouts or an individual workout can be set up for the user. The workouts are set up with a first then teaching structure or a start to finish model. The workouts can be saved so the user can improve with repetition. In addition to exercises and workouts, Exercise Buddy provides the instructor with teaching tools, including flashcards, tests, nutritional activities, coloring activities, lesson plans and more. There’s also a body systems tool that allows the user to learn to identify the parts of the body, including the muscular system, skeletal system, digestive system, and the brain. The Exercise Buddy Professional app is currently available for iOS and Android devices with optional in-app purchases. The app is compatible with tablet devices only, iPad, Google Chromebook, and most Androids. For more information on this app and others like it, visit bridgingapps.org.

Listeners today, we are super excited to welcome Brian Norton, director here at Easterseals Crossroads of our INDATA Project and our whole AT program, but he’s here to talk about a really cool project that he got to do over the last year with our public library services here in Indiana. So I thought it was very important just to have him on and get to learn a little bit more about it. Brian, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

I feel like it’s been forever since I’ve had you on here, so I’m pretty darn excited. So for our listeners who maybe haven’t heard you on here sometime in the past, can you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, so again, my name is Brian Norton. I’m the Director of Assistive Technology here at Easterseals Crossroads. I’ve been here for a long time. This is the only place I’ve ever worked. I’ve been in assistive technology for 24 of those 26 years, but started as a job coach back in 1997 and quickly moved over to assistive technology in 1999 and I’ve been here ever since. And so I really have the pleasure of getting to kind of oversee a lot of the things that we do here in our program. I love our podcast, our outreach, our education wing of what we do and getting to kind of really make sure folks understand everything about assistive technology, that it’s out there, where they can get their hands on it and how it works, those kinds of things. And then also oversee our direct services as well with folks who are receiving direct services, whether that’s receiving a device, training, all those kinds of things. I get to work with a really great group of folks who do that, so just love my job.

Awesome, awesome. Well, we all love working with you and for you too, and I’m not just saying that because you happen to be in the room and can go back and listen to this later and use it against me, I guess. But well, Brian, you do a lot of really cool things here and like I said, it wouldn’t be the same without you, but what I had you on here today to talk about was a project that you worked on with the library here locally over the course of the last year. Can you maybe just start us off by telling us kind of an overview of what the project was and how it came about?

Yeah, so our library system here reached out to us about a year, year and a half ago, and they’re undertaking kind of what they’re referring to as a digital inclusion roadmap, really wanting to make sure that all of the materials and the services that the library provides, and if you really think about it, there are a lot of things that the library does for folks. They’re trying to make sure that those things are accessible for all people, all people with all abilities. And so they approached us very specifically about this digital inclusion roadmap, making sure that their technology is accessible for folks with disabilities and really all abilities who come in through the door.

And so we really got a chance to partner with them to get to understand what they provide, the different services, the different mediums with what they provide that information on, and really put together what we’re referring to as an accessible workstation. We installed 25 of those across their network, so every branch has this accessible workstation, did training with the librarians, reference librarians, other staff, just making sure that as patrons come into those libraries that they’re able to help address or connect them with those digital tools that can help them have better access to, again, materials and services that are provided.

Awesome, awesome. So kind of listeners, if you think about those computers you come in and can use in a library to well access the internet, their database, all of those kind of other things, we’re talking about one of those kind of stations. So Brian, I know it’s always challenging because people come to us a lot and say, “Hey, I want to make this completely accessible to everybody,” and that’s really, really a gigantic task. But can you highlight maybe some of the things that were put on the workstation and then why you chose to go with those maybe as opposed to some different alternatives?

Sure, sure. Initially, we did quite a bit of research. Again, meeting with them talking about what they do and trying to really understand what they provide to folks. We did a lot of site visits, we talked to a lot of staff. We provided an online questionnaire for staff and people, patrons who would come in about what they needed. And so that really informed some of what our choices were. But I always refer to this, you can’t meet every need. That’s just impossible. There are just things that are going to be a little bit more complex that you really can’t meet in kind of a public setting with being able to identify certain tools. There’s just going to be some situations that you can’t address. And so I always refer to this thing called the 20/80 Rule. Take about 20% of the technology that’s out there to meet about 80% of the needs and really trying to meet the greatest amount of needs.

And so we took a small amount of technology to meet the majority of needs. We wanted it to be user-friendly, intuitive, simple, something that’s sustainable for the library as well, that they wouldn’t have to upgrade things and spend a lot of money every year making sure that these tools continue to be useful. So sustainability was a big thing that we looked at and we wanted it to not be a whole lot different than the computers that they currently have. And so we really looked at ways, what are we going to put on this accessible workstation that doesn’t make it look like it’s Darth Vader’s Starship? We didn’t want this big thing sitting in the middle of the library. We wanted to look just like the regular computers there and also looked at what can we also not just put on this workstation but just pull through on the other workstations to make sure that they have accessibility on all the different computers that they have.

And so as we took a look at that, we started with a desk… when that desk is kind of… it’s a height adjustable workstation. We wanted something that could adjust up and down. We wanted it to be simple operation, so one touch operation, not just for people coming into the library, the patrons, but also for the staff to operate. We want it to be super fast, it’s got to be quiet. And so we ended up recommending this desk that goes up and down. It’s got about a 25 inch height adjustment, so whether you’re really tall or really short, you can sit or stand in front of it. We recommended a task chair so that folks could be comfortable while they sat, making sure that they had the adjustments so that they could sit for prolonged periods of time and make sure that they could continue to use the computer.

We also did things with different keyboards, two different keyboards we recommended. There’s a keyboard out there called The Vision keyboard. The Vision keyboard, it has vision in its name, so it’s bigger keys. You can see that they’re high contrast keys, which is great, but they’re also bigger key regions and for folks who have targeting issues, difficulty pressing particular keys or targeting those keys, they could just allow them to be able to target those things more easily and be able to operate the keyboard more efficiently and productively. We also then installed a large print keyboard specifically for folks with low vision so that every character, number, symbol on the keyboard was large print and in high contrast so that folks with low vision could see what was going on with the keyboard. A couple other things for keyboarding and more mobility access, we recommended a couple of arm supports providing some extra support for folks who had repetitive stress types of injuries, maybe tremors resulting from MS or fatigue or those types of things from stroke and or MS or muscular dystrophy.

So they had some arm supports on there. We recommended a regular mouse and a track ball. There’s a track ball option. I think many folks who are in the AT world recognize that track balls don’t require as much range of motion back and forth, and a lot of times track balls have programmable buttons so that you can perform a click lock so you can drag something across the screen without having to hold the button down, and so wanted to make sure a track ball ended up on there as well. As far as software, we looked at really the things that are already built in. I think what’s amazing these days is a lot of the big tech companies already have really great software that are built in to their operating system, and then thinking about sustainability for these particular workstations in the library, being able to support them longer term, just made sense to stick with some of those tools.

It’s a public access workstation. I think of Windows speech recognition, that is something that we pulled forward for folks. We do have a microphone attached to the computer so that they can dictate text and be able to navigate the computer with their voice. But with Windows speech recognition, I would argue Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which is a pretty popular voice input program, is something that most folks would prefer or want. However, Window speech recognition’s free and it’s built into the program and for sustainability purposes for the library, it just made sense. In fact, I do have some clients who would prefer that particular program over Dragon. And so for our needs, we went ahead and kept with that Windows speech recognition software. We also pulled forward the Windows built-in Magnifier, which is pretty robust these days. Has a lot of different tools and capabilities for folks who have low vision.

We did bring in NVDA, a free screen reader, so non-visual display access so that folks who are blind could continue to use the computers, immersive reader, whether you’re in Office 365 or the Edge browser, we made sure that staff knew about that program. Super helpful to be able to read information aloud, be able to focus on different… improved focus, provide colors, increase spacing, other types of things, made sure staff were aware of Office Dictate, the speech recognition software that’s built into Office 365, Word, and PowerPoint that’s already a part of their programs. Made sure they also knew what was under the Ease of Access Center, things for vision, hearing, dexterity, mobility, focus, and more. So a lot of different things that we really kind of pulled through and made available for folks. The other thing that we wanted to do, we’re in a library, so we’re reading materials, periodicals, books and other kinds of things.

And so for folks with low vision, obviously we wanted some sort of a magnifier solution. We ended up going away from the traditional desktop magnifier just because they’re difficult to transport and I know there’s more simple, more easily transportable devices these days. I think of the Topaz PhD and those kinds of things. But we went away from those and we really went to the kind of a tablet stand. We got them an Android tablet because not only on those devices do you have some magnification capability, but you can also add in a lot of different apps that can provide a lot of access to folks. We provided a Galaxy Tab device, it’s an Android device, and then pulled through some of the accessibility that’s built into it and spent time with staff being able to train them on those particular tools. A lot of different technology. That kind of scratches the surface.

I will say there’s a lot there, right? It’s going to be a lot for folks to be able to understand in addition to just the technology, we also put in how-to user manuals for folks. So there’s more of a simplified user manual option. There’s a quick guide option for folks just to quickly jump in to be able to understand a particular feature or tool that’s within those programs. And then we went and also are starting to put together tech tips. For every tool, we’re putting together a two to three minute video because not everybody likes to read. Even if you’re at the library, you might not like to read, you’d rather watch a video. And so we’re doing some video tech tips as well to help people, again, help it make it intuitive for folks and a little easier for them to understand and use those particular tools.

Oh, for sure. And I think that also helps in the long run because while this might be a huge initiative of whomever works there right now, when other leadership takes over or you have turnover, and I know the library actually isn’t a place that has a whole ton of turnover. If that’s a place you want to work, that’s the place you want to work. But it’s just great to still have those tools. Otherwise, all this stuff’s just going to sit there and never be used, and you’re going to have folks come in that could really benefit from it.

And I really like the way that you went with a lot of built-in stuff because I mean know, in AT, especially on our clinical program, there’s times where the built-in stuff is great and it works just fine other times where that individual really needs the individual accommodation. But like you said, try to serve as many as you possibly can. And it’s great because that’s not going to be outdated in four years. That’s just going to be updated right along with the operating system right along with the computer and just really save a ton of upkeep and money in the long run because I know we’ve done these kind of projects before, maybe not to the scale with different places and when it comes time to update, well that funding was once.

And we can’t do it anymore. And next thing you know, just have a pretty nice computer, maybe a little nicer than some of the others with a bunch of non-functioning software on it. So I love that you really, really thought about that. Brian, how long has this project been going on and are those workstations up and ready to roll?

Yeah, so it’s been going on for about a year and a half. That’s when we were initially approached. They started rolling out workstations this past spring and they are getting closer. I think by the first of the year they should have all of the workstations put in place. We did run into a snag. At our library, they use this PC reservation software, which is basically users or patrons can come in and use the computer for an hour, but they have to log into those computer systems to use them for that hour. After that hour, it turns itself off and then you have to go back in and pick up another access code from the librarian.

It just helps folks kind of move through those computers. There’s a lot of people who come in and use them, and so they got to keep them available for new people that are coming in. And what happened is that software caused some issues. And so if you use adaptive technology at all, sometimes there are permissions that need to be made. And what we are running into is that software was keeping some of the adaptive software from running correctly, but they have now fixed that and they should have that solution rolled out by the first of the year as well. So we’re hopeful that by the first of the year, everything should be good to go.

Nice. I’m sure anyone that’s in this field in any way, shape or form has dealt with that in some way where an update fries all your stuff or you finally get that database at work completely and totally accessible and they update it over the weekend and nothing works on Monday or everything that you kind of did. So that’s almost one of those things you hope doesn’t happen when you come in, but you almost kind of expect it sometimes with those kinds of things. Brian, I know we kind of talked about some of the hardware, some of the software, just a couple of other kind of real quick things. I don’t know if we talked about microphones, headphones, things like that, but I know if I’m using speech recognition in a library or maybe using text to speech in a library, that’s probably a pretty good consideration. I don’t want everything read off the screen to me as loud as it can be. So did you put some of that kind of hardware in there to assist?

Yeah, that was an interesting approach that we had to take with that because we’re in a library, lots of people come in and use it. We were thinking about hygiene, how does that work with microphones and headsets and those kinds of things. For a microphone, we used a boom mic. It’s a SpeechWare 3-in-1 microphone, so it’s real sensitive. You don’t have to be right up on top of the microphone to get it to work for you.

We’re also not putting a microphone directly in front of the person’s mouth, which might’ve been used by several other people during the day. And so thinking through that, so that’s the type of microphone we use. As far as headsets, there is not a headset with the actual computer. For headsets in our library system and the library system that we did this for, you have to go to the librarian or you can bring your own headset in so they can plug their own headset in if they have it, there’s an easily accessible jack for you to plug that in, or they can go to the librarian and pick up or rent a pair for $2 or a very low amount. It’s a very low dollar amount to be able to rent those from them. So we went with that. So there is not a headset, but you can get them either from the library staff or you can bring your own in.

Well, this didn’t say anything bad about the library, but if you did have its own headset over there, I guarantee it would be at another computer within a few days.

It’ll come and go.

Most definitely. Most definitely. Would definitely move to whomever needed it kind of at that time. Right. Well, Brian, are there any lessons learned, anything that you kind of found out that maybe you didn’t know beforehand or where you really had to pivot in your decision making or anything like that that kind of happened along the way?

Yeah, I think initially we went in with this thought, “We’re just going to put these accessible workstations in and it’s going to be great,” but obviously we’ve had to pivot a little bit based on what for thinking about sustainability, upgradeability, those kinds of things with some of our choices. The other thing is I just think working with the library system, it’s amazing the amount of services that they provide for folks they don’t even think about. And what we have learned is, “Wow, what a great partnership it can be between us so that we can cross refer folks back and forth.” When you think about services like digital literacy, our library system’s doing a lot with digital literacy and so are we for folks with disabilities, and so we can cross refer folks for those things. We also, with the INDATA program here, the Indiana Assistive Technology Act, one of our big pieces that we do is education and outreach.

And what we have is a partner who’s willing and able to be able to provide information about our program and the wonderful things that assistive technology can do for folks free of charge. And it’s just a great opportunity. And so we developed these things called Patron Accessibility Guides and said, “You know what? If you’re coming into the library and are using some of these adaptive tools, why not be able to share with the folks who are coming in that these things are on either your computer or if you have a smartphone or a tablet, you can download some free apps that can provide a wonderful amount of accessibility and access to you from home.” And so we developed accessibility guides for all sorts of things, whether it’s for reading, writing, math, note-taking, hearing, vision, or just the stuff that’s built in, the accessibility features built into iOS or Android, and they’re now distributing those to folks who are coming in that are using the workstations and have questions about accessibility. So it’s been a great, great partnership.

Nice. That’s great. That’s great. We could help with the library, get to actually help out their patrons. And then also the two goals of the AT ACT are really to get the word out and get assistive technology in people’s hands and it accomplishes both those at the same time too. So definitely a win-win win. Well, awesome. Well, Brian, if our listeners want to find out more about maybe this project or other projects from INDATA and other things, what are good ways for them to do that?

Yeah, so a couple of ways. Obviously go to our website, it’s www.eastersealstech.com. You can learn all about a lot of the services we provide, whether that’s through INDATA, the Indiana Assistive Technology Act, or our clinical program, which is our fee for service where we work directly with folks, get in the weeds with them a little bit more, or you can give us a call for this particular project. If you’re looking to work with your library system and have some questions about that, you can reach out and talk to me directly. It’s (888) 466-1314, and that would be a great way to reach us through the phone.

We will put both of those down into the show notes so that folks can easily access. Well, Brian, thank you so much for coming on today. I’ve been meaning to have you on for a while, but timing just hadn’t worked out. So thanks for coming on today and tell us all about this great project.

Sounds great. Take care.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on 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 Nikol 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 guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads, our 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.